Cult TV Blog

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 ...

Recently I went to Sheffield, largely to see Europe's biggest listed building, which is the postwar development of Park Hill flats. I won't go into the tale of hope, disillusionment, deterioration and redevelopment using private money in any great detail. But Park Hill is the sort of development which was in it's hay day while Our Sort of Television was being broadcast. This episode of Doomwatch is (rather postmodernly) about another development of that type, and with the show's knack of predicting coming events, foretold the Doom of high rise living. Well, I say foretold, but high rise blocks of prefabricated construction were already doomed in this country after the partial collapse of one called Ronan Point (pictured) in 1968, three years before this was broadcast. Doomwatch rather tells the tale of human suffering in the blocks. It paints a picture of the ability of a tower block to cause isolation and mysteriously turn people into violent monsters. Apart from t...

I wanted to devote a separate point to this episode of Doomwatch alone, being probably the best-known purely for the fact of having never been seen on television before. That story is one which is well told HERE and I don’t propose to revisit it except to comment that I find it hilarious that pornographers of the 1970s were shocked at the idea of soft porn being broadcast on television and so a mock-up porn film had to be made. The wonder is that I don’t think the subject matter of this episode has really come up in this blog before, at least in any great length. I was amused to read recently that despite a drumming by the critics Confessions of a Window Cleaner was the highest-grossing UK film of its year. The account I was reading described it as ‘low-brow’, but the contemporary concern for the effect of the media on people’s morals and the simple fact that a smutty film could be both highly-criticised and extremely popular, indicates a certain ambivalent attitude. The root of t...

Today I have taken delivery of the newly-released boxed set of the remaining episodes of Doomwatch. I seem to remember a rather ambivalent attitude towards this show, based on the only two episodes I have seen before, which coincidentally form the first two remaining episodes of the first series. Suffice to say that I am glad I ordered this series, and I have paused in rewatching Paul Temple and in watching The Stone Tape for the first time, in order to post some second thoughts on Doomwatch. For a start, I must congratulate Simply Media on a wonderful restoration and presentation job. There is the odd jump in the picture only, it has really been incredibly well restored. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my oft-expressed opinion that if you want modern-standard TV, you should watch modern TV. Archival footage of forty or fifty years ago cannot reasonably be expected to keep up with it, and there is just the odd jump in the picture now and then. That said, watchin...

Well that’s the annual Winterval over as far as I’m concerned. I’m slightly disorientated because nearly everyone in my apartment building has gone away for Christmas, leaving the place eerily quiet and dark. Additionally I had underestimated how warm a small modern flat could be, with the strange result that I’m sitting here in an unheated flat on the 27 th December wearing a vest (undershirt to US readers) and feeling distinctly warm. These two things are putting me in mind of the end of the word and so my attention has naturally turned to the legendary series Doomwatch, which I see is due to be released in its remaining entirety in the spring. This post is solely based on the DVD of two episodes – about a plastic-eating virus and mutant rats – and reading around other people’s writing on the show. In this show the 1960s’ ambivalence towards scientific progress reaches its peak, as does suspicion (I don’t really want to use the words conspiracy or paranoia) towards the establish...