Cult TV Blog

And even more appearances of the crashing Jaguar footage! Both of these are from the US show Saturday Night Live, which I don't know very well (and since I see it's now on its 47th season I doubt I'll ever have the time or energy to catch up) although I have seen sketches from it and enjoyed them very much. The first occurrence (which I can't believe I have only just learned about because a cat driving a car is exactly my sort of thing) is in the recurring sketch Toonces the Driving Cat. Specifically as I am writing this I am watching the one called Toonces without a Cause (it's on YouTube and the icon for it is actually the Jaguar going over the cliff). Can I just say how much I love the idea of a real grey tabby cat doing non-cat-appropriate things through the agency of a very obvious puppet? I particularly like the scene where he has greaser hair. The Jaguar footage is repeatedly used for the point at which the cat inevitably crashes the car. In fact I can't ...

A little break from the orphaned episodes because I've found out about several other appearances of the white Jaguar footage ( Credit ) and it's in a show I only discovered this week. In fact despite my frequent worries that I will reach the point where there is no more old TV to be discovered, this week I have managed to discover three shows I didn't know existed: this one, The Innes Book of Records and The One Game. Of these only the last has been released commercially but I haven't actually watched any of it yet. This one touches on the project that I have had at the back of my head for literally years but never faced, which is to have a go at getting my head round the UK regional TV franchises, whose logos appear at the beginning of so many of the shows which appear here. I am now not going to attempt this project, because  this page  has all the information I could have wanted and frankly it is so complicated. Even as a child it made no sense to me that I was sitti...

As you all know I have a policy that shows I think are absolute duds will not appear here, and for most of my first viewing of this show I was thinking that I would have to comment that Black Carrion wouldn't appear here if I wasn't going through the appearances of the famous white Jaguar. In fact I have noticed that opinions about it on the internet tend to be very divided. Don't get me wrong, the majority opinion is very clearly that Black Carrion is utter dross. However there is also a solid phalanx of people who really appreciate it. I think that may be because this show draws on the mythology and folklore of the possibly abandoned or cursed village where people don't go and if they do they don't come back. The village in this case is even believed not to exist, but there are many real life examples of this.  Dode in Kent  would be an example,  Kuldhara in India  would be another. Sometimes these villages, or their inhabitants, vanish completely, such as  th...

Another show I have rather avoided writing about here. I am going to be completely upfront with the reason, which is the rather superficial one that the actor Gene Barry plays the lead character, Gene Bradley. I have even had to check that three times while writing it, and I just find the similarity of those names very confusing. Barry was of course American, in true ITC fashion and Bradley is of course the archetypal ITC hero, millionaire, sophisticated, and all over the continent like a rash. And this episode has a very classic plot around inheritance and control related to marriage, which is very solid and a real contrast with the exotic Jason King. The Jaguar footage is used in a quite low key way to show the demise of an associate of Bradley's, who has already gone to the castle housing the titular icon. If you have the Network DVD box set there is a featurette on disc 4 called Icons Aren't Forever, which of course I had to watch in preparation for this post, in which Barr...

It's been a while since I've watched a Jason King and I'm suffering from some culture shock, so perhaps I'd better start with a disclaimer that it's very unlikely this blog post will be very serious. Because, well, Jason King. When I started this blog I made a conscious decision to minimize pure description of shows, because it gets so wearing reading the same stuff all over the internet. However I am going to make an exception for this episode because how otherwise am I going to reference   Jason King's Groovy Pad ? Original ITC Synopsis (contains spoilers) Jason King falls in love with a gangster's girl friend - and finds that the arrows of love can lead to death. Olivier  (DAVID BUCK)  is a man with a mission. He wants to steal one million franc's worth of emeralds from Paris' Orly Airport. And he needs the help of gang leader Jean le Grand in order to carry out the raid. But le Grand  (KIERON MOORE)  knows that Olivier would very much like to ste...

Department S is one of my all-time favourite shows, simply because the plots are insane and the characters wild. It is as if they looked at every other show, dropped a few LSD and started writing what they saw. I have really noticed the difference coming from other ITC shows for these posts, and have also realised that the comparison of different shows is another thing we miss out on with the tendency to binge watch box sets. On the other hand this one has been so confusing. The moral is, if you have two or more cars written off during the course of a show, don't make two of them white. It makes it terribly confusing to Google five decades later. Even the internet movie car database, which is otherwise scarily precise, seems to have got confused. Anyway as far as I can tell the first white car to crash, which is driven by a dummy, is a first generation Chevrolet Corvair (don't tell me if it isn't!). I went to the trouble of finding out because I was interested by its transa...

I'm afraid I have got out of sync with these posts and this one should chronologically come before the last, so we make a brief return to the sixties. I am delighted to find, on reading round for this post, that  Grant's  son, despite not being old enough to remember this the first time round and probably the only one in his friendship group to watch quality TV like this, has the discernment to recognise that if you get into a white Jaguar you are going to die. This is the sort of memory which becomes very special as you get older. I have no idea whether Mark 1 and Mark 2 Jaguars exist in the US but when you come across one in later life it brings back your childhood viewing with Dad. I see that this is the first time I have written about this TV series here. There is a very simple reason for this: The Saint was one of the series I watched and loved as a child, and while I have several box sets, I have rather avoided blogging about it to leave my fantasies intact. You see I wa...

We arrive at shows broadcast in the seventies and still using the white Jaguar footage (although this show was actually made in 1968). I am not even going to pretend to do a full discussion of this show but will purely focus on what interests me - simply because it has already had very full discussion on the internet, especially the page on the Randall and Hopkirk Deceased website linked below. I actually love this one, purely because I love the classic film set up where a family come together at an isolated house (with or without the reading of a will), all loathe each other and then the bodies start piling up. It was virtually impossible to get through this series without using that plot at some point! As always when I watch this show I have unresolved questions about Randall's work and finances. Most obviously how he manages to afford a flat decorated in up to the minute seventies decor, despite never having any money. This episode brings up another question and I honestly don...

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...

Caution: there is a possible plot spoiler in this post. It is below the line. Our second show where the white Jag gets it and our second episode of The Baron. This one may even have some tenuous connection to the antiques trade, because as you all know, a cameo brooch is heavily involved. I'm liking this Baron very much because it is very firmly out of the ITC stable and yet is a solid mystery. It is set in Spain, which gives it its ITC sophistication. For the main part it is also visually very ITC, however I think many props are used to set up the mystery in a way very characteristic of The Avengers. What I mean by this is the amount of 'antique' (reproduction in reality) furniture and other props. I would suggest that ITC usually would be more likely to go for a modern look. If you put this clobber in an episode of The Avengers, it would spell out that a great old English family has gorn to the dogs.  Here the old family set up is contrasted with the modem set up of the l...

I mooted several possible linked posts plans in my last post. As you can see I have gone for the idea of a series of posts on the episodes of shows featuring the famous ITC white Jaguar plummeting over the cliff. You can read more about the making of this  here  which is also the list I'm going by for my posts. I hope I can complete this, however I might have difficulty with the final appearance on the list, an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. My first thought about the use of these Jaguars is that it was relatively economical to shoot this footage once and reuse it. I imagine nowadays it could be done virtually and I see new Jaguars cost between £30,000 and £65,000 so at current prices it would be very expensive! Nor were the cars new at the time: they used a mixture of Mark 1 (1955 to 1959) cars and Mark 2 (1959 to 1967) cars. You won't see them on the road here now -as far as I can see the numbers remaining of both models are down to the hundreds, not least ...