What Else I've Been Watching

 I do like this blog to bear at least a resemblance to the TV I'm actually watching, and while I've obviously been watching a lot of X-Files recently, the other things I've been watching haven't really appeared here, so this post is by way of a catch up.

I've been watching odd episodes of The Prisoner. This is partly because I've been reading Ali Jaffer's Official Prisoner Companion on the canal bank on rare sunny afternoons and he's got me thinking about the theory that Number 6 is placed in the Village by the authorities as a plant to test the security measures. You may even find this approach being tested out here in the form of a series of blog posts at some point. I'm also interested in applying Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey template to the series (helpfully there's even a version with seventeen stops); although I have so far not resolved the problem that I'm not sure which order to follow for this one. And that's even without the series of posts I've projected for literally years to examine the different viewing orders; again I'm not sure how I would do this, since a single post for each viewing order may prove cumbersome.

I have been watching two series starring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson all the way through, even thought I can recite whole passages of the scripts from memory: Filthy, Rich and Catflap, and Bottom.

While I've been posting about The X-Files I have also watched all the way through Monty Python's Flying Circus several times. I have been making a point of paying more attention to it than I normally do; and as with all quality television I'm noticing even more things I've never noticed before, with each repeated viewing. What's on the telly? Looks like a penguin.

I must have seen it because I have definitely watched all the way through the first series but the Murder She Wrote episode Murder Takes the Bus. It's a glorious pastiche of And Then There Were None, Psycho, Murder on the Orient Express, and even manages to get in some hints of The Cat and The Canary. Best of all it features Rue McLanahan as an unlikely librarian. Sadly her role as Blanche Devereux was still in the future, otherwise they'd have probably had her sit on all the men's laps.

It's one of those shows which I find it very difficult to blog about but I love the youth and exuberance of The Monkees.

The show which has perhaps most insinuated itself into my attention recently has been the 1987 to 1988 US TV show about Max Headroom. I swear our politicians watched it as kids and decided to make that dystopia the future. What particularly interests me is the way there are people who are 'blanks', who have disengaged from the record keeping and monitoring and effectually don't have an identity. I like this idea, especially as I'm now not economically productive. Of course this idea that if you're not working you're not productive is nonsense: even the most hardcore self sufficiency freaks of the 1970s would have traded things with other people. But it's interesting this brings up a weakness in capitalism: it depends on you being paid and spending, so to sabotage capitalism, even if you can't stop buying things at all, you can buy much less and decide where your money goes. 

I haven't just been watching TV though, I have been involved in a history project at the museum I volunteer at and they've even let me write a post for their blog about what not to do with ancient buildings. You can read it here: https://www.sellymanormuseum.org.uk/news/2023-08-21/whats-wrong-with-selly-manor