Cult TV Blog

Image: a drawing by Ronald Searle of Holmes's rooms at the Festival of Britain. Credit: here. ) This post is about the 1968 BBC series, rather than the earlier Hammer film with Cushing as Holmes. Oh dear, within a space of about a month Peter Cushing has become 'my' Doctor Who, & he has now completely usurped Basil Rathbone as 'my' Sherlock Holmes. No pressure there, then. Nor yet the slightest hint of a monopoly. I didn't actually know he'd played Holmes until I found the boxed set in a charity shop today. I have a personal history with Holmes. I read the Conan Doyle stories when I was very young - certainly before the age of ten. At the time I thought him wonderful & would model myself on him. The one guaranteed way to get me to do something then would be to tell me Sherlock Holmes would do it. As I've got older my native cynicism has caused Holmes's repute to be overshadowed in my estimation by a more grown-up & certainly contempor...

I will definitely be returning to Danger Man at some point, if not necessarily in the near future. I am rather less sure that I shall actually finish the episode-by-episode blog I started on the Doctor Who. I got distracted from both of these by the early death of Rik Mayall, which it seems trite to call 'tragic'. I mean, Nigel Planer's tribute to him was, 'He's left me on my own, the bastard.' I was thinking I couldn't really post here on The Young Ones, but when I look at the TV starring Mayall that I have in the house (in addition, Bottom, & Filthy, Rich, & Catflap), TV doesn't come much more cult than this. I was too young to watch The Young Ones, but I remember it as the one of the formative experiences of my childhood, so I must have managed to watch it somehow. Perhaps I wasn't really too young, but perhaps Mother disapproved - a ridiculous act in itself, guaranteed to ensure that any nearly-teenager will want to view the material di...

It's not happened so far that I've written the title of a blog post & changed my mind about doing it at all, with nothing written. But for the first time I nearly didn't post. I'm actually writing these words on my first time of watching through The War Machines, having turned off when I tried before. I actually am not sure I really have anything to say about this series, since I essentially agree with the iffy reviews elsewhere on the internet, but I realise I respect this serial enough for trying, that I don't want to leave it unblogged. The plot & its main preoccupation is the classic sixties one of the fear of the machine taking over. I do love it that WOTAN is credited in the end credits, but sadly that rather sweet touch won't save this one. It was the first of the more scientific ones made after Dr Kit Pedler was taken on as unofficial science advisor. The result is a preoccupation with the computer technology of the time & with the GPO T...

The trouble is that in a sense I know this story too well, having read it repeatedly as a paperback as a child, in fact after Unearthly Child I was all prepared to be unimpressed with the actual TV programme in comparison with my own pictures in my head for this one. This introduction of course indicates that I was pleasantly surprised: good move rushing straight into the daleks as the second adventure, & the story & production both compare very favourably to its predecessor. In fact The Daleks has an incredible sureness of touch, & is so readily-recognisably a Dr Who story so early. It does seem to me that it *feels* different from Dr Who stories as they would later become. Remember the original purpose of Dr Who being to be educational? This was plainly already forgotten by the time of this headlong rush into sci fi, but it is recognisably more 'worthy' (I can't think of a more suitable word) compared to the ITV serials of the time I watch. A scientifical...

(If this post were to have an Avengers-style subtitle, it would be, In which we discover what the team who created Adam Adamant Lives did before they created Adam Adamant Lives.) Blogging is a funny thing: once you start a blog it seems to take on a life & direction of its own, dragging its author behind it. It can also be very therapeutic, because the blog can show the blogger what he's actually thinking: if you keep it with any regularity there is no real hiding! The point of this is that when I started this blog I said to myself that I would not blog about The Prisoner (way over-analysed on the internet already), or about Doctor Who (far too much competition). I've already found myself breaking one of these decisions: this post marks my breaking the other one. Don't get me wrong, the tags list at the top of the page will show that I'm hardly the sort of person who would *not* watch Doctor Who, & indeed I do, in fits & starts. My favourite Doctor is Chr...