Cult TV Blog @culttvblog - Tumblr Blog

This Blog

This is a blog about my love for cult TV, mostly old and mostly British. It is the continuation of a blog I kept on Blogger for ten years.

Tags Used on This Blog

50s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/50s%20tv

60s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/60s%20TV

70s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/70s%20tv

70s TV Season: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/70s%20tv%20season

80s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/80s%20TV

90s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/90s%20tv

00s TV: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/00s%20tv

afterlife: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/afterlife

Armchair Theatre: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/armchair%20theatre

Armchair Thriller: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/armchair%20thriller

Barlow at Large: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Barlow%20at%20large

Blake and Mortimer: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Blake%20and%20Mortimer

Blake et Mortimer: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/blake%20et%20mortimer

Comedy Playhouse: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/comedy%20playhouse

Dalgliesh: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/dalgliesh

Dead Head: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/dead%20head

Doctor Who: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Doctor%20Who

Doomwatch: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/doomwatch

Indoor League: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/indoor%20league

Jokers Wild: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Jokers%20wild

Max Headroom: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Max%20Headroom

Missing Believed Wiped: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/missing%20believed%20wiped

Murder Most English: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/murder%20most%20english

Not on Your Nellie: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/not%20on%20your%20nellie

Number 6 was a Plant: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/number%206%20was%20a%20plant

Paul Temple: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/Paul%20Temple

Play Away: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Play%20Away

Problematic TV: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/problematic%20tv

Red Letter Day: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/red%20letter%20day

Rutland Weekend Television: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/Rutland%20Weekend%20Television

Sapphire and Steel: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/sapphire%20and%20steel

Shadow Squad: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/shadow%20squad

Sky: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/Sky%201975%20TV%20Series

Special Branch: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/special%20Branch

The Avengers: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20avengers

The Avengers Series 1: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the%20avengers%20series%201

The Fenn Street Gang: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/The%20Fenn%20Street%20Gang

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20hardy%20boys%2Fnancy%20drew%20mysteries

The Invisible Man: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/The%20Invisible%20Man

The Long Chase: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20long%20chase

The Lovers: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/The%20Lovers

The Organization: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/The%20Organization

The Prisoner: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20prisoner

The Tomorrow People: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20tomorrow%20people

The Tomorrow People Master Post: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20tomorrow%20people%20master%20post

The War Game: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20war%20game

The Wednesday Play: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/the%20wednesday%20play

The XYY Man: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the%20xyy%20man

Villains https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/villains%201972

Whodunnit?: https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/tagged/whodunnit%3F

This blog is mirrored at tumblr.com/culttvblog (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email) Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com

If You Go Down in the Woods Today (1981)

This post is going to be one of my occasional attempts at rehabilitation on a programme which is, in my opinion, neglected or far less popular than it should be. This time, this delightful TV film which has pretty lukewarm reviews at best, isn't best portrayed by IMDB and was aimed wrongly by its own creator and star, National Treasure Eric Sykes.

To start with the IMDB summary, I'm afraid it gives the wrong impression, because it says:

'A scoutmaster and eight scouts go camping in Tangle Woods. When he and a cub get lost, their mishaps draw attention from military, intelligence, and criminals, causing chaos.' This is to misunderstand what is happening completely and a better plot summary would be:

'When eight scouts with their scoutmaster (who isn't their regular scoutmaster because he has fallen ill) go camping in Tangle Woods, they find the woods mysteriously full of strange characters. In this eccentric world, nobody is who they seem to be and several agencies have an interest in what is happening in the woods. What will happen to the scouts and can they manage to light a camp fire?'

There is also a problem in that the show, being written and directed by Eric Sykes, who also starts as the scoutmaster, is reasonably expected by most viewers to be a comedy. This is reinforced when the scouts draw up by train and the scoutmaster opens the door of the freight compartment they are in to reveal the first four letters of the station name, which happens to be Twittering. Unfortunately I think Sykes has aimed it wrong and I think the atrocious reviews online are right that as a comedy it absolutely fails.

However I should note that IMDB puts it in dual categories of humour and parody, and I think as a parody film it functions much better. In addition to the mystery genre I think a recent possible influence could be the updated Famous Five series of 1978, because If You Go Down in the Woods Today is set very much in the world of the Famous Five: the English countryside, which is heaving with suspicious men doing criminal things. At further remove I think it is very much in the parody vein of the later series of The Avengers, and I think viewers could do a lot worse to get in the right midset to watch this than watch a Series 6 episode of The Avengers, All Done by Mirrors or Wish You Were Here, for example. I obviously can't say whether this film was a conscious influence on The Comic Strip but I would suggest their Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982) is in a similar parody vein to this film and also picks up on the Famous Five connection, of course.

The opening scene at the station reinforces the Famous Five/folk horror ethos of the film when the scoutmaster tells they stationmaster they are going camping in Tangle Woods, and the stationmaster in a reallly creepy way warns him against the dangers of the woods, telling him that something strange is going on there and the heaps of coffins in the station have all been taken out of the woods.

After the scoutmaster and cubs leave the station, the stationmaster reveals to us that he is not what he seems by ringing two Roman Catholic priests in a car to tell them to head off the cubs. They drive off and tell the cub pack that they could camp in other places than in Tangle Woods. Of course scoutmaster and cubs ignore this advice and carry on to Tangle Woods.

On the way they pass a picnicking couple, who use a radio in their car to tell the police that they are on their way. The suspicious characters really are mounting up.

At every step the scoutmaster and cubs encounter strange characters who are not what they appear to be. I can only say that in my opinion, if you watch this film as a humorous parody of the Famous Five-type adventure genre, it's an absolute delight.

However it is subsequently revealed to us (but not to the scoutmaster or cubs) that the reaason the woods are absolutely crawling with Hilda Handcuffs is three celebrities of the criminal underworld are there after two million pounds which has been hidden somewhere there. As the film goes on, MI5, the army, and even the navy get involved in the operation in the woods. I think another possible genre that this film can be compared to is spoofs of spying or army films. Examples which spring to mind are, of course, Carry on Spying (1964), Morecambe and Wise's The Intelligence Men (1965) and their 1985 film Night Train to Murder is very much in the vein I'm thinking of.

I would therefore suggest watching this film without any thought that it is a comedy and trying to appreciate it for its atmosphere and spoofing.

It certainly has a full house of Big Names: Tony Selby, George Sewell, Anna Dawson, Nosher Powell, Joe Lynch, Roy Kinnear, and Fulton McKay, whose agents obviously thought that it wouldn't be a complete flop so I'm really not sure what has gone wrong.

I'm not going to reveal what happens at the end and let you find out for yourself if you want to take the plunge.

I accept the repeated criticism in various reviews that if you're exapecting a comedy you won't get it with this one, but haven't mentioned the other criticism that I also agree with, which is that it's too long for the plot and so rather loses it towards the end. Probably this should have been an hour at the absolute longest and not a full length TV film.

A delightful film which I recommend for its atmosphere, if you go into it expecting the right thing. Probably best to watch a series 6 Avengers immediately before to get into the mood, though.

This blog is mirrored at

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Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog

There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about

#80s tv #eric sykes

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense: The Sweet Scent of Death

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense has only appeared on this blog once before, as part of a series of posts on 'White Jaguar' television, because Black Carrion uses the famous jaguar-going-over-a-cliff footage that appeared so often in 1960s and 1970s independent TV. However the reason it hasn't appeared more often is that, at least in Britain, the series is quite inaccessible.

