Children’s ITV beckons, with Glenn Kinsey sitting in for Tommy Boyd.
The first episode of Tiny Toon Adventures here is Fields of Honey.
Tommy Boyd is back for the next episode, The Buster Bunny Brunch.
After this, an episode of Truckers – episode 4.
Then, recording continues with a programme called Woof!
It guest stars Martin Jarvis.
The whole episode is recorded as it looks like I just let the recording run.
After this, Home and Away. Part way through this, recording stops, and underneath, deeply ironically, is a news report about the Maastricht Treaty which formulated the current European Union. Does this count as a hit for this blog’s Deathwatch, given last week’s referendum result?
Here’s a tape chock full of Simpsons episodes. First, Krusty Gets Busted, in which Krusty the clown is framed for armed robbery by his sidekick, Sideshow Bob.
Next, Some Enchanted Evening, in which Homer and Marge go out for the evening, leaving the children in the care of a psychopath.
In Bart Gets an F, Bart gets an F.
Simpson and Delilah is the episode where Bart uses a hair growth formula, and suddenly becomes a go-getter. It contains one of my favourite Mr Burns lines, as he watches his workers on CCTV. “Morons. Pathetic Morons in my employ stealing my precious money.”
There’s Dead Putting Society where Homer plays Ned at crazy golf.
In Bart The Daredevil, the scene where Homer tries to jump a canyon on a skateboard is one of the best sustained gags the show has ever done.
Itchy & Scratchy & Marge sees Marge complaining about the violence in cartoons. But she’s then dismayed when other people want to ban Michelangelo’s David from Springfield Museum.
After this, recording switches to Equinox – Theme Park Heaven. It starts with a look at Disneyland, the pioneer of Theme Parks, and there’s some interesting footage from the launch, including Ronald Reagan (then an actor, of course) presenting.
This is a nice programme, talking to the people who design rollercoasters, who are just as nerdy about what they do as you’d want them to be. They’re working not just with the laws of physics and engineering, but also with psychology, of what makes a ride exciting or scary.
There’s nice look at Disneyland Paris (then Eurodisney). They obviously picked a great day to film there, as it’s all lovely blue skies. My experience of the park is that you certainly can’t rely on that.
There’s also a look at the Universal Studios Earthquake ride.
Special Effects legend Douglas Trumbull now works developing simulator rides, like the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios.
There’s a look at the work being done by Evans & Sutherland, taking their military simulators, and applying them to civilian applications. The quality of their real time graphics seemed so impressive at the time, but today it looks ancient.
Virtual Reality at this stage is not quite as advanced.
There’s some doomsaying about how addictive VR could be – nothing really changes.
I don’t believe this shot of Disneyland is entirely real.
I wonder if anyone has kept any of the supporting material these programmes generated?
After Equinox, the recording continues for a while, with the start of Evelyn Glennie in Concert.
A bit of cruft on the start of this tape – a Movie Channel ident, quickly replaced by the end titles of something – not really enough information to say for sure.
Then, George A Romero’s Monkey Shines. I saw this in the cinema, but I honestly don’t remember much about it. Let’s see.
There’s some reassurance to start with that this is all just a film.
Some gratuitous nudity to start us off. Then our hero, Jason Beghe, goes for a run with a backpack filled with bricks.
Now, for some reason, I’d somehow got confused with The Dark Half, and had thought that this film also starred Timothy Hutton, but I guess Jason Beghe is just as good.
On the other hand, Tom Savini was on Makeup Effects duty, so that’s good.
Beghe’s run doesn’t end well, and he’s hit by a car, and ends up paralysed. But there is a silver lining, as his doctor is played by Stanley Tucci. Well, that might not be a silver lining for the character, but it certainly is for me.
Beghe’s old roommate, John Pankow, is experimenting on Capuchin monkeys, injecting them with human memory cells to increase their learning abilities. You might recognise Pankow as Merc Lapidus in Episodes.
