Classic TV

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

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: The Wanderer (1994)

23 May 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The Wanderer

There are few better known, more successful sitcom writers than Roy Clarke. The creator of Last of the Summer Wine, Open All Hours, Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt! and Keeping Up Appearances, genteel, Northern, comedies of manners and silliness are his forte.

Which makes The Wanderer, a short-lived 1994 series about reincarnated medieval knights in modern times on an eternal quest for one of their graves, somewhat of a surprise. The show starred Bryan Brown (FX: Murder By Illusion, Cocktail) as two twin brothers, the good Adam and the evil Zachary. Originally born in the 10th century, the two are fated to fight each other at the turn of each millennium, the winner influencing whether the next millennium will be ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

Reincarnated in the 20th century, Zachary wants revenge on Adam for killing him a millennium previously, but he also wants to take advantage of the growing superstition arising from the turn of the current millennium, planning to have Adam die in front of witnesses so that he can pose as his dead brother. But for his plan to work, he needs a magic item from his 10th century grave, and only Adam knows the location of that. Or at least the original Adam did – modern day Adam? Not so much, although he’s prone to the occasional flashback to his original self, which helps him on his quest to retrieve the artefact first so he can stop Zachary.

Both have helpers in the modern day: Beatrice (Kim Thomson), Zachary’s lover in the 10th century, has been reincarnated as well and accompanies him on his journey, helping him with her witchy magic; while Adam’s helper, Godbold (Tony Haygarth), was a monk in the 10th century but is now a wrestler and plumber. And then there’s Clare (Deborah Moore), Adam’s lover in both centuries.

A co-production between YTV and Sky in the UK, ZDF in Germany, and Antena 3 in Spain, the show ran for 13 episodes, with Adam wandering the world each episode looking for Zachary’s grave, Zachary occasionally cropping up to be extrovert and annoying in comparison to the introverted and dull Adam. Indeed, the whole show was intensely annoying: as well as Brown’s acting and the light entertainment vibe that Clarke apparently couldn’t escape adding to the show, The Wanderer had ‘Into The Labyrinth syndrome’, with the first season concluding with Zachary’s grave being found, the two brothers ready for their clash to begin… only for it to be revealed that another artefact needed recovering and a new quest had to begin. Cue the second series that never materialised.

The show hasn’t been repeated or released on DVD since it originally aired, but you can at least have its title sequence and some clips, unfortunately mostly dubbed into various foreign languages. The last collection is in English, though, so you can judge the quality of the acting for yourselves.

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Scum (1977)

22 May 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Ray Winstone in Scum

Over the years, there were many controversial plays produced for the BBC. However, few of them were so controversial that they were pulled before transmission over concerns about their content. Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, which depicted both someone who might be the Devil and the potential rape of a disabled woman, was the first, while this week’s play, Scum by Roy Minton, was the second, not getting an airing until 14 years after it was made.

Directed by Alan Clarke and featuring the likes of David Threlfall, Phil Daniels and Ray Winstone, the play was set in a borstal and deals with the question of whether young offenders’ institutions actually rehabilitated its inamtes. Winstone arrives at the borstal after allegedly attacking a prison officer at his previous borstal. After suffering abuse from the prison officers as well as the ‘daddy’ (the top dog) at his new home, Winstone decides to take charge and become the new daddy.

The play was withdrawn because the BBC’s powers-that-be decided that it glamourised borstal – an odd decision, given the racism, gang rape and suicide depicted by Scum. It was a decision that seemed even stranger when, like Brimstone and Treacle, a movie version of the play was released just a few years later that featured most of the main actors.

Weirdly, though, the phrase ‘Who’s the daddy now?’ entered popular parlance and years later, Winstone used it in a series of ads for Holsten Pils – odd, given that he’d originally delivered them in a banned play while beating an inmate around the head with a sock full of billiard balls.

But just to prove that the power to shock has diminished, you can now watch the whole thing on YouTube – and it’s the Wednesday Play. Enjoy!

More religions added to the blog’s handy guide

17 May 2013 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Last week, I unveiled this ‘ere blog’s handy guide to all the Western, English-language TV shows that have portrayed particular religions to be true in some way. At the time, I said it was a work in progress, and I’ve already separated the original entry out into separate posts, mainly to avoid crashing browsers with too many videos.

Anyway, following various people’s suggestions that my memory is full of holes…

…I’ve added a few new shows to the various pages.

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Contact (1984), Elephant (1989)

15 May 2013 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Alan Clarke's Contact

All good things must come to an end, and the various play strands on UK television were eventually replaced with TV movie strands instead. However, that didn’t mean an end to quality. Quite the contrary: Screen Two, BBC2’s film strand, produced some of the best movies/plays that British television has ever produced.

Fittingly, the first ever Screen Two production in 1984 was Alan Clarke’s Contact, based on AFN Clarke’s book of the same name. Hard though it is to believe in retrospect, but Northern Ireland was once a hotspot for terrorism in the western world, with the provisional IRA engaged in decades-long guerrilla warfare with the British army in Northern Ireland, while carrying out bombing campaigns there and on the mainland, too.

It’s a historical situation that was examined in many works, including ITV’s Shoot To Kill, almost all of which were controversial at the time. Contact, which was followed by a sequel from Clarke called Elephant, were the decade’s best attempts at capturing the nature of ‘The Troubles’ on film.

It follows a platoon of paratroopers patrolling ‘bandit country’ in South Armagh, a hotbed of IRA activity running along the unmarked border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It explores the trauma of soldiers living under the constant shadow of terror. With little in the way of plot, Contact is an examination of the dynamics of fear as much as it is a comment on the specifics of the Irish situation. Nevertheless, it re-opened the debate as to how television drama should address the Troubles.

Clarke took the stripped-down narrative approach of Contact even further in 1989 with Elephant. Without story or character, Elephant features 18 reconstructed and completely unrelated murders on the streets of Belfast. Clarke’s intention was to strip away any sectarian justification for killing by showing the harsh realities of murder.