Classic TV

Classic shows that have almost been forgotten, as well as shows that should probably have been forgotten

Are you nostalgic about something?

23 January 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

I’m running a bit low on nostalgia. Okay, I’m not really – there’s still plenty of shows piled up in the ‘Nostalgia Corner’ queue. However, the time needed to do them justice versus the time I actually have available most of the time aren’t always the same thing.

So in a somewhat radical move, for the first time since I opened the blog in 2006, I’m asking you gentle reader if you’d like to contribute your memories of a TV show from your youth to Nostalgia Corner. They can have aired anywhere in the world and you can write as much or as little as you want. The only criteria I have are:

  1. There should, if at all possible, be illustrative clips available on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, the Daily Motion, et al that can be embedded in an entry
  2. They should either be in English or be available subtitled/dubbed into English.

Do I have any volunteers?

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play (on Thursday): Fable (1965)

23 January 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Sometimes, plays can be used to illustrate a societal or political problem, through allegory or even fable. Sometimes, though, they can be too subtle for their own.

Fable, John Hopkins’ 1965 The Wednesday Play, was actually a rather daring piece – a commentary on race relations in the UK and South Africa that inverts the two countries’ societies to imagine a British racial apartheid, but one in which whites are the brutally oppressed, blacks the authoritarians running the system. Narrated by Keith Barron, the play contrasts the experiences of an oppressed white couple, Joan (Eileen Atkins) and Len (Ronald Lacey), with the middle-class, black, liberal writer Mark (Thomas Baptiste) living under house arrest with his wife Francesca (Barbara Assoon). As well as showing by analogy just how poorly black people were then treated by white people, it also castigated the efforts of white liberals in South Africa to challenge the regime, arguing that they showed little interest in doing anything except being self-righteous.

The play, which was also interspersed with stills and documentary footage of conflicts in South Africa, Vietnam and elsewhere, was powerful enough that its broadcast was initially postponed by several weeks because of fears that it would raise racial tensions in a forthcoming by-election in Leyton, East London, that involved a candidate who had previously lost his seat following a notoriously racist campaign in Birmingham. 

Disappointingly, however, the audience at the time didn’t quite understand Hopkins’ message. “I got a letter from a viewer which said ‘I really enjoyed that play. Boy, you showed them what would happen if they came to power, if they had the authority.’ He didn’t even need to specify who ‘they’ were.”

You can watch the play below, although unfortunately, this copy is from BBC4’s 2005 ‘TV on trial’ season, so involves a certain amount of on-screen ‘grafitti’. 

Charley says: Don’t do drugs like Alice in Wonderland did

22 January 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

While the UK was largely content with scaring the crap out of everyone through public information films in the 1970s, the US was then following a policy of education: tell people the risks and they’ll make the right choice.

This might have been a mistake in the case of its 1971 film, Curious Alice, an animated fantasy basedon the characters in Alice in Wonderland. It shows Alice as she tours a strange land where everyone had chosen to use drugs, forcing her to ponder whether drugs are the right choice for her.

Just to make sure she chooses the right one, rather than picking one at random, each character represented a different drug: the Mad Hatter represented LSD, the Dormouse represented sleeping pills and the King of Hearts represented heroin. I won’t spoil it by telling you which one she opted for (or didn’t).

PS I’ve no idea if the title is a reference to the slightly porny famous 1967 Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow).

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Kinvig (1981)

16 January 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Nigel Kneale is best known as the creator of legendary BBC science fiction character Professor Bernard Quatermass. As you might expect, that attracted science-fiction fans to him. 

I can’t help but feel he didn’t have a very good experience with them, because after parting ways with the BBC in the 1970s and heading over to ITV, he came up with a sci-fi comedy, Kinvig, that took the serious piss out of sci-fi fans.

It starred Tony Hagarth as Des Kinvig, UFO enthusiast, sci-fi fan and owner of a small electrical shop. One day, ‘Miss Griffin’ (Prunella Gee) enters the shop wanting help. Kinvig soon deduces that she’s an alien from the planet Venus – except she turns out to be from Mercury. Oh well. Close.

The trouble is, all of this could be the Walter Mitty-like delusions of a science-fiction fan, desperate for some excitement with a beautiful woman. The audience is never sure as Kneale takes us through seven episodes of one ridiculous sci-fi situation and set after another, mocking everything and everyone along the way.

It’s not the funniest thing you’ll ever see but it’s interesting to see Kneale trying to do comedy and sci-fi at the same time. It’s available on DVD but you can watch it on YouTube below. If you like it, buy it:

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Northstar (1986)

9 January 2014 Rob Buckley 12 Comments

Northstar

As mentioned yesterday, over the years, there’s been quite a vogue for TV shows about humans upgraded through technology. In a little game of “spot the odd one out”, though, I included Northstar in that list. Did you spot it? Naughty me, hey?

In fact, Northstar actually represents a similar but subtly different genre: the ‘accidentally upgraded’ human. In these stories, through some kind of accident, usually natural but not always, someone gets superpowers. I say superpowers, because whether it’s The Amazing Spider-man, The Incredible Hulk or The Flash, the source of the story is usually a comic book, where such things used to be de rigeur*.

Often, though, these shows got stuck at the pilot TV movie stage. One ABC pilot, The Power Within (1979), for example, saw a stunt flyer struck by lightning and get the power to zap people with electricity. He also needed a special Gemini Man-esque watch to stop him from accidentally zapping things. I’d show you a clip, but there aren’t any, so here’s the video cover instead.

The Power Within

A few years later, again from ABC, came Northstar, starring Greg Evigan (of later My Two Dads fame). This saw Evigan playing an astronaut who gets zapped in the eyes by sunlight while on a spacewalk. Then when he gets back to Earth, whenever he’s exposed to sunlight, his body and brain go into superdrive, his eyes go all weird and flashy, and he becomes fabulously smart (stage one) and powerful (stage two). Unfortunately for our Greg, too of a good thing is bad for his health and his brain and body start to overheat (stage three), meaning that he can only go super-sun-powered for a short space of time, before he needs to sit in the shade and cool off for a bit.

Co-starring the lovely Deborah Wakeham as the scientist who has to help him cope with his newfound abilities, and Lethal Weapon/Dharma and Greg’s Mitchell Ryan as the army general he ends up working for, it wasn’t the smartest of shows, as you can probably tell, given that early on, when Evigan is presented with a numeric keypad for opening a door, he’s told there’s over 1,000 combinations. Or that Wakeham’s hubby is missing in the Andes as part of a 12-man anthropological expedition. But it’s fun.

Enjoy!

PS If Northstar sounds vaguely familiar to you and yet you never watched it, it might be because it’s one of the 70s and 80s shows satirised by Jack Black and Ben Stiller with Heat Vision and Jack. Full marks if you can spot all the references in just this title sequence alone:

* Not always. There’s The Invisible Man, of course, who’s a crossover between the technology-upgraded and the accidentally upgraded. The Gemini Man got his powers through an accident with technology, too. As did Jake 2.0. So sue me, there were two odd ones out.