He finds a woman who trains monkeys to assist quadriplegic patients, and persuades her to train his experimental monkey. Beghe and the monkey, now named Ella, get on well – unlike Beghe and the nurse hired to look after him, who seems to treat the job like a penance. I don’t understand why he continues to keep her on, given that he hates her, she hates him, and her budgie continually annoys him. So Ella kills the budgie, and the nurse quits.
Beghe thinks Ella is getting out of the house at night, and he has dreams from Ella’s point of view. They appear to have a telepathic connection.
Beghe isn’t the most contented of quadriplegics. He learns that Doctor Tucci missed a diagnosis that could have meant he wouldn’t be paralysed, and he gets even more angry. When he tries to contact Tucci he learns he’s with his ex-girlfriend. This, not surprisingly, makes him even angrier.
But the monkey trainer, Kate McNeil, likes him, and, while Ella is taken away by Pankow for testing, she and Beghe spend some quality time together, and in one of the creepiest love scenes I can remember, they have sex in her lab where all her monkeys being trained go a bit mad. I don’t think that would be conducive to romance.
There’s apparently a temporary fault on the broadcast, but I can’t tell what they might be talking about. Strange.
Pankow decides to inject himself with the human memory tissue, to see if he can get a telepathic connection with Ella. But while he’s messing around in the lab, Ella returns, and electrocutes Beghe’s controlling mother in the bathtub.
Then it’s Pankow’s turn as he gets jabbed with the sedative meant for Ella.
And finally, McNeil returns, but manages to trip and knock herself unconscious, and Ella tries to set her on fire. Thank goodness for flame retardent clothing.
Beghe eventually calms Ella by miraculously moving his hand to turn on some music, then biting her to death. I’m not surprised this movie wasn’t a big hit, after all, who wants to see that?
There’s a fantastic disclaimer at the end.
“None of the incidents portrayed have ever been recorded in the ten year history of the program.”
Following this, recording continues with a behind the Scenes of Last of the Mohicans.
There’s a UK Top Ten
Behind The Scenes: Single White Female
Then, recording continues with Howling VI – The Freaks. A story of circus folks making their way to Transylvania, acccording to the introduction, but it appears to be set in a small desert town in the US (although being a Howling sequel I’m assuming it’s Australia).
It opens with a young woman running for her life from an unseen terror, and when she finally succumbs, we see she was holding a teddy bear.
A mysterious Englishman (Brendan Hughes) arrives in a small town. He drops a teddy bear on the road as he approaches. This will become a theme. The local law officer doesn’t want him there, but the local priest offers him a job refurbishing the crumbling church, which he does with aplomb.
Then a local travelling circus arrives in town, led by Harker (Bruce Payne).
Our mysterious man, Ian, is in love with the preacher’s daughter, but he has a secret which means they can’t be together – he’s a werewolf. He’s captured by Harker and presented as one of his freaks. I have to say, I’ve seen better transformation effects.
And I’m bailing out now. I really couldn’t care less about this – bad werewolf effects and carnival sideshows are two of my least favourite things.
Here’s some more Cheers. In Madame LaCarla, Carla’s psychic is retiring and offers to train Carla as her replacement. Carla’s crushed when she discovers that she’s a fraud, but then realises that she could do the same job and make money.
In The Norm Who Came to Dinner Norm injures himself while decorating Frasier and Lilith’s house, and stays as a houseguest while recuperating.
In Ma’s Little Maggie, Cliff’s girlfriend Margaret is visiting, and has to meet his mother (Frances Sternhagen). They hit it off, and Mrs Clavin proposes on Cliff’s behalf.
Next, Unplanned Parenthood, in which Lilith suggests that Sam and Rebecca should babysit to see if they’re good potential parents, so they decide to babysit Carla’s kids.
In Bar Wars V: The Final Judgment, the bar prepares for the annual Halloween fright from Gary’s Olde Town Tavern. The gang’s prank causes Gary to die of a heart attack
For the cold open of the next episode there’s a rare bit of location filming in Boston.
