Classic TV

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

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Brimstone and Treacle (1976/1987)

30 May 2012 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

It’s Wednesday so guess what. Yes, that’s right. It’s time for The Wednesday Play, a chance to watch a classic British television play in its entirety. This week, the play we’re going to be watching is Play For Today‘s Brimstone and Treacle, written by one of Britain’s finest television playwrights Dennis Potter and starring Michael Kitchem Denholm Elliott, Patricia Lawrence and Michelle Newell.

Brimstone and Treacle caused something of a stir in its day because despite being made in 1976 and adapted into a movie starring Sting in 1982, it was never screened on television until 1987.

Why? Because of the subject matter. Brimstone and Treacle sees Kitchen, who is possibly the devil himself – certainly someone who can break the ‘fourth wall’ – come to visit an ordinary household in which the daughter has been severely injured in a hit-and-run accident and is apparently in a near vegetative state.

Let’s just say that after that, bad things happen. But then so do good things. It’s the combination of the two that caused offence. Alasdair Milne, then head of TV programmes at the BBC, decided to withdraw and ultimately ban it, on the grounds that the work was “brilliantly written and made, but nauseating”.

Potter later said:

I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated my view of the world and the people in it. I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God. […] I was engaged in an extremely severe struggle not so much against the dull grind of a painful and debilitating illness but with unresolved, almost unacknowledged, ‘spiritual’ questions.

So follow me after the break to one of British television’s most controversial works. Watch it to the very end or you’ll miss out on something important.

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Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Sapphire and Steel (1979-82)

24 May 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Sapphire and Steel

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

Ironically, it was only a matter of time until I got round to Sapphire and Steel. Now I have the time, so let’s delve into one of the coolest, scariest TV shows there’s ever been on UK TV.

I say ironically, because Sapphire and Steel is a show about time – specifically, Time going wrong, usually as the result of things that live in the ‘corridor of Time’ but sometimes of its own volition. In the world of Sapphire and Steel – which is also our modern world or at least the modern world of the 1970s and 80s – Time is everywhere and it is the enemy. It wants to break in. It wants to trap you. It wants to steal your parents. It wants to eat your soul. And then it wants to do the same to everything and everyone you know.

And to stop the world as we know it being destroyed when this happens, mysterious entities, apparently named after the elements*, perhaps even the incarnations of the elements themselves, intercede using all kinds of weird, unexplainable powers.

However, if you think they’re here to help us, you’re sorely mistaken, because Sapphire and Steel, played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, are not like you and me. Even when they pretend to be on our side, to empathise with the predicaments of the mortal and human, they’re not. And they’re ever-so-willing to sacrifice every single one of us if necessary if they have to stop time. They have their own morality, their own rules and they don’t care about us. But they’re the only thing stopping history making us history, so do what they say.

Allow Sapphire to explain to the nature of Time to these annoying children and then follow me after the ever so scary title sequence to explain a little more about this most engrossing of shows:

Alternatively, there’s this rather lovely documentary about the show.

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The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Alice in Wonderland (1966)

23 May 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Alice in Wonderland

Once upon a time, the TV schedules in UK were full of plays. There were strands including The Wednesday Play, Play For Today, Theatre 625, Armchair Theatre, Espionage, Out of the Unknown, Tales of the Unexpected, Play of the Week, Twentieth Century Theatre, The Sunday Night Play and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Now, we have Playhouse Presents on Sky Arts and that’s about it.

So today, in an effort to boost the ‘play count’, I’m starting a new strand on TMINE, appropriately entitled ‘The Wednesday Play’, that’s going to feature a different classic play each week. Now, I could start with almost anything, but since we have a taste for the unusual round here, let’s start with Jonathan Miller’s 1966 adaptation for The Wednesday Play of Alice in Wonderland, starring John Gielgud, Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Michael Gough, Leo McKern, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Malcolm Muggeridge and Eric Idle.

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Classic TV

A couple of Doomwatch books for your delectation

21 May 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

I might get round to doing Doomwatch in Lost Gems/Nostalgia Corner some day (there’s a long list). It was a 1970s show that “dragged from the headlines” stories about science and then sent a fictitious government department to investigate their worst possible outcomes: genetic engineering, sound pollution, subliminal messages, embryo research, toxic waste – they and more all got a look-in. It’s the show that catapulted Robert Powell to stardom – and then took the unexpected step of killing him in the final episode of the first series – and its name entered the English language for a while, such was its power.

Here’s the entire episode for your delight.

Anyway, a friend of mine from university has now written not just a whole book about the show, he’s also gathered together the scripts from some of the lost episodes (yes, another victim of the BBC’s archive-wiping policy of the 70s) into a second book, the proceeds from which are going to charity. Both are going to be published in July. Here’s the press release so you can find out more:

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Classic TV

Nostaligia Corner: Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980), World of Strange Powers (1985) and Universe (1994)

17 May 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World

There’s nothing like grainy TV and film footage and an authoritative-sounding narrator to really scare the crap out of people, particularly kids, with the mysterious and unexplained. This truism was very much proved with Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, a 13-part TV series narrated by newsreader Gordon Honeycombe that looked at every bit of weirdness the world seemed to offer in those days: the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, Bigfoot, giant figures in the landscape, UFOs, the Tunguska explosion, giant squids, stone circles and more.

Bookended by science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, opining from Sri Lanka on how likely any of these things were, each episode went around the world to interview witnesses, take pictures and generally scare the crap out of you with the help of scary music and Honeycombe’s commentary. Not all of it was of the scary variety, however, with episodes looking at the ‘Antikythera mechanism’ (last seen in BBC4’s The 2,000 Year Old Computer a couple of weeks ago) and vitrified hill forts in Scotland, for example. Yet somehow, through the sheer power of suggestion, the creepy crystal skull logo, the equally scary theme tune and Gordon Honeycombe, it all still seemed terrifying, even when Clarke popped up at the end to invariably say he didn’t believe a word of it.

You can watch all of it on YouTube, so take your pick of how you want to frighten yourself with this playlist:

The show hit something of a vein in the public consciousness, with huge numbers of people watching it. It even got satirised by The Goodies in their LWT show.

So popular was Mysterious World that it launched a 13-part sequel show Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, which followed in Mysterious World‘s footsteps by examining psychics, stigmata, clairvoyants and others, putting forward the best cases possible for their existence without any real scepticism whatsoever. It’s actually this series that most people remember, thanks to its focus on things that could really terrify, such as ghosts and poltergeists. However, whether it was because Anna Ford was now doing the narration or I was five years older, it all seemed less scary somehow.

Again, it’s all over YouTube, so choose which one you want to scare yourself stupid with from this playlist .

Nearly 10 years later, ITV returned to Clarke for yet more un-mined mysteries of the world, with Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious Universe, this time narrated by Carol Vorderman. Following the same template as the earlier shows, this looked at everything from the mysteries of the pyramids and zombies through to appearances of the Virgin Mary and crop circles. Whether it was just because the footage was less grainy now, Carol Vorderman is no Gordon Honeycombe or I was 10 years older, it wasn’t scary at all, although you can decide for yourself with this playlist.

The shows didn’t have a huge cultural legacy, although the Divine Comedy did release a song called ‘Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World’.

However, once seen, never forgotten…

What’s that behind you, by the way?