Classic TV

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

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Mulberry (1992)

23 August 2012 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Mulberry

Sitcoms, as a whole, don’t do science-fiction. Fewer still do fantasy. You get the occasional one, such as Kröd Mändoon, but you’d be hard-pressed to come up with even 10 fantasy sitcoms once your initial flurry of 1950s/1960s sitcoms The Munsters, The Addams Family, Mr Ed and My Mother The Car was out the way, I reckon (challenge: extended).

1992’s Mulberry, created by UK sitcom stalwarts John Esmonde and Bob Larbey (The Good Life, Please Sir!, Ever Decreasing Circles), is one of these unicorn-tears rare few: a primetime fantasy sitcom. Intriguingly, for a whole series, it wasn’t even obviously a fantasy sitcom.

It starred Karl Howman (Jacko from Esmonde and Larbey’s womanising painter sitcom Brush Strokes) as the eponymous Mulberry, who appears at the country house of a crotchety spinster, Miss Farnaby (Geraldine McEwan of Marple), wanting to become her servant – a position which hasn’t yet been advertised. Over the course of the first series, it becomes clear that the mischievous Mulberry may not have Miss Farnaby’s best interests at heart: he’s in cahoots with a mysterious man in black (John Bennett of Saracen), who appears to want Miss Farnaby killed, even if Mulberry appears to be having second thoughts.

But all becomes clear by the end of the sixth episode: Mulberry has come to kill Miss Farnaby… because the mysterious man in black is Death, Mulberry is his son and Miss Farnaby is his test job for the ‘family business’. Here’s the title sequence and you can watch the whole thing after the jump.

Continue reading “Nostalgia corner: Mulberry (1992)”

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Z for Zachariah (1984)

22 August 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Z for Zachariah

Apocalyptic tales were all the rage in the 80s, thanks to the ever-present fear of nuclear war. 1984, with its obvious connections to Orwell, spawned more than its fair share of these terror tales on TV alone. Most famous was Barry Hines/Mick James’s ‘documentary’ Threads about a nuclear war and its effects on Sheffield, but the BBC’s Play for Today slot also featured an adaptation of the novel Z For Zachariah.

Radio Times coverOriginally set in the mid-West but relocated to Wales for the play – drama budgets being what they were back then – Z for Zachariah sees a young woman, Ann Burden (Pippa Hinchley), survive a nuclear war by virtue of living in a small valley with a self-contained weather system. At first believing she’s the only survivor, her lonely existence is eventually ended when a scientist, John Loomis (Anthony Andrews), arrives. The rest of the play details the changing, deteriorating relationship between the two (no, no spoilers).

As you might imagine, it’s not a cheery affair and with only a TV drama budget to work on and with its relocation from the US, it’s not entirely convincing. But as was common with many of the tales of misery from the 80s, it’s powerful stuff. Unfortunately, it’s not available on DVD, but you can watch it below on YouTube, you lucky people. Enjoy!

Continue reading “The Wednesday Play: Z for Zachariah (1984)”

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: The Secret of Croftmore (1988)

25 July 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

David Tennant in The Secret of Croftmore

Grown-ups weren’t the only people allowed to watch plays on British TV – or even to have plays especially written for them. ITV’s Dramarama, which ran for seven series during the 80s. As well as provided seasoned writers and actors a chance to work with a new audience, it also provided an opportunity for new, young writers and young performers from around the UK to work in plays. It saw two spin-off series launched – Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest and Children’s Ward – as well as one play, Mr Stabs, which was a sequel to the early 70s children’s fantasy series Ace of Wands (about which, I will one day write, don’t you be a worrying).

Since this is the last Wednesday Play before my summer holidays, it seems appropriate to schedule The Secret of Croftmore, which gave a certain young ‘David Tennant’ in one of his first roles before drama school. I won’t spoil it for you beyond saying that appropriately enough, there’s a supernatural element to it. Anyway, it’s only 25 minutes long so enjoy!

If you want to watch more of these lovely plays, including Mr Stabs and Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest, they’re available on DVD from Amazon.

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Artemis 81 (1981)

18 July 2012 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

Well, in our Wednesday Play slot, we’ve featured plays that have changed attitudes, plays that have entertained, adaptations of classic works of fiction, the gritty, the funny, the meta and more. But plays can also be experimental.