In this episode, Where Have All the Floorboards Gone?, Boston sportsman Kevin McHale gives Norm a special birthday gift. But then the gang get him obsessed with the number of bolts in the floor of Boston Garden. And Lilith gets a new haircut.
Next, in Head Over Hill, Sam sends Carla to humiliate the owner of Mellville’s, but instead, she ends up sleeping with him.
The last episode here is A Fine French Whine in which sleazy French Henri is still trying to steal Kelly away from Woody.
Henri’s visa is expiring, to Woody’s delight, but to Kelly’s dismay. She agrees to marry him to keep him in the country.
After this episode, recording stops, and underneath, there’s a bit of a gardening programme
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This tape has some more Quantum Leap episodes, starting with Future Boy. Sam leaps into a 1957 science fiction TV show, as Future Boy, the sidekick to Captain Galaxy. Captain Galaxy goes off script, describing a more peaceful, positive future than the writer of the show has written.
Al tells Sam that he has to save the life of Moe Stein, the actor playing Captain Galaxy (Richard Herd) – but he can only do this by having him committed.
Stein has started developing actual theories of time travel, and as he discusses them with Sam, it seems they are very close to Sam’s own theory, on which the show is predicated.
When he’s actually committed, he escapes from the court and rushes home to use his time machine. as the special effects imply, it almost works.
There’s a fabulous moment at the end, when he announces he’s not going to do the show any more, he answers one last letter, from a young Sam Beckett, asking him to explain his theory of time travel. As he explains it, Sam leaps. A lovely closed loop.
The next episode is Black On White On Fire in which Sam leaps into the body of a young black medical student, in love with a white girl, whose brother doesn’t approve of the relationship. It’s also the eve of one of the biggest riots in the civil rights movement, in Watts.
There’s a lot of stock footage of the riots, plus what looks like specially shot scenes of mayhem – which might have been shot for the programme or it might be from another drama about the riots. If it’s new material, it looks like this was an expensive episode, but none of the footage includes any of our featured characters, so I’m suspicious.
I think the dramatic arc of this episode is a little contrived, but it’s ultimately moving, and Scott Bakula does some fine work.
Something frothy in the next episode as Sam leaps into the body of a chippendale dancer. This episode is called Private Dancer, set in 1979 at the height of Disco.
This episode co-stars Fame’s Debbie Allen, who also directed the episode.
Sam has leaped to help a deaf girl, Diana (Rhondee Berlaut) who works in the disco, to prevent her from falling into a short life of prostitution and death from Aids.
Heidi Swedberg, Susan off of Seinfeld, plays a woman who promises to book her to dance, but is actually going to pimp her out.
The next episode is another musical story, as Sam leaps into the body of a pianist. Scott Bakula has a good singing voice. And the song he sings throughout the show is familiar, so I must be remembering it from watching it the first time.
This is a slightly silly story, as Sam is reunited with his old writing partner, he’s being chased by unknown bad guys, and she’s pathologically unlucky.
After this, trailers for Nice Town, and Bookmark with PD James.
Then, recording stops, and underneath is part of Newsnight, featuring the story about arms exports to Iraq by Matrix Churchill. The tape ends after about 20 minutes of this.
This tape is the Last Night of the Proms 1993 introduced by Richard Baker. This year, it consists entirely of British music.
The first piece is The Perfect Fool by Gustav Holst. I always think of Holst as a composer of an older era – closer to Beethoven and Brahms – but he died in 1934, so he’s more contemporary with Rachmaninov. I love his music, it’s so English, and you can hear things that show how much he influenced someone like John Williams.
The Proms audience seems to be at the height of its ‘yahoo’ behaviour at this time. Actually, I should say, the Last Night audience, which is unrepresentative of the regular Proms audience. During a particularly quiet moment in this piece, someone lets off a very loud bang. That’s clearly someone who’s not there for the music, which I thought was the whole point.
The next piece is the Second Clarinet Concerto by Malcolm Arnold. The soloist is Michael Collins.
This one’s a bit more jazz-inflected than I usually like, but it has nice moments. It was written for Benny Goodman. The composer himself was in the audience, and takes to the podium to receive applause at the end.