I find this strange. The series' predecessor, Hammer House of Horror, is all over the internet and widely available on DVD, and is accordingly popular. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was an attempted follow-up in the dying days of Hammer Studios, and was a joint effort between Hammer and 20th Century Fox Television in the US (where it is known as Fox Mystery Theater), and is one of those shows in which it was perceived an American actor or two would help it along across the Atlantic. Yet Hammer House of Horror has had several releases on both region 1 and 2 DVDs, is pirated all over the internet and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was last released on UK DVD in 2005 and every time an episode gets put on the internet it tends to get taken down. Or rather, some episodes do. Some of the episodes remain online, and others are as rare as rocking horse shit. It's very strange.

I'm afraid if you're in the US you're on your own with this one but the good news is that there is an alternative to the prohibitively-expensive-on-the-used-market UK-issued DVDS. This is in the shape of a Germany-released box set which has the English-language soundtrack as an alternative to the German-dubbed track. The even better news is that there is an Edinburgh-based seller on UK ebay selling it for less than £20 so there is no need to worry about getting it into the country. If you're looking for the set on the continent the German title is Vorsicht, Hochspannung!

The Sweet Scent of Death is written by our old friend Brian Clemens, and its similarity to episodes of the earlier anthology series called Thriller. It is about an American ambassador to Britain and his wife, who take a country house to find strange things happening, which are apparently somebody taking revenge related to a case the wife won in court in her previous life as a barrister.

I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has watched this episode where actress Shirley Knight (who plays the wife)'s accent comes from. Is it a Boston Brahmin accent? It is certainly less rhotic than a lot of American accents but I have been unable to place it.

One of the interesting things about this episode to me is that I think the general perception of it would have changed since its original broadcast in 1984. What I mean by this is that I think in 1984 when the diplomat's wife is absolutely distraught howling that there is a strange man looking at her in the garden, viewers would probably have watched her husband telling her that she was imagining it and seen this as him being sensible and calming her down by not paying attention to the strange ideas she has and encouraging them. I think forty years later this looks quite different and probably viewers now would be more likely to see this as him being unsupportive or even suspicious on his part.

I have a few criticisms. For example we see an ambassador assault a presumably British citizen in full view of a police officer with no comeback of any sort. I think in reality, he would probably just be back in the US in no time making use of that diplomatic immunity. Another major problem with the plot is that we are expected to believe that the US ambassador and his wife have just gone to live in a house in the country with no security and not even any staff. I do not believe that being an ambasssador to another country is the sort of job where you do it at the office and just retain your own life at home with nobody around. Also the other thing is that nobody in their right mind would take on that sort of house with only a cleaning lady who we never actually see, certainly not when you're used to being in the diplomatic/political set.

An interesting mystery, marred only by a few credibility gaps.

Have a quick snatch of Count Binface reciting Homer in Greek.

This blog is mirrored at

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There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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#80s tv #hammer house of mystery and suspense

The Avengers: Never, Never Say Die, Compared with Night of the Big Heat

Something a little different today, because for some time I have been pondering similarities between the Avengers episode Never, Never Say Die ( Production finished 14th February 1967 and first broadcast 17th March 1967) and the film Night of the Big Heat (released May 26th 1967 in the UK and in 1971 in the USA as Island of the Burning Damned), so I'm going to lay out what I'm thinking in this blog post and you can all tell yourselves how wrong I am.

In fact the similarities are largely incidental because the plots of the two broadcasts are quite different. Never, Never Say Die is more science fiction and Night of the Big Heat is more horror.

Never, Never Say Die is about people being copied with robots who are indestructible but have problems with radio and television waves.

Night of the Big Heat features a couple running an inn on an island: he is a novelist and manages to hire a woman with whom he has already had an affair as his secretary. For some reason the island is experiencing a massive heat wave, and a scientist checks in to the inn to do experiments on the island. There are unexplained things happening to people and animals, and lots of unexplained interference with electrical appliances. The reason for the strange happenings is that the island has been invaded by aliens, who are banished by an unexpected thunderstorm.

I am going to lay out the things which strike me as similarities about the two.

In both shows we see banks of electronic equipment in shots which at least look like each other.

Both shows feature disturbance on communication equipment: televisions and/or radio.

In Never, Never Say Die, Christopher Lee's character repeatedly gets run over, always just standing in the road before this happens. In Night of the Big Heat a character nearly gets run over because he's just standing in the road.

Both shows feature similar-looking fantasy cottagey interiors: Night of the Big Heat is very definitely set in the fantasy world of The Avengers.

Peter Cushing's character in Night of the Big Heat is called Dr Stone and there is also a Professor Stone in Never, Never Say Die, played by Christopher Lee.

Night of the Big Heat has a full house of 1960s regulars who had appeared at various times in The Avengers, which is another way it looks very much like the ITC TV of the 1960s: Christopher Lee, Patrick Allen, Peter Cushing, Sarah Lawson, Thomas Heathcote and William Lucas. Kenneth Cope needs no introduction to the readers of this blog, of course.

I badly want there to be a connection between this Avengers episode and this film, but haven't been able to find one. At the very leaast there are similarities and if you like The Avengers I think you would definitely like Night of the Big Heat as being set in the same fantasy world. In fact there was an earlier television adaptation of the novel of Night of the Big Heat in 1960, so it's possible that was an influence on The Avengers first, and then the Avengersy elements in the 1960s zeitgeist also affected the production of the film so they ended up looking like each other. Unfortunately the 1960 TV adaptation is missing believed wiped.

Something I find hilarious about the film is that they've slathered the entire male cast in glycerin to make them look sweaty in the heat (and I mean absolutely covered) but they've only done this on the cleavage of the secretary and not on the other female actress. Obviously she's a lady and just glows. Speaking of the secretary, who is best candidate to be what my late mother would have called a sexy piece, I do have one criticism, which is that Night of the Big Heat is actually quite sexy because everyone is glistening, but I honestly think it could have been so much more sexy in horror film tradition. The secretary is basically the only sex object but there are way too many clothes being worn for the situation to my mind, and they've missed an opportunity.

Nonetheless an Avengers episode and film which bear a passing resemblance to each other, and if you like the Avengers I would definitely say you will like the film.

Meanwhile in Clacton the record-length postal ballots have started arriving and as you can see this one went to a patriot who voted Binface. 🚮

This blog is mirrored at

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There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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#60s tv #the avengers #night of the big heat

Forty Minutes: Separate Tables

Forty Minutes (1981 to 1994) was a BBC documentary series which ran to 324 episodes. You already know how long each one lasted, and that is the only thing they all have in common: there are all sorts of riches in the back catalogue and being so recent, many of them are available online. Separate Tables is also online as Last Days on Grand Parade, although the actual title on-screen is Separate Tables, referring to the behaviour of permanent residents in Eastbourne's hotels.

I have written here before about the thing I have about hotels. In my opinion they are just as magical and evocative as theatres: there is a public front where people go to experience a smooth illusion for a time and then leave, and there is a behind the scenes, where we don't see what happens in service to the grand illusion in front of house. The service stairs or lifts of a hotel are just as theatrical as all the kit around a stage and the props. Far more than theatres, hotels support our dreams in that we might go there on holiday, or a conference to help with employment, or while staying in an area for a significant life event. I think this is why so many mysteries take place in hotels, because they are pregnant with meaning for us.

I said that the phrase 'separate tables' refers to the behaviour of the permanent residents in Eastbourne's seafront hotels. The documentary focuses on The Burlington, but also mentions other hotels with permanent residents. We see them sitting at breakfast, literally at separate tables in the dining room not talking to each other. This is very strange because otherwise we do see the residents chatting with each other over the crossword or in the evening. And yet when asked they tend to say they don't have very much in common with each other. It's genuinely a really strange relationship they have with each other and the staff of the hotel.

