Cult TV Blog

Continuing a series of posts about TV episodes related to the circus. In my last post, about the circus which comes to Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen, we met the feared side of the circus. You don't want to be taken by all those freaks. Of course, in that instance the town was too freaky even for Papa Lazarou to face. Here, however a circus invades reality in, in many ways, a much more scary way. Side show characters from an old film of a circus are managing to escape from the celluloid and trying to take people's souls, so that they can continue performing as they did in the past. As regular readers know I usually read round on the internet before writing a blog post, because this blog has from the start been animated by the desire to avoid the endless description and repetition on the internet, and try to say something different. I was surprised, when I started reading about this show, to find that despite being one of my favourite Torchwood episodes, it really isn...

Continuing a series of posts about TV episodes relating to the circus. Caution: This is about an episode depicting a character in black-face and may be distressing. The episode has been removed from Netflix for that reason. In fact let's not beat about the bush, The League of Gentlemen contains something to offend pretty much everyone, including little people, travellers, the Irish, toad lovers, you name it. I cannot believe that I have somehow never visited Royston Vasey on this blog before, although it's possibly just because I haven't been able to face trying to write about it. The League of Gentleman (which has been described as 'like watching Monty Python remake The Wicker Man from inside Alan Bennett's fever dream') is a very successful comedy series which basically pushes the envelope in every way conceivable, based in the strange town of Royston Vasey.  In this episode the circus comes to town. One of the reasons I wanted to include this episode was that...

Regular readers will notice that I've commented a few times recently that this blog isn't always representative of what I'm actually watching. This is mainly because I like to do one blog post for one episode of a show, but of course doing it that way is much slower than we ever view TV, requiring as it does at least a little reading round, etc. This post is therefore an experiment to try to do a blog post which represents the TV which is going in through my eyes and ears and running around in my head, to see whether I like this format of post. I will simply write about what I have been viewing, and in this case comment on some episodes which have been in my mind as possible blog posts but probably won't hatch. I have watched my way through Series 9 of The X-Files again. There are two episodes which I was comsidering making blog posts but probably now won't. The first was Improbable, which is an absolute joy because it introduces the subject of numerology to the wor...

Sit down if you're reading this and are a fan of The X-Files, because I'm going to utter a heresy. I love series 8 of The X-Files, although to be frank I'm the only person I know who does. What I love most about it is the way it returns to some of the core X-Files themes after the off-the-wall episodes of the past couple of seasons, and also that Mulder is mostly absent, which gives Scully a chance to shine in her own right. This is what The X-Files would have looked like if the FBI had fired Mulder and put Scully in charge, complete with flat objective description and being clear when she can't explain stuff, and it's glorious. I know, right? You're all looking at me the way we look at Americans when they have a go at making tea. Roadrunners also incorporates a number of my favourite things: a cult, isolation, and links ot a number of urban legends. It's also an episode where Scully gets implanted with something, yet again. I suspect that probably in 2023 U...

This blog post is actually about two separate documentaries about the events in Enfield reported as 'the Enfield poltergeist' in the late 1970s. It really winds up my INFJ/librarian brain that I have been entirely unable to date the first one here , which since it doesn't even have titles on the version on YouTube may not even be a whole programme. At the beginning it has an overlay saying BBC however there is no footage apparently later than the seventies so I am assuming it is a contemporary broadcast from the late seventies and the version on YouTube is a recording of a later broadcast, because UK TV didn't overlay the channel over the show in the 1970s. I know, because I was there and if they had I would have wound up my mother by trying to rub it off the screen. The other one is a Channel 4 documentary from 2007 called Interview with a Poltergeist here .  For simplicity I will refer to them as the BBC documentary and the Channel 4 documentary respectively. Truth to...

Keith Allen Will Burn in Hell is a 2007 Channel 4 documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church. I was looking for Louis Theroux's series of documentaries about The Most Hated Family in America, but there aren't pirated versions online so you've got Keith Allen instead. I would also recommend an internet documenary called Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church as a complement to this one, but I'm being good and sticking to the TV one. Aren't I good? The internet reviews for this documentary are universally bad and I honestly can't think why.  This documentary is banging. In fact I think it's the best one on this bizarre church I've seen because it treats WBC as a spectacle to start off with and gradually escalates and this sense of horror creeps over you until you want to throw something at the screen. And it's done in an incredibly low key way, as if it isn't really a very polished documentary. Any old documentary can have the Phelps-Roper f...

I have decided to go ahead and do something which I have considered for some time but fought shy of doing, namely a series of posts about documentaries, as opposed to the purely fictional shows I normally write about here. I have fought shy of this project because the last time I had a few odd TV shows to write about I declared I was having an orphaned episodes series, which got out of hand and ended up with puching fifty posts and took four months. I could see documentary season becoming even more unwieldy, but I'm going to set out and see what happens. I will try to stick to documentaries which are TV shows naturally, although you all know that I'm going to break this rule. As always I'm going to select documentaries purely because they interest me so I have a whole like of shows about weird shit lined up: we have religion, pirate radio stations, abuse, and all sorts of odd things. I'm also going to try to stick to documentaries which are available for free on the int...

