Cult TV Blog

I have decided to make this the last post in my current Documentary Season, purely to try to keep it in some sort of control. There are of course loads of other documentaries sitting on my hard drive that I want to write about - in fact I might do a Home of Your Own series of posts which they would fit in - but I don't want it to take over the blog for now. Hence I will attach some conclusions to this series of posts in this post. Apart from anything else I've had a bit much of reality for the present and am gagging for the unreality I usually see on TV. This documentary is about the Ashwood Day Centre, a day centre for people with mental health needs, in Leeds, and was made by the University of Leeds in 1982. This documentary has one serious defect, which isn't a reason not to watch it because seeing the day centre and the interviews with the service users is fascinating, which is that it doesn't include a formal statement of who runs the day centre and what it specifi...

'It's a bit black over Bill's mother's' is a very old Birmingham saying indeed, and it means that storm clouds are forming to the South East of the city, over Stratford-upon-Avon. The 'Bill' in the saying is of course William Shakespeare and I think I am the only TV blogger who can blog about this documentary and add such local colour. Apart from my own bizarre attitude this documentary is a masterpiece of historical documentary making, about what on earth is going on with Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford parish church, because it's nowhere near big enough to contain a body. The investigation is absolutely fascinating as an example of televisual dramatic documentary making. It starts off with the vicar refusing to let them just randomly dig up the grave (because of course he did, they'd need to go back with a court order, and this is largely for dramatic effect), saying that the famous curse on the tomb is indication enough that Shakespeare wouldn...

This show is appearing here because it is a show about something that actually happened in history and so it can broadly be called a documentary although it develops the subject somewhat. But when have you ever known me to stick to the rules, whether made by myself or anyone else? Battleground was a single series show made in 1978 about historical battles which are then re-enacted by war gamers in the studio. I'm not sure whether the word geeky existed in 1978 but it's definitely the word for it, along with blokey. It's also something else I love enormously, which I have decided is slow television: TV which doesn't require much in the way of scenery or effects and moves at the pace of an elderly arthritic snail. This show also goes to show that there was a time when TV wasn't required to move at the speed of light and did genuinely cater for many different interests. I suppose other examples would be that show that shows people playing pub games on the show, and of ...

The Family (not to be confused with the several other TV shows with the same name) was a 1974 BBC series of twelve episodes about a real extended family in Reading. It was a major turning point in 'reality' TV (in the UK - there was a previous similar series called An American Family broadcast in 1973) because it gave the viewer real access to the Wilkins family, their daily lives and conflicts. The show is online in two versions, a shorter summary of the whole series, and all the epiosdes are currently available online. I would recommend seeing all the episodes for the full effect. At the time it was incredibly powerful, attracting much interest (at one point HUGE crowds which the police couldn't control turned up for the wedding of two of the characters and fought over the bouquet) and criticism (1970s Britain wasn't ready for the rather unvarnished portrait of teenage pregnancy, affairs and children with different fathers it portrayed). It was also rather unusual in ...

This is a documentary about the 25 day riot and rooftop protest at Strangeways prison in Manchester in April 1990. It is the 2015 documentary here . As always I'm finding that blogging about TV brings out things about shows which I wasn't expecting. These posts about documentaries are making me think about different documentary techniques and making me criticise the way different documentaries show their subject. This one primarily uses a deceptively powerful technique about this technique of some narration but mainly depending on interviews with the prisoners, officers and even the chaplain in the middle of whose sermon the riot kicked off. Sounds perfectly simple doesn't it, and certainly doesn't sound powerful. But it's the juxtaposition of the different interviews which is what makes it powerful. Seriously this is some powerful documentary making. What I mean by this is the way you see the screws saying there was no abuse of the prisoners going on. You then imme...

So far I've been good and stuck to my self-imposed rule of doing TV documentaries for this series of posts, but y'all knew I would never stick to that. And so here we have Murray Grigor's 1972 16mm film called Space and Light, about Cardross Seminary, just outside Glasgow. It's available to be seen on youtube  here . You may wonder what makes me think it's documentary enough to be included here, because it's rather unusual. In fact the more unusual features are what I think make it an absolute masterpiece of documentary. It is short, for a start, just over twenty minutes. Not one word of dialogue or interview is spoken, the only sounds you hear are music specially composed for it based on the Veni Creator Spiritus sequence for Pentecost and odd snatches of what is happening in the scenes shown. Instead what you get is the visuals alone with no description of any sort. And it's glorious. Absolutely glorious. The seminary is a sort of architect's wet dream...