Otherwise the residents live the sort of life you would expect elderly people who live in a hotel and don't have a home to look after, to live. They amuse themselves with walks and their own interests.

The documentary gives us the reason some of them have chosen to live in a hotel rather than anywhere else. I have no idea whether people still live as permanent residents in hotels (presumably you can get anything if you're able to pay for it); certainly in this documentary they are presented as very much a dying species who used to help tide hotels through the winter but weren't really very much of a financial asset to a hotel by the 1980s. The documentary leaves their future rather uncertain because the hotel is having a building project to make the place more suitable for the burgeoning conference trade and it is heavily hinted that the residents probably won't want to live in the reconstructed version.

It is noticeable that the concerns of the elderly residents are of course quite similar as befitting people at the same stage of life. They have mostly experienced bereavement, for example. They think about their future and the possibilities of becoming unwell or having to go into care. The documentary pulls no punches about depicting a group of people who have the best years of their lives behind them, and I wonder whether there is something about the sort of people who go to live in hotels that puts them in this mindset. There isn't a single one of those elderly people who just ignore their age and carry on without worrying about it, for example. They are all, or nearly all, widows or widowers but there isn't a hint of any one of them thinking about marrying another of the residents or even having a romantic life. This aspect of their mindset, however, remains unremarked. Certainly when I was a nurse working in elderly care I can assure you they were at it like rabbits and ignored any rules they were presented with, really quite different from this lot, but as I say the strange absence of sex isn't remarked.

My only criticism of this documentary is generally that it is very selective about what it asks - it is really a documentary about the residents of a hotel, rather than about the residents as people - and leaves this viewer absolutely dying to know more about the people. Of course you may consider this a strength and the sign of a good documentary rather than a weakness as I do! For example one of the residents interviewed at length is Mrs Sybil Bloom (pictured) who was just born to be a gift to the camera. She's a character and hugely personable, which may explain why she is so prominent. However, it mentioned that she is 86 at the time of the programme and has been living in hotels for over forty years. There isn't a hint of why a married couple (as she was at the time) would be living in hotels rather than their own home in their mid-forties. Unless I'm mistaken she's got a very slight South African accent and I really really want to know what happened.

On the whole, though, I think this documentary accurately reproduces the atmosphere of a hotel. You hear bits of other people's stories, and they are essentially fairly unreal places where people pass each other.

Incidentally I see from the internet that the Burlington Hotel is still going (it's massive so it's a bit difficult to see what else it could be used for) although I'm going to be just as much of a crashing snob as Mrs Bloom and pass comment that judging by the pictures of the rooms on the website things have gone a bit downhill in quality terms since 1988. Of course this is exactly what you would expect in a huge seaside hotel, and there is no mention of long-term residents of course.

An absolutely fascinating documentary, whether you see its failure to give me all the information I wanted, as a strength or weakness.

Speaking of the seaside, support for Count Binface in Clacton is growing throughout the country. It would be hysterical if the Binface Party ended up being a serious political party as a result of this moment.

This blog is mirrored at

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There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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#80s tv #Forty minutes #40 minutes

Monty Python's Flying Circus: You're No Fun Any More

I have commented before that a Monty Python episode, or even just a sketch, will tend to enter my head for a time and rather preoccupy me before leaving and being replaced with another. Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion Go to See Jean-Paul Sartre has finally left my head and the Science Fiction Sketch has entered it instead. I have also commented that the reason Monty Python doesn't appear very much here is because I find I can't write about it. The Monty Python humour rather evaporates when analysed in my opinion: the best you can do is describe it as if you are sharing it at school or work the day after the broadcast. That is rather what I did with the Monty Python advertisement for Birdseye Peas. I felt it worked well with that little-known piece, but my ambition with this blog has always been to avoid description if possible.

In fact I was thinking I would be at a disadvantage with this one because science fiction films really aren't my strong point, and I knew there would be endless references to famous films which I wouldn't recognise and would end up making a fool of myself. I have therefore been heavily dependent on Darl Larsen's Monty Python's Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorised Guide to Possibly All the References, which is certainly exhaustive. Of course Mr Larsen is a foreigner so sometimes misses some meanings, although the only absolute howler I've spotted while reading about this episode was where he calls Scots language Scots accent, which it certainly isn't.

One of the things he has made me realise about this episode is that there are far more sexual references than I had realised. This does make me feel a bit silly, because the 'you're no fun any more' is an explicitly sexual reference, even as portrayed in the episode. Larsen takes it further to point out that the reference to Scotland being so full that there are three men to a caber is also a positively filthy innuendo which I'm ashamed to say I'd missed completely. The reference to whipping is of course directly kinky. Larsen suggests that the preceding snatch of the vampire not biting the woman also has a directly sexual reference in terms of a vampire being, as it were, engorged with blood but I could leave that one myself.

I am once again struck by the different pace of television at this time. Specifically what makes me think of this is the little detail that the camel spotter is called Mr Sopwith. While not an obsessive fan I consider myself fairly familiar with the Flying Circus but had never spotted this momentary reference. How would anyone, seeing it just once in their family living room, have a chance to spot all these details? It's quite something that so many TV programmes at the time put in tiny details many of which were probably missed by viewers over 50 years ago.

However of course the main attraction for me is the blancmange which invades the planet to turn Englishmen into Scotsmen.

I knew of course that there would be references galore to science fiction films here. I was thinking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), because it is one I like and is actually on my laptop. It is also very close to the plot of the spoof science fiction film, in terms of people being changed. Of course The Blob has a distinctly blancmange-like alien, which has many similarities. Larsen also suggests references to The Invisible Man (1933), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Forbidden Planet (1956), Angry Red Planet (1960), and Them! (1954).

The Pythons have a swipe at pretty much everyone here, all in the name of parodying the ridiculous conventions of the science fiction genre. Most obviously Scotsmen, who are depicted as primitive, stupid, foreign, and generally othered. However the woman in the research lab also embodies the dumb bimbo of science fiction. He gives a lengthy list of the tropes from science fiction the episode uses, and there is a shorter, slightly differently-named list on Tekevision Tropes is you want to look.

Larsen makes the excellent point which I really hadn;t noticed that the woman in the lab doesn't have a name and is only referred to by pronouns. The fact that she is just calle She or You puts her on the same footing as the invaders here just referred to as Them, so that she is made the Other in common with the invading blancmange.

There is also the strange effect that incidental music can be heard inside the lab, while rhetorical statements are taken literally by Graham Chapman, and the other way round. This episode genuinely takes every convention of science fiction at once and stuffs them into a relatively short sketch.

I don't have any criticisms of this episode, and particularly like the way it ends with Scottish music instead of the normal Monty Python music. Highly recommended, although other people will certainly get more science fiction references than me.

Finally a short video, and in case you are reading this abroad and don't know who this man is, it's Sir Edward Davey, leader of the ultra-sensible and serious Liberal Democrat Party, and he's endorsing Count Binface for Clacton.

This blog is mirrored at

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There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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#60s tv #monty python

Six Dates with Barker: 1899 - The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town

This is a spare post I've been keeping for emergencies as once again we're in Resignation Week and the entire country has a banging hangover so I'm in no position to get the post I was writing in order.

