Classic TV

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

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Dear John (1986-1987)/Dear John (USA) (1988-1992)

8 December 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

John Sullivan is best known in the UK as the creator and writer of Only Fools and Horses. But he did write other shows, including Just Good Friends and… Dear John. Guest what show this Lost Gem is about.

As the show’s title suggests, this is about a regular guy called John who comes home to get a ‘Dear John’ letter from his wife (the words of which are sung in the theme tune), who tells him she’s leaving him for another man.

To get his life back on track, schoolteacher John joins a support group for divorced people, run by a woman called Louise (catchphrase: "Were there any sexual problems?") and populated by various oddballs, including Ralph (a colossal nerd who drives a motorcycle-sidebar combination), Kate (an attractive but ‘frigid’, thrice-divorced woman played by Belinda Lang from 2.4 Children), and ‘Kirk’, a man who dresses like John Travolta and claims to be a spy, but is really a guy called Eric who lives at home with his mum.

The show largely revolved around the interactions between these characters at the support group and the humour of their various situations and characters. But there’s a great deal of pathos as well, given the situation, with Ralph having been married by a Polish woman just to get a UK passport and Eric/Kirk being lonely and inadequate so having to devise a persona in order to function in the real-world and possibly romance Kate, with whom he falls in love: in one episode, Eric resolves to be himself, but when a pub fight breaks out, he discovers he can only stop it, by becoming Kirk again.

The show ended inconclusively after two series and a ‘special’. Kate gets a new boyfriend and goes to Greece, but that’s about as far as it goes for story arc. But that was about as far as it went.

Dear John (USA)

However, following the sitcom-import trend of the 70s and 80s, NBC in the US acquired the format and scripts and developed their own Dear John. Notable cast members were Judd Hirsch of Taxi fame, who played John, Isabella Hoffmann (Homicide) played Kate, Harry Groener (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) played Ralph, while Jere Burns (Burn Notice) played Kirk.

There were a few but notable changes to the show along the way, changes that essentially made the show blander and less biting. The theme tune, while essentially the same, becomes faster and happier; Kate is no longer frigid, merely divorced; and Kirk really is a secret agent, even if no one believes him at first (ironic, given Burns’ current role in Burn Notice).

Although considerably messed around in the schedules, Dear John (USA) (as the BBC retitled it when they acquired it) lasted four seasons on NBC, but hasn’t been seen since, making it a ‘Lost Gem’. However, the UK original is available on DVD.

Really Lost Gems: The Adventures of Don Quick (1970)

1 December 2011 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Adapting the classics is something that science-fiction does a lot of. The Forbidden Planet is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, while (if you squint a bit) Gene Rodenberry always claimed that Star Trek was based on the Hornblower books.

Cervantes’ Spanish-language classic The Adventures of Don Quixote doesn’t get a whole lot of adapting these days, but way back in 1970, ITV decided to do it as a science-fiction series called The Adventures of Don Quick. Starring Ian Hendry (the original star of The Avengers), this saw intergalactic maintenance man Don Quick, together with his second-in-command Sam Czopanzer (Ronald Lacey) – can you see what they did there? – travel from planet to planet each week. On landing, Quick would proceed to interfere with the way the planet was run, because he knew best.

The planets were varied – and symbolic. The Higher The Fewer sees a population that lives in 2,000 storey skyscrapers organised by class; The Love Reflector has a planet of beautiful women – and one six-inch male astronaut; and The Quick and The Dead sees Aphrodite, Hera and Zeus (Graham Crowden) saving Sam and Quick from a volcano.

Lasting all of six one-hour episodes, Don Quick saw guest stars including Roy Marsden, Leigh Lawson, Patricia Haines, Yutte Stensgard, Madeline Smith, Gay Soper, James Hayter, Kate O’Mara, Bryan Mosley, Colin Baker and Anouska Hempel. Mike Newell even directed an episode.

However, only one episode of the show survives and it’s not on YouTube, so I’m only going to be able to give you the theme tune, as preserved on the album “Top T.V. Soundtrack Themes”. Sorry about that – blame ITV.

Lost Gems: ABC in the 70s

24 November 2011 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

For all my efforts to remind everyone of long, lost shows, the history of TV is littered with shows that are so obscure, even I haven’t heard of them. So let’s all watch this promo for ABC’s Friday night line-up in 1970. In among the more famous shows like The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, there are shows like The Nanny and the Professor, That Girl and Love American Style that are entirely new to me.

Let’s watch together and see why no one probably remembers them any more.

Of course, ABC was “the place to be” in the 70s – at least according to ABC – which was a theme of many of their promos. See how many you recognise from this one from 1971.

[via Toby]

Question of the week: which aspect of old TV would you bring back?

23 November 2011 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Remember TV when you were kid, eh? Just four channels or maybe just three, full of programmes that don’t exist any more. Maybe they were even black and white rather than colour. Great, wasn’t it?

Of course, I’m not just talking about nostalgia for a TV show or TV shows that have long been cancelled and forgotten about, shows that haven’t been imitated or copied since – or maybe copied ad infinitum to lesser and lesser effect. There were wholly different ways of doing TV back in the old days.

Remember the variety show? The shows that allowed people to criticise what they’d seen on TV, like Points of View, Right To Reply and Open Air? How about the "long running viewer competition" like Puzzle Trail, in which viewers would get more and more clues each week until someone got the right answer? Did you know ITV once even broadcast a play performed in ancient Greek?

Not these days. Doesn’t happen.

So this week’s question is broad:

What aspect of old television would you bring back?

My choice would be the old Open University programmes. For the uninitiated, the Open University is a UK university that lets people work towards degree remotely from their own homes at their own pace. Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet, DVDs, etc, tuition is largely done through other media, but for a few decades, the BBC used to broadcast Open University TV programmes late at night and early in the morning on weekdays, and for a big chunk of the mornings on BBC2 at the weekends.

Imagine that: being able to watch university-grade lectures on dozens of subjects for free in the comfort of your own home. Watch a half hour social studies programme on the tension between deterrence and justice in criminal sentencing, then a geography programme about malnutrition in India, then a mathematics programme about non-Euclidean geometry, one after another.

Look, here’s one about velocity diagrams!

I was young, I should have been watching Going Live: I watched the Open University instead, and I’d like it back, please. How about you?

Classic TV

Lost Gems: The Name of the Game (1968-1971)

17 November 2011 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

The Name of the Game

‘Wheel’ series have just about disappeared now. What’s a ‘wheel’ series? Well, imagine a series with some high-profile stars, but they’re so high-profile, there’s not room for them in each episode. So each week, you have an episode that invariably features only one of those stars.

One of the pioneers of wheel series was NBC’s The Name of the Game, which starred Tony Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack. Running for 76 episodes, it was based on the TV movie Fame is the Name of the Game and looked at three characters working at Howard Publications, a large magazine company. Franciosa played Jeff Dillon, a crusading reporting with People magazine; Gene Barry played Glenn Howard, the company’s owner and publisher; and Robert Stack played Dan Farrell, the editor of Crime magazine.

Here’s the ever-so-60s title sequence. Well, one of them. I’ll explain after the jump.

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