Cult TV Blog

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 am currently starting a much-needed holiday, which is what turned my mind to this episode, and I realise I have been putting off blogging about The Tomorrow People. The reason is the obvious one - it is a hugely ambitious show, which also manages to be ridiculously confusing and, er, bound permanently to the 1970s, with all that that implies. It is also rather difficult to write intelligent criticism of this show because it has all already been said. My own long-standing criticism is that I find it confusing - even to the extent of not being able to disentangle episodes, adventures, series, who is who, and so on - and this is not helped by a changing cast of Tomorrow People. There is also the matter of this being a children's show, and I have been trying to think myself into how a child would view this episode, and I suspect the emotions would be a mixture of envy for the Tomorrow People and horror at how the enslaved boys are treated. Isn't that the point of much writing...

My posts here have veered rather towards the gritty school of cult TV, and this show is no exception. I am also rather unusually in awe of this show, and regular readers will know that my pantheon of shows which are supreme quality is vanishingly small, but Out entered it as soon as I watched the first episode and simply had to order the whole series. Trevor Preston was given two series of his own to write - this one in 1978 and Fox in 1980 - after writing episodes of The Sweeney, which tells us exactly what stable this show comes from. Out, however, is not a cop show by any manner of means - the story goes that a criminal called Frank Ross got grassed up and ended up in prison. At the start of the series he is released from prison, baying for revenge. It's a sort of inversion of the principle of Man in a Suitcase, because the hero is done badly to by another criminal rather than the Secret Service. Man in a Suitcase is of course a classic, and it will give you some idea of the ...

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 ...

Recently I went to Sheffield, largely to see Europe's biggest listed building, which is the postwar development of Park Hill flats. I won't go into the tale of hope, disillusionment, deterioration and redevelopment using private money in any great detail. But Park Hill is the sort of development which was in it's hay day while Our Sort of Television was being broadcast. This episode of Doomwatch is (rather postmodernly) about another development of that type, and with the show's knack of predicting coming events, foretold the Doom of high rise living. Well, I say foretold, but high rise blocks of prefabricated construction were already doomed in this country after the partial collapse of one called Ronan Point (pictured) in 1968, three years before this was broadcast. Doomwatch rather tells the tale of human suffering in the blocks. It paints a picture of the ability of a tower block to cause isolation and mysteriously turn people into violent monsters. Apart from t...

Reality vs unreality, that is one of the continual themes in the TV of this age, that I write about here. I err on the side of unreality myself, and would identify the intrusion of brutal reality into the television world, as the seventies wore on. One of the doyennes of unreal television is the character of Jason King, and somebody leaving a comment (you can see it  here ) about a forthcoming biography of Peter Wynegarde has caused me to watch the eponymous series today. The opening scene makes the location of this episode clear: the manor house used to set the scene is used in many ATV series as well as The Avengers, so the episode is firmly set in Avengerland, thereby making its setting in unreality clear. The premise is even more unreal: the plots of Jason King's crime novels start to happen in reality and naturally he is suspected of the crimes. I love this Jason King, particularly that pretty well everyone is a caricature, in fact I think that generalisation can be exten...

I have been away and watched some current day television. It was rubbish, by and large, but gave me some ideas for posts here. I watched some Murder She Wrote and remembered how I got myself in trouble some time ago by asking if Angela Lansbury strikes Americans as a convincing American. I was hoping for a yes or no answer and didn't get one! So I thought I'd relive it by writing about an American playing Miss Marple. ...who of course isn't a convincing English person to a native speaker, but this film does a good job overall of portraying a cast of mixed nationality as British, while having a good go at dealing with our ridiculously complicated social stratification, and the film ends up very watchable. I would be interested in how they sound to US viewers. In general I shouldn't like this film, because it is a festival of big names, in addition to Helen Hayes we have Bette Davis and Leo McKern. They are such good actors that their presence isn't distracting. I s...