I am delighted to have found this show down the back of the internet since although the whole series is available commercially, I'm too mean to buy it. Six Dates with Barker (1971) is a set of six plays by different writers but all featuring Ronnie Barker in various roles and set at different dates. I haven't seen the others because The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town made a particular appeal to me; it also happens that the date for the play is 1899.

It was written by Spike Milligan and is therefore naturally insane. He intended it for his fellow Goons Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, and himself: however in the event Sellers was unavailable and so it found its way into this anthology series. Fans of the Goon Show will know that the show made several journeys from radio onto television. In mmy humble opinion this play most resembles The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956), which I also love dearly and which has the advantage of not featuring Harry Secombe, whose voice goes through me. The Mukkinese Battle Horn and The Phantom Raspberry Blower have exactly the same surreal, satirical, punning and ludicrous humour as The Goon Show, and it's very much in the same tradition. In fact there are two versions of The Phantom Raspberry Blower: this, the earlier one, and a redone version which appeared on The Two Ronnies' show a few years later. I have seen the other version some time ago and remember not liking it as much as this. Judging by the internet reviews both versions have their fans and detractors.

The premise is that a killer is stalking the streets of Victorian London and killing or hospitalising his victims by blowing a raspberry at them. It is a parody of Jack the Ripper. The parody actually starts even before the titles with the words 'Chopper Films Presents,' a parody of course of Hammer Films. Being set right at the turn of the twentieth century it also satirises much of Victorian society including a whole set of policeman all disguised as Queen Victoria.

There is further surrealism and punning humour as you would expect. A suspect identified in a photograph by an arrow turns out to have an actual arrow suspended from him head pointing at him. An identity parade is assembled but rather than get the other members from the public they get them from Harrods. The detective doing the investigation walks out of interrogating someone, goes to feed the ducks, and all the time we hear the interview continuing as the lady he is talking to remains in his office. A victim of the Phantom Raspberry Blower finds a moustache tattoed on her face as a result. The detective has a nervous breakdown in the middle of the show and as a result spends quite a lot of it in an asylum dressed as Napoleon. There is a recurring visual pun on the sound of the raspberries blown by the Phantom Raspberry Blower and the appearance of real raspberries in one form or another.

In production terms there are some very familiar faces as well as both Ronnies, although they're all well disguised for the period. Ronnie Barker carries most of the roles with ease. Cleverly there are certain scenes done to look as if they are old footage, which then turn out not to be when you recognise Ronnie Barker in the scene. Honestly I'm still not sure if some genuinely old footage has been used. If you watched the rest of it with the colour turned down you could think it was old footage, so good are the production values, if a little surreal.

My only real criticism of this is that it is wildly politically incorrect. There is a completely unnecessarily anti-Semitic depiction of Disraeli and also a scene featuring black face. In what is otherwise a fun romp through crime-ridden Vistorian London these things rather deflate the moment.

Otherwise this is a very fun play written by a master of comedy which is also excellently produced. Highly recommended.

This time the resignation is of the odious Nigel Farage who thinks to save himself from various investigations by resigning his seat in the Commons and immediately standing for the same seat. I am delighted that one by one the other major parties have announced that they will not be standing candidates in the resulting by-election because they will have nothing to do with Farages games. I love the way they're refusing to stand against him: it's a remarkable achievement by Farage to unite all five major parties against him. The result is at the time of writing the only candidate standing against Farage is Count Binface. We all love Count Binface and this means he has been tacitly endorsed by all the other major parties. It also means both candidates are unserious novelty candidates. So let's have the Count destroying a journalist shall we?

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#70s tv #ronnie barker #the phantom raspberry blower of old london town #six dates with barker #Youtube

Play for Today: Speech Day

I had probably best start by apologising for this blog post in advance, since it's partly driven by sheer irritation at the plot summary on IMDB and so I'm feeling a bit ratty. The plot summary is 'Three underachievers have fun at a school speech day'. Honestly, they'd have been better leaving it blank because the only way you could come up with that as a summary of this play is by either writing it without watching it or volitionally missing the entire point of the play. What this play actually is is a play about a school speech day in which the real point is society and the class system. I'm also going to have one of my discursions away from the subject of the blog post onto Jerusalem, driven by irritation at the Wikipedia page.

After an easily-missed tiny scene in which a family are eating, we are straight on to the National Anthem. I'm not making this up.

Actually the societal and class subject of the play is highlighted in the easily-missed prologue by the father (with a Yorkshire accent) quoting Cromwell telling his men that they could pray if they liked but should keep their powder dry. And thus we are straight into class struggle, civil war and crown vs parliament. I'm just sorry he didn't use the Cromwell quote about keeping your bowels open. I would have done.

Obviously moving straight from this to the National Anthem is making a point. The reason we hear it is the mum of the family is ironing her son's uniform ready for the school speech day the next day. The reason we hear the National Anthem is that it is playing during close down on the BBC. We then see the outside of the building and the camera pans over the block of flats, which happens to be the famous Hyde Park flats (pictured) in Sheffield. It was one of two absolute behemoths of social housing in Sheffield, but has now been demolished. The other one, Park Hill, is still standing and English Heritage did the absolutely unthinkable and listed it, making it the biggest listed building in Europe, to the visible fury of the city council who had spent years running it down ready to demolish it. If you fancy it I highly recommend a documentary called Streets in the Sky, all about Park Hill. In fact if you fancy a trip to Sheffield, Park Hill is a seriously sexy building which leaves its mark on everyone who encounters it and I highly recommend a visit. Anyway, the anthem praying God to save the monarch is playing in social housing at the other end of the social scale.

Given that this is a TV blog you lucky people get the behind the scenes making of the shut down video that I have found down the back of the internet, with a definitely pre-CGI spinning globe.

Of course the significance of Sheffield is the setting is that it is the Steel City and we see scenes of work in the steelworks. Another point about class.

I have to say that I think the school is a rather odd one, probably deliberately so for the purpose of the play, in that it is clearly a normal comprehensive school, attended by all sorts of pupils, some of whome are largely uneducatable, others can't afford the uniform, and so on. Yet it obviously has aspirations to be a much posher sort of school. This disjoint is largely the point of the play: (most of) the staff go along with this fantasy which is almost based in unreality. The kids are expected to be in uniform with white shirts for the day, despite some of them not having these things. The mayor is the one presenting the prizes, despite the fact that he himself also worked in the steelworks for years. The vice chancellor of a university is giving a speech, and let me tell you very few if any of those kids would ever have seen the inside of a university except as employee in the 1970s. Finally most of the teacher wear academic gowns and hoods for the speech day. I don't think you needed to have a degree to be a teacher at this time, and I'm certain gowns and hoods would not have been the norm. The school is largely a fantasy. This is not a play about having fun, it's about who benefits and how the structures of society and state aren't quite real.

The boy who is mainly the protagonist is the one who lives in the modern flat and goes to see his grandfather who still lives in a virtually derelict terraced house, and who is coded as the voice of reality in this situation. He doesn't believe that the future will be positive, is convinced that the social strata will never change, and so on.

One of the boys gets thrown out of the speech day for laughing and goes to talk to the school gardener, who is another voice of reason in this play. During this sequence the entire school sings the unofficial anthem of England, Jerusalem, by England's maddest poet William Blake, and set to music and gifted to the suffragette movement by Parry. During this we see further industrial scenes appropriate to the words of the hymn about satanic mills.

So this is the bit where I leave the subject of the blog post far behind, because I made the mistake of going on to Wikipedia to check the idea I've got in my head that Blake's dark satanic mills can be understood to be a reference to the Church of England.

