Classic TV

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

Classic TV

Old Gems: Starman (1986-1987)

9 February 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Robert Hays as Starman

Back when I wrote about The Invaders, I mentioned the genre of the “fixing-up wanderer” that was popular in the 60s and 70s:

Whether it was The Immortal, Branded, Coronet Blue, The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu or any of the others, the format was essentially the same and designed to allow shows to be broadcast in any order during syndication, re-runs, etc, without anyone getting lost: a man (it was always a man) would travel from town to town, doing his best to evade some horrible authority or person chasing after them; he’d try to stay low profile, but sooner or later, he’d discover some drama in the town that needed fixing. The situation would get fixed and the hero would move on to another town for the next episode, typically without anything happening that would change the overall show format (unless it was the first or last episode of a season).

Now the genre didn’t die out altogether in the 80s. Occasionally, it would resurface, sometimes mutated through intermingling with another genre. In the case of Starman, we have the marriage of “fixing-up wanderer” with the movie tie-in.

Back in 1984, Starman was a lovely little John Carpenter movie that starred Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen. Bridges played an alien who comes to Earth after intercepting the Voyager 2 space probe and its invitation to visit to us. He takes the form of Karen Allen’s dead husband and they go on a road trip together so that Bridges can get a lift home from another bunch of aliens.

Along the way, Bridges’ alien learns all about humans and their ways – including emotions and this Earth-thing we call love – and at the final instance reveals that Allen is now pregnant with a child who will be hers and both his and her late husband’s. When the child grows up, he will be a teacher to humanity. And it’s all very tear-jerking and lovely:

So that’s 1984, driving around in a late 70s Mustang, coming to Earth thanks to a space probe launched in 1977. Everyone got it?

Right, let’s fast forward a couple of years to 1986 and ABC wants to adapt the movie into a TV series. Rather than start from scratch, the show also fast forwards 15 years into the future… to 1986. So everything in the movie apparently happened in 1971 or earlier.

Huh. Okay. How’s that work exactly?

Anyway, that minor logistical issue aside, the story is that the Starman’s son is now 15 but has been abandoned by his mother (now played by Buck Rogers in the 25th Century‘s Erin Gray – yes, the producers couldn’t afford any of the original cast) to foster parents who have just died. Realising his son is in trouble, the Starman comes to Earth and assumes the form of another dead human – this time dead photojournalist Paul Forrester, played by Airplane!‘s Robert Hays. Together, he and Starman Jr travel together around the country, fixing people’s problems while they search for Erin Gray – all while being chased by the same federal agent, now played by Michael Cavanaugh, who gave the Starman such problems in the movie.

Here are the titles – I have to confess it’s slightly new to me, too, since I only saw a dubbed version in French while I was on holiday there. As with most dubbed shows of the era, it seemed better when it wasn’t in English:

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Classic TV

Lost Gems: The Ascent of Man (1973)

2 February 2012 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Well, as ‘Lost Gems’ go, you can’t get much more ‘Lost Gem’-ier than The Ascent of Man, the 65th official most important programme in the history of British television. Made in 1973, it was the follow-up and some might say companion series to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which looked at evolution of Western culture and art. In it, Brains Trust member Jacob Bronowski discussed the history of science, starting with the evolution of man (and, of course, woman) and working its way through early human society to modern times.

And it was, quite simply, breathtaking.

Here’s a clip of the show and the then-controller of BBC2 and the man who commissioned the series, Sir David Attenborough, to tell you all about it. Then after the jump, you lucky people, all 13 episodes of the series.

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Classic TV

More gods in The Aphrodite Inheritance?

30 January 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The Aphrodite Inheritance

So I’ve obviously seen Michael J Bird’s The Aphrodite Inheritance a couple of times now, but thanks to the glorious low quality of my copy coupled with my not being the sharpest tool in the box, I might have missed as many as three gods and possibly an implied fourth god from the roster who appeared in the story. At least, according to the Michael J Bird tribute site…

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Classic TV

Lost Gems: Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, A Life in Pieces (1990) and Why Bother? (1993)

26 January 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling had a long and illustrious career as a comedy character. Originally created by Peter Cook for Beyond The Fringe and Not Only… But Also, he was an aristocrat used by Cook to satirise any number of things as well as for pure surrealism. But he’s probably best known for his attempts to get ravens to fly underwater.

Dudley Moore: Is it difficult to get ravens to fly underwater?

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: Well, I think the word difficult is an awfully good one here. Yes, it is. It’s nigh impossible… There they are sitting on my wrist. I say ‘Fly! Fly you little devils!!’… (then) they drown. Little black feathery figure topples off my wrist and spirals to a watery grave. We’re knee deep in feathers off that part of the coast… not a single success in the whole forty years of training.

DM: Does this makes your life a miserable failure?

SAS-G: My life has been a miserable failure, yes.

Probably his finest hour, however, was in Christmas 1990, when over a period of 12 days on BBC2, he explained to Ludovic Kennedy what gifts he’d like for Christmas in A Life in Pieces. These five-minute sketches allowed Sir Arthur to look back over his life in exchange for gifts of a partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves and so on. However, his reminiscences exposed him unwittingly as a coward, liar, murderer and many other things.

If you have an hour or so, even though they haven’t been released on DVD, you can enjoy on YouTube all 12 episodes of A Life in Pieces:

That wasn’t the last the world heard of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, however. He went on in 1994 to record for Radio 3 a series of five interviews, Why Bother?, with none other than Chris Morris. During the interviews, Sir Arthur talked about his experiments on eels, his role in the racial violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King trial, his military career, including his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, and his habit of strangling his business partners, as well as his next project: cloning from the fossilised remains of the infant Christ.

The interviews were completely improvised and Morris says:

It was a very different style of improvisation from what I’d been used to, because those On The Hour and The Day Today things were about trying to establish a character within a situation, and Peter Cook was really doing ‘knight’s move’ and ‘double knight’s move’ thinking to construct jokes or ridiculous scenes flipping back on themselves, and it was amazing.

Thankfully, the BBC has, in its wisdom, released Why Bother? on CD, but it’s also available on YouTube. Alas, Peter Cook died in 1994. He is much-missed.

Lost Gems: Thompson (1988)

19 January 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Emma Thompson is, of course, one of nation’s greatest treasures – the female Stephen Fry, or, if you will, Stephen Fry the male Emma Thompson. However, while she is of course the superior actor and feature writer (she’s only the person to have won both best actor and best writer Oscars), Fry is the superior sketch show writer, as this ‘ere blog’s regular feature ‘A bit of A Bit of Fry and Laurie‘ regularly demonstrates.

How do I know? Because although our Emma has appeared in sketch shows, including Stephen’s very own Saturday Night Fry, her attempt at sketch show comedy back in 1988 – the eponymously named Thompson – didn’t fare as well as Stevie-baby’s.

Starring Thompson, Imelda Staunton and Stephen Moore, Thompson was a loose collection of sketches and musical numbers written by Thompson. And although it had its moments, it wasn’t great, being successful with neither audience nor critics. Described in Time Out magazine as "very clever-little-me-ish", it lasted only one series, has never been repeated and our Emms has not returned to sketch comedy since.

However, although it’s not been released on DVD, a few episodes are available on YouTube, including all of episode three. I should mention at this point, incidentally, that Emmy-wemmy was married to Kenneth Branagh at this point, and he appeared in a lot of the sketches, including this slightly over-intimate one.

Enjoy!