Cult TV Blog

I have had several run throughs of both series of Special Branch before, but have tended to miss something in this episode. I feel like the stakeout is a standard dramatic set up for the crime shows of the seventies - dramatically it allows character development, allows for an exciting denouement and must be relatively cheap. The only difficulty is preventing boredom settling in and that is usually done by the interplay between the (invariably two) officers doing the stake out. Unfortunately they didn't have the ultimate resort of a totally weird event used by Scully and Mulder while they were being punished by the FBI in later series. In this episode the development used to distract from the ennui is the friction between Haggerty and Craven, which in fact dominates the whole episode. This is an entirely personal view because as regular readers know I prefer my TV unreal, but the ongoing friction doesn't really do it for me. This is purely because situations where you can't...

I have honestly no recollection whether I have posted about Special Branch here before: I have a feeling that since it is a show which took a marked change of direction from its 1960s incarnation to its 1970s incarnation, I may have posted about the 1960s incarnation before, and left the 1970s version to be dealt with on a different day. That day has npw arrived, and frankly I am surprised that I haven't got round to posting about how much I love this series here. It has literally everything. It has 1970s nostalgia (my dad had a Ford Cortina like that), it has politics in their broader sense, it has the internal politics of the special branch, it has the personality clash between Craven and Haggerty, and most particularly it has that wonderful 1970s feel. WHat I like very much about Intercept is the political topic of the South American oil and how this is all related to a parcel bomb which goes off right at the beginning. Energy and violence: what more 1970s subject matter coul...

I posted  recently  about my fear that there will come a time when there is no 'new' vintage TV to be discovered, a post which certainly seems to have made a hit with the blogosphere, judging by the number of page hits. Of course this may be partly explained by the recommendation by  Mitchell Hadley  (thank you), who has made me realise the reason that the hit counter for posts about The Man from UNCLE has suddenly gone up, even though I too don't think I'll bother watching the film.   Having seen it as a recommendation on Amazon and hummed and ha'ed over it, I saw the discs for the 1973 series of Special Branch for sale yesterday and bought them on spec. I am delighted to say that while I didn't initially warm to this show, having watched a few episodes I think I have found another quality 1970s series. Except this isn't a 1970s series. It's a 1960s – 1970s series, which went through a major transformation of approach, cast, and production v...