Cult TV Blog

This post will mark something of a departure from a tradition I have unintentionally started on this blog. The tradition is that when I am writing about 1970s TV, I start by reflecting on the circumstances under which I first watched it, comment on how the humour and attitudes haven't work well with time, and then either decide it is rubbish or express my horror at how many of the cast have been posthumously convicted of child abuse. This pattern developed in a series of posts I did wome time ago on seventies TV. Are You Being Served, however, will buck that trend completely. This post is actually occasioned by my finding the DVDs of Grace and Favour (the 1990s resuscitation of the show set in a country house hotel) and also the DVDs of Are You Being Served Series 1 in very close succession. I actually have almost no recollection of the episodes in series 1 at all, despite the fact that Are You Being Served has rather been repeated to death over the decades. Almost no recollec...

Apologies for the lack of TV-based posts here recently. It has been the weather for getting out and about, and when indoors, the picture which illustrates this post will show where I have been! The pub is actually the Gunmaker's Arms in Birmingham's Gun Quarter, which sells proper beer, much of it made by the local Two Towers Brewery. 

It is my day orff, I have done the little jobs I have to do and it is looking like rain, so instead of me sitting in the park reading Philip Heselton's new biography of Doreen Valiente (weird is my life), you lucky people get a blog post about Survivors. Survivors is a series which I have rather avoided so far, despite having looked at it in shops and on line multiple times, I have always metaphorically put it back and in fact am writing this post on my first viewing of the first series. It is having an interesting effect on me, in that it is making me question why I like the television that I do. In fact considering from watching The War Machines (see my last post) I got a warm comforting feeling that IT failings would almost certainly prevent the takeover of the world by computer-based machines, Survivors gives me the warm, fluffy feeling that the holocaust imminently-expected in the 1970s didn't actually happen. You see if War Machines taps into a major fear of the moder...

Since the majority of hits to this blog are from places other than the UK perhaps I had better begin this post by apologising for my compatriots. It is #notinmyname that we are leaving Europe, in fact it's nothing but an embarrassment. Which is almost true of my last post on this First Doctor adventure ( here ), which I'm slightly ashamed of on re-reading it. I suddenly found a new, sealed, DVD of this show amongst my library (can't think where it came from, obviously by rogue computer technology) and decided to give it another go. Much of what I wrote about it the first time still stands, in terms of the dead sixties fear of encroaching technology. Ironically of course, it is only the connection of computers all over the world which means you are reading this, which would have seemed like an impossible dream of the future at the time. On rewatching this show I am finding the mixture of technology and non-science quite interesting. I love it that the feared take over ...

This is, of course, one of the series 1 Avengers episodes which have been recorded in audio form by Big Finish. SInce I bought that first release I do have that audio version to listen to as well as the synopsis in The Strange Case of The Missing Episodes. Let my initial criticisms of the Big Finish versions be considered as read at the start of this - I maintain that the TV scripts needed more adaptation to audio form - since I want to concentrate on the actual show in this series of posts. Suffice to say that I am finding the Big Finish audio much more understandable combined with the descriptions of events and scenes in the book. This episode, only the second in the first series, brings to the fore Dr Keel's pain and feeling of mission to be an avenger after the murder of his fiancee. In a very real sense, the rest of The Avengers makes no sense without the events of these first two episodes, even if the series progressed beyond Dr Keel's very personal trauma. In Brought...

I go rushing back to the early sixties with a series 1 episode of The Avengers, of which fortunately more survives than does of the last one I posted about. That said, the synopsis I am basing this post on is based on surviving camera script according to the book and has some patches of dialogue too. I believe this is available in reconstructed form from Big Finish, if you like that sort of thing, but I haven't heard that myself. My overall impression of this episode as I read the synopsis is the likelihood that this would have been exactly the sort of television that would have given Mary Whitehouse the screaming abjabs at the time. On the surface it is essentially a straightforward spy story (with a remarkably Avengers touch in the fact that information is transmitted at the zoo using a monkey) with much of its setting being in the underworld of a strip club. Thinking back to the Britain of the time, this was probably far more risque fifty years ago than it would be today, si...

I have a policy for this blog of not posting about TV shows which I consider complete duds: naturally that means more frequently that if you don't find a show written about here it means that I've never seen it, which applies more to the American shows you will find talked about on the cult TV blogosphere. That said, I am writing about this show to try to clarify my own thoughts about it: the fact that it appears here means that I don't think it is no good, but I have decidedly mixed emotions about it. Firstly is the fact that somehow I had managed never to hear of it. I see that it was broadcast from1973 to 1976 and so I would have been in no position to see it when it was first broadcast. It has all the hallmarks of quality, because it was created by Brian Clemens ( a name which should require no introduction to readers of this blog) who scripted the majority of the episodes. I see from the wikipedia page that some of them were based on Avengers scripts (including Tak...