Cult TV Blog

I am indebted to Grant Goggans's ecxellent and thoughtful TV blog, firebreathingdimetrodon.wordpress.com, for bringing this show to my attention. I like Grant's style of writing about shows, one episode at a time, and of course his son also gets to comment on the shows. While the world of cult TV on the blogosphere may be a largely self-referential one, it pays off when we bring new shows to each other's attention. Now I know I have been thinking about accent quite a lot recently on here, largely through watching Murder She Wrote for the first time in many years. The question of accent isn't really one I comment on here a great deal, believing that viewers will understand the intended impression given by the chosen accent of a character. Come to think of it, if viewers of the TV series I write about here see the subtle nuances of class as exhibited in the various British accents differently from my own view, I don't think it really matters. A good TV show is unde...

Recently I asked Mike Doran on a comment on this blog whether Angela Lansbury sounds British or American to American ears. He rightly mentioned various accents, but then said that most Americans have long forgotten that she isn't American born and bred, which answered the question which was actually in my head. Of course it is in the nature of the thespian to conjure something which isn't there, into the minds of the audience. That said, it's always difficult to reproduce something you haven't seen. At the weekend my God mother and I were in a National Trust property and the guide was making the point that the bizarre colours on much old china are simply explained by the fact that the artist had either never seen what he was supposed to represent, or else he had only seen a monochrome picture.is These ramblings on accent and the difficulty of reproducing something you haven't seen are actually by way of an introduction to this episode of Murder She Wrote, in fact...

I thought I had already blogged about this episode but I'm damned if I can find it! Well even if I have I'm going to blog about it again because I like it so much, even though it seems as if the fans are rather divided about this one. I genuinely can't think why! Perhaps I had better say in advance of anything else that my thoughts on this one will be heavily influenced by the interview with Petunia Winegum included on the Optimum box set. I have a feeling that the reason this one doesn't go down well is because of the huge number of great actors in it. I don't mind this myself - they are great enough that they don't distract me - but the sheer array of talent may distract from Steed and Mrs Peel for the fans. One of the things Petunia Winegum says in the interview is that this one was mooted to be turned into a feature film, which I think would probably have been a mistake because it both parodies the world of the silver screen and there's way too much u...

The Avengers spinoffs are coming to my attention thick and fast at the moment. At the start of this year I hadn't heard of the comic strips. I knew about the Right Guard advertisement, but I didn't know that a decade before Patrick Macnee had appeared in a more-overtly Avengers-inspired fashion shoot. It was a promotion for clothes by Austin Reed in Terylene fabric and took the form of a spy story in the Man's Journal, presented with Woman's Realm in April 1966. You can download a PDF of the whole thing  here  and my source for the images is  here . I like this spin-off enormously because it manages to capture the visual world of The Avengers so perfectly.

This is of course an adventure from The Avengers' comic book adventures. I bought the second set of adventures published by Big Finish, only to find that there is a printing error on one of the discs of this set in the first edition. The upshot is that through Big Finish being keen to bend over backwards to please their customers I have wound up with two copies of the disc of The Secret Six (both of which are printed with the name of another adventure. Rather than throw away the surplus one, if anyone wants it, just drop me your address in a comment on this post (I won't publish it), and I will put it in the post to the first commenter. There is a sense in which this is both a return to the early days of The Avengers (literally two against the underworld), and yet also manages to reference virtually every mystery in history, as well as referencing various Avengers adventures, which themselves already reference or parody many adventures! It may sound overly postmodern but this A...

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the whole genre of scary TV shows. Last year, for example, I bought the boxed set of Thriller, only to find that it didn't really do a great deal for me. And yet this is strangely idiosyncratic, because as a child I loved both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Tales of the Unexpected. Yet strangely I have never taken to Hitchcock's films, finding them too biased towards the suspense and away from things actually happening, and the two TV shows I loved so much as a child have failed to hold their interest for me as an adult. Another classic film series of the horror genre to which I was exposed as a child and which I find has lost its interest now is the Hammer House of Horror films. I have a feeling that their interest as a child was contingent on the fact that I was staying up beyond what mother would want, she was asleep upstairs, and the films contained a hint of sex - once again the horror and the sex alike never really came to fru...

I wrote a whole post recently about the contents of my Amazon basket. Some of those things have moved from my basket into my possession, so this post will be more about things I actually have in hand. I have bought the second volume of  Big Finish's  dramatisations of the Steed and Mrs Peel cartoons from the sixties. You can of course imagine my joy at having another four new Avengers adventures. It was cheapest to buy the CDs from an Amazon marketplace seller and you can imagine my disappointment at finding that my new, sealed set contained two discs the same so that I was missing one adventure. Kudos to Big Finish for sending me a replacement disc without fuss - I really hope it was just mine that was like this, a whole run gone wrong could really be expensive. The first volume of Spike Milligan's show  Q  has found a home on my shelves. I love Milligan's humour, although I would say that I suspect the confusing and eccentric numbering of this series (beginning a...