Cult TV Blog

I have to come clean at this point - I haven't seen any of the other films in this series but I found them for sale at a price I was prepared to pay and chose this one because it features a railway station. In the unlikely event that my televisually literate readers haven't come across this series, here is somebody else's account of what they are about: The first unofficial Doctor Who spinoff video was  Wartime , in 1988.  This was made by Reeltime Pictures, known for their  Myth Makers  interview tapes, and is the only one of its kind that was made while Doctor Who was still on television.  Their second effort was  Downtime , in 1995, which we will be looking at soon, probably the best known unofficial spinoff.  The point of these things mainly was to fill the gap left by Doctor Who when it went off air in 1989, to give the fans something new.  Another company was also doing the same kind of thing in the 90s: BBV, which stands for Bill Baggs Vide...

I have posted about this Sapphire and Steel assignment here before, episode -by-episode, and I have made a conscious decision not to re-read those posts before writing this one. There is a sense in which all the locations of Sapphire and Steel adventures play at least one role which railway stations or trains often play, that of a contained environment in which the action can take place. This pertains for the house, the block of flats, the garage, and so on. But this function is extended in Sapphire and Steel to become a plot device where this contained environment can be attacked by forces outside it, usually time. This is a very imaginative way to capitalise on a relatively cheap setting to produce, and its low cost is documented as being one of the things which made Sapphire and Steel attractive to start off with. It is also what makes this show so different from a straightforward detective -type use of the train to create a closed environment. Unbeknown to me, there is a term f...

This one has, of course, been chewed over at length on the Internet after the discovery of more fortuitously -preserved episodes in Nigeria in 2013. Since this is a series of posts on railways as portrayed in cult TV, I feel it is easy to stretch the definition of rails to include the London underground, the location for much of this story. In fact I find the whole set-up of this adventure very interesting. London is apparently completely deserted apart from the characters necessary to the story. This is an interesting echo of the 'unreal' England depicted in later series of The Avengers, to the extent that I'm wondering whether this Who was partly an inspiration for the approach. In fact this Who almost exactly embodies the look, the feel, the characterisation of The Avengers; of course unless the BBC had actually discovered time travel at this point it is likely Doctor Who receiving the influence, unless both shows picked up on something in the zeitgeist of the time. ...

My apologies for being absent from here for some time: my work life has been busy (in addition to continuing mired in conspiracy and controversy worthy of The X-Files), but now I am on annual leave and have the mental and physical space to think about some TV programmes. I am focussing on 731 here because despite being the second of a two-parter, it is the one in which a train features more highly. I know I keep banging on about how blogging about TV shows helps the viewer to think about them in a different way, but it happens to be true. The X-Files has been something in the way of duvet viewing for me for the twenty years since it was first broadcast here in the UK, and I have probably seen this episode dozens of times, but my reading around the subject has only today made me realise what this episode is based on. I had no idea that the very title of the episode is taken from real experiments carried out by Japanese during and after World Ward 2, which were co-opted by the US gov...

I find that this Avengers episode was one of the first shows I blogged about here ( here ). Naturally I don't feel that what I said there can be improved on in any way,  but I do want to at least touch on Dressed to Kill in this series of posts on railways and railway journeys. It has made me think of the role train journeys can play in films and TV shows. I have already touched on the role of the train creating a closed environment,  most useful in a whodunit as providing a limited pool of suspects. The fact that trains make journeys provides an allegory of change - almost what would be called pilgrimage in religious terms. In Dressed to Kill the passengers in one carriage alone are deliberately separated from the rest of the train and then left in an isolated place where they can't threaten the villain's plans. 'Its a bit quiet for Wolverhampton, ' indeed. The pilgrimage aspect of train journeys is paralleled by the more supernatural associations of the railw...

I have an impression that Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is rather less popular than many of the shows I post about here. I find the most popular is The Avengers (particularly posts where I talk about Mrs Peel – I think I may have explained those posts’ popularity) and then The Man from UNCLE, although I haven’t really posted on many of those episodes. You would think, with the show’s 1960s vibe and appearance, it would be right at the top of the list. Perhaps there may be a problem with genre, although I would place it firmly into 1960s unreal genre myself, but a railway journey contained in this episode is enough excuse to include it in this series of posts on the railways. Perhaps I should post more on this show and see what happens. Please don’t get the impression that I don’t like this show – it is actually one of my favourites to put on and just drift into the mood of the episode – but I find I want to start off with a few criticisms. I feel there is a difficulty of credibili...

It’s a funny thing (damn, I swore I wouldn’t start out like that) but coming to this, one of my all-time favourite Avengers episodes, straight from the Man from UNCLE episode I last blogged about, it seems rather plain and ordinary in comparison. I would like to think that that merely suggests the sheer psychedelic quality of UNCLE rather than any defect in The Avengers. I also wish to put right the error I made in my last post of only getting to the railway when I had dealt with the actual programme, by starting straight off on the subject of trains. The opening scenes bring to mind a very different picture of the world of trains, and a different Britain, from that which pertains today. Look at those rows of trains in uniform livery, a livery which brings back happy memories of train journeys with my parents as a child. Not a livery you would see nowadays, and of course you would see all different liveries now: a legacy of the subsequent Conservative government’s policy of privati...

This series of posts on railways and railway journeys on cult TV shows kicks off with this second-series episode of The Man from UNCLE. And the show itself starts off in great UNCLE style with the men using communicators hidden inside guide books. If they survive they are no doubt in someone’s collection nowadays. I also love the way it starts with Solo ogling a pretty girl. I find it interesting the way you could actually miss the railway journey in this show if you tried to – the journey is mostly a foil to the colourful plot and larger than life characters. I hadn’t thought about it until watching this show for the umpteenth time this afternoon, but I hadn’t thought about what genres The Man from UNCLE could reference, by which I mean that it obviously isn’t just a straight spy show and while the third series has the reputation for camping it up in competition with Batman (imagine even trying…) this episode of this series is certainly not completely dead pan. Elements of camp ab...

I’ve been feeling the need to do something a bit different here. True to form, there is always a new way of looking at classic TV and I’m proposing to do a series of themed posts about TV shows which feature trains, the railways, are set around the railways, or feature a journey as a considerable feature of the show. Of course I will probably allow myself endless leeway as to what I can include under the heading of the railways, or else I will change my mind about this themed series of posts and instead do what I am planning for the future, themed posts around particular actors. My personal obsession with trains began as a child, and bizarrely very quickly expanded to include everything associated with them. It is not merely me, but it seems to be a national obsession, since we all know that grown men happily give up the trappings of the office of a weekend to go and work on hobby and restored railways. Trains are of course an ideal vehicle (pardon the pun) for the TV or film writer,...