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...

Very classic ITC territory here, Nazi war criminals intent on world domination, unexploded bombs and only The Champions standing between them and their ambition. At this point I realise that I really could do with watching all the way through the ITC series again, because I am completely certain that these themes are recurring ones, but couldn't particularly tell you which shows. From memory, I am certain there is another Champions where they deal with a Nazi who has been hiding out for twenty years and (somewhat incredibly) thinks the war is still going on, and there is a Department S with a Nazi theme. In true Department S style it is treated much more as a backdrop of Nazi memorabilia, and to be fair you have to be a bit theatrical in that show because otherwise Jason King might appear unreal. And we can't have that, can we. Actually I have also literally just realised the sheer number of shows at this time with Second World War themes. I was hoping to have a short, pithy re...

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...

This part of the Tomorrow People demonstrates perfectly why I fought shy from blogging about it. The show went on for so long with so many story arcs that it can be difficult to keep hold of. I think we can truthfully say that A Man for Emily is the point at which it went off the wall. We have the bizarre space family, we have Peter Davison in swimming trunks, we have them make an Earth mission with the only research done in old westerns and we have the Tomorrow People interfering in this. In plot terms I personally feel this may have been stretching the Tomorrow People slightly further than was a good idea. This is entirely personal because I can well see that the idea of a next evolution in human life would well include interaction with aliens, because this is one of the weird interests of the time. There are also a lot of completely earth-bound concerns dealt with by the show, including racism and ghosts. My own opinion is that this episode gives them too much to do and also raises ...

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...

Goodness, it isn't often you get two programmes featured here with the same star, but Tom Adams illustrated the last post and is the star of this series, which I have wanted to see forever. Now fortunately the guy who runs the Archive TV Musings blog (if you haven't seen it, rush over there now, because it's much better than this one, he posts regularly and stays on subject better than me) has put the whole series on his YouTube channel. The channel has other good things like episodes of Freewheelers. The show is described by Wikipedia as a police procedural, but I'm not convinced it is as such. It is set in a sort of hard shoulder of police work so naturally does show police procedure but DCI Lewis, whom Adams plays, is a bit of a maverick and so it is more of an anti-procedural. Given that it was broadcast in 1980, I feel it was a deliberate contrast from the big name detective series of the time, The Sweeney, Target, The Professionals. The Enigma Files feels radicall...

Another year and once again I'm saving blogging about Too Many Christmas Trees for some unspecified time in the future. It will surely come as no surprise that I adore the naughty and slightly childish humour of the Carry On films. I suspect they may be one of those British things which don't travel well, but as always I stand to be corrected in the comments. I have deliberately chosen this one of the four Christmas TV specials on the box set because it is my favourite, and yet strangely it is often considered the weakest, according to the internet. Therefore it seems right to give it a plug here and have a go at rehabilitating it. It consists of a number of sketches joined together with a banquet, and manages to contain all sorts of things we associate with Christmas. These include elements of pantomime stories and spoof other genres of films and fiction. Visually it is splendid, and starts off with a shot of a manor house. We all know that in TV that speaks to established wea...

I am feeling a little trepidation at the thought of reviewing a Who which is a definite favourite of the fans - I realise that my usual tendency is to pick a show or episode which routinely gets savaged on the Internet, and have a go at rehabilitating it. My thoughts about this one are relatively few. The names of Doctor Who adventures are rather confusing. We have The Mind of Evil, The Faceless Ones, The Face of Evil, and so on. Personally I tend to think of them as 'the one where...'. In the case of this adventure I am not sure that actually helps because I think of it as 'the one where everyone would be better leaving well alone,' and that is also my title for several others! In fact I think it would be better called by one of the titles mooted before the final was settled on, and which unfortunately was rejected on the grounds it was pretentious: The Day God Went Mad. A major thread of the story is commentary on humans' religious instincts and behaviour, sp...

Once again we find ourselves in the presence of quality television. I have recently dropped the name of Kneale when talking about Quatermass, which I haven't got round to blogging about yet, but I didn't then own this series. For some reason I never fancied it, which may be for the very individual reason that there are a lot of famous names in this series, not only in the production, but in the cast, and as you know that normally doesn't go well with me. This eminence is reflected in the fact the Network boxed set comes with a leaflet about Kneale and the series; the only thing more eminent is to get released by the BFI. The theme of this series is given as bestial horror, which I had some difficulty understanding, but seems to mean the individual episodes are about horror, involving animals, entities we don't understand or which don't exist. I would also note that the episodes involve the extremes of human emotions. Buddyboy is no exception, and despite starrin...

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...

I try not to do much in the way of description here, because there's a lot of that about on the internet. In the case of Target there isn't any, so here we go. Hackett arranges a sting because he is informed a strong van is going to be raised. It doesn't happen but he finds his informant has been murdered in his own car. Hackett immediately suspects Maynard, a local respectable luminary of being behind this, and confronts him at the golf club. After twists, threats and intimidation, and much police footwork, the truth about what is happening on the ship, is revealed. I love the glee with which Hackett confronts Maynard at the end. I commented before that the cars in this show are gorgeous. Hackett is given a mark 3 Ford Cortina to drive after the murder in his original car, a more recent Ford. The flares are also quite something. Apart from the cars what most strikes me about this show is how old fashioned the police's office looks. The clattering of typewriters do...

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 have watched through the whole series in a day while I have unwell and have some impressions. 1. When you watch the show like that its different authors and abrupt cancellation really do show. 2. This isn't a bad thing - it goes with the plot of an occult conspiracy. 3. The theme music and visuals give exactly the right impression. 4. My original impression that in places it's a gallery of 1970s pyjamas, remains. 5. Bizarrely for the age, while there is obviously a sexual relationship going on, Anne remains fully dressed. 6. Also bizarrely, Tom wears progressively less as the series goes on, and not just to a bare chest, but has a conversation with his brother wearing only his underpants, when elsewhere in the show we see he owns a dressing gown. 7. I feel a certain bleakness about the show is deliberate. 8. How did the writers know the plot of the X-Files, twenty years later? I quite like this format of post, actually, I know I tend to be a bit verbose.

 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 - ...

I am indebted to Grant Goggans's ecxellent and thoughtful TV blog, firebreathingdimetrodon.wordpress.com, for bringing this show to my attention. I like Grant's style of writing about shows, one episode at a time, and of course his son also gets to comment on the shows. While the world of cult TV on the blogosphere may be a largely self-referential one, it pays off when we bring new shows to each other's attention. Now I know I have been thinking about accent quite a lot recently on here, largely through watching Murder She Wrote for the first time in many years. The question of accent isn't really one I comment on here a great deal, believing that viewers will understand the intended impression given by the chosen accent of a character. Come to think of it, if viewers of the TV series I write about here see the subtle nuances of class as exhibited in the various British accents differently from my own view, I don't think it really matters. A good TV show is unde...