Cult TV Blog

Another Christmas has been and gone and I have once more resisted writing about Too Many Christmas Trees. I am sure I will write about it at some point, I'm just rather wary of not doing it justice - although I suppose I can always return to it in the future. Instead I'm going to write about Noah's Castle, although I'm not sure I can do that justice either. Noah's Castle features an actor who appears in many of the TV series of the era I write about - Simon Gipps-Kent. There are a couple of reasons he hasn't appeared here yet: the first is that he was type-cast in the role of upper class youth in the sort of time-travelling period drama which has never really appealed to me. The other is that up until recently I had only come across him in The Tomorrow People. I haven't yet managed to sum up what I would want to say about that show in a blog post, because I'm rather ambivalent about it, both about the show itself and I'm not really sure what I think...

I ventured over the sea to the US in my last post (and thank you to Mitchell Hadley for commenting on this and bringing it to the attention of the TV blogosphere) so of course I've come scurrying back to Blighty this time. The Professionals is a show which I have tended not to write about here, despite it being one of my favourites. For a start I remember watching it with my dad, which is enough reason for it to be favourite, and it is also redolent of the clothes, cars and life of my childhood. It seems like it does have a cult following on the internet - the following just doesn't seem to have passed over into the cult TV blogosphere. I have a theory about its (relative) lack of popularity. Much 1970s TV suffers from being made in the 1970s. The times were awful. The fashions were laughable. The social mores of the time were ridiculous (many a time Bodie and Doyle begin a conversation with a woman with the words 'Look, love...'). As just one example, the four CI5 cars...

weeks ago I posted here about a first-series episode of Get Smart, and the post seemed very popular, at least to judge by the comments. The way I discovered that the series was available was this: I saw the whole boxed set in the HMV shop round the corner from me and it stirred a memory of the show. I simply had to have seen it because it seemed so familiar, but I had little recollection of it, so I only bought the series 1 set online as a taster to see if I woud like it again. I did and as my Christmas present to myself have duly bought the whole series as a boxed set (in region 2 format, obviously). I also managed to get it on ebay for £20 less than the normal retail price which is around the £50 mark. The set includes all 138 episodes on 25 discs, with 8 hours of bonus footage and features. I see from the box that the run time is 3964 minutes, which is 66 hours of Get Smart. I've started early but I don't think I will have exhausted it by Christmas day! Some of the online re...

How have I managed to get this far without writing about this Avengers episode? Perhaps I had better start by disclosing that I have a ridiculous bias and this Avengers is one of my favourites. In fact I think it may even encapsulate best the Avengers thing for me. The whole episode is set firmly in Avengerland for a start. This of course was necessary because some of the more pantomimic elements of the plot would be incredible if seen against the real world of the 1960s. I say pantomimic because while there are times when the subject matter of this programme is treated very seriously, and would even be very distressing if the events of this episode happened in reality, they are treated in a way which can hardly be taken seriously. For example the opening shots of the man who hits the wall so hard it leaves his imprint in the plaster. The scene is as if a comic strip has come to life: the man dies and yet we see it. It is like the scenes in a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom gets hit...

Before The Avengers. The Avengers. After The Avengers. That is largely my own description of the landscape of 1960s British TV. Regular readers will of course know that I see The Avengers as a high point, and everything else is rather an anticlimax, or under the show's influence, or imitating it. It is for this reason that I tend not to venture into the world before The Avengers very often (except in film terms - most of the films I watch are pre-Avengers). Ghost Squad is thus a rare departure for me - although still bang up my street because it is still an ITC show, which studio produced the majority of the rest of my favourite viewing. Ghost Squad was never really going to appear here, until I came across the box set in a charity shop in Stratford upon Avon this week and took that as the universe's message to me. I'd read about it, of course and it tends to come up in my recommendations on Amazon, but I'd never really taken a fancy to it. I'm trying to put my fing...

Let me get two things out of the way before I start on this actual show. The first is that I have been watching Honor Blackman play a probation officer in the show of the same name. The only reason the show won't get a post here is that it isn't really my sort of thing - but if you like shows with legal-type settings which are note police procedurals or court room dramas as such, you may very well like it. The second thing is that I prepared for this blog post by *listening* to the episode rather than watching it, and what I listened to was the version produced by Springbok Radio in South Africa in the 1970s. I have all the remaining episodes of that show which I downloaded from the website about it and they are jealously backed up on two laptops, my google drive and a CD-Rom: they're not getting away from me anytime soon. I have previously commented here that the website devoted to the South African radio Avengers series no longer seems to allow the shows to be download...

A few posts ago I said that I would try to concentrate more on blogging about single episodes of quality shows. And thus we come to Bottom, which I don't think I've written about here before, although it is one of my favourite shows ever. Coming out of the alternative comedy scene of the 1980s, it isn't really comparable to the Goodies, and yet I do think there is a slight comparison in the theme of down-at-heel 'friends' who end up stuck together for better or worse. The difference is in the tone of course - the friends in Bottom are really mortal enemies who have a bizarre codependency going on, while the friends in the Goodies are really friends who club together to do anything in a time of need. I feel it is significant that one is pre- and the other is post-Thatcher's Britain. My favourite scene in this Bottom episode is the card game with which it opens. It is obvious that this kind of card game has frequently been replayed in this house, and also that ...