Cult TV Blog

How have I managed not to pass comment on Minder up to now? Despite being a series which IMHO went on too long, I love the gritty depiction of 1970s London in the early episodes. This is the same world shown in The Professionals and The Sweeney, just seen from the underside. This episode is based on real events  of the Spaghetti House Siege in 1975, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Minder script. Three black men attempted to steal the week's takings from an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, but wound up taking the staff hostage. Surveillance techniques were used by the police, the hostage takers made rather confused attempts to pass the robbery off as a political act, the press nobly agreed to help the police manipulate what was happening by their headlines, and one of the hostages developed what later became known as Stockholm Syndrome.  The episode also deals with another issue of the time, namely immigration, by cleverly juxtaposing the concerns ...

A belated happy new year to all my readers. I wasn't drunk all this time; I managed to pick up a bug which has literally laid me low for a week, hence the lack of posts here. Today I want to write about a series I bought on spec and comment on the way it is often compared to the slightly later series Minder. Turtle's Progress is what we would now call a spin-off from the 1975 show Hanged Man. I have owned Hanged Man on DVD, have watched it all the way through, and am not going to beat about the buch in declaring frankly that I didn't take to it. I bought it thinking that I would like its main premise, of a company boss who 'dies' in order to investigate who has it in for him. I still do like that premise, I just found that it lacked oomph and failed to hold my attention, a completely personal response to it, and of course you are welcome to disagree with me vehemently. Turtle's Progress features one character from Hanged Man, but the setting is very differen...

Another series that I remember from the eighties but started in the seventies. It's also another series that I'm finding much better on watching it now, than I remember it being at the time. Another series featuring some seriously dodgy motors (see, I'm already starting to talk like Arfur). Another series aiming at realism & grittiness. Another series (more are to come in this series) set in the hand-to-mouth world of the criminal underground. So much so seventies TV show, but there are several fings which interest me here. I wonder what the original target audience for Minder was? - what prompts me to wonder this is that it strikes me as very much the working class used as entertainment. Minder very much shows the other side of the 1970s era of prosperity, both in its depiction of hand-to-mouth dodgy dealings, but in a frequent depiction of rich people as even more dodgy than the poor people. There is often a very real element of a morality tale in Minder, & the...