Cult TV Blog

It's Fake Mediums Week on the blog! Lucky you none of you come here for sensible blogging, isn't it. Actually it's remarkable how things come to your attention in common themes. When I posted earlier this year about television plays it was remarkable how psychopathy came up and I wasn't even looking for it. Now in my viewing fake mediums have come up. There is of course a certain irony in there being a Randall and Hopkirk episode featuring a fake medium. I like the ones where people who aren't knowingly psychic or professional mediums can see Marty either all the time or under certain circumstances. On the other hand I suppose having a real ghost with you is a fairly certain way to weed out the fake mediums! We're still in classic ITC territory and I'm going to say it right now - for my money you can keep all the CGI in the world, there's nothing to compare to a good set and some back projection interspersed with some stock footage. I like my TV to be un...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . I have never watched The Prisoner in the production order before, and while obviously it screws up the order of episodes at the end, it has the advantage for my agenda of giving us this couple of cosy therapeutic episodes together at this point. I am going to deal with them together because, to be quite frank, I don't like them, always get up quite a lot of hope about them and end up feeling rather disappointed. I am going to be even more frank and say that this is because they are both ridiculous. Once Upon a Time is bizarre and Schizoid Man falls flat on its face because it's impossible. We all have lookalikes, but not to that extent (although of course I do myself frequently get mistaken for Telly Savalas). Nonetheless I think they go well together because they both reference elements of psychotherapy and particularly the anti-psychiatry of the sixties. It will come as no surpris...

I have rather got out of the habit of posting my sightings of the books from John Steed's flat in Stable Mews. I suppose I have got used to the idea that this set of distinctive leather-bound books would keep appearing all over the place in sixties TV (and it's not only the books, props reappear all over the place in The Avengers, and recently I have read about props being used in both The Prisoner and Randall and Hopkirk Deceased). I have got so used to seeing them, that recently it took me aback to see Steed hiding behind his books when pretending to be under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen and chased by a murderous fake nanny who is a diabolical mastermind. Of course the episode could only be Something Nasty in the Nursery.

For many years I have wanted to know what the books were in Steed’s flat at 3 Stable Mews. I mean specifically the collection of uniformly-bound leather volumes, one of which he is seen reading in only one episode. It is evident that they are not just a random collection of brown-back books, because of the uniform binding. They are clearly a set, they were either bound all together or one at a time in imitation of the others, maybe even by the same binder. The number of them mean that they are unlikely to be a set of encyclopaedias or even a set of one of the English writers. I had always theorised that they could be court reports, bound magazines of a previous age, or a set of books uniformly bound; standard authors, type of thing. Because these books have a very distinctive red and black band a little down the spine, I have taken the liberty of assuming they were the same set of books when I have seen something that looked like them appear in other TV series of the 1960s. If...

It's been a while since I've posted on The Avengers & since I've got a man in taking apart my sideboard with a crowbar & taking away all the rubbish I don't want, I might as well post on this vintage episode. And vintage it really is. My introduction to The Avengers was the Tara King series & the colour Mrs Peel episodes, so I have a weakness for them, but whenever I return to series 4 I have to admit I can see why it's often thought the best. I think probably the Avengers 'recipe' is at its best in these episodes. The episode is populated with a cast of characters who are overdrawn to exactly the right degree: they wouldn't seem real in the real world but aren't overdone. Steed is at his best playing his upper class buffoon role at the golf club. The scene immediately after the opening scenes, of the stocking-clad figure searching an agent's apartment, place this in the category of corruption in the Establishment. The visual langu...

(I will return to The Prisoner soon: I just need time to get my head round allegory in Dance of the Dead!) Classic Avengers territory, here, as far as questions of identity, doubles, deception, & state secrets are concerned. Watching Department S this time has really made me re-evaluate it as a successor to The Avengers, in a rather Series 6 mould, in terms of bizarreness, eccentric, flamboyant characters, & an organisation behind the characters' odd lives. Of course I have my usual gripe that the actors' faces are too familiar from sixties TV & have a tendency to make you wonder where else you've seen them - Basil Dignam & Robert Urquhart would be the ones that do that to me here. I'm intrigued by the impressive use of Steed's library - the books that appear in Stable Mews - that I can spot in no fewer than three locations in this episode. I don't always disapprove of repetition! Of course this is a piece where momentous matters of state ar...