Before the next piece, as the orchestra rearranges itself, Richard Baker compliments the dress sense of the proms audience this year – cue plenty of men in dinner jackets and bow ties. “They decided to get into rather more elegant shape.”
Cut to this chap.
“Well some of them, at least. There’s a sort of backwoodsman among the very well dressed fellows in the front.”
Next, it’s Dance Rhapsody No 2 by Frederick Delius. Followed by excerpts from a ballet, The Triumph of Neptune, by Lord Berners. Not a piece I’m familiar with.
The first half of the concert ends with Rio Grande by Constant Lambert. Kathryn Stott is the pianist.
The second half is shown on BBC1, in a simulcast with Radio 3. Richard Baker introduces it from up in the gallery, from where I’ve watched a few Proms concerts. He talks to Andrew, who was first in the queue.
He also talks to Bridget, who’s been coming since the 70s.
“And this is your husband Christopher. Christopher, what have you enjoyed most about this season?” I guess Bridget’s opinion wasn’t worth canvassing.
The first piece is some of William Walton’s film music for Richard III.
Next, Songs of Travel by Vaughan Williams, with Bass John Tomlinson.
There’s music from Murder on the Orient Express by Richard Rodney Bennett.
Then, the traditional Land of Hope and Glory by Elgar.
The concert finishes in what used to be the traditional style, with Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs. In a slight departure from the norm, John Tomlinson sings part of it, and clarinetist Michael Collins takes part in the Hornpipe.
Also not always performed, is the cadenza clarinet part in Spanish Ladies, played by the retiring principal clarinet of the orchestra Colin Bradbury, who gets a special mention by conductor Barry Wordsworth in his speech.
The concert concludes in traditional fashion with Jerusalem, and the national anthem.
After this, there’s a trailer for a new series of Omnibus.
Then, what I assume is an extra programme, a short film called The Novelty, written and directed by Christophe Wassort. A little boy runs through a rural town, talking to the villagers, and all the dialogue is birdsong. Something exciting is happening, and all the villagers start spreading the news, and converging in the centre of town, but the recording finishes before we discover what the excitement is for.
This tape opens with UK Gold, and the end of some classic Eastenders. Lofty, Angie, Mary the Punk – the gang’s all here.
Then, the very first episode of Survivors, The Fourth Horseman. Survivors still has one of the greatest narrative title sequences of all time.
The programme opens with Abby Grant (Carolyn Seymour) playing tennis with a ball-serving machine. They get their money’s worth out of it.
Things have already started as we join the programme. Grant’s son is at boarding school, and are quarantined. The telephone exchanges are short staffed.
She lives in a place called Brimpsfield, which sounds made up, but there’s a real place with that name. I can’t find a train station there, but it’s quite possible for the trains to have stopped running there since 1975 when the programme was made.
Abby’s husband finally arrives back after a long, fractured journey. He’s played by Peter Bowles – was he a big TV star at this point? If so, this flags him as a major character.
Things get a bit ominous when Bowles can’t get Radio 4 on the radio. Then the power goes off.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Jenny Richards (Lucy Fleming) has a friend with the disease, whose boyfriend is a doctor. He’s able to tell her how serious the epidemic is, and recommends she leaves town for the country. Naturally, while she’s walking the streets of the town, a bunch of men threaten her.
Abby gets sick, and is clearly sick for a time, but she wakes up, looking awful but still alive. And she discovers Peter Bowles dead on the sofa. So much for star power, and a smart dramatic device to underline the seriousness of the plague.
By the end of the episode, Abby has discovered her son might be alive, having been taken in a group from the school, to camp somewhere in the country. She symbolically cuts her hair short, and burns down her lovely house, then drives off into the night.
The next episode is Genesis. Abby is awoken from sleeping in her car by the sound of a helicopter. Its pilot is Greg Preston (Ian McCulloch) who’s returning home, only to find his wife dead. His expression here sums up the entire series, really.
