Cult TV Blog

The Power of the Witch - Real or Imaginary? is a 1971 BBC documentary about contemporary witchcraft, which is appearing here for Samhain. The veil is thin and so is my damn patience. Let me say right at the start that this is an excellent documentary, purely because it does a good job of trying to marshall the information on perhaps the most difficult subject there is. The word witch and the idea of witchcraft have been ridiculously slippery over human existence and this documentary, I think, chooses the correct combination of interviewees. We have actual modern witches, a vicar, a member of the Church Army, a psychologist. Obviously I can claim this to be a subject that I know a fair bit about. The interviewees all give their own particular view of the subject, and while that is good in itself I would wonder whether the production team knew enough about the complex subject to provide enough context to what was said. For example you have the Church Army officer talking about the devil ...

Warning: This blog post is about a documentary about child abuse and may be distressing. I have linked the relevant report of the Scottish Child Abuse inquiry which also contains significantly disturbing accounts of abuse, including in a setting of religious worship. Sins of our Fathers is a BBC Scotland documentary about abuse in Fort Augustus Abbey school, a school run by Benedictine monks in Scotland: both the school and the monastery have been closed since the 1990s. It is available on iPlayer. And it's bloody devastating. It goes straight into its first explicit description of sexual abuse within a matter of minutes and then immediately goes on to how the authorities at the monastery knew, and it isn't even talking about Fort Augustus yet, it starts with all the other monasteries of the English Benedictine Congregation first and then indicates that the Fort Augustus scandal was the last to break. This technique is literally devastating, completely factual, and you will kav...

This post is about two documentaries, one of which is TV and the other isn't. I'm doing them both for completeness in case anyone is interested and because they both interest me. So there. Actually the subject has been touched on on the blog before in my post on the Danger Man episode Not So Jolly Roger here . They are about the sea forts called Maunsell forts (after their designer) built in the sea in strategic places off the coast of Britain during the second world war. The wikipedia page ( Here ) is actually very good but the short version is that a man called Guy Maunsell invented several designs of forts which would be phsyically in the sea outside the then limit of British territorial water to stop German forces approaching the land rather than stop them once they got here. They weren't everywhere around the country, they were placed in the Thames estuary to defend London and surrounding areas and outside Liverpool to protect Liverpool. There were two separate design...

Keith Allen Will Burn in Hell is a 2007 Channel 4 documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church. I was looking for Louis Theroux's series of documentaries about The Most Hated Family in America, but there aren't pirated versions online so you've got Keith Allen instead. I would also recommend an internet documenary called Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church as a complement to this one, but I'm being good and sticking to the TV one. Aren't I good? The internet reviews for this documentary are universally bad and I honestly can't think why.  This documentary is banging. In fact I think it's the best one on this bizarre church I've seen because it treats WBC as a spectacle to start off with and gradually escalates and this sense of horror creeps over you until you want to throw something at the screen. And it's done in an incredibly low key way, as if it isn't really a very polished documentary. Any old documentary can have the Phelps-Roper f...

I have decided to go ahead and do something which I have considered for some time but fought shy of doing, namely a series of posts about documentaries, as opposed to the purely fictional shows I normally write about here. I have fought shy of this project because the last time I had a few odd TV shows to write about I declared I was having an orphaned episodes series, which got out of hand and ended up with puching fifty posts and took four months. I could see documentary season becoming even more unwieldy, but I'm going to set out and see what happens. I will try to stick to documentaries which are TV shows naturally, although you all know that I'm going to break this rule. As always I'm going to select documentaries purely because they interest me so I have a whole like of shows about weird shit lined up: we have religion, pirate radio stations, abuse, and all sorts of odd things. I'm also going to try to stick to documentaries which are available for free on the int...

The Mark of Satan is the final episode of Hammer House of Horror and it's a belter, straight out of a classic horror film stable. Graveyards, castles, and mortuaries are classic places to set a horror film and this one goes for the final one. It's a great place to set a horror film because clinical places are uncomfortable and being a mortuary rather than a hospital you get acres of bare flesh so it creates whatever emotions in triggers in the viewer personally. In fact in discomfort and bare male flesh it's a bit like visiting this blog. There is one aspect of this episode which has gained a different significance since it was broadcast in 1980, and that is that Edwyn, the protagonist, thinks he has been infected with an evil virus. It actually came to me as a bit of a shock that that wouldn't have had the strength then that it does now! In fact did you know that it was last week the vaccine was supposed to be activated and nobody who's been vaccinated is supposed ...

Absolute fan favourite, this one. Not surprising, when it is inspired by many of the classic tropes of horror films.  In the reviews online you will, of course, repeatedly see Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) mentioned, in which aliens replace people with copies. It's an obviously great horror classic, and this episode presses all the right buttons to make the fans think of it. You will also see that The Stepford Wives (1975), about the titular town of strangely conformist wives, is mentioned as a possible inspiration for the conclusion. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this: humans have been around for a long time and we can't always have completely original ideas! But I would suggest another possible inspiration for this story, which is the urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker, in which a motorist picks up a hitchhiker who then vanishes and not infrequently leaves some item of clothing behind. This was popularised by Brunvand's 1981 book about ur...