An episode brim-full of allegory, this one, & perhaps one of the ones with the most intimate, personal themes, by which I mean identity & personhood, as well as issues of power. My one criticism of this episode is that it can become incredibly confusing, but then that has been the age-old intent of any visual medium with two characters who look the same! It starts in Number 6's cottage, which as a reproduction of his own home can be seen as an allegory for his own space & identity, or else somewhat allegorical for his life before The Village. I want to try to make an allegory of the zener cards. I feel the individual cards could be allegorical (the cube for imprisonment, the wavy lines for changeability, the cross for contradiction, etc) but I feel that would be over-elaborate. Perhaps the cards could be understood as an allegory for humanity, taking the time to play a 'game' of the trendy folk-psychology of the time, in the midst of the barbarism of The Vill...

If Don't Nail Him Yet relied heavily on an unspoken subtext of the agent's personal matters coming into play, this one hinges overtly on the workings of institutions - governments & even the spying game. Specifically, it's about what happens when an individual in an organisation is put out to grass for years & what happens when he becomes his own little outpost. In this episode the tension between Drake & his boss is explicit - he tells him he often overrates his abilities, after asking for a reassurance that a proper team to support him would be in place. This revisits the theme of Drake working in conditions that would lead anyone to get fairly terminally pissed off. It is also evident that Drake isn't the only one in that position - his contact in Beirut describes the difficulty of getting anything she needs, & this is contrasted with sledgehammer subtlety with the resources of the local police. There is a rather obvious moral here - you can only...

Yes, I know. This still isn't noticeably a post about The Corridor People <sigh>. I'm obviously going to have to come back to them. Instead it's actually happened - this is a blog about TV, & I hadn't decided what I would do when I got to the point of re-watching something I'd blogged about before (http://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/spyders-web-spyder-secures-main-strand.html) & wanted to write about it again. I've settled on another post. This is actually the second time I've been watching Spyder's Web since my original post, & I've reacted differently each time, the first by being unimpressed, & this time by warming to it all over again & thinking how good it is. This time round this episode strikes me as the best of the series - I think I found the plot somewhat over-involved last time, but that comes across as being the point this time. However this invites the obvious criticism that if it is confusing...

The opening scene of this Venus Smith episode may perhaps encapsulate what is wrong with all of them: I wasn't around in universities in the early sixties, but whatever the students were dancing to, I'm damn sure it wasn't the Varsity Drag. The song comes from a 1927 musical called Good News, & since this would be associated with their parents' generation, it would have been terribly demode. I don't get this total feeling of wrongness with the other songs used in the Venus Smith episodes: even if they are old songs they're suitable to their nightclub milieu. The wrongness extends to everything else in this episode: the plot is outlandish, the characters unsympathetic, it simply fails to maintain interest. The university setting falls flat on its face - to me it feels like the idea of a university of someone who hadn't been one. Since James Mitchell, the writer, had been to Oxford, this idea is just plain wrong, but nonetheless it remains for me an...

It's difficult to see how you could fail, when you open a show with an external of the house used for The Avengers' episode The House That Jack Built! On the other hand, this one shows how truly incestuous 1960s TV was by using Gerald Harper as a totally convincing & chillingly calm villain, who nonetheless makes me wonder what Adam Adamant is doing in The Champions! It's not really a TV star as such, but Steed's library turns up here with some good shots, sadly not good enough to be able to read the titles on the books. I like the plot of this Champions very much: this may be because it is essentially a straightforward detective story (with a supernormal twist of course, in terms of knowing who the fanatics' next victim is. I feel this makes it much more believable: the swap of an agent for a convicted criminal is a simple espionage trick that would be believable in the real world, which contrasts favourably with the sheer fantasy of some Champions scr...