He meets a woman in a fur coat, Anne, who needs his help freeing a man from under a tractor. She’s obviously from a rich family. “Father sent the servants away.” And she’s wearing a fur coat. She and Greg swap stories as they wait for the injured man to wake up. He opens a bottle of champagne. “Champagne tastes awful when it’s warm” she says.
Abby meets some people living in a house which still has power. One of them is Arthur Wormley (George Baker) a president of a union. “I think God might have spared me to lead those that are left.”
He’s a ‘hang ’em high’ type, and when another group attack the house, Wormley has the leader summarily shot. So Abby leaves.
Greg doesn’t think much of Anne and her plan to get all the little people working for her, so he heads off, and while he’s in town stocking up on drugs, Jenny finds him. Heading back to the quarry to deliver drugs to the injured man, he finds Anne walking away. She tells Greg the man’s dead, so he tells her to get in the car. Cut back to the quarry where the injured man is trying to crawl from the shack he was in, shouting for his partner. Bleak stuff.
The episode ends with Jenny spotting a fire in the distance, and persuading Greg to find it. It’s Abby, who’s set the fire as a signal for others to find.
Before the next episode, the end of some Eastenders.
Then there’s a chance to vote for the programmes to be shown on ‘Grandparents Day’
Then, more surviving, with an episode called Gone Away. I haven’t mentioned Talfryn Thomas yet, as recurring comedy Welshman Tom Price, but he keeps popping up. Last week he found a Rolls Royce to drive. Here he finds a deserted farm, goes hunting unexpectedly, harrasses a man and his son when the son grabs a chicken, and then comes across Abby’s church headquarters.
Abby, Greg and Jenny go scavenging. They fill up at a petrol station – it’s a good thing this is still the 70s, and there are such things as petrol pumps with crank handles.
The find a supermarket with food, but it’s under the control of Wormley and his ‘community’. There’s a stand-off, but Jenny grabs a shotgun and they get away. Cue a debate about who has authority, and what kind of civilization they want to live in.
Wormley’s men find the church, but only Tom Price is there. Abby, Greg and Jenny return later, but one of the men, Robert Gillespie, warns them that the others are in the church, and manages to get the men to leave – not before Tom Price volunteers to join them.
The next episode is Gone to the Angels, written by Jack Ronder, the first episode not written by series creator Terry Nation. According to iMDb we’ve missed the episode Corn Dolly.
the trio is on the way to Abby’s son’s school, hoping for some trace of her son Peter. Jenny and Greg find two small children.
Peter Miles (Nyder in Genesis of the Daleks) plays a man who manages to accidentally shoot Greg in the arm.
He’s a bit rubbish, so they don’t stay with him very long. They go to meet Abby, who’s found three religious men in a remote house. But they’ve not had the plague yet, and Abby infects them.
Survivors, at least at the start, is a fine series, but hideously grim. It’s like The Walking Dead without the zombies. If I have a complaint, it’s that Nation’s dialogue is a little bit on the nose, when they’re discussing the politics of societal breakdown.
It’s not a series I love, because the premise unnerves me – I know I’d be utterly hopeless in such a scenario, and I’d be dead within a fortnight. But I admire the rigor with which the show plays out its different scenarios.
After this episode, recording continues with For The Love of Ada starring Irene Handl and Wilfred Pickles. The tape runs out during this.
The tape opens with the end of Food & Drink. Then a trailer for Ren & Stimpy.
Then there’s a trailer for Manga and Akira.
Then, an episode of Star Trek. In The Empath, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are transported beneath the surface of a planet, where they encounter an unknown life form, in the guise of a woman in a floaty chiffon dress.
For the gadget nerds, there’s a nice close-up of McCoy’s medical tricorder.
As well as the woman who doesn’t speak, whom McCoy has christened Gem, there’s also a couple of aliens.
There’s a lot of running about, as the aliens seem to be testing the crew. And Gem the Empath is able to heal injuries, with a lot of exaggerated mime.