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...

Warning: this post concerns a documentary about serial killing, sexual violence and child abuse, and some readers might find the subject matter distressing. The Tuesday Special was a 1990s ITV documentary series. I haven't seen any of the others, and probably won't because this seems to be the only one on the internet, and I have to say this is some quality documentary making. Actually Fred West, the murderer with his wife Rose featured in the documentary, has featured on the blog in  this post before, in a parody form for dark humour. The story of the Cromwell Street murders is well known but basically Fred West murdered at least thirteen people between the 1960s and 1990s that we know of. He was a monster of illegal sex and violence, and the household he and his wife Rose ran was an exemplar of dysfunction and abuse. The story of the investigation is fascinating because if it hadn't been for Rose West's solicitors sending a fax with a particular picture to the prosec...

Heart of the Angel is a delightful BBC documentary from 1989 about The Angel underground station in Islington. This is another of those occasions when I'm going to say don't bother to read what I have to say, just go and watch it. Doesn't mean I'm not going to go into ecstasies of praise about it though. Thre are two techniques used in this documentary, straightforward interviews with the staff and customers, and the always reliable documentary technique of just turning on the camera and recording what happens.  The interviews are less successful in my opinion, and obviously can feel a little contrived. It's the scenes of the normal activity of the station which are most successful, and they are WILD. The staff are wildly eccentric, obviously at the end of their tether on a daily basis and start behaving in ways which, as a former psych nurse, I recognise as some of the institutional ways of coping. We have the lift attendant with his strange philosophical questions...

The Power of the Witch - Real or Imaginary? is a 1971 BBC documentary about contemporary witchcraft, which is appearing here for Samhain. The veil is thin and so is my damn patience. Let me say right at the start that this is an excellent documentary, purely because it does a good job of trying to marshall the information on perhaps the most difficult subject there is. The word witch and the idea of witchcraft have been ridiculously slippery over human existence and this documentary, I think, chooses the correct combination of interviewees. We have actual modern witches, a vicar, a member of the Church Army, a psychologist. Obviously I can claim this to be a subject that I know a fair bit about. The interviewees all give their own particular view of the subject, and while that is good in itself I would wonder whether the production team knew enough about the complex subject to provide enough context to what was said. For example you have the Church Army officer talking about the devil ...

Warning: This blog post is about a documentary about child abuse and may be distressing. I have linked the relevant report of the Scottish Child Abuse inquiry which also contains significantly disturbing accounts of abuse, including in a setting of religious worship. Sins of our Fathers is a BBC Scotland documentary about abuse in Fort Augustus Abbey school, a school run by Benedictine monks in Scotland: both the school and the monastery have been closed since the 1990s. It is available on iPlayer. And it's bloody devastating. It goes straight into its first explicit description of sexual abuse within a matter of minutes and then immediately goes on to how the authorities at the monastery knew, and it isn't even talking about Fort Augustus yet, it starts with all the other monasteries of the English Benedictine Congregation first and then indicates that the Fort Augustus scandal was the last to break. This technique is literally devastating, completely factual, and you will kav...

This post is about two documentaries, one of which is TV and the other isn't. I'm doing them both for completeness in case anyone is interested and because they both interest me. So there. Actually the subject has been touched on on the blog before in my post on the Danger Man episode Not So Jolly Roger here . They are about the sea forts called Maunsell forts (after their designer) built in the sea in strategic places off the coast of Britain during the second world war. The wikipedia page ( Here ) is actually very good but the short version is that a man called Guy Maunsell invented several designs of forts which would be phsyically in the sea outside the then limit of British territorial water to stop German forces approaching the land rather than stop them once they got here. They weren't everywhere around the country, they were placed in the Thames estuary to defend London and surrounding areas and outside Liverpool to protect Liverpool. There were two separate design...

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...

  What did you do in 1970s Blackburn if the kids refused to behave and you were worried they would end up in a life of crime? You got the Juvenile Liaison team from the police in to scream at them. Forget The Sweeney, this is some bloody scary television. I'm a bit confused about what the team was actually intended to do, and it's not possible to find out online because the internet is mostly dominated by reviews of this documentary. The opening titles say that the role of the team is to caution children and young people brought to their attention. I'm not sure what was intended because to me a 'caution' is a legal thing the police can do. Basically it's you admitting to what they say you've done and them giving you a formal caution and it saves them the trouble of taking you to court. Because this blog aims to be instructive as well as entertaining, just in case there is anyone who doesn't know here is a Public Service Announcement: NEVER ACCEPT A POLIC...