Un Embarras de Richesses

There is currently an abundance of old, cult TV available for free online, so of course the sheer quantity is frying my brain and I will have to use this post to signpost to a selection of the riches currently available. Please note that some of these shows are desperately rare, are rarely available online, some of them are things which are high on the collectors' lists of shows which 'nobody' has seen since about 1970, and are likely to vanish from the internet quite quickly! I haven't had time to watch these things in great detail at this point.

Late Night Horror (1968) was a BBC horror series which had to be cancelled after only six episodes because of the tidal wave of complaints from viewers. Stepping out from among the vampires and mad surgeons is the only episode to survive about a children's birthday party, appropriately enough called The Corpse Can't Play. Suffice to say that this is one of those shows which the Scarred for Life people have featured as the sort of traumatising television they concentrate on! Also of note is that the boys all wear ties for the birthday party, and one of them even a cardigan (pictured). It was released on DVD but is currently available on YouTube.

The 1975 play in the BBC2 Playhouse series Diane, directed by Alan Clarke, is available on the Internet Archive, which is thankfully back online after being taken down by an attack. If nothing else I can confidently say that the play accurately reflects life in the UK as it actually was in the 1970s (or at least as remembered by me) rather than the highly stylish version which tends to be how it's reconstructed.

The Hill of the Red Fox (1975) is an intelligent children's television series about Cold War espionage, about a boy brought up in London who goes to live in the highlands of Scotland. It is a magnificent exhibition of 1970s UK and also of the highlands.

Shirley's World (1971-2) is another of those shows made with transatlantic co-operation, and indeed showed in the USA before it showed in the UK. Shirley Logan (played by Shirley MacLaine) is a photo-journalist and this show is about her adventures. It was produced and directed by Ray Austin, and although I've only dipped into it, it has a quite ITC, globe-trotting feel about it. To be frank, what I like best about it is the episode plot summaries on Wikipedia, which make it sound absolutely wild. For example:

'On a remote island in Scotland Shirley lets slip to a tax inspector about their illicit homemade whisky which causes the islanders to declare independence and Shirley leads the resistance against first the army, then the navy until the Prime Minister sends Dennis Crift to sort it out.'

It did have a commercial release in 2012 and is periodically repeated on Talking Pictures TV but the physical media for The Gold Robbers (1969) is very expensive and I've never seen it so it was nice to find it on YouTube. It's a police investigation show possibly inspired by the famous Great Train Robbery of 1963.

One episode of Second City Firsts (1973-8) did appear on this blog's Blogspot predecessor as an orphaned episode, but there are currently more episodes of it on YouTube. It was a series made here in Birmingham of plays by new writers. I can't do a better description than this link: https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/second-city-firsts-by-lez-cooke/

This film isn't TV but does fit here because anyone who likes Sapphire and Steel will love it, but Bloody New Year (1987) is about some youngsters who find themselves in a hotel on an island and find the past is intruding. There are ghosts and zombies galore, and my only criticism is that I could have done with more ghosts than zombies personally. There is a particularly effective scene in the hotel kitchen where poltergeist activity is reproduced using the film technology of the time, particularly where knives are flying about on their own. Pre-CGI it also has an immediacy and reality that is curiously organic-feeling in comparison to today's film and TV. The critical reception has tended to be rather poor for this film, but I honestly think it's like Sapphire and Steel on crack, and it's great.

Finally we have the legendary documentary series Man Alive, which made 7,459,372 episodes in its time of being broadcast from 1437 to 1981. Alright, I'm exaggerating somewhat but you get the idea. At the time it was quite controversial because it often covered subjects concerning sex or relationships which were quite avant garde at the time. Even though it suffered from being partly wiped it is so legendary that there are still episodes of it on the BBC website to be watched, forty years after it ceased broadcasting. The ones on the BBC website are possibly the best known ones but currently there is a bumper crop of others online, all very grainy and often with the time signature running along the top. I would particularly recommed Alright We'll Do It Ourselves about the efforts of the people of Stepney to get a football pitch. It features coverage of a festival they hold (including pram racing involving visiting nine pubs) and shows Trevor Huddleston before he departed for South Africa.

I don't often talk about theme tunes on here, but Man Alive has the most magnificent titles and both its and The Gold Robbers' theme tunes are absolute BANGERS so have a couple of sound tracks.

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