There’s a Sophie’s Choice moment when the aliens tell Kirk he must choose which of McCoy and Spock should be the subject of their experiments. But McCoy zaps both Kirk and Spock with his hypo so the aliens choose him.
After this, there’s a trailer for Big Science. Then recording switches to an old Top of the Pops on UK Gold, including a performance of Save All Your Kisses For Me.
Then, some really vintage Doctor Whowith William Hartnell as the Doctor in The Keys of Marinus. The announcer keeps saying it’s from 1963, but this story is from April 1964. Some impressive miniature work to open the episode.
I have no idea what Ian’s wearing. I expect it relates to the previous story, Marco Polo.
Hartnell’s grasp of the dialogue in this opening Tardis scene is rather tenuous. He’s really reaching for his lines.
Not that his lines are all that much, even when he does deliver them. Unless he’s really garbling them. They emerge from the Tardis to see a huge sea, but it’s very still. Barbara says “it isn’t frozen, is it?” to which the Doctor replies “No, impossible in this temperature. Besides, it’s too warm.”
The sea is actually acid, and there are some aliens lurking around.
Also lurking is George Coulouris, who is the last inhabitant of the vast structure on the planet.
His grasp of the dialogue seems as shaky as Hartnell’s.
The strange aliens are the Voord, mounting an attack. But if the Doctor and his friends can find all the lost keys to a machine called “The Conscience”, it can control the minds of the Voord and repel them.
So they’re given travel dials that teleport them to the location of the first key, but Barbara is missing when they arrive.
In the next episode, they discover Barbara, and she’s fine, and being very well looked after.
Ian’s suspicious, and when they all fall asleep, we learn he was right to be, as a woman puts some strange devices on their foreheads as they sleep. Barbara’s falls off, and she awakes to hear a very loud sound which knocks her unconscious.
When she wakes up, it looks like the room they’re in is ruined and dirty, but the others can’t see it.
Looks like the people on this part of the planet are under the control of some brains in jars.
Ian and the Doctor are taken to their magnificent laboratory, and the doctor admires the amazing technology on offer – still under the influence of the jarbrains.
Luckily, Barbara is still unaffected, finds the jarbrains, and destroys them. They join up with two of the people who are now free of the jarbrains, and the Doctor decides to split up and go to find the fourth key while Ian, Barbara and Susan, with newcomers Altos and Sabetha
In the next episode, the crew (sans the Doctor) look for the third key in a place that’s full of traps, including a descending spiked ceiling threatening Barbara.
Before then next episode, there’s something far frightening than anything 1964 Who can conjure up – the end of Top of the Pops presented by Jimmy Savile. It’s a Christmas edition. And even worse, Dave Lee Travis is also a presenter.
Then it’s back to less frightening fare, for the next episode of The Keys of Marinus. Ian and Barbara have transported to a frozen area of the planet. Francis de Woolf plays a threatening mountain man.
In the end, they all manage to regroup and teleport away. But for some strange reason, Ian is alone when he discovers a man unconscious in some kind of museum, near a display case holding the final key, and he’s unconvincingly bopped on the head by someone whose face we never see, who takes the key and sets off the alarm.
So Ian is accused of murder, and has to defend himself. Luckily for him, the Doctor is on hand to defend him.
There’s some perfunctory courtroom antics, and the Doctor fakes out a guard to reveal he had a part in whatever conspiracy is afoot to steal the last key and accuse Ian.
In the last episode, the Doctor clears up the trial, then takes the last key to return to George Coulouris. But he’s dead, killed by Yartek, leader of the alien Voord. There’s a lovely moment when Sabetha, a woman from the jarbrain land, is being brought out by another Voord, who trips over his own feet and stumbles into the room.
In the end, the magical machine that was to solve all woes gets destroyed, along with the alien Voord, and all is well.
After this, recording continues with the start of a Diana Dors film I Married a Woman. There’s a few minutes of this before the tape ends.
First on this tape, a film by Nick Broomfield, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. This is the documentary whose subject was eventually dramatised as Monster with Charlize Theron.
