Cult TV Blog

Following my last post about secrets, lies, and my resignation without notice from my employers, I am delighted to move on to a post about adventure and to announce that a mere nine days after leaving my job I have been offered another one. With a better employer, slightly less money but then you can't have everything. In fact my friends who still work for my last employer are all green with envy. And since my claim for a large amount of money for constructive dismissal and disability discrimination is with the arbitration and conciliation service which is the first step towards an employment tribunal, I doubt they will be ill-advised enough as to try to give me a dodgy reference. Anyway, Knight Errant as it stands is the remaining two episodes of two slightly different shows with the same theme. Long before Midsomer Murders, it managed to continue into a second series with the loss of the lead actor. It is mainly of interest as far as this blog is concerned, as a possible prec...

As usual there is a reason for a hiatus in posts here. I am delighted to announce my resignation without notice from my shitty employers on Monday and that I already have an interview this coming week. They asked me in today to ask me to go back but they’re going to have to do much better than that, and I am pursuing their treatment of me into an employment tribunal. Anyway, my current personal issue provides the perfect setting for watching The Game (a BBC series first broadcast on BBC America in 2014 then over here on BBC2), because it is all about intrigue and lies. It also has the unusual distinction of being the newest TV show I have ever written about here, so it must be good. The Game is set in 1972 and it has achieved a remarkable success for me. Normally I hate period dramas of all sorts because of the feeling of unreality in comparison to the actual period TV I more usually watch. That said, 1972 is bang in the middle of my period, and The Game does a remarkable ...

Yes, I know I'm coming to this incredibly late, but I feel the need to give an opinion. Some years ago when I started watching all the way through the remaining Avengers episodes I bought the series box sets released by Optimum Home Entertainment (the ones released as whole series in boxes with swirly patterns). These are of course the definitive releases and you can get them in a whole box set with loads of extras. The extras include PDFs of the scripts, commentaries, galleries of production stills, and so on. The shows have been cleaned up within an inch of their lives. These are without a doubt the definitive releases. There are just a few failings with them. The major one of course is the complete absence of subtitles. And there is another one which I do see mentioned on the internet reviews, which is that the way the discs are stored in the complete set makes them difficult to take out and return without damaging them. I have found that with my individual series box sets:...

It literally hasn't stopped raining here for most of today, and so I have perforces remained at home for much of it. A rainy day turns my mind to the fact that when I was a child I had something called a 'rainy day' box, which was actually an old coal scuttle, in which lived toys which I didn't use at other times. I was allowed to put things in it when it wasn't aa rainy day, but not take things out of it. I find that I still actually do this with a small heap of books waiting to be read, in the back of the wardrobe. Similarly old TV is a classic occupation of rainy days. I was going to comment that this post was not about TV at all, but I realise that actually it is. I started off looking on Amazon to see if any new-old TV shows are around which I haven't heard of, and ended up reading reviews of old films starring Arthur Askey, Will Hay, and Old Mother Riley. I realised that many of the Amazon reviewers had the same memories as me of what TV was like in the...

As an adult, tell people you are watching Sesame Street and you get mixed reactions. Firstly people make fun of you, then they tell you how much they used to love it, and then they will end up singing a song to you. The more filthy minded will of course make a point of telling you what C really stands for, but we needn't let them delay us at this point. The point is that while it was conceived as a children's TV show it is one which is fondly remembered by people my age and younger, and I'm going to post about it here because this is my blog and so I wll. I'm calling it seventies TV because that was the age in which I first watched it, I'm rewatching some episodes which have been released as 'Old School Sesame Street' on region 2 DVDs and don't intend to watch beyond that one decade. The first thing I have to say about Sesame Street was that when I was a child I perhaps didn't benefit from it as well as those who produced it would wish me to. Giv...

Well here I am back on track for the moment with posts on series 1 of The Avengers. I must just repeat the sensation of loss I've been feeling, as I have posted about series 1, because once I have stopped to think about all of the episodes that's it, there really will never be any new Avengers for me. The fiction on the internet just doesn't mostly cut it because people are so preoccupied with getting Steed and Mrs Peel into bed, and for me much of the point of their relationship is that they never actually do go to bed. This first series Avengers is of course one in which Steed doesn't feature at all - Dr Keel does it all on his own - and so we are in genuinely different territory from the one we know so well from later Avengers seasons. That said, my very first impression of this episode is how very 'Avengers' it actually manages to be right from the start. What I mean by this is that it one of the first things the viewer sees is a scene behind the scenes ...

I have been watching The Sweeney again. I posted specifically about the movie on this blog, but I don’t think I posted about the TV series as such. One of the things I have in mind to do is series of posts around different actors (capitalizing on the frequent recurrence of actors in 1960s TV, which usually annoys me so much, I know) and one of the things I had in mind was to focus on Ian Hendry, and he had a role in the first episode of the first series. I realized that I hadn’t felt inspired to watch the series again for about six months, and so I popped a disc in and pressed play. I had previously watched through all four seasons quite happily, and if you had asked me to place The Sweeney in a map of my televisual world, I would probably have put the show as coming out of the same stable as The Professionals and The New Avengers. This is despite one of my old neighbours’ attempts to put me off it by telling me how very old-fashioned it was. On the surface The Sweeney can well be ...