Classic TV

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

The Weekly Play

Play for Today: Armchair Theatre – The Hothouse (1964)

22 November 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In an exciting mirror of the real world and to cover up the fact that I was too busy yesterday to do The Wednesday Play (sorry), for this week at least, The Wednesday Play has become Play For Today. 

This week’s play comes from ITV’s flagship play strand, Armchair Theatre. Most people interested in UK TV plays tend to focus on the BBC’s Play for Today, The Wednesday Play, et al, but ITV did produce a really superb range of plays itself. Making its first appearance in 1956, Armchair Theatre was the most notable of ITV’s play strands, attracting writers such as Fay Weldon, Jack Rosenthal, John Hopkins, John Mortimer and Allan Prior, and giving us A Night Out from Harold Pinter, Robert Muller’s Hitler ‘what if’ The Night Conspirators and Alun Owen’s Lena, O My Lena.

Various plays were even popular enough to launch spin-off series, including Callan (A Magnum for Schneider), Out of This World (Dumb Martian), Armchair Mystery Theatre, Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width and The Sweeney (Regan).

However, today’s play is the 1964 production The Hothouse, starring Harry H Corbett from Steptoe and Son, and Diana Rigg, a year before she became Emma Peel in The Avengers. Written by and co-starring Donald Churchill, this light-hearted play pulled in an all-time audience record of 8.3m homes. In it, Churchill plays Gordon Parsley, the assistant manager of a supermarket, part of a chain owned by self-made millionaire Harry Fender (Corbett). Hoping to be promoted, Gordon’s prospects look bright when, at the annual staff dance, Harry takes a shine to the ambitious employee’s vivacious wife, Charlotte (Miranda Connell).

On the other hand, the boss’s interest in Charlotte could spell trouble – especially when Harry’s wife Anita (Rigg) decides to meddle and invites the young couple to spend a weekend at the Fenders’ country cottage, where Harry tends his precious mangoes and melons in a hothouse.

Here it is, remastered in all its glory. If you like it, get buy it on DVD (it’s a special feature on The Avengers series 4 DVDs). Enjoy!

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Whiz Kids (1983-84)

8 November 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It’s 1983. Computers are new. Computers are cool. So is WarGames, the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie about a computer hacker that breaks into the US military supercomputer and nearly accidentally starts World War 3.

So what would be better than a TV show in which a whizz kid hacker breaks into military computers and causes World War 3 every week?

Oh. Well, unless you do an Aeon Flux and end the world every week, that’s not going to last long as a series, is it? So how about a more traditional affair in which a nerdy computer hacker (and his gang of friends) solve crimes that in some way revolve around computers? We could eek that out for a whole season, couldn’t we?

CBS tried to do just that with Whiz Kids. Starring Matthew Laborteaux of Little House on the Prairie and The Red Hand Gang, it saw computer hacker Richie (Laborteaux) building a computer of his own, RALF, from the spare parts his father sends from overseas on telecoms jobs. With the assistance of a few friends (one black, one female, one cool white boy, one annoying young kid to maintain the standard demographic/tokenist spread of the time), as well as newspaper reporter Lew Farley (Max Gail), the police and from episode 13, former secret agent Carson Marsh (Dan O’Herlihy), Richie solves various crimes, usually ones involving murders and corporate espionage but occasionally involving spies.

WhizKids.jpgThe show didn’t really push many boundaries in terms of either plotting or character development, but the show did avoid the traps of having the kids solving crimes by themselves, of making only Laborteaux’s character capable of any thought and of having an entirely romance-free set-up: a love triangle between the cool kid, the girl and Richie was hinted at. The kids don’t spend all day indoors, but actually have other hobbies. It was also hinted that the girl (Alice, played by Andrea Elson of ALF fame) was actually quite a good hacker herself, but Richie was too up himself to notice.

The show also didn’t avoid the question of the kids’ ethics: the show depicted some genuine hacking techniques, including ‘war dialing’ (named after WarGames), brute force password cracking, denial-of-service attacks, and even social engineering, some of which would be considered serious criminal acts within a year of the show airing.

Perhaps Wizz Kids‘ most notable aspect for people now was the amount of genuine classic computer software and equipment that ended up in the show, with Apple, Autodesk, Hitachi, RadioShack, Atari, Xerox, Mattel and Commodore among the companies that provided product placement – look closely and you’ll spot an Apple II and a TRS-80 on display.

However, the show itself only lasted one season and hasn’t been released on DVD. All the same, YouTube is your friend and here’s the entire series for you to enjoy. Have fun!

The Wednesday Plays: Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Man From The South (1960) and Diamonds Aren’t Forever (1989)

7 November 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

While The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits remain the most well known of America’s anthology series, there remains one significant non-genre anthology show that in some ways, embodies the classic common notion of The Twilight Zone – a story with a twist in the tail – better than The Twilight Zone did.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents, hosted by the eponymous film director, originally ran for seven seasons, first on CBS from 1955 to 1960 as half-hour episodes, and then on NBC between 1960 and 1962, followed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which lasted for a further three seasons. Each started with an introduction by Alfred Hitchcock himself and ended with a follow-up sketch. Intriguingly, these varied depending on what country you saw them in – in the US, they frequently mocked the sponsors and popular commercials, while in Europe (with Hitchcock speaking fluently in French or German as the need demanded), they usually mocked Americans.

In between these Hitchcockians bookends were stories, occasionally directed by Hitchcock himself, that were dramas, thrillers and mysteries that almost always ended with a surprise twist – far more than Twilight Zone episodes did, certainly. Only once did the director himself appear in the main story, but a list of all the notable actors that did appear in the show would be vast.

A list of all the talented writers who wrote for the show would be equally long, but possibly the best and the most famous episode of the entire run was the Man From The South, featuring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre. That was written by no less than Roald Dahl, who went on to give us his own version of the show as Tales of the Unexpected.

As always, if you liked it, buy it on DVD!

So popular was Alfred Hitchcock Presents in syndication that it was revived in the 1980s, following the success of a TV anthology movie similar to the cinematically released 1983 movie The Twilight Zone: The Movie. Hitchcock obviously couldn’t do any new introductions, so colourised introductions from the original series were used instead.

The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran on NBC from 1985 to 1986 and was revived on NBC’s sister channel the USA Network from 1987 to 1989. This had a greater tendency towards the comedic and went far and wide for material, even taking in a Sherlock Holmes mystery along the way. It was successful enough to encourage The Twilight Zone to be revived in the same way, although these lacked Rod Serling in any form beyond a brief smokey appearance in the main titles.

Possibly the most timely, if not the best, is this 1989 effort, Diamonds Aren’t Forever, which starred George Lazenby as definitely not James Bond. Definitely not.

Enjoy (and say thank you to Toby for suggesting it)!