Cult TV Blog

Well that’s the annual Winterval over as far as I’m concerned. I’m slightly disorientated because nearly everyone in my apartment building has gone away for Christmas, leaving the place eerily quiet and dark. Additionally I had underestimated how warm a small modern flat could be, with the strange result that I’m sitting here in an unheated flat on the 27 th December wearing a vest (undershirt to US readers) and feeling distinctly warm. These two things are putting me in mind of the end of the word and so my attention has naturally turned to the legendary series Doomwatch, which I see is due to be released in its remaining entirety in the spring. This post is solely based on the DVD of two episodes – about a plastic-eating virus and mutant rats – and reading around other people’s writing on the show. In this show the 1960s’ ambivalence towards scientific progress reaches its peak, as does suspicion (I don’t really want to use the words conspiracy or paranoia) towards the establish...

Christmas is coming and true to form I’m getting as close to being Christmassy as I’m ever going to be by posting about a ghost story. It may seem like this broadcast is way outside my comfort zone of usually 40+ years old TV, but I have always had a fascination with anything which could come under the heading of weird. I am keenly awaiting the release of the forthcoming documentary on Borley Rectory, since that along with this story was one of the formative influences of my young weird life. Also ‘the paranormal’ may be said to come under the usual definition of ‘cult’ rather than my own definition, of anything I like! This is a show which rightly claims to be based on a true story, of a family tormented after the daughters began playing with a Ouija board. It is one of the more high-profile haunting stories in British psychical lore, and is the more effective for having taken place in an urban area in modern times and is therefore free of the usual paraphernalia of ghost stor...

I am watching the first series of Batman (1966). I consoled myself for the reduced-size reopening without a conveyor belt of my favourite sushi restaurant (who the hell picks sushi off a menu?) by buying the boxed set, expecting a diversionary trip down memory lane and some very lightweight viewing indeed, but of course it's set me off thinking. I watched Batman in my childhood, although it was after the 1960s. Since I must have been very young and I remember singing along to the theme tune (truth to tell, it's hard to stop myself doing it even now), and making the sound effects. It must have been before I encountered The Avengers for the first time, which was on the advent of Channel Four in the UK. That said, on revisiting it, Batman reminds me so much of The Avengers. I have Googled this connection at length and have been unable to find anything on the internet drawing parallels between the two series, although naturally this search is necessarily complicated by the ongoi...

The rest of the classic TV blogosphere is beginning to reflect on how our favourite shows celebrate this festive season. In typical fashion I have merely touched on Christmas in name only with a ghost story, and am now running back to seeing possible allusions to apartheid in The Prisoner. I must apologise to my regular readers for not posting in a little while; the trouble with my 'manager' is continuing and has all been rather stressful. I have wound up being a witness in a disciplinary hearing for one of my 'colleagues'. The manager conducting the hearing looked slightly shocked when he said that I was making a very serious allegation, and I replied by putting a dossier in front of him of six years of incidents, and the dates when I informed the manager of these things, copies of emails, and so on. This may seem divorced from the subject in hand here, but actually it isn't. The subject of this episode comes down really to humans' mutual need for society...

Pagan. Now there's a word which gets a hammering all round and is taken up and run with by all sorts of people. Its etymology is Latin, of course, from the word for fields, and it means people of the fields. It's a Latin way of saying country bumpkin, and was coined at the time Christianity was a spreading urban religion to refer to the unbaptised hordes who stuck to their previous Pagan ways. Similarly Christmas is a festival argued over by all sorts of people, and it seems strangely suitable that I should be reviewing this story of alleged Pagan remnants from this box set  of ghost stories for Christmas. I may or may not write about the others, which are in the main adaptations of MR James's marvellous stories, but I've chosen to start with this one since I find, reading the reviews of the internet, it gets widely criticised for not being a ghost story. It seems to me that it can be considered a ghost story, it's about a ghost of a different sort from t...

In so many ways, this episode is a no-brainer when looking for possible allusions to South African apartheid. The level of surveillance in The Village rivals anything Botha's government could later have thought up. The laying of traps using the sophisticated methods of corrupt medicine. The use of technology to monitor events. The activities of the 'jammers' are not dissimilar to the method of keeping your opponent busy which I delineated in my last post in this series. But what particularly catches my interest in this episode is the activities prognosis on Number 6. Even though he is usually portrayed as the most discontented inhabitant of The Village, it is interesting how much – unless intended to lull his captors into a false sense of security while he is gaining intelligence – his daily life in The Village is a routine of simple leisure and relaxation. In fact that would seem to be the routine of every inhabitant for the purpose of this episode, although such thi...

I touched briefly on The Sweeney, when I did a series of posts on 1970s TV shows earlier in the year. Re-reading my post, I find that I was mainly interested in the historical context of the show, making reference to the contemporary history in my local area. To tell the truth, I have never actually got on well with The Sweeney. I thought for a long time it was because one of my old neighbours put me off it by describing it sneeringly as 'very old fashioned', and recounting how she and her partner, who likes it, would fight over the remote interminably until her got so drunk he would go to sleep and then she would watch what she wanted. Unfortunate and largely irrelevant associations aside, I didn't realise that The Sweeney also spawned two films, the subject of this post, and through watching them I have discovered what I think is wrong with The Sweeney. The show is much better served as a film than as a TV show. There, said it. These two films are basically Sween...