Cult TV Blog

Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV series which haven't appeared here yet. This is one of those posts which afford me great pleasure - in case anyone reading this hasn't seen this series I am delighted to be introducing you to a show which is such a delight. In fact this is a blog post which will rather write itself. It's also one of those occasions when I will tell you not to bother reading my blog post but to go away and watch the show post haste - of course this is about the 1985 series called Mapp and Lucia. There was also another series of the same name in 2014 which is also excellent, just in different ways. There was also an excellent adaptation into radio plays and additional novels by Tom Holt and other authors. Holt's are excellent and authentic, but I haven't read the others. The show has the advantage of working with quality source material, in the shape of the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson. In fact I think you should go away and read them as w...

Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. I have very mixed feelings indeed about The Chinese Detective and I'm aware that quite a lot of what I want to say about it isn't about the show at all. To get the essential bit out of the way, The Chinese Detective was a BBC detective show broadcast from 1981 for two series, about British-Chinese Detective Sergeant John Ho (played by David Yip), who tends to be rather unconventional and have ongoing confrontations as a result with his superiors. It is also about the reaction he gets from being British-Chinese and is set in London, heavily focusing on the east end or dockland, as far as I can tell. If you haven't seen it the closest I can think of is that it's similar to The Sweeney without the violence and has the confrontation with authority with added racism from everyone else. My mixed feelings begin with the reason you may not have heard of it and this is for what I would call pu...

Looking on my shortlist of shows for this series of posts about eighties TV series I see that a high proprtion of them are comedies. The 1980s are of course known for the revolution in comedy that took place and the coming of the 'alternative' comedy scene, but having watched a couple of shows based in the changes in the railway shed at Swindon in the 1980s I suspect that comedy may not have been that representative of 1980s TV, but is better than the sheer unrelentingly depression of everything else that was going on at that time. There's Nothing to Worry About (1982) was a pilot series in three episodes, intended to be an ITV competitor to the BBC's Not The Nine O'Clock News (1972 to 1982). There were only ever three episodes made and the cast then went on to make Alfresco (1983 to 1984) which may also appear here in this series. Of the three There's Nothing to Worry About is the only one which hasn't had a commercial release, but the three episodes are av...

Continuing a series of posts on TV shows from the eighties we come to Blackadder, specifically the pilot which was never aired, but is available in varying quality on the internet. I find it absolutely fascinating to see a classic TV series in a pre-production form. It is transferred to what I think is the reign of Henry VII because there is definitely a king on the throne and there is a troupe of Jumping Jesuits (necessitated by the eunuchs cancelling), so obviously this was pre-reformation. You will, however, read that the historical allusions are vague, and I can't really disagree. The initial broadcast series of Blackadder was set earlier than this. It's particularly interesting to see that Baldrick is played by actor Philip Fox, which casting gives the role quite a different feel from the one we all know from the Tony Robinson portrayal.  What does, however, come across loud and clear, is the character of Blackadder, fully formed. He connives, conspires, and manipulates hi...

Hot on the heels of my post on End of Part One, we have another comedy series which draws on the Pythonesque humour of some years before and is placed just before the alternative comedy explosion of the eighties. In fact The Steam Video Company, as you can tell by the title, is distinctly looking backwards. The Steam Video Company is more securely in the eighties, being broadcast in 1984, although there is a connection between the two shows, because writer of this show, David Renwick, also wrote End of Part ONe as well as The Burkiss Way, the radio show which was the inspiration for End of Part One. He is a well-known TV writer, having also written at least in part, One Foot in the Grave, Jonathan Creek, Cosby, Poirot, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, There's a Lot of It About, Whoops Apocalypse, The Dick Emery Show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Little and Large Show, The Les Dawson Show, and The Two Ronnies.  We are not only in the presence of truly great writing, but also in the p...

Regular readers will recollect that at the beginning of last year I started a series of posts on programmes which, borrowing a phrase from the world of Doctor Who, I christened orphaned episodes. By that I meant that they were not commercially available and had lost some of their episodes. It was a very interesting experience because I rather found that this took over my life: I had no idea how many random episodes of old shows are knocking about the internet, discovered many shows that I had no idea existed, and even following my rule that I only post about things which take my fancy, it became an engrossing project over a period of months.  A similar thing is happening with this series of posts about 1980s shows. One of the reasons my posts are a bit sparse is that I'm going through an initial shortlist of shows on my hard drive and in my DVD collection, which is taking some time in itself. Take away all the shows that I think are great but either aren't actually from the eig...

This is a continuation of a series of posts on 1980s TV series which haven't appeared here before. This is a general post about this show rather than about an individual episode. In a previous post about a show called The Fear we were in the world of eighties London gangsters, albeit as they intersected with yuppies. Running Scared is a 1986 children's TV show also set in the world of London gangsters. In fact I'm finding that many of the 1980s shows I've got on my shortlist are set in the world of London gangsters. This is of course representative of my personal taste in eighties TV rather than an objective representation of the TV of the time, and honestly there is an awful lot of dross you won't be reading about in this series of posts. This show is about a girl who has come into conflict with a career criminal and has the power to put him away for a good long time because her grandfather happened to have  a clue to the criminal's identity, left behind during...