Since my last post I've been sounding like a sweary version of Robin (holy nuclear codes, Batman!) and was going to do a Batman post but have added Batman to my list of shows which are well nigh impossible to blog about, for reasons which I'm not entirely sure about. So anyway, instead a post about The Specials, a show which started off as an internet streaming thing and moved to TV. You can see the whole thing for free on their youtube channel  here. It's about five adults with learning disabilities, who all went to the same school, became friends, and decided that they wanted to live together independently in a house. The logistics of doing this with their care needs turned out to be incredibly difficult and ultimately the parents of one of them had to set up a company to run the house. And this is of course the point, because if you don't have care needs or a learning disability, and you want to share a house, you just find a place and work out the finances and so on...

Real gangsters this time, rather than fictional ones. I was delighted to find this documentary about the two main gangs in Birmingham (the Johnsons and the Burger Bar Boys) in the twenty first century, because I wanted to opine about documentaries about gangs and was afraid I was going to have to use the flawed One Mile Away on the same subject (which is still well worth watching in conjunction with this one but is widely criticised for various things which will become apparent. I do get that it's very difficult for a documentary maker to write about a subject which is still in the making and which involves two completely closed groups who are obviously wary of appearing on TV. In fact even writing this post has given me endless trouble so I'm feeling more sympathetic than I was at the beginning! The real difficulty for the documentary maker over these two gangs is that there isn't an apparent reason for them. Both documentaries ask members of both gangs what it's all a...

This is one where you really do have to watch the video to get the feel. ☝️ I wasn't going to but I went through Sparkhill on the bus this afternoon and simply had to do a post on Citizen Khan. Actually starting with a video of Mr Khan was a mistake because I'm already hysterical and will have great difficulty concentrating. Citizen Khan is a sitcom about a ridiculous British Pakistani Moslem man who lives in Sparkhill (each episode is dedicated to the people of Sparkhill) and fancies himself as a community leader. This flat statement is completely to understate the impact of this show: When the first series of the pioneering sitcom Citizen Khan aired last year, it sparked around 200 complaints and was accused of making fun of Islam, stereotyping Asians and being disrespectful to the Qur'an. A Facebook post said: "Cancel the show OR we will have repeat of riot we had a few months ago." Well, a second series and a Christmas special have been filmed and there have b...

Next for Fake Mediums Week we have Seance, a special made by Derren Brown in 2004. While I'm on the subject of fake mediums I have remembered a random fact which is of relevance. I'm not sure whether any other states had these kind of laws but from 1951 until the act was repealed the possibility of real mediumship was kind of indicated un UK by the Fraudulent Mediums' Act of 1951, which repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Despite loads and loads of mediumism going on there were only four convictions under the Act. On the other hand Derren Brown is someone who very clearly doesn't believed in mediumistic abilities, so he isn't actually a fake medium, but this show is showing how fake mediums do it. To be perfectly frank I find him a bit freaky, because if I were in his presence I would start wondering whether I had decided I wanted that cup of tea or whether he'd implanted the idea in my head. This show is all about fake mediums (that is all mediums, in Brown...

The advantage of themed series of posts is they keep my grasshopper mind on the subject and the disadvantage is they don't necessarily represent what I'm watching and detract from the principle that I blog about what I'm actually watching. Hence a sort of round up post of some things I have been watching and some things I've just discovered. Some of these might get a post of their own as well. When I was doing the posts about orphaned episodes it brought home to me that it is important not to give a show or a film the same name as another one. Obviously we know all about this problem with The Avengers, but it turns out there was a TV comedy show between 1983 and 1988 called  Who Dares Wins . Even at the time that name was a mistake because since it is the motto of the SAS it had already been used by  this  film, and has since been used by  this  TV show and then  this  one. What is wrong with you people? You might think you're giving your show a punchy...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . Another TV series which manages to get the word theatre into the title and is an anthology series of plays. Last week  Mitchell Hadley  made some kind remarks (thank you!) concerning the thoughts I had that TV hasn't come up with many new things which weren't derived from other media, such as theatre. Since then I have thought of another thing initiated by TV, the infomercial, but events have moved my thoughts on to how television doesn't just reflect society but apparently predicts what is happening. There are probably people who think The X-Files predicted the future, but then the only reason 1984 has come to pass is governments are using it as a manual. Unusually for me I will base this post around an orphaned episode but mention a couple of other shows as well.  The classic example of a British TV show which anecdotally had an uncanny talent for prophecy, was of course  Doomwatch , and the linked ...