Cult TV Blog

This episode of Virtual Murder is one which really makes me wonder why this show isn't more known because it stars Jon Pertwee, who is surely known to everyone in the cult blogosphere, as an Italian chef (who is Spanish) and the villain of the piece. He does a brilliant job of portraying a man who is utterly barmy, and this comes across in everything he says because of his odd manner of speech, but nonetheless nobody has stopped to think he's insane. You may think that I'm naughty giving out that he's the baddie right at the start, but so does Virtual Murder, and I think that just underscores that this show is about the atmosphere and the whole story, not just about solving the crime. You've got it, exactly like so many great 1960s TV shows. The details of the investigation are of course entirely psychological and the profile drawn up of Silverado is fascinating. We don't only see this excellent portrayal of human life in the excellent depiction of the barmy Sil...

A friend recently had IT trouble and lost access to years of photographs and notes on his interest in urban exploration. He was bemoaning that he didn't understand the explanation of what had happened given to him by the IT person who was dealing with it. I gave my jaundiced opinion that if you can't explain something in a way that a non-specialist will understand what is happening, you don't understand it yourself. Of course you already know that I'm saying that as the prelude to saying that I have had some difficulty understanding this show. Not for the first time blogging has forced me to get my head round a show which I have been allowing to wash over me, so that I can talk about it here and allow for any readers who haven't watched the show. If you've watched it you probably understand it better than me anyway, it's HUGELY ambitious and naturally I tend to get distracted by the sights of eighties Birmingham. The One Game is a mini series of four episode...

This is the only remaining episode of the third series of Public Eye, and the last episode set during Marker's sojourn in Birmingham for me to blog about here. It is intended to be a depiction of the ins and outs of a particular relationship, however what most strikes me about it is the depiction of Marker's work. To come straight out with it, if  I was professionally approached by both a husband and a wife who just plain will not talk to each other, I would find myself very hard pressed not to slap them. The husband can't ask his wife why she appears nude in a photograph which has appeared in a photography competition in the library where he is chief librarian. The wife can't ask her husband what he knows about this and can't tell him that she has been blackmailed for absurdly small amounts for years. Most of the commentary on the internet focuses on the ins and outs of this relationship between Ainsworth and his young, beautiful, French wife Marie. In quite a go a...

I see that I wrote about this series in a general post ( here ) in 2016, in which I expatiated at length about its gorgeous setting of the former Birmingham Central Library. Having got that out of the way, I'm intrigued that it has struck me very differently this time. This post might come across a bit apocalyptic, and I'm not sorry in the slightest.  I seem to have missed much of the point of this show when I wrote about it before (silly me). There is a recurring motif that the world of Cold War era espionage depicted in The Game is, indeed, a game and one that is played by the characters. You could of course interpret that idea several ways, including it meaning that you might have to follow rules or use tactics or strategy to win. However I think it is much more clear that The Game is somewhat unreal. You play the game regardless of the impact on the players, and another recurring motif is the different ways people react to things like deaths which carry out in the course of...

This series of posts about TV related in some way to Birmingham prods me to blog about The Firm (by Alan Clarke for the Screen Two series) which I will happily admit I have been wanting to write about but have been rather avoiding. The connection with Birmingham is simply a scene set in the city. Strangely for a city with five universities, three cathedrals (and there used to be an additional Liberal Catholic pro-cathedral) and three rivers, Birmingham only has one football team, Birmimgham City Football Club, which had its start in the winter of 1875, when the choir cricket team of Holy Trinity church Bordesley thought they would try the new sport of Association Football. BCFC has or had a firm of hooligans called Zulus, which started as a derogatory name for them because of their multicultural nature. In a sense there is very little to be said about this show because the internet is replete with reviews and commentary, so I will just say whatever happens to go through my mind about i...

Real gangsters this time, rather than fictional ones. I was delighted to find this documentary about the two main gangs in Birmingham (the Johnsons and the Burger Bar Boys) in the twenty first century, because I wanted to opine about documentaries about gangs and was afraid I was going to have to use the flawed One Mile Away on the same subject (which is still well worth watching in conjunction with this one but is widely criticised for various things which will become apparent. I do get that it's very difficult for a documentary maker to write about a subject which is still in the making and which involves two completely closed groups who are obviously wary of appearing on TV. In fact even writing this post has given me endless trouble so I'm feeling more sympathetic than I was at the beginning! The real difficulty for the documentary maker over these two gangs is that there isn't an apparent reason for them. Both documentaries ask members of both gangs what it's all a...