I've neglected to comment so far on how much I love the very obviously hand-dran maps that announce the location of each adventure. You wouldn't catch that happening nowadays! Shades of The Man from UNCLE in this episode, with a tailor's shop (admittedly not a cleaner's) providing a cover for a secret vault, accessed through the changing room. I feel the sheer complexity & quaintness of the security system suggests the consultant who devised it was a very elderly lady! There are also shades of The Avengers episodes The Mauritius Penny & The Hour that Never Was in the use of a dentist, which is bound to cause a sensation of at least discomfort if not fear, in any number of people. I feel this Champions episode is unusual in its all-out use of technology, which is needless to say trumped by the Champions' super powers. It is unusual to find such technology in this show. If the language of props is to be understood, Steed's books are displayed to bes...

I think this may be one of my favourite episodes of The Champions, not least because of the feat of speed displayed at the beginning catching up with a van. There is some seriously strong acting ability here - I wonder whether 'alcoholic homeless person' is a stock character at drama school, but some actors get the feeling of fragility just right, as Harry Towb does here. There are some of the sixties recurring faces here as well, unfortunately I did find it distracting here, working out just which episodes of which shows I've seen them in. Anthony Bate is superb as the doctor, just chilling enough. It would be dangerously easy to spoil the role by giving even the slightest hint that it is not serious, but Bate plays it completely straight. I just wonder whether Steed resents him going off with his books from Stable Mews. I feel the role of the nurse doesn't suite Patricia Haine as well as the role she played in The Avengers' Who's Who - she seemed to relis...

Some may disagree with me about this (I wouldn't go to the stake for this opinion) but I would like to call this a Champions show set in Avengerland. I don't literally mean the countryside round the Borhamwood studios, but even though its location is Cornwall it's actually set in an England of decayed gentry, frightening locals & megalomaniac plans hidden under the - naturally completely unconvincing - cover of Cornish witchcraft. This is exactly the sort of cast found in later Avengers episodes! There are even shades of the Avengers in the false replacement for Sharron McReady. Several 60s regular actors in this episode: my favourite is Trennick, played by Terence Alexander. It isn't so overdone here, but I love him in ex-RAF mode in the Avengers episode The Town of No Return. I previously associated him too much with Charlie Hungerford in Bergerac, a character with whom I had no naturally affinity. I had no idea the poor man died of Parkinsons's Disease...

This is the second Avengers episode I'm looking at in preparation for the next episode of The Prisoner, since it reminded me that Split uses the personality/mind swap technique, although in a quite different way to Who's Who. I'm sure I remember seeing this episode on VHS with the standard Series 6 titles, but instead on my DVDs it has some alternative titles, very sixties. Apparently, according to the commentary, made for the American market. This is also apparently a Mrs Peel script reused, although rumour has it it was filmed while the Mrs Peel series was still being filmed. I think this is the first Linda Thorson Avengers I've written about. She seems to divide critics & fans very deeply. It's nothing to me, personally if I had to pick a favourite Avengers girl, Mrs Gale would be my choice. The irony is, of course that this series best exemplifies the Avengers 'thing': when you think of what the Avengers is, it's often a Linda Thorson ep...

Can you detect a pattern emerging here, that before I do another episode of The Prisoner I do some other things that are related, at least in the strange way my brain relates things, to the next Prisoner episode? In this case my brain isn't half as strange as the ones in this Avengers episode, where personalities are swapped so that agents of a foreign power can kill their way through our security network, with nobody suspecting them, since they look like Steed & Mrs Peel. Reading around this Avengers episode I realise that I've never fully appreciated it, probably because it is definitely one of the more light-hearted ones. But I'll have to add it to my list of episodes that reference feature films, in this case The Ipcress File (1965). I didn't spot this because I haven't watched it (derp), but it references visuals & plot elements: 'A top scientist called Radcliffe is kidnapped and his security escort killed. Harry Palmer, a British Army serg...