Generally, television dramas tend to aim for ‘mimesis’, to be as close to reality as they can. There’s a lot that goes into that: characters that seem like real people, dialogue that sounds like something you’d hear in conversation, logical plotting with effect following cause, and so on.

But art doesn’t have to have mimesis, as many a surrealist or Brechtian will tell you. Theatre and to a lesser extent film can try not to mimic reality, but instead to challenge conventions and impose its own.

Television finds this much harder to do, thanks to audience expectations. But sometimes it tries.

All of which is a very pretentious, convoluted and somewhat sophistic build-up to my trying to defend the almost indefensible: Artemis 81.

Originally intended as a mini-series, co-funded by Danish TV, this 1981 TV production by noted scriptwriter David Rudkin (as well as several individual plays for television, he also adapted MR James’ The Ash Tree for the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, and contributed to the screenplay for François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) saw paranormal novelist Gideon Harlax (Shelley‘s Hywel Bennett) involved in an epic battle to save the earth from the Angel of Death (Eldorado‘s Roland Curram) and Danish organist Dr Albrecht Von Drachenfels (Dan O’Herlihy), aided and abetted by his wife, Gwen (Dinah Stabb), an Oxford student (Daniel Day-Lewis, but unrecognisable) and the Angel of Love and Light Helith (Sting, in his first proper acting role).

Now if you’ve made it through that paragraph without inadvertently sniggering once, you’re a stronger and more serious person than I. And if you can make it through the first four minutes of Artemis 81, let alone the whole thing, without doing the same, your Herculian strength of will will become a thing of legend. Follow me after the jump where you can find out more about it and even watch it. All three hours of it. Is that a challenge or what?

Continue reading “The Wednesday Play: Artemis 81 (1981)”

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Casting The Runes (1979)

12 July 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Casting The Runes

Since we’ve been talking a bit about the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas this week, it seems appropriate to have a look at ‘the one that (almost) got away’: ITV Playhouse‘s adaptation of MR James’ Casting The Runes.

Virtually all the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas were adaptations of short stories by James. Only 1976’s The Signalman, written by Charles Dickens; 1977’s Stigma, written by Clive Exton; and 1978’s The Ice House, by John Bowen, deviated from this tradition. However, this wasn’t because the producers had run out James stories to adapt – far from it, since BBC4 went on to adapt James’ View From A Hill and Number 13 in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

In fact, just as the BBC was winding up its annual Ghost Stories for Christmas, ITV’s ITV Playhouse anthology series chose to get two of its rival’s contributors, writer Clive Exton and director Lawrence Gordon Clark, to adapt James’s Casting The Runes. This wasn’t the first time ITV had adapted James or even Casting The Runes: there had been four black-and-white productions made of James stories between 1966 and 1968, including Casting The Runes, which have now been virtually lost (although some parts do remain of the adaptation of Casting The Runes), and it had adapted Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance for schools in 1975. But unlike those previous adaptations and those of the BBC, which had all been period pieces, this was a modernisation and extension of James’ original story.

Starring Just Good Friends‘ Jan Francis and Children of the Stones‘ Iain Cuthbertson, Casting The Runes took James’ tale of a covert, supernatural battle between a man and an outraged mage who’d received a bad review from him and transposed it to a modern day conflict between a TV journalist (Francis) and a notorious self-styled Aleister Crowley-like figure (Cutherbertson), outraged at being mocked by one of her documentaries.

Most of the features of the original story remain, from the Satanic curse secretly passed to Francis when she least expects it to the demise of a previous critic thanks to the curse a few years earlier, although the narrative is more linear and more eventful than James’ original. While lacking the quiet, haunting atmosphere of the BBC adaptations that perhaps only age, the empty countryside and a lack of people can bring, the ITV Playhouse version overcomes this by effectively using visual and sound effects – although Cutherbertson’s costuming and performance add an element of unwanted comedy to the proceedings.

Strangely, despite ITV Playhouse running for another five years, there were no more adaptations of James’s stories by the series – or by any other series – until Janice Hadlow revived the format for BBC4 and continued it once she moved to BBC2. Hopefully, now that BBC4’s drama budget is being handed over to BBC2, we’ll get another one this year.

If not, as in 1978, there’s now a golden opportunity for ITV to revive the tradition. Are you listening, Peter Fincham?

The full thing’s not available on YouTube, although Network DVD have very kindly released it on DVD (as a bonus, you get that adaptation of Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance as well), but here’s a trailer for it: