Classic TV

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

Lost Gems: Laugh??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

15 March 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

TV sketch shows come and go with disturbing regularity. Often, they’ll disappear without anyone realising they were there at all. But quite often, they’ll be training grounds for later comedy talent. Look at The Kevin Bishop Show, which gave Karen Gillan from Doctor Who her big break.

Now let’s look at Laugh??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee, a sort of sequel to A Kick Up The Eighties which essentially launched the careers of two Scottish talents: Robbie Coltrane and John Sessions.

A BBC2 show, LINPMLF emphasised two things in its publicity: the fact it had a female lead (Louise Gold – not a well known name, but the only regular British puppeteer on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, and one of the voices from the first three seasons of Spitting Image) and that it was Scottish. Yet the show itself was a more eclectic affair and largely revolved around Robbie Coltrane and John Sessions.

A success it was not. Today, if it’s remembered at all it’s for Coltrane’s Russian TV sketch, its diverse number of literary spoofs, ranging from Treasure Island through Edgar Lustgarten all the way through to the escapades of Dr Johnson (played by Coltrane) and Boswell (Sessions) – and for one character in particular, again played by Coltrane: Mason Boyne, a Scottish presbyterian orangeman, and his wife Morag (Gold).

But unfortunately, as with a lot of sketch shows, it was both hit and miss and didn’t get the ratings to support a second series. Did that stop Robbie Coltrane or John Sessions? Not a bit of it.

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Lynda La Plante’s Civvies (1992)

8 March 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Civvies

What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day on a UK TV blog than to look at a piece of work by the UK’s most celebrated, famous and popular female TV writer, Lynda La Plante CBE? Even better, it gives us a chance to take a look at the show that gave the world its first proper chance to say “Hello to Jason Isaacs!”

Civvies was a 1992 BBC1 drama by former actress La Plante, who was fresh from BAFTA wins thanks to the previous year’s Prime Suspect on ITV. She’d written Civvies four years previously, but in common with a series she’d researched about the drugs squad, it had sat on the shelf until the Prime Suspect win had shown she was capable of more than just another rehash of her popular 1984 show Widows and its sequel Widows 2.

The show was inspired by a builder working on her house who asked her to help him find jobs for some friends who had just left the paratroop regiment. “I rang up eight different security firms, but they refused to offer work to ex-soldiers on the grounds that they were too institutionalised,” she said at the time in an interview with The Independent.

Deciding to tell the stories of these supposedly unemployable paras and men like them – in fictionalised form at least – La Plante created a show that saw a group of former paratroopers, traumatised and in one case seriously wounded by their tours in Northern Ireland, trying to find legitimate work for themselves on ‘civvy-street’ and instead inexorably being drawn into a life of crime.

For the show, which an executive at the time described as “the most violent home-produced series the BBC has ever made”, the producers assembled a cast including Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia himself), Peter Howitt (Bread and later the writer/director of Sliding Doors) and the relatively new-to-TV Lenny James (now best known from US shows Jericho, The Prisoner and Hung). James also went on to star in the BBC’s The State Within, where he was reunited with another Civvies co-star – a certain Jason Isaacs.

Here’s the opening title sequence.

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Lynda La Plante’s Civvies (1992)”

Lost Gems: Wipe Out (1988)

5 March 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

It’s easy to think in this day and age that just about everything is on the Internet or DVD. Whether it’s some obscure piece of 1950s tatt or Latvian adaptations of On The Buses, Network has probably released it already or there’ll be a web site dedicated to it somewhere.

But sometimes, shows are so lost, I can barely give you anything to work with.

Take the 1988 ITV1 mini-series Wipe Out. Now, it’s not been totally forgotten. There are references here and there to it. But largely it’s been forgotten by the world.

Airing almost immediately after The One Game back in 1988, Wipe Out appeared to be a series in more or less the same vein. The show was heavily trailed with adverts in which security broke down at a prison, resulting in a riot, followed by a vicar of some sorts suggesting that it was the result of “pure evil”. Cue a show about possession, etc, right?

Wrong. Because although it was still the late 80s, this was actually a show about computer viruses. Written by Martin Stone and Richard Maher, the conceit of Wipe Out was that it was actually set in “the very near future”, a future so near to ours it was otherwise indistinguishable from it bar the fact that computers with artificial intelligence are running large chunks of the UK’s infrastructure.

Ian McElhinney (now in Game of Thrones) played Max Raines, a home office investigator who goes to the prison to investigate the riot and soon discovers that it was the computer running the security that had had problems, something that was supposed to be impossible thanks to its artificial intelligence. His investigations eventually lead him to John Fairling (Nigel Terry from Excalibur), the psychologist who helped develop the intelligence behind the computers. Terry, who’s something of an anarchist, wants to bring down the UK – and the US, which also uses the computers – and during his research with the dangerous inmates of the prison came up with the idea of driving the AIs mad using a virus called The Paradise Project (IIRC), named after Milton’s Paradise Lost. He intends to deploy the virus to the infrastructure computers, including those running air traffic control and the UK’s defences, with the help of a bunch of like-minded terrorists.

A parallel plot see McElhinney’s character manipulated by Home Office mandarin Clive Rawlinson (actor and antique dealer Tristram Jellinek) using secret records about his parents’ deaths during the Mau Mau uprising. Eventually, things dovetail together with Raines stopping the Paradise Project from being deployed, Terry being captured (or killed) and the Americans apparently happy – until Rawlinson reveals the extent of his manipulations and McElhinney angrily pressing the button that will activate The Paradise Project. The final shot: the planes and missiles of the UK and then a cut to credits.

The message of course being don’t trust computers, particularly smart ones, or we’re all in trouble.

That was, of course, the last seen of Wipe Out. It’s never been repeated and never been released on DVD. There was no sequel and everyone apart from me appears to have forgotten about it. It’s a Lost Gem.

Since I don’t have any clips or even photos to leave you of Wipe Out, have Colossus: The Forbin Project instead, which is a similarly themed film that’s rather good.

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Jossy’s Giants (1986-87)

23 February 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

"Football’s just a branch of science."

There’s not been many football shows on TV. Footballers’ Wives, sure, but that wasn’t so much about the football as, er, the wives.

One of the few shows that have aired was a show for children, Jossy’s Giants, that was on BBC1 for two series back in the 80s. The show’s plot centred around the ups and downs of a boys’ football team, the Glipton Giants (formally Glipton Grasshoppers), and their enthusiastic Geordie manager Joswell ‘Jossy’ Blair, who had previously played for Newcastle United.

Written by – of all people – the Newcastle native and darts commentator Sid Waddell, the show was watched by 6.3 million viewers but only lasted for 10 episodes, before being turned into a musical that ran at the Bolton Octagon in 1989.

But apart from the football and Jossy, it’s best remembered for its insanely catchy theme tune by former Play School presenter Mike Amatt, which you can listen to now. I’ll warn you though: you’ll be humming it for the rest of the day.

And if that’s whet your appetite, here’s a playlist of some of the first few episodes. The first video’s from the fifth episode, so skip to the second video.

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Treasure Hunt (1982-89, 2002-03) and Interceptor (1989-90)

16 February 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Treasure Hunt

Back in the early days of Channel 4, the urgent need for ideas to fill an entire network full of programming was clear. Despite all the preparation time and work, you don’t just create seven days of year-round programming out of nothing. So, Channel 4 looked around the world for formats it could use.

For game shows, there was a problem: ITV had pretty much sown up the US format-acquisition market, taking everything from Family Fortunes and The Price is Right. So Channel 4 had the interesting idea of plundering French TV for formats.

Like Countdown? Think it’s British? Then gasp in awe at the original show, Des chiffres et des lettres, at 47 years old the oldest TV programme on French TV and one of the longest-running game shows in the world:

Another fondly remembered Channel 4 game show that started at the same time also originated on French TV. Treasure Hunt began life as La Chasse au Trésor (and eventually La Chasse aux Trésors) on Antenne 2:

In it, a bunch of people back in a studio solved clues that would lead to treasure. They themselves didn’t do the hunting: that was up to a guy in a helicopter who followed their instructions. And here in the UK, with Treasure Hunt we got more or less the same thing, with former newsreader Kenneth Kendall helping a motley collection of contestants back in a studio to solve clues, all while ‘a skyrunner’ went out in a helicopter, usually in the UK, sometimes in exotic locations like Australia, to find the next clue and eventually the treasure.

That skyrunner – Anneka Rice, the possessor of one of the most famous, award-winning bottoms on British TV. Here are the very familiar titles.

Continue reading “Nostalgia corner: Treasure Hunt (1982-89, 2002-03) and Interceptor (1989-90)”