I found that the Wikipedia page for Jerusalem is dominated by folklorist A W Smith's opinion that the hymn is about a mythical visit to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea alone, rather than the other mythical visit of Jesus to Britain with Joseph, and I'm afraid this opinion has set me off. It is clearly arrant nonsense, and the poem clearly refers to the mythical visit of the Divine Child to this island. I can tell you this for a fact because of the way the words go: 'And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?' etc. This cannot refer to Joseph of Arimathea alone because there is no tradition of Christianity in which he is called the Lamb of God, also his face cannot be described as divine. The only person in Christianity who both had human feet to walk on England's mountains, is also divine and referred to as the Lamb of God is Jesus himself. I'm not about to get involved in a Wikipedia war, and I'm not one of those people who look down on Wikipedia, but I think that page has gone very wrong. I also didn't find confirmation for my idea that the mills were intended to refer to the Church of England.

Back to the subject of the blog post, I have to say that this is an excellent drama. Every character is drawm in detail and comes out loud and clear. The schoolboys are just the right degree of revolting and the contrast with the utter fantasy of the school is perfectly drawn.

In fact while I do try to be critical I'm so desperate for a criticism of this play that the only one I can think of is that the school sings Jerusalem slightly too fast in my opinion. You may take this as a marker of what quality this play is.

But wait, before you go, you all knew I was going to go there.

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#70s tv #play for today #Youtube

Monty Python: The Great Birdseye Peas Relaunch of 1971

A fairly lightweight thing to post about this time, given that the entire British isles have an absolutely BANGING hangover after celebrating this week. It's also strangely suitable because someone commented that every time he saw Starmer the theme to Monty Python went through his head and I'm afraid that's now stuck, so this is the week to do Monty Python.

If you've worked through the Flying Circus, the records, the live performances, Fliegender Zirkus, the films, and are still hungry for more there are a few not-so-rarities knocking around the internet in the shape of the commercial work they did. Strangely, considering I'm not a capitalist, I actually think the commercial plays they did are amongst their best work. I have known about Henry Cleans Up (1974), which Michael Palin and Terry Jones did for Guinness, but have only recently discovered the very existence of The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971 and Is This a Record? (1973). Henry Cleans Up is essentially a training film on how to run a pub, with the details on what you actually have to physically do and all the mysterious stuff that goes on in the cellar. Is This a Record was made (confusingly) for The Guinness Book of Records and is essentially a guide to how to get a record for doing something.

How do you even begin to describe The Great Birdseye Peas Relaunch of 1971? Well it's an advertisement for Birds Eye Peas. Made by Monty Python, with, as far as I can see complete independence to do their thing. It lasts nearly half an hour. It was intended for internal use at Birds Eye. I can't begin to think why a frozen food company would need to advertise their own products in Monty Python style to their own staff but I'm very glad they did!

It starts as if it is a great epic film before giving up that idea and we are straight into the Birdseye board room with the Pythons being the board, and let me tell you they are all blind drunk (but again, that's life in the UK for you. If an American ever comments on the amount we drink, well you would drink if you lived here). All I can say is that I don't think many businesses are happy to have their board depicted as making business decisions blind drunk, so this is an interesting insight into the attitude of Birdseye in the early 1970s. Into the midst of all the empty bottles appears the Comparatively Good Fairy, who helps the board decide the sales targets for the salesman. Along with turning a few of the board into frogs of course.

Did I mention that this piece is absolutely wild?

We see the effect of the new target on a salesman, who had been dancing with abandon until then, and is terrified after hearing of the new target.

Next we have a very sxy bit of buxon ladies in bikinis. If I say that the camera only focuses on the bits contained by the bikini, you get the idea. This is Monty Python cast free from the constraints of television and allowed to go wild at a frozen food company's expense. I am absolutely certain that nobody who watched this actually got hold of the methods outlined for increasing their sales in 1971!

We return to the board room for a talk in characteristic style by Graham Chapman about how to grow peas. They ask a marketing man about how to do this. The marketing man comes into the board room with an interpreter because he speaks absolute gibberish, which I'm sure went down well with anyone who hated the marketing men.

We then move onto the familiar theme of Monty Python vox pops on the subject of peas, calling in all the familiar characters from theFlying Circus. Of course none of these is serious in the slightest and I can only repeat that this was a remarkably brave thing for Birdseye to do, albeit making them bang up to date.

You get the idea. This is genuinely Monty Python let loose and it's great.

Normally I like to be somewhat critical about eh programmes I blog about here, but honestly I don't have a criticism, I could watch this until the next Prime Minister resigns in about six months. I see online that there are a couple of reviews from people who feel that this isn't nearly as good as The Flying Circus, although those reviews don't tend to give a clear reason. Probably frozen peas as a theme for Monty Python doesn't appeal to them.

This is an excellent programme for anyone wishing for just a bit more Monty Python.

Since we're in Prime Minister Resignation Week perhaps it's a suitable occasion to have Mrs Thatcher quoting the Dead Parrot Sketch at Tory Party Conference.

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#70s tv #monty python #Youtube

The Omega Factor: Illusions and Conclusions

This is the final episode of the series, in which it resolves the various plot elements it has brought up in the previous nine: magical abilities, the working of the department, what the government thinks it is doing, and of course what gthe shadowy Omega is about.

It does this by very bravely introducing a whole new raft of characters and a whole plot twist in the final episode, none of which we've seen before so that you could think you'd tuned in to the wrong show. Of course doing this would break all the classic commandments of

The episode introduces agents from the other side of the Iron Curtain, brought here by Intelligence who then disappear. Of course Crane psychically gets hints of what has happened to them, and also of course he believes in the existence of Omega, a belief which is discouraged. Our man who met the agent from East Germany has also disappeared.

While resolving the plot this way might seem like a huge gamble, it is probably best to make clear that this episode was not intended to be the end of the series, but was meant to be the end of the first series and it would continue in a second series which was never made. Apparently the cancellation of the second was largely down to the intervention of Mrs Whitehouse.

In fact I think this episode is a high point for the apparently unrelated reason that atmospherically it is superb. This and two other episodes (the one with the students and the one investigating the haunted house) are all absolutely superb at giving the viewer the willies with simple atmospheric tricks. This one uses the classic film noir technique of having some of the action take place at night in the middle of a thunderstorm, which automatically ramps up the tension. Since the subject is defected people from Eastern Europe some of it takes place either in actual hotels or in a large country house which is as near as damnit to a hotel, and as I commented in the series of posts before, if you set something in a hotel I will automatically love it.

I don't really have a criticism of this episode. It certainly works to resolve most of the questions which have arisen over the previous nine episodes. The ones it doesn't are clearly left because it was not intended to be the final episode. In true X-Files fashion it leaves us still not sure who is who. I have not heard them but Big Finish did a series of audio adventures continuing the series, so I don't know how they continue or conclude it.

Conclusions about the Series

I've really enjoyed blogging through this series again. It has real tension and particular high points which I have mentioned above.

I have two major criticisms. Firstly that the series does not adequately develop the existence of Omega, the organisation which is after all the entire point of the series, before suddenly splurging the details of the organisation's activities in the final episode. I would have liked more specific detail as it went along, to establish the group as a clear hook for the whole series. The other is that the anthology series format doesn't work that well for a series of ten episodes with a single plot arc: it makes the episodes lose contact with each other and the viewer really has to work to discern the single thread through the series.

This isn't a criticism and probably reflects whether viewers will like this series or not, but nearly five decades later there is also the reality that what is being investigated by the department cannot be described as measurable or objective and so is not what you could call scientific. You have to be willing to suspend disbelief and return to the world of 1970s popular parapsychology to get into this series.

