THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH

Yeah, so this is a real thing, a show from 1976. The synopsis is just about perfect:

'Bigfoot finds a young boy lost in the vast wilderness of the American north west. Bigfoot raises the boy and calls him Wildboy. Now, eight years later, they fight crime and aliens who show up around their forest home.'

Putting aside why Bigfoot didn't try and contact social services, it's worth noting that one of this particular Bigfoot's battle moves is a prodigious leap, something not previously attributed to Sasquatch in anyhing I've ever seen or read. Crime and aliens won't know what's hit them.   

American TV at it's very best. 

TENUOUS TIE IN

Glowering Swiss hunk and 'handsome bastard' Oliver Tobias shot to fame in Harlech Television's 'Arthur Of The Britons', so much so that a publicity shot from the series was subsequently featured on the cover of the 1972 edition of K.K Downing's well received book on the Saxon and Norman monarchy. 

Not much is really known about the 'actual' King Arthur, of course, so Downing simply wrote a chapter summarising the first twelve episodes of the hit HTV show. No-one noticed, and it became part of the History curriculum in English and Welsh schools until 1998.  

TELLYOGRAPHY

We still take photographs of Dr. Who from off the telly, even though technology has made this largely redundant nowadays. This is why these photographs have a pleasingly analogue rough and readiness to them, and also why Fearlono's lamp appears over John Woodnut's left ear.

PC MAC

Ian McNaught-Davis

1929-2014

SKY PLUS

‘Sky’ is such an unsettling, weird, pagan sci fi ghost train ride of a programme that it’s sometimes hard to believe that it ever existed or, incredibly, that it was created for kids. 

Happily, primary historical source ‘Look-In’ recorded the details for posterity, along with the frankly incredible reminder that there used to be 14 regional ITV channels. The past is a foreign country, we watch telly differently there.

Nice to see that The Rollers are providing us with their 'History Of Pop'. Next week, Alvin Stardust begins a new six part series called 'The Rise & Fall of The Byzantine Empire'.

DOWN AND SAFE SEX

ABJECT APOLOGY

Sitcoms are one of the most difficult television formats to maintain, which is why, if they are popular, they often go on for slightly too long, beyond when they may have exhausted the original idea or ‘jumped the shark’^*. 

Case in point: the Ronnie Corbett vehicle ‘Sorry!’, which ran from 1981 to 1988 and documented the pathetic life of Timothy Lumsden (Corbett), a middle aged librarian whose every move was governed by his overbearing mother. Clearly a metaphor for the Thatcher years, ‘Sorry!’ ran out of steam in its sixth series but, due to popular demand and the BBC’s ongoing difficulties in developing time travel sit-com ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’^**, a seventh series was commissioned, which is where things got weird. 

The problem is, of course, that sit coms necessarily revolve around a situation - and situations, by their very nature, are usually in a state of flux. With ‘Sorry!’ it was clear that Timothy Lumsden would need to move forward, to find a girlfriend, to get a life - or to simply surrender to being alone and miserable and probably end up killing himself, which, any way you look at it, is not particularly funny. 

Having used up a myriad of storylines in the preceding 36 episodes, series seven is notable for some bizarre diversions, not least the third episode (‘Who’s That Lady?’) in which Tim, wishing to get a woman’s perspective, goes out in drag and gets touched up in a club car park by Nicky Henson, and the disturbing fifth episode, ‘Better Out Than In’, in which Timothy becomes possessed by ancient evil. 

After unpacking a delivery of supposedly new library books, Timothy becomes drawn to an aged tome bound in human flesh. Reading it aloud opens one of the portals of Hell, and poor Timmy is taken over by Assyrian winged demon, Pazuzu - with predictably hilarious results! 

As a young man, I can remember laughing like a drain at the bit where Mother goes out to the shops and, as she steps out of the front door, is hit on the shoulder by what she assumes is a spot of rain, only to look up and see a laughing Timmy urinating out of an upstairs window, his eyes rolling back in his head. That’s a lot funnier that Del Boy falling through that bar, yet, for some reason, it is ranked only second on the Channel 5 ‘Great Comedy Moments’ list.

"Sorry, Timothy isn't in right now"

'Let the power of Christ compel you!'

Mother gets in on it.

The climax to the episode, in which Tim’s Father conducts a DIY exorcism, is notable for its pre-watershed use of 98 strong swear words, including 60 instances of ‘f___’, twelve ‘motherf_____’s, three ‘c___sucker’s and twenty three uses of the word ‘cunt’. Numerous complaints were made to the Broadcasting Standards Commission but, ultimately, the BBC were exonerated as every single instance of rude dialogue was countered by the phrase ‘Language, Timothy’, making it clear that the use of the words was socially unacceptable. 

One of the more outlandish twenty seven minutes in British broadcasting history, ‘Better Out Than In’ was watched by almost 30 million people, a statistic only beaten by the series finale^***, in which Tim’s father dies and, after the funeral, Tim strangles his mother and interferes with the corpse, a downbeat but sadly inevitable ending to a much loved show. 

*    The phrase ‘jump the shark’ was originally coined after a 1975 episode of ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ in which Compo went surfing on Ramsden Reservoir on Nora Batty’s ironing board and, inexplicably, was menaced by a rubber Great White. This moment is usually cited as the end of the show as a credible entity. Unabashed, the programme continued for another 35 years.

