Cult TV Blog

This show begins with the murder of 'The Gourmet Chef' (a parody of TV chef Keith Floyd, and no the amount of wine he drinks is not an exaggeration). Dave Spanker (a parody of Spender) is doing a lot of standing around being nostalgic for the North but isn't getting anywhere with solving the murder and the police commander realises he will have to assign somebody else to the case. Fortunately for us he assigns Jason Bentley (who wears crushed velvet and drinks while driving), Bonehead and Doyle, and Shouting George from The Weeney. And that is how we discovered what would happen if parodies of four TV detectives of the seventies were brought together to solve a crime. And it's glorious. To be frank you could probably finish reading this blog post here because this show is so good and so funny I literally have nothing but unconditional praise. Your life would genuinely be better spent watching this show than reading my wittering. So if you close the page now and go and f...

I have been watching some episodes of Armchair Theatre. I am finding it terribly worthy, rather stodgy, and frankly rather prefer the superficial soufflé TV shows I normally watch  and don't want to have to feel like I should be in evening dress to watch TV. It appears I am not the only one and  this page  (which I really do recommend for good background to this show and also Special Branch) indicates that Euston Films were recruited to shake it up. Regan was the second episode of the revised show. To be frank my first impression of this was not at all favourable, for a single reason. At this length of time, when the population and language of London have changed beyond recognition, it would be difficult or impossible to find someone who would think it natural to refer to the Flying Squad as the Sweeney Todd, but you could have done in the early seventies. But I myself went in pubs in the seventies and I find it difficult to believe that a pub would have been full of peo...

Apologies for the hiatus in posting. I have temporarily been watching some films and some less cult TV. Regular readers will know that I don't shy away from difficult subjects but even I find it difficult to know how to write about the Charlie Chan films in the twenty first century! Similarly I have been watching the Confessions films starring Robin Askwith and frankly while I am not embarrassed to reveal my liking for 1970s sex comedies, writing about them here could get rather wearing for you. Nonetheless we remain in the seventies because my manager has developed a habit of saying 'Shut it' ... referring to whatever the staff member thus addressed is working on. She is also pregnant and actually commented that she hadn't got any dinner because she'd eaten it by 11 o'clock. There is no point telling her about a TV show made well before she was born so here I am to ramble on about an episode of The Sweeney. Jackpot begins with extended footage of the delicat...

As I am writing this, I am waiting in for a plumber, who is going to install a new hot water cylinder. Hence the illustration: I am looking forward to a long hot soak like Tony Selby but don't worry, I won't inflict pictures on you. Long term readers are already traumatised by the sight of my man boobs anyway. Obviously I have been watching The Sweeney, prompted by the episodes I have seen recently of its BBC competition, Target. Of the two, frankly I think The Sweeney is the superior: Target tried to improve on the recipe of The Sweeney and wound up overdoing the violence, with the result that the characters tended to become one dimensional. Target also feels much more claustrophobic than The Sweeney, which in comparison depicts a greater richness of human interests, relationships and interactions. The result of The Sweeney's cult status was that the stars of stage and screen queued up to be beaten up and screamed at by Regan. I had forgotten about the guest stars and ...

I have been watching The Sweeney again. I posted specifically about the movie on this blog, but I don’t think I posted about the TV series as such. One of the things I have in mind to do is series of posts around different actors (capitalizing on the frequent recurrence of actors in 1960s TV, which usually annoys me so much, I know) and one of the things I had in mind was to focus on Ian Hendry, and he had a role in the first episode of the first series. I realized that I hadn’t felt inspired to watch the series again for about six months, and so I popped a disc in and pressed play. I had previously watched through all four seasons quite happily, and if you had asked me to place The Sweeney in a map of my televisual world, I would probably have put the show as coming out of the same stable as The Professionals and The New Avengers. This is despite one of my old neighbours’ attempts to put me off it by telling me how very old-fashioned it was. On the surface The Sweeney can well be ...

(Pub Bombings memorial picture credit: http://www.robertcjones.co.uk/Birmingham%20Cathedral%20Churchyard,%20UK.html ) I went to the Dental Hospital yesterday. I didn't need any work done - just my dentist fussing unnecessarily - & as it turns out I can relate that fact to the subject matter of this blog quite easily. For a start the present soon-to-be replaced building is a gem of 1960s architecture if you like that sort of thing, very much out of the same stable as the building in the opening scenes of Danger Man: 'The late Professor Alexander MacGregor, the then Director of Dental Studies and Mr H. Locksley Hare, the architect, visited many of the newer and outstanding schools in Europe. The design of the building incorporates many ideas acquired during these visits. The new building was opened in 1965 at a site next to the General Hospital (now Children's Hospital). This building was the sixth home of the Hospital and School.' ( http://www.dentistry.bham.ac.u...