However this series is rightly hugely popular, indeed legendary. As a forerunner to the X-Files, it intriguingly lays the ground work for the later series in fascinating ways.

Just don't go probing into my mind, you don't know what you might find.

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#70s tv #the omega factor

The Omega Factor: Double Vision

This is the penultimate episode of The Omega Factor and its narrative function is to begin tying up the ends of the plot which have been raised in the previous episodes: what happened to the magician Drexel, what Omega is about (although it is not mentioned explicitly) and why everyone in the department is acting very suspiciously indeed.

The ESP subject of the episode is hallucination, possession, psychedelic substances, and all that sort of thing. The episode introduces a visiting academic from Cambridge (do I even need to say that he is just as suspicious as everyone else in this?) who has these as his specialist subject and does much of the commentary.

This may all sound like a huge amount for a single episode to marshall into some sort of order, but cleverly it does it by introducing a new plot element: namely Crane starts seeing his wife (who you'll remember died in a car crash in the first episode) walking about. This is a handy hook on which to hang hallucination and psychedelics. There is also a big element in that Crane does actually seem to be losing it in this episode, so we don't know whether the intention is to drive him off his head. Crane's visions of his dead wife are reflected in the plot by a thread about modern-day grave robbers, or rather people who just open up graves for no apparent reason, at least one that isn't resolved by the end of the episode. The elements of seeing the dead and the body snatchers are possibly the double vision of the title.

There are two scenes which I particularly appreciate in this episode. One is a scene where Crane goes with Anne to the zoo on a Saturday. We see them walking around in scenes which are naturally full of people. But then Crane thinks he sees his wife. Cleverly, the very short sequence which follows depicts him on his own chasing after the woman who he thinks is his wife. Presumably they couldn't actually empty the zoo of people so these shots are all at close range, but the sudden absence of peeople gives the scene a wonderful dream-like feel. This is a genuinely eerie and uncanny scene. It is in this scene he finds a coat left by his 'wife', which turns out to be an actual coat which belonged to his real wife. Subsequently he visits his own flat in London and finds that all her clothes have been taken, so it is apparent that what he is seeing is definitely not a ghost and something else is happening. These discoveries turn on its head the impression we had got that Crane is either hallucinating, stressed, dreaming, etc. Later on when he finds that there is no record of his wife's death, at hospital, police, etc, adds to the really eerie impression.

I see that I commented on the other scene which impressed me when I last blogged about this series: it is a scene in a disco, in which a small number of extras dance to the hits of the seventies on a dance floor the size of my living room, and it's hysterical. The show attempts to make the most of this small cast by close shots so that we rarely see how few people are there, but if you pay attention it's abundantly clear how inadequate for the task the personnel they have are. It's a wonderful scene because of the way it is and I love it.

I have a plot criticism, which is that all the other characters' attempts to gaslight Crane into believing he's imagining that he's seeing his wife, continue far too long after he starts finding evidence that a trick is being played on him. Finding that his deceased wife's possessions are missing while he is apparently seeing her walking around, should have been the point at which everyone else stopped snapping at him that she's dead and to pull herself together. They should have wondered who'd stolen all her frocks and why. There is also the recurring criticism that in a show called The Omega Factor, the organisation called Omega obviously has its fingers over everything that is happening, but you would think it would have at least have got a mention or two to make it explicit.

Otherwise this is an absolutely excellent episode. I love the plot device of having Tom start seeing his deceased wife and look forward to blogging about how the various plot elements are resolved in the final episode.

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The Omega Factor: Out of Body, Out of Mind

As so often, blogging about a show is helping me get to grips with it and giving me a new understanding. In the case of this episode I have come to understand why I always lose the thread of the series at this episode. It starts with depicting the intrusion of Omega into the workings of Whitehall, with a government official mysteriously dying, and another lighting an unnamed lady visitor's cigarette with a lighter with an omega on it. This lady is the reason I lose the plot here, because I honestlly don't know who she is and after two viewings of the episode, still don't. It's possible I have got this wrong and have somehow not noticed her, but should know who she is, of course. But I have chosen to conclude that the people in the opening couple of scenes represent Omega's intrusion into various aspects of government and are not part of the previous plot. It is clear that Scott-Erskine, who recruited Crane, is apparently involved with this.

Otherwise the episode takes as its paranormal subject, out of body experiences, and research into them by Department 7. And the show's status as a predecessor of The X-Files is cemented by Crane settling well into the Mulder role and definitely objecting to the possibly dodgy experiments the department are doing, as well as to the constraints on him imposed by having signed the Official Secrets Act. He goes to London, summoned to meet Scott-Erskine in a park, and it's exactly like Mulder meeting any of his contacts throughout the series. He describes how he thinks a secret organisation, using an omega as its sign, is interfering and plotting to kill the president of an unnamed African country. The episode also leaves everyone completely unclear who is on what side and who is Omega: again a plot point very worthy of the X-Files.

His brother has been discharged and the brothers are sharing a tiny one-room bedsitter in Edinburgh. This is largely a plot device so that Crane can see his brother's out of body experiences going on, and they are depicted with all the benefits of the technology of the time. It's probably what, twenty years later, would have been seen as a bit laddish because we're into having chats in their pants in the middle of the night territory. I think, again, this suggests a lack of continuity between the different writers of this series because up to now we've been treated to a magnificent array of 1970s pyjamas when things have happened at night.

Omega's plot to kill the African president goes wrong when Crane unwittingly 'triggers' the intended assassin, who is a student in Edinburgh, by saying the word omega to him, with the result that he kills his girlfriend, and that is how the episode ends. It is clear that people can be manipulated to the point where merely seeing an omega or hearing the word makes them die or kill other people.

Having got over my problem with not recognising the woman in the opening scenes I really enjoyed this episode and really appreciated its status as an X-Files predecessor.

My main criticism is the way the characters in the opening scenes are introduced. It might just be me, but they are characters only in one episode of the series, but I think they give the impression of being regulars and are confusing.

In this episode I'm a bit uneasy with the huge subject-matter of scientific experimentation into out of body experiences and also a massive conspiracy with international political intent, going on. This is not a criticism, because it's obviously difficult to go from a brother's concern for his brother to a supernatural assassination plot, and the writer holds it together well. Crane's intuition about things happening is used as the rather convenient glue to hold the different aspects together and move from subject to subject.

An interesting episode of this series, which has benefited from the sort of attention needed to blog about it.

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The Omega Factor: St Antony's Fire

I have mentioned before that this series of only ten episodes, despite having a single plot arc, is also an anthology series and each episode has a different writer. This has the effect that each one has a slightly different tone.

Here, we are into territory which on the surface feels much more like straightforward detection. Crane reads in the paper that his friends, Bob and Jean McKenzie, have died, and he wants to go and find out what happened. doesn't want Crane to go, and we're immediately into Mulder territory where that decides Crane that he's going regardless. The McKenzies' life's work was to start a community, which is likened to the real-world Findhorn Foundation, working on plant psychic abilities and things like that: very much classic seventies parapsychology. Before their deaths they sold the community to a company to run it.

Crane is immediately catapulted into a sort of caricature of a remote Scottish village. All the villagers know each other, are infinitely suspicious, and the village is frankly incredible. A village dance turns into a free for all where people just lose their shit and start fighting. I will admit to having been to a ceilidh in my time, and I don't remember that being part of the proceedings.

