Cult TV Blog

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . Since Arrival is ours and our Prisoner Peter Smith's first introduction to The Village, there is a wealth of material and I will deal with it across two posts. This one, the first, will deal with the nature of The Village itself in the light of the psychiatry and criticism leading up to the end of the sixties, and the second will deal with Smith's admission to the hospital, the significance of his admission and will reinforce some of the points made in the first post. The show immediately draws our attention to The Village, even before it starts to explain anything about Smith. Cafe, taxis, shop, map, Village - this is the order the show introduces the Village. The map indicates that there is nothing outside The Village and I would suggest that that is because The Village is a particular sort of institution called a total institution. At the time the identification and criticism of ...

I see it is five years since I went through The Prisoner on the blog so it is high time I had another go at him. I have been thinking about the various viewing orders but I'm having some difficulty with deciding how to do it so I'm going to do a series of posts on Number 6 as a psychiatric patient and The Village as a hospital. In fact, this always strikes me as one of the more blindingly obvious ways of understanding the series beyond the usual understanding of control and freedom, although I'm rather surprised to see little on it online. I would hate to think that you would find actual original research on this blog! For the record I don't think that one single approach to the series, beyond repeating underlying themes, is correct or even possibly intended by McGoohan. However when you look on the show in a psychiatric sense it suddenly begins to look very different. I think it can be understood to be about a very special inpatient of a very special psychiatric hospit...

This is a show I came across recently and have gone out of my mind over.  The pilot is on the Internet Archive but I have treated myself to the boxed set as a late birthday present. Bluey is a 1976 Australian TV series which as far as I can tell has a cult following in Australia but I'm not aware of it being widely known in the cult TV blogosphere. Perhaps I should just say that we are all familiar with lots of seventies police TV series from both sides of the Atlantic and this is not out of the same stable at all. This is special. I suspect the team were aiming for a police procedural set in an oddball detective team which would have been utterly ordinary. Luckily if that's what they were aiming for they missed their aim completely. To cut to the chase it's about a police officer called 'Bluey' Hills who is really good at his job. He's so good at his job he's accumulated a telephone directory size file of disciplinaries and nobody else can cope with him in ...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . I see I began these posts on January 16th, and had no idea they would occupy me for the next four months. 42 blog posts about 58 TV shows later we have come to the end for now. Now that I have reached the end of this unexpectedly long series of posts I am in a position to document some of the reflections these posts have occasioned in me. These reflections were intended to be attached to the last post but have become rather unwieldy. I have tried to make them as snappy as possible. The first is about wiping shows , which is the main reason is that these shows were split up.  I find it absolutely bizarre that early TV (in fact up to the seventies) was influenced by the culture of the theatre so that each show was a one-off and never to be repeated. There are complete runs of fifties radio shows extant and while most film before the forties has been lost, that was because of the instability of the medium, not del...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . I seem to have come to the end of the orphaned episodes I have for now, and this post is to gather together some shows that I think people might like but I don't think I can squeeze a whole post out of each one. I still have one separate post to publish with my reflections on this journey down the junked TV rabbit hole. Mornin' Sarge  (1989) is a single season comedy set in an incompetent police station and made by the team behind  They Came from Somewhere Else . You can read the story behind this team  here . Not to beat about the bush I think this show may be a bit Marmite, and online opinion seems to be divided between raving about it and a few people saying it wasn't much cop (geddit?). The  pilot episod e has got loose on the internet. Mr Majeika is an almost legendary children's TV series about a wizard who has failed his exams seventeen times so is sent to earth to teach in a primary school. He...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . I think I have reached the end of these posts for now, so this will be the last post in the orphaned episodes series, just except for a post dealing with some odd shows that I won't do full posts about, and some reflections. This is the second episode of this show i have posted about, and the whole series must have been fascinating if these two odd episodes are anything to go by. As is so often the case with these shows there is another with the same name, but this post is about  this one  not  this one , which really does sound odd. This is about an ordinary man who quite suddenly finds himself with supernatural powers, and the full implications of this for his life. After he feels an accident his colleague has, in the manner of the time the hospital his colleague goes to sends round a parapsychologist, wonderfully played by Geoffrey Bayldon. Boysie, the guy with the gifts, ultimately sends him away and s...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . Another episode from  Tales of Unease . This one is in a few places online. I'm afraid I can't remember which so can't link the right one, but in one copy the sound drops out for much of the show, but if you start watching that one don't despair - try one of the others because they're not all the same and the whole show with complete audio is out there. The above link is quite critical of this show because of the absence of explanation in the plot and unsatisfying conclusion. My own reading would be that I think the unease it leaves you with is largely the point. I also would think it's deliberately not explained fully and leave space for the viewer to think about it. In retrospect one of the reasons to watch this show is for its utterly sixties atmosphere (it was shown in 1970). Art students are perhaps one of the more countercultural avocations of the time and quite a bit of the show is devoted to t...