Classic TV

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

Weird old title sequences

Weird old title sequences: The Banana Splits (1968-70)

20 December 2012 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

The Banana Splits

Chances are, you’ll have heard The Banana Splits’ theme tune at some point. Still popular in its own right, it’s also a favourite for remixes and sampling.

Chances are you won’t ever have watched it, though – at least not the original series. Unlike other kids shows of the time, this weird mix of live action and animation that crossed The Monkees with Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In hasn’t had the longevity of other shows. Yet if you watched it, it would be hard to forget the near nightmarish qualities of Fleegle the beagle, Bingo the gorilla, Drooper the lion, and Snork/Snorky the elephant, and the somewhat surreal show they were in.

Imagine you’re four years old. Now watch the title sequence and know fear.

PS I should point out that Cartoon Network put out some Banana Splits Internet cartoons in the early 2000s and there was a new series in 2008, so there’s probably a generation of kids being traumatised right now by the latest incarnation of the Banana Splits.

PPS I should probably also point out than Jan Michael Vincent of Airwolf fame appeared in the not at all racist Danger Island strand of the show that ran in the first season.

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Nuts In May (1976)

19 December 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Nuts in May, featuring Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman. Also pictured is Mike Leigh

To end this year and my current season of Wednesday Plays, I’m going to leave you with what is arguably the best of all the plays that have ever aired on British TV (discuss): Mike Leigh’s 1976 Play For Today Nuts in May. Starring Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman as the eccentric married couple Candice Marie and Keith, it sees the nature-loving duo going on a camping holiday and putting vast amounts of work into ensuring that they have the perfect vacation. But when less high-minded campers arrive, things get a little… strained.

Voted the 49th greatest British TV programme by the BFI, the play has influenced everyone from Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer through to Ben Wheatley, the director of the recent Sightseers*. So put your feet up and enjoy the hilarious and near to the bone Nuts In May. As always, if you like it, buy it to support those nice people who made it in the first place.

* Although he hadn’t seen it before he was about to make the movie, so ended up removing bits to make Sightseers less like Nuts In May

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: K9 and Company (1981)

12 December 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

K9 and Company

Okay, a little bit of a cheat since it wasn’t broadcast as part of a play ‘strand’, such as Play for Today or Armchair Theatre, but here, for your delectation, is K9 and Company, the first ever Doctor Who spin-off and arguably the best of them all.

First broadcast on 28 December 1981, this pilot for a TV show that would never materialise saw Elisabeth Sladen return to her most famous role, Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith, now safely returned to Earth and living a life for herself once again as a journalist. But when she goes to visit her Aunt Lavinia in the country, she finds her aunt is missing – but Lavinia has left behind a present from her friend the Doctor… Can you guess from the title what it is?

The show was an attempt by then Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner to solve two ‘problems’ – the first was that he wanted to get Lis Sladen back into Doctor Who, but she was unwilling to be just a companion again; the second was what to do about Doctor Who companion K9, who was logistically problematic. As a result, JNT wanted to write out the robot dog but he/it was incredibly popular. K9 and Company, in which Lis Sladen would be the Doctor figure and K9 a helper, was his solution.

And, actually, it’s pretty good. Written by former BBC producer Terence Dudley (Doomwatch, Survivors), beyond K9, it doesn’t touch on science fiction at all, instead being a spooky Christmas mystery involving what appears to be the supernatural. Sarah Jane gets some character development and family background – and gets to beat up a baddie (in Dudley’s novelisation of the story, it’s suggested she’s now a karate black belt). And it’s an enjoyable 50 minutes or so.

The show got above average ratings – 8.4m, which was more than the average episode of Doctor Who was getting at the time. But unfortunately it was a victim of BBC politics: commissioned by Bill Cotton, it was disliked by his replacement as BBC1 controller, Alan Hart, who chose not to commission a series.

But in many ways, the show lived on and was not forgotten. In the Doctor Who story The Five Doctors, both Sarah Jane and K9, now living together in a suburban house, make an appearance. School Reunion reintroduced Sarah Jane to the new series of Doctor Who and she had K9 with her – by now, broken down and in need of repair by the Doctor. And, of course, Sarah Jane got another spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, in which a new and improved K9 made at first occasional appearances before becoming a regular in the third series.

But here, for your delectation, is the full thing, which is also available from Amazon: buy it if you like it! One word of advice: even if your eyes can withstand the title sequence, your ears probably won’t be able to take the theme tune, so probably best to mute it.

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Hardwicke House (1987)

29 November 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Hardwicke House

Is it possible to have nostalgia for something that was never truly on TV? Let’s find out with ITV comedy Hardwicke House, which received so much outcry from the press and the public that only two of its seven episodes were ever transmitted in the UK, it was never transmitted outside the UK, never repeated and rumour had it that ITV had wiped the master tapes (it hadn’t – the VT department had hidden them).

Remember it? Probably not. Written by Richard Hall and Simon Wright (The Comic Strip Presents…), Hardwicke House was set in the eponymous run-down comprehensive school and attempted to combine the style of The Young Ones and Saturday Live with a standard sitcom – you can probably also spot the influence of producer John Stroud’s Who Dares Wins and Educating Marmalade, as well.

The central gag was that the teachers were as bad, if not worse than the pupils, which would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the exact ways in which they were bad: head teacher Roy Kinnear spends most of his time drinking; deputy head Roger Sloman pervs after the sixth form girls’ gym team (with the help of the history teacher) and offers the younger boys “extra biology lessons”; Pam Ferris uses her French lessons to try to get her pupils to go on political protests with her (“Ou est le Cruise?” – “Le Cruise est dans la silo a Greenham Common”); and so on.

All of that still might have worked if it hadn’t gone out at 8pm on a weekday, next to the likes of Full House and Duty Free, and hadn’t ended up with pupils thrown down stairwells or charred to a crisp testing burglar alarms.

There was uproar, there were complaints on Open Air, even MPs waded in and before you knew it, Hardwicke House was whipped from the screens and replaced by 10-year-old repeats of Chance in a Million. ITV, which had envisaged a good run for the show, had to cancel production, but as Roy Kinnear had convinced the writers and the cast to sign up for a second set of episodes so they would still get paid even if the show was cancelled, it ended up costing them a lot of money.

Although none of the episodes have been repeated, you can still watch those first two episodes below, including the feature-length first episode. And you can also see an out-take from episode five that would have featured former Hardwicke House pupils Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson doing what they were good at: ultra-violence. Enjoy!

The Wednesday Play: The New Twilight Zone – A Small Talent For War (1985)

28 November 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Plays can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be several hours, sometimes even days, or in the case of the new Twilight Zone episode A Small Talent For War, they can be as short as eight minutes.

As remarked previously, Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone turned in some of the finest works of short drama ever to grace US TV screens. With a revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents proving popular in the 1980s and a Twilight Zone movie doing reasonably well at the cinema, too, so The Twilight Zone was resurrected for three seasons of largely original scripts between 1985 and 1989. These included contributions from Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Stephen King, George RR Martin, David Gerrold, J Michael Straczynski, Rockne S O’Bannon and others, with directors Wes Craven, William Friedkin and Joe Dante all getting a turn behind the camea, too.

One of the revival’s most novel features – for the first two seasons, at least – was to forego the mandatory half-hour or hour-long episode length, with many episodes airing in tandem or triplets with others to make up the full run-time. While it never quite reached the heights of the original, one of the new series’ very finest short pieces was A Small Talent For War, starring John Glover (Brimstone and Smallville) as an alien who delivers an ultimatum to the world. It’s a lean piece of brilliance, entertaining, funny, chilling and in its own way profound. Enjoy!