There is also much suspicion about the Mckenzies' deaths, which eventually turn out to be incredibly a result of ergot poisoning then murder. Of course you know that in no time Crane (followed by Anne, who experiences an attempted murder by the extraordinary method of locking her in a greenhouse and gassing her) is going to have attempts made on his life, and of course so it is. I love the method they plan to kill them at the end, by sending them up in a dodgy helicopter which isn't safe.

I am astonished that the episode names the real-life Findhorn Foundation at all. Frankly, it probably didn't really have a choice, since the community the McKenzies founded is so clearly based on the Findhorn Foundation that I can only surmise they thought they might as well go the whole hog and name the inspiration. The foundation is the largest New Age intentional community in Britain (or was, I gather it has rather faltered of recent years), with as you'd expect an eclectic spirituality with roots in Moral Rearmament and Rosicrucianism. The aspects of the foundation which most resemble aspects of this episode are that most of the episode takes place in a large hotel near the community. The Findhorn Foundation famously ran the Cluny Hill Hotel (pictured), nicknamed the Vatican of the New Age, as a sort of educational centre. The other aspect very reminiscent of Findhorn is the horticulture aspect of the community. Famously, one of the leading lights of Findhorn, Peter Caddy, experimented with gardening at Findhorn in Scotland while unemployed and living in a caravan, as a way to feed his family. His huge success garnered national and international attention: he attributed his success to his spiritual practices but the locals attributed his huge vegetables to a local micro-climate and the huge amounts of manure he obtained from locals! Perhaps it should be said that while the Findhorn Foundation has its critics, I'm not aware of allegations of murder such as we see in this episode. This is why I'm so surprised the show went with the obvious identification of the murderous community with Findhorn.

So far so real, but the episode doesn't lack paranormal aspects. Crane goes to the McKenzies' house and psychically relives their deaths. It is also clear (to us, but not to Crane) that Martindale, their boss at Department 7, is in on the strange events and murders at the village. The episode also brings up a mention of the mysterious Omega. Now this is my fault completely for not mentioning it before, but periodically the titular Omega has appeared in the episodes, however there has been no explanation for what it means. Finally, the situation where Crane and Anne are stuck in the scary village, is resolved by Crane using his psychic abilities.

One of the things which comes across loud and clear is that Crane is what my late mother would have called a sexy piece. No sooner does he arrive in the village than one of the women from the unit is all over him like a rash, which is reciprocated. Then Anne arrives and she is all big eyes because we've already seen him dropping very heavy hints to her he wants something to happen. I don't object to this thread to the show, although it's a bit difficult to see what function it plays.

I do have one criticism, which is a broader one about the series rather than about the episode specifically. It is that the omega theme is produced rather sotto voce when it is introduced. I happily acknowledge that I have failed to mention it so far, but it is also mentioned for seconds in an hour-long episode. Given that the Omega mystery is what gives the series its title I think probably it should be more prominent.

I really enjoyed this episode: I like the way it feels more like a mystery with supernatural elements than the others. It was also fascinating seeing Crane with two women on the go!

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The Omega Factor: Child's Play

It won't ever appear here because I don't do costume dramas, but if you want a very funny criticism of the 1972 series War and Peace, as well as an account of how he became a Communist, Mitchell at It's About TV has one for you at: https://www.itsabouttv.com/2026/05/what-ive-been-watching-april-2026.html?m=1

This episode of The Omega Factor has poltergeist activity as its single supernatural theme, so I'm not feeling the need to do such a summary of the plot as I've been doing for previous episodes. The plot is simpler, and of course you all knew I was summarising plots to aid my own understandling rather than yours, didn't you.

Anne and Crane visit an old friend of hers who's son has been sent home from his boarding school because of strange destructive things happening. To cut a long story short, of course in no time he's being experimented on at Department 7. The boy is of course well-read in the fantastic contemporary literature beyond his years and can talk about things like psycho-kinesis.

Probably at the time (this was broadcast in 1979) the most prominent alleged poltergeist case to come to viewers' minds would have been the Enfleid Poltergeist which had been all over the tabloids and investigated by the SPR. Interestingly, this case is in some ways a complete contrast to the working class family in Enfield: the boy is at boarding school, lives with his interior designer mother but his separated father insists he goes to boarding school. Interestingly, just as in Enfield, the setting of the child is almost completely unexamined here because the apparent poltergeist activity is being concentrated on.

It is blindingly apparent from the start that Colin's poor mother really isn't coping. She comes across as quite ineffectual: she doesn't feel able to assert herself with the headmaster of the boy's school, she feels pressured by her ex about what is happening with the boy's schooling. On one level she is merely an over-stretched single parent, but the impact of her relative inability to cope on the poltergeist activity is not examined. She also feels pressured by a mam from a government department to let Colin undergo tests, and allows him to chang eher mind. Frankly the most basic investigation of this case would focus on the boy's feeling of being sent away from home, and caught between to two parents who are obviously in some conflict. This is not a criticism of the episode, which is completely focused on the show's overarching subject of Department 7 and naturally omits other matters.

It does however bring up the matter of the ethics of experimentation, especially on children by setting up a conflict about Martindale hypnotising the boy. Martindale justifies this by saying that the boy (a child) has agreed to it but has not got his mother to agree to this. This strand is an important subext of this plot. It is never mentioned explicitly in the episode but we see a child taken from a rather stressful, if not actually unhappy, home and school situation, and taken off to a lab in Edinburgh to be made the centre of attention. I like that the 'celebrity' aspect of this is completely unexamined by the episode, because it allows the subject to come up in the viewer's mind.

I have a plot criticism which is that while the episode starts off being about poltergeist activity which is not controlled by the child it centres on, it changes suddenly to being about the child's psychokinetic abilities which are of course under his control. My only other criticism is that it spends quite a lot of time just depicting experimentation on the child's psychokinetic ability, which doesn't really aid the plot and causes a bit of a hiatus.

At the end of the episode a mysterious personage, apparently from Scott-Erskine's office in London, comes to take the boy away from his mother for further tests. He is suspicious and the car he has come in moves on its own and runs him over. As an uncritical depiction of a child's psychokinetic abilities this episode is superb.

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The Omega Factor: Powers of Darkness

Content warning: this episode has a graphic scene of someone burning to death

This is, I think, my favourite episode of the series, just because I would single it out for its atmosphere of mixed experimentation and shock. It feels a bit different to the others. The reason for this may be something I haven't mentioned yet, which is that the ten episodes of this series each have a different writer. Regular readers will know that I don't tend to get on well with anthology series, and while I obviously like this series because I'm writing about it, I think that probably the series having a single plot arc, would have been improved by having a single writer for its ten episodes. In the perennial comparison to the X-Files, that series of course went on for 97 series and had umpteen different plot strands, so could only reasonably have had multiple writers.

The episode starts with three people, who turn out to be students, holding a seance with fingers on an upturned wine glass and the alphabet placed around the table on pieces of paper. It turns out not only that their fourth housemate has had a nervous breakdown and is in a psychiatric hospital, but the boy has been doing experiments for money with Martindale at Department 7. They have a dramatic end to the seance, and we are immediaely taken to the hospital, where we discover that Crane's brother is also a patient.

I don't follow things as well as I used to, but I'm not entirely clear how the brother ended up in hospital.

At the doctor's request Crane and Anne give one of the students a lift home. Crane once again glimpses the woman who was in Drexel's bookshop in the first episode, but of course she's disappeared when he gets out of the car to look. The student they are giving a list to has also spotted her (cue spooky music). She tells Crane and Anne how she and her friends have an interest in spiritualism, and talks about their strange experiences. The student who has had the breakdown has been taking datura as part of these experiments.