**   ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ eventually debuted in 1993 after almost ten years of intensive development. It is generally considered the greatest sitcom of all time. 

*** The final episode was watched by 80 million people, i.e. everyone in Britain and half of France.

ON THE ROAD

In the mid-seventies, an ill-defined patch of nothing roughly located between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda became an unexpected geographic celebrity, a notorious place where no man, boat or aeroplane was safe, where things just disappeared, never to return. Was the cause natural, unnatural or supernatural? Was it perhaps extra-terrestrial? And what was a bare faced Galen from ‘Planet Of The Apes’ doing there? 

In the ‘The Fantastic Journey’ pilot, a group of eggheads (and the lead boffin’s son) are out innocently doing science in this so-called Bermuda Triangle when an ominous green cloud engulfs their boat. After some swirly effects, the party find themselves shipwrecked, trapped on a bizarre and mysterious island where all sorts of wildlife and all sorts of people from all sorts of times and places and planets co-exist. Within about twenty minutes, for instance, our shipwrecked protagonists have met a chilled out new age Doctor from the 23rd century, as well as tangled with a group of angry 18th century pirates, led by a man who looks like Ian McShane, only younger and smaller. 

 

The series that followed built on this premise, but only ran for nine episodes, so left a number of unanswered questions and under-developed concepts in the wake of its premature cancellation. What is clear is that the bizarre and mysterious island had an endless supply of lurex, as almost everyone seems to be wearing it (especially the men, resulting in some distracting and unpleasant lumps and bumps in the crotchal region). 

Most of the original characters were supposedly ‘returned to their own time’ (i.e. fired) after the pilot, leaving a core crew of the hippy future guy, the scientist’s son, the black Doctor (mainly there for fighting and shouting ‘right on’) and, as they went along, a foxy half alien, half Atlantean telepath miniskirt lady and her psychic cat and, best of all, shifty, waspish Roddy McDowall as a shifty, waspish scientist who, in the end, despite wearing all black, turns out to be a bit of a sweetheart. 

This motley crew traipse around day after day in the same clothes looking for a way home. The separate parts of the island are reached via flashing laser portals which instantly transport the traveller to their next stop, although it isn’t clear if they are travelling through time as well as space. Either way, on this ‘fantastic journey’, they encounter lots of people from the future, several robots and some green faced Hispanic looking people in a series of silly scenarios that tick the boxes in terms of sci fi television cliché (hey, there’s a society ruled by sinister kids; a society ruled by an evil tyrant; a society ruled by sexy women and evil tyrant Joan Collins, etc.) as well as traditional drama staples like haunted houses and doomed romances. 

 

The following scene is from an episode in which our travellers happen across an enormous but totally deserted fairground. Unabashed by just how incredibly creepy that is, and undeterred by the fact that, wherever they go, people want to kill them, they amble happily over to the site in search of fun. As they approach, all the lights go on and the music starts and the Merry-Go-round goes merrily round and all that and STILL they don't run away. To be honest, they deserve the quasi-mythological, hairy, cosmic horror that comes next...

If anyone can explain where the thunder and lightning at the end comes from, we'd be very grateful.

The whole programme is as daft as daft can be, and extremely enjoyable, especially when those wonderful analogue synths kick in. Cheap and shoddy, occasionally laughable, the show nevertheless has a sense of (mostly unfulfilled) mystery, a feeling that anything could happen because all the clocks are broken and the maps are wrong. Thirty years later, someone will throw loads of money at this concept and call it ‘Lost’. 

Interestingly, after a blaze of publicity and some best selling books, it was very quickly proved that stories about the Devil's Triangle were just that, stories, and the supporting evidence mere invention, urban legend, i.e. statistically, that area of sea is no more dangerous than any other area of sea, and most incidents occurring there had quite prosaic explanations. Human nature is such, however, that people still believe in the various fraudulent claims made about The Triangle, and there are many who remain wary and frightened of it, although much of this may be down to Barry Manilow’s terrifying 1981 hit single of the same name*. 

*The Wikipedia entry for this song is worth quoting in full:"Bermuda Triangle" is a song by Barry Manilow, from his album Barry. Released as a single in 1981, it reached number 15 in the UK charts, and number 16 in Germany.The song features tonicizations, the cycle of fifths and a brief modulation to the tonic minor, which represents Manilow 'losing his woman'.

MILTON JOHNS

Like many people around the world, one of our hobbies is taking photographs of Milton Johns off the telly. Here is one we took today, although, for Milton, this was 45 years ago. 

DOWN AND SAFE

THE ZEN OF BLAKE'S SEVEN

 

 

You'll either know what this post is about or not, really, not that it is terribly important either way.

Basically, TOMTIT like Blakes 7, missing apostrophe and all. For some reason we identify with the story of a ramshackle bunch of criminals getting by on stolen technology and acts of petty vandalism. So much so that on our days off we dress up in boiler suits and silver wellies and go and stand outside industrial units and factories and pretend that they are Federation strongholds. Then we kill everybody and burn the place to the ground.

FEARLONO particularly sees a lot of himself in Soo Lin.