As is typical with his films, Broomfield often appears on camera, and narrates it.
It’s a bizarre story. Wuornos killed eight men, but as we join the story, Wuornos, a 35 year old woman, has been adopted by another woman, Arlene, and is being defended by a lawyer who seems more interested in how much money the story of the case can make, and in playing his music for Broomfield’s camera.
It’s only at the end of the film that Broomfield finally gets to meet Wuornos, then on death row. The conversation mostly revolves around Arlene and her attorney Steve. “I think they’re the money hungry people.”
There’s an interesting part of the conversation where Broomfield has to do a voiceover to remove part of the conversation about the US TV movie that had been made about the case – she believed that the police had illegally profited from the movie. And the film ends with footage of the announcement of dismissals of police officers involved in the case.
After this, recording continues for a while, with the start of Elvis ’56.
Then, recording switches to the end of a Sophie Grigson food programme, Grow Your Greens.
Then there’s an episode of Cheers. In Is There a Doctor in the Howe? Frasier learns that his marriage to Lilith is over, and to cheer him up, Rebecca throws a divorce party for him to cheer him up. But when she drives him home, they feel the tug of mutual attraction. But before they can get on with it, Sam and the gang appear to cheer up Frasier with 6 hours of 3 Stooges videos.
When they finally leave, and Frasier and Rebecca settle down, in walks Lilith, back suddenly from her year long seclusion in the ecodome.
After this, recording continues with the start of an episode of Roseanne. Then it switches to David Vine and some snooker, the World Championship.
there’s a trailer for Arena: Tales of Rock and Roll about the real-life Peggy Sue.
Then, an episode of Have I Got News For You, first in a new series, featuring guests Jonathan Ross
And Peter Cook.
“Education Secretary John Patten recently sent a letter to Lord Griffin in which he misspelled the words ‘advice’ and ‘sincerely’.” Why does that ring a bell?
Other stories covered include The very strange world of Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith – news that Smith’s mother was to marry Wyman’s son. For some reason that seems odd and creepy, until we remember that if the two weddings had taken place in the opposite order, Wyman would be marrying his step-granddaughter. Ugh. Rock and Roll.
One of the stories covered was Princess Diana speaking publicly about anorexia and bulimia for the first time, and Littlejohn makes a crass joke about it. Stay classy. At least the scripted comments by Deayton only make fun of her alleged infidelities.
First on this tape, Cracker and The Mad Woman in the Attic. It’s directed by Michael Winterbottom.
It’s the very first episode, and it was broadcast on my birthday, 27th September 1993.
There’s a potential serial killer, who’s killed on a train. Adrian Dunbar is found near the tracks, but claims amnesia. Christopher Eccleston, as DI Bilborough, thinks he’s feigning it.
The story establishes Fitz’s gambling, and establishes his relationship with Penhaligon – she trusts him when Bilborough takes him off the case.
After these two episodes, there’s To Say I Love You. A young man with an unfortunate haircut meets a girl who’s way out of his league, but she likes his awful karaoke singing, so they hook up. Sean Kerrigan is played by Andrew Tierney, Tina by Susan Lynch.
Barbara Flynn, Fitz’s wife, is seeing a therapist, David Haig.
Fitz’s mother is played by Beryl Reid
The two lovers start a bit of a murder spree, first with a local thug to whom she owed money, then a policeman who interviewed her about the case.
But because Fitz has gone public with his profile of them, they decide that he’s their next target. In the meantime, Fitz and Bilborough identify Sean as the man in the case. But Tina tries to seduce Fitz in the pub, posing as a student. It’s played as if Fitz might be falling for the seduction, but there are clues in the dialogue which tell us he’s onto her – he references the film Badlands – having seen the poster in her flat. Then, when he’s reeled her in enough, Penhaligon turns up to arrest her. But Sean sees the arrest, and gets away, setting up part three.
Which isn’t on this tape, unfortunately. The tape ends just after this episode.
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WH Smith – another reference to Meat Loaf – I hope he’s OK
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