Cult TV Blog

Hot on the heels of my post on End of Part One, we have another comedy series which draws on the Pythonesque humour of some years before and is placed just before the alternative comedy explosion of the eighties. In fact The Steam Video Company, as you can tell by the title, is distinctly looking backwards. The Steam Video Company is more securely in the eighties, being broadcast in 1984, although there is a connection between the two shows, because writer of this show, David Renwick, also wrote End of Part ONe as well as The Burkiss Way, the radio show which was the inspiration for End of Part One. He is a well-known TV writer, having also written at least in part, One Foot in the Grave, Jonathan Creek, Cosby, Poirot, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, There's a Lot of It About, Whoops Apocalypse, The Dick Emery Show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Little and Large Show, The Les Dawson Show, and The Two Ronnies.  We are not only in the presence of truly great writing, but also in the p...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . As I suspected, the later episodes of the show are giving me more trouble to apply a psychiatric explanation, despite being increasingly off the wall, and in fact this one is probably going to be the most difficult of the entire series. The reason for that is that there are several different things going on and it is possibly they're not all real, so I'll make a few suggestions about the episode and let you think about it rather than being my normal dogmatic self. The first possibility is that there is a warning about the perceived power of psychiatry in the Amnesia Room. It remains the stuff of conspiracy theories but no doubt there are some people somewhere who think psychiatrists have the technology to wipe your brain completely and let you go off as a happy robot. The second possibility is a therapeutic allegory about being who you are and not being other people. Despite what he...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . This is the first episode of the late sixties and early seventies sitcom Mr Digby Darling, about an executive in a rat control business and his secretary. I am honestly mystified that I had never heard of it until I came across it while researching these shows; it was hugely popular at the time and was I believe the fourth most viewed TV show at one point. The show's almost complete absence in the cult TV world (after all, there are endless old TV shows and yet ones which aren't as good as this get talked about ad nauseam) is absolutely bizarre. It has two wildly popular actors starring (Sheila Hancock and Peter Jones), who had previously been in the successful The Rag Trade, which has had a commercial release. Really odd. Anyway, that means I don't have anyone else's opinions to disagree with so you get my own untested views. I can see why this show was so successful. It is essentially a sitcom about a rathe...

This is a series I have had on my radar to write about here for yonks. Like many shows the Dick Barton 'franchise' has had many incarnations - this is about the 1979 TV series, however there are previous radio serials and the films from the forties starring Don Stannard as Dick Barton, as well as comics and novels. The TV series is available in a complete box set, and my only criticism of it is that it can be difficult to navigate because the different adventures are only given numbers. This one is number three, which is on disc three. There is a certain irony of course, that I have recently been very snooty about period drama and here I am enthusiastically reviewing a TV show made in the seventies but depicting the forties. And depicting it very well indeed. I have thought about why I like this but generally don't like period drama, and I think it might be because this isn't starting from scratch - you only have to listen to the radio series or see the films to know th...

In some ways we are very lucky to be living in the times we are. The current intense polarisation of society allows a quick identification of how you will get on with people. In the US you have it relatively easy, because you just have to ask people who won the election and their response is likely to give you a good idea of the rest of their opinions. Here we tend to do that by their reaction to the word brexit, although now we have the handy indicator of whether they've had the vaccine and the reasons for their decision either way. I have been spending time sitting in the sun recently (pictured below) and yesterday a man started chatting with me who told me quite seriously that Bill Gates was spying on me through the coronavirus vaccine I have had and that this is part of a new world order. I remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. Apart from anything else, if this was actually happening, a member of our government would have left it on a memory stick on a train by now. In th...

I was convinced I had already blogged about this Avengers episode, since it is one of my favourites, but am unable to find it if I have. The episode came to my mind recently, because once again I am having a spot of bother at work. I solemnly swear I don't go looking for it! But when I explained to my manager the reason that it is a phenomenally bad idea to stop anyone except management reporting incidents, I found myself using the words of Mother in this episode, when he comments that his interlocutor would be foolish not to suspect him . Nobody should be above suspicion, and the best-intentioned of people can, and do, go off the rails. Since then one of my colleagues has quite rightly blown the whistle on their failureto treat a particular event as an incident, and management have wound up looking very silly indeed. Anyway the upshot is that all three of their seniors are looking for other jobs. Incidentally, in this one Mother dictates a memo to Grandma, whom we never see, an...