This is one where you really do have to watch the video to get the feel. ☝️ I wasn't going to but I went through Sparkhill on the bus this afternoon and simply had to do a post on Citizen Khan. Actually starting with a video of Mr Khan was a mistake because I'm already hysterical and will have great difficulty concentrating. Citizen Khan is a sitcom about a ridiculous British Pakistani Moslem man who lives in Sparkhill (each episode is dedicated to the people of Sparkhill) and fancies himself as a community leader. This flat statement is completely to understate the impact of this show: When the first series of the pioneering sitcom Citizen Khan aired last year, it sparked around 200 complaints and was accused of making fun of Islam, stereotyping Asians and being disrespectful to the Qur'an. A Facebook post said: "Cancel the show OR we will have repeat of riot we had a few months ago." Well, a second series and a Christmas special have been filmed and there have b...

The Flower of Gloster has to appear in this series of posts because it's a children's programme about three siblings and another girl they meet on the way, taking a boat along the canals from north Wales to London, so naturally they end up in the Venice of the Midlands, in one of the episodes. I always forget in between viewings of it, that Flower of Gloster is a delight, an utter delight, it is so sweet, so nice, it is so redolent of a different age. Well, actually an age of incredible change. This was the absolute tail end of the commercial transport that the canals were designed for, and before they had a period of stagnation before being revivified as a leisure resource. You can read more about the show on the Canal World forum  here. The other thing I always forget about it is that it's a mixture of drama with actors (although the boy keeps letting his face show what he's thinking rather than what he's supposed to be thinking, which in itself is so sweet) and s...

I'm putting Gangsters (1976 - 1978) as the first blog post in this series of posts about TV related in some way to Birmingham to get the post which I anticipate will be most difficult out of the way first.  Recently I seem to be writing  a lot here that I find various shows difficult or don't understand things, and I suspect that this is because I'm in a place where I can think about a few things I've been trying not to think about. So of course I'm going to have to come clean and admit that I love this show dearly but also find it incredibly difficult. I honestly find it confusing, am never very sure what is happening or who is who and keep getting distracted by the spectre of some since-demolished Brutalist masterpiece. In preparation for this post I have watched through the whole show again (over a few weeks, not in one go), read what I could find about it online and watched the Open University show about it which forms an extra on the final disc of the DVD box s...

This is the introduction to a series of posts about TV programmes related in some way to my home city of Birmingham. Truthfully it's a bit of an easy ride because we have had several TV studios here as well as several shows using the city for scenery or set here, so I'm going to pick my favourites and share my idiosyncratic impression on them as always. The name Birmingham comes from the Old English Beorma-Ingas-Ham, the home of the tribe of Beorma. Well, Beorma is the current academic favourite for the name of the notional founder, but beyond an Anglo-Saxon tribe settling here around the sixth century, it isn't known whether Beorma came here, or even existed. That said there has been human settlement since about 8000 BCE and there was a first century Roman fort here. In the Domesday book it had nine households. Peter de Bermingham obtained a charter to hold a market in 1166, but the market town remained a small Warwickshire town. And then came the Industrial Revolution. Th...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . Second City Firsts (1973 to 1978) was a show produced by the BBC which featured a lot of writers' first time TV productions and was made at Pebble Mill right here in the Second City. 28 of the 53 plays survive and there are several on the internet. Unusually for these shows this one has attracted quite a lot of comments online and I would point to  here  for an excellent overview of the series. Early to Bed is dead gritty and set in a mining community much further north than here. It has an interesting use of visuals to contrast the traditional (the mine) with the then modern, in the shape of many of the decorations and furnishings we see in the terraced houses including, symbolically an electric fire. I am having some difficulty placing the affair which is the actual subject of this play in the contrast I have set up, because the young man seeing the neighbour is of course also part of the community. Perhaps t...

Regular readers will remember how I walked out of my last job in September and walked straight into a better one. I am delighted to announce that only three months later an even better opportunity for promotion has come along and my notice is in. As my congratulatory present to myself I bought several of the things in my Amazon basket, Spike Milligan's Q, which I don't doubt I will be writing about here soonish, and Flower of Gloster, about which I just have to rush into print at once. On reflection I find that I have written about several children's programmes here, or rather programmes intended for children, which may or may not have a grown up following as well, but relatively few of these stay in my permanent collection. Tintin is there in French - he used to irritate me in English, and then I actually went to France and saw kids sitting on the floor in the hypermarkets reading the books, and got hooked. I also keep the 1970s version of the Famous Five, just because....