Cult TV Blog

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . It is April and the weather is just warming up for the Easter weekend as I write this, so of course that's the perfect occasion to blog about the Dick Emery Show Christmas special broadcast in 1980. This may seem an odd choice, but then in common with Dame Hilda Bracket, I have always been very happy being me. Unfortunately that is not something which can be said for many comedians. Their interior world can often be described as tortured, which is caused by and causes external instability. Spike Milligan is the example that springs to mind, but Dick Emery is no exception (his life really was extraordinary): Dick Emery seemed destined to become an entertainer from the moment in 1915 when his mother went into labour after staggering off the stage of the London Palladium. His parents Laurie Emery and Bertha Callen performed together in a music hall double act and Bertha’s advanced pregnancy had not been considered a suffici...

Today a show I was delighted to discover on YouTube (unfortunately the channel I downloaded the episodes from has gone now, so unless they are elsewhere online the only option is one unofficial DVD release): I love Dick Emery and while he plays several characters, this series is different from the sketch shows I remember him from, because it is an actual story in which Emery stars as a shambolic private eye who is hired with his assistant to locate six people connected with the estate of a deceased aristocrat. The fact that Emery plays most of the characters he seeks is not cheap, but in the grand tradition of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here is the history of the show, lifted from  here In 1979, Dick Emery had jumped ship to ITV, a year later in 1980 he returned to the BBC with his popular Dick Emery Show.  By 1982 Emery was growing tired of the existing format of his BBC show and wanted to find new avenues to explore. Using a new format and character, Jewish private de...

Yes, I know this is supposed to be about TV, but I happen to have the Dick Emery film, which includes his trademark characters & humour, & not the TV version, which I've tried to watch in the past & found hard-going. The DVD has recently come back into my possession when a friend had a clearout of her flat & pointed out that it was full of my stuff, as she cleared out her handbag of some random weird stuff, which I was delighted to see again. The show actually ran from the 1960s to the 1980s, therefore including my target decade here. Emery came from a theatrical family, & the fact that this show can be described as vaudeville places it in a different era of entertainment: 'The show, which ran irregularly from 1963 to 1981, involved Emery dressing up as various characters, "a flamboyant cast of comic grotesques". These included the buck-toothed Church of England vicar, sex-starved, menopausal, man-eating spinster Hetty, and Clarence, an outrag...