Why haven't I thought of this similarity before? As I write this I am watching Never Say Never Again, and while fans will know some don't even think of this as a real Bond film, I have a weakness for the unloved and orphaned. I see from t'internet that the first Bond novel by Ian Fleming was published in 1953 - although push that back to the middle of the forties if you believe that Fleming plagiarised Bond from another writer. The first film was in 1962, although again there was a Bond episode broadcast in the 1950s US TV show Climax! I am not convinced that UK scriptwriters on The Avengers would have been that likely to have seen that show, but of course you never know. The first Avengers episode was broadcast in 1961. In novel terms Bond has the head start but The Avengers was broadcast in the UK before the first Bond film. This  page has a list of real people who could possibly have contributed to Bond's personally - I had no idea there were so many! But one thi...

Yesterday I went to Leamington Spa, which is not far from here but is always an expensive journey because there is someone there with the same taste in TV as me, who keeps selling his or her DVDs to the entertainment exchange, and I keep buying them. Yesterday I bought series 1 of a series I have never heard of before, Rogue's Rock, but which I find I like because it is definitely out of the same stable as Freewheelers, even down to some of the same music. In non-TV I bought the horror film spoof Young Frankenstein, and bought the boxed set of Thriller. I have seen the show before but not for some time and have somehow never blogged about it here. Thriller is one of those series which is described as legendary by some, and since it is an anthology series, you can often find it described as mixed. Lady Killer is the first episode, and it's excellent, despite embodying virtually everything I dislike in television of this era! For a start the three main characters are played by...

Apologies if you have left a comment on this blog and it has not been published. I have found that blogger has not been sending me emails to say that a comment had been left and so I have just found a large number of comments awaiting motivation. Apologies too if I have deleted your comment by mistake. There were comments in Chinese and also a lot inviting people to apply to be sexy webcam models. I would apply but I don't think I am what they have in mind!

 I suppose there was a time when the only source for information on cult TV was books - and friends, of course. Then came the internet and provided a place where fans of old TV could both publish their own opinions and be influenced by other people's. I find these days that whenever I want information about a TV show and google its name, the web pages which give me the information I want will tend to be from blogs, and will also give me the writer's opinion to make me think in a different way. This post is almost entirely due to the influence of Grant Goggans's blog, since he has been watching The Goodies with his son and has prodded me into giving the show another go. Of course I have seen The Goodies before, but I suspect I wasn't in the right mindset at the time, because I remember heartily disliking it. On watching it again I find I like it enormously and in fact have watched the discs I have, several times. But let's get the criticism out of the way first - ...

Apologies for the lack of TV-based posts here recently. It has been the weather for getting out and about, and when indoors, the picture which illustrates this post will show where I have been! The pub is actually the Gunmaker's Arms in Birmingham's Gun Quarter, which sells proper beer, much of it made by the local Two Towers Brewery. 

It is a feature of this blog that the majority of the shows I write about were broadcast before I was born. I have recently come across DVDs of some later TV shows, some of which I remember watching with my parents, so I'm going to have a series of posts on Seventies TV. I'm proposing that it will take the form of a single post on each of the series: It Ain't Half Hot Mum, The Sweeney, Rising Damp, & Yes, Minister. The last one is cheating a bit because I see the first series was actually broadcast in 1980, but it feels very seventies to me. I may also do a post on The Professionals, even though I've already written about a couple of episodes here. In characteristic mode for this blog I leap straight in with the most controversial. You will not see this show broadcast on the BBC nowadays (there are episodes on youtube); they have decided it will never be broadcast again, for its offensive racial stereotyping. This revolves around the use of Cauca...