There is a distinctly puritanical streak to this episode, to my mind. Everyone in the episode who joins in occult experiments, taking drugs, or anything else that humans do, ends up mad or dead, and this is clearly a judgement on their activities. The look of the rest of the show is completely 1970s Britain, but interestingly the students are presented in a slightly different look. They mostly wear older looking clothes (think All Creatures Great and Small) and their tenement is dressed with a wealth of old furniture and decorations. Of course it's quite common for students to dress in vintage stuff, and I think there may have been a craze for the look at the time, but this means the students look very different from everyone else, in televisual terms they're coded as either more formal or from the past. I don't have a satisfactory interpretation for this difference in presentation, I'm afraid, and will probably think of one after I've posted this.

The episodes references several discredited parapsychology cases which were all the rage at the time (Bridey Murphy and The Bloxham Tapes) which sets the episode perfectly in the white hot milieu of uncritical 1970s parapsychology. Another thing which comes up is spontaneous human combustion, which is not only a wild thing even to discuss, but is a positive roller coaster ride to actually film for a TV series. Continuing their experiments the students have a failed go at hypnosis: failed, that is, until they find they've hypnotised the girl who Crane gave a lift, by mistake. Of course Crane walks straight into this and sees what happens which is a remarkable exhibition of the actress's histrionic gift.

She talks about having been a witch and being burned at the stake. Our POV immediately goes back to the hospital where we see the student on fire and bursting into Crane's brother's room, as if he wasn't ill enough. The student dies. There is a complete mystery to how the fire started, which is treated by the show as spontaneous human combustion, and that in itself is treated as a thing which happens. Then we go straight to the show's next funeral. Jenny, the student who was hypnotised, is distraught with worry that in some way she made their friend catch fire. She talks about having something going on in her head, and says she doesn't know who she is. She talks about having been in the cemetery in a previous existence, and asks to be hypnotised again to go back to her previous self. Honestly, it's very hard to see this episode as being positive about the events in any way: it's very clearly a warning not to mess about with parapsychology.

Of course we know full well that the regression is going to be a disaster, and suddenly she's one of the North Berwick witches being burned at the stake and King James is involved (hope she had a bible for him to sign, that would be really rare collector's item). She wanders off so Department 7 ring the police to report her missing and probably mentally ill.

In the final scene, Crane psychically locates Jenny in a church; when they get there they find she thinks she is a dead witch and is doing some sort of ritual at the altar (I think the likely source for her actions is the 1970s literature on Wicca). They get Martindale from Department 7 who gives Crane a drug and Crane psychically rescues Jenny from Drexel (who, remember, is already dead) who appears, and he stabs Drexel with a knife. Jenny is better at the end of this.

I have a criticism of this which is that I think the ending is rather weak in comparison to the excellent build up. The reason for this weakness is that the episode has given a theoretical explanation in parapsychology for everything else which has happened in the episode but not for this. Suddenly, the entire cast is doing things which have previously been presented as dangerous, and there isn't a justification for it.

That said, this episode got one of the highest endorsements a TV programme of this era could get. The BBC's duty office log recorded a call on 11th July 1979 from Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed arbiter of all that is decent and moral and professional disapprover:

'I am almost lost for words. I want to complain about The Omega Factor being shown in family viewing time before nine o'clock. It contains scenes of hypnosis, the supernatural, and a man apparently burning to death. It is one of the most disturbing programmes I have ever seen on television. I know that you are moving away from physical violence but now you are moving into the realms of psychological violence.

'Incredible. And the programme ended with violation of the church with black magic and witchcraft. You may quote me when I say someone must have gone off their heads.'

The BBC acknowledged that the episode breached guidelines for what could be broadcast before the 9pm watershed. The producer was reprimanded and a second series was never commissioned.

Regular readers will remember how The Goodies spent episode after episode setting out with the intention of getting a complaint from Mrs Whitehouse, with no success, ultimately being forced to make an episode actually starring a parody of her. I think what the BBC should have done was check what they were broadcasting before the watershed and this show should obviously have been afterwards.

I like this episode hugely for its atmosphere and the keenness the students bring to it, despite a relatively weak ending in my opinion.

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The Omega Factor: After-Image

Content warning: suicide.

Spoiler alert: this post gives away how the episode resolves at the end.

My last post highlighted the ways in which this series is a sort of precursor of The X-Files and this episode continues very much in that vein. The Omega Factor has a certain advantage over The X-Files because when all is said and done Mulder doesn't mostly claim to have psychic abilities, however Crane as the protagonist of this show, definitely does. The show makes use of his abilities as a repeated way of moving the story on: he falls asleep, sees things which are going on elsewhere, reports them back to Department 7, and so we all know what is happening elsewhere without anyone having set a foot out of Edinburgh.

We start the episode by seeing Crane's nemesis, evil magician Drexel, carrying out sensory deprivation experiments on people. We then go back to the department and discover that the government has put significant restrictions on the department's activity as a result of Crane's escapade in the last episode resulting in the death of the army major who worked on the mind control experiments. We also discover that Drexel was behind the experiments and the suicide.

Notwithstanding the restrictions Anne has arranged to spend a c ouple of days at the Mayer Institute in Paris, which does work on sensory deprivation, to find out about their work. She sets out on the night train from Edinburgh, accepts a drink from a man on the train, and next finds herself waking up at the Mayer Institute a couple of days later, remembering nothing of what has happened in between. She agrees to take part in the institute's experiments into sensory deprivation. Of course we see in no time that the evil Drexel is experimenting on her.

Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh it becomes apparent that Anne is missing and enquiries start being made. Again, despite the restrictions on his movements, because he has been told he is going nowhere, Crane slides into the Fox Mulder role by going off and making enquiries on the railways. The result is that back at the department nobody can find him. The way he just wanders into places, finds the exact worker who was on the train, and gets them to answer his questions posed pretending to be a reporter, may perhaps be improbable, but I love this narrative tachnique's use as it again makes the narrative quite light and gives answers without the need for much explanation. I think there is naturally a sense back at the department that they're regretting taking him on for his remarkable gifts, because of course he's also a complete liability.

The episode naturally raises concerns about the effect of Drexel's experiments on Anne, and whether he may have left her vulnerable to being 'activated' in some way in the future. The episode does not explicitly raise this subject but lays the foundation for it in another way, which will become apparent below. It's a very effective way of doing it.

The episode culminates with Department 7 going to the house in Scotland where Anne is actually being held and experimented on. It becomes apparent that not only did the management of Department 7 know what was going on with her but Drexel is actually working for one of Britain's allies (there is an American there) who are carrying out the experiment with Britain's agreement as a result of negotiation at a diplomatic level. Ultimately a previous subject of the sensory deprivation experiments bursts in and shoots Drexel who dies. This is the way the worry about the potential effect on Anne is sown.

The main criticism of this episode is, of course, that while it is a great drama and hugely suspenseful, the plot is absurd. It is absolutely ridiculous for the department to perform a fake kidnap on Anne to do sensory deprivation on her when she would obviously have consented to it in the first place. As a way to run a research institute it's a bit potty. This plot does, however fulfil the function of ensuring that Crane has no idea who he can trust at all.

Exactly like Fox Mulder.

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#70s tv #the omega factor

The Omega Factor: After-Image

Content warning: suicide.

Spoiler alert: this post gives away how the episode resolves at the end.

Exactly like Fox Mulder.

This blog is mirrored at

culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)

There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about

Vote Green for real hope and real change! greenparty.org.uk

#70s tv #the omega factor

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