Classic TV

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

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Max Headroom (1985-1988)

28 October 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Never, in the history of music videos, has so much effort been devoted to giving one VJ a back-story as with Max Headroom.

Picture this: it’s 1985. Music videos are big, especially thanks to the relatively shiny and new channel MTV (music television). Computers and computer graphics are also big, thanks to the Apple Mac, arcade games and movies like Tron and The Last Starfighter. So what more natural blend of coolness could there be than a computer-generated VJ?

Unfortunately, computer graphics weren’t quite up to the job back then, so Canadian actor Matt Frewer got slathered in prosthetics and make-up to become the world’s computer-generated VJ, ‘Max Headroom’, a stuttering, witty, seemingly plastic American ‘shockjock’. And he was very popular. You can still see his influence in Back To The Future 2.

But the arrival of Max Headroom for some reason required an answer to the question, "Who is Max Headroom and where does he come from?"

Bizarrely, the answer was supplied by Channel 4, who decided to cash in on a literary and movie phenomenon, ‘cyberpunk’, to create an origin movie for Max Headroom that was set ’20 minutes into the future’. Surprisingly, it was bloody good, and even more surprisingly, despite its inauspicious British origins, it launched two seasons of one of the most innovative and satirical TV sci-fi shows British and US TV has ever seen.

Here’s the start of the British movie:

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Weird old title sequences: LA Heat (1996), possibly the worst TV show ever made

30 September 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

LA Heat, in my estimation, was possibly one of the worst TV shows ever made. Yes, worse than Angela’s Eyes and even Saving Grace. I’m not going to write epic swathes of text about why it was so bad. I’m just going to let the beyond-parody title sequence speak for itself.

If that didn’t persuade you, here’s the first episode of the second season. If your IQ drops as a result of watching it, that’s not my fault.

Classic TV

Old Gems: Blue Thunder (1984)

22 September 2011 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Blue Thunder

Made in 1983, Blue Thunder was a cracking little action movie. Directed by John Badham and starring Roy Scheider (Jaws), it questioned the increasing use of military-grade equipment by the police and the new powers of surveillance available to the police that technology was beginning to afford them.

The centrepiece of the film was ‘Blue Thunder’ as it was nicknamed, an armour-plated police helicopter with a 20mm chain cannon, infra-red cameras, the ability to hover almost silently and microphones that can listen through walls – famously, as an on-screen caption said at the beginning of the movie, technology that was all available in the US at that point.

The film’s message was clear: we have to be very careful about this technology because in the wrong hands, even those of the government, law and order could be subverted. And at the end of the movie, Scheider lands Blue Thunder in front of a train and lets it blow up so no one can use it against the citizens of the United States.

So irony indeed that following the success of the movie, ABC decided to make a TV show in which Blue Thunder is benevolently used by Scheider’s character (now played by James Farantino and called Frank Chaney rather than Frank Murphy) to stop criminals, aided by Dana “Wayne’s World” Carvey and Bubba “Police Academy” Smith.

Here’s the halfway decent titles of the TV series.

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Classic TV

Lost Gems: Cover Up (1984-1985)

8 September 2011 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Cover Up

For years, women in TV action shows were, shall we say, ‘ornamental’. Not often given much by way of character and what they had often revolving around the hero of the show, they were there to be pretty and give the largely male audience something to look at – or to just be secretaries. The heroes? Some were rugged, admittedly, but others could be old and tired, obsese or even one-armed.

Come the 60s, women began to get something to do, thanks to the likes of Cathy Gale and Emma Peel in The Avengers and Honey West in the eponymously named Honey West. What didn’t happen for a long while was for men to become the eye candy for female viewers, the add-on to the heroine.

That took the 80s and with CBS’s Cover Up, women who had been holding out for a hero finally got what they wanted.

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Classic TV

Old Gems: The Baron (1965-66)

1 September 2011 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the transfer between book and TV series, a lot can change. A case in point: the ITC adventure series, The Baron, a sort of prototype Lovejoy and the first ITC show filmed entirely in colour that featured people rather than puppets.

Based on John Creasey’s series of novels, The Baron starred American actor Steve Forrest as John Mannering, a former Texas ranch owner and antique dealer who takes on missions for ITC’s catch-all British spy service, Diplomatic Intelligence*, aided by his glamorous spy colleague Cordelia Winfield (Sue Lloyd) .

What’s interesting about this is that in the books

  1. Mannering is British
  2. He’s a former jewel thief
  3. He’s married
  4. He doesn’t own a cattle ranch
  5. He doesn’t work for British intelligence

Basically, ITC bought the name and made another version of The Saint but starring an American. Nevertheless, it was a fun little action show, with lots of fights, car chases and running round, even if the scripts themselves were largely unremarkable. The theme tune was great, plus anything with Sue Lloyd in it has to be good. And for ITC lovers, this was the very few show to feature the notorious "white jaguar driving off a cliff scene" that later appeared in virtually dozens of subsequent ITC shows.

Largely written by Terry "I created the Daleks" Nation and Dennis Spooner, another former Doctor Who script writer, the show was very much in hoc to American financing. As well as the US lead, the show was redubbed for the American market, with words like ‘petrol’ changed to ‘gas’. The original assistant planned for Mannering, David Marlowe (played by Paul Ferris), was replaced by Winfield at US instigation as well.

However, those who live for the American market, die by the American market because when ratings suffered, a second series for the show was out of the question, despite doing well in the UK. Happily, you can buy it on DVD still.

* At the time, SS/MI5 and SIS/MI6 didn’t officially exist