Shooting the Breeze: The End of Cult TV
The BBC are closing down their Cult TV website. Paul Chan remembers the days before overexposure of soaps and then make-over shows and reality TV brought the curtain down on some excellent TV drama.
What are your all-time favourite TV shows? Are any of them less than 15 years old? For me, nostalgia is a great thing, and TV shows over the decades illustrate what was popular at the time.
Unfortunately, times change and now there is so much make-over and reality TV around these days, driven by low costs and high viewing figures that it's hard to see them going out of fashion in the short term.
I wonder what will have become of the people who have switched to other satellite TV channels, started using the Internet or simply turned off the TV and done something else instead.
BBC4 recently screened a Time Shift show about Sixties Fantasy TV. In it they namechecked shows like Quatermass, A for Andromeda, The Avengers, Adam Adamant, The Prisoner, and discussed how the prevailing attitudes of the space age, women's lib, colour TV and the Cold War led to the creation of some of the most imaginative and fun shows of TV history.
Not many people will have noticed the BBC4 live broadcast of a remake of the original Quatermass Experiment. The show was acted and broadcast live in the style of the original show but with higher production values and on location.
Fans of Sherlock Holmes may have as little as two weeks to listen to these audio stories on the Sherlock Holmes BBC mini-site.
Doctor Who is one show which most people who have lived in Britain will be familiar with. Everyone has their favourite Doctor and the recent revival with Christopher Ecclestone has been a great success for Saturday evening family viewing. Fortunately, the Doctor Who website is staying.
Of course, if you really liked some of these shows of yesteryear, you can indulge your nostalgia and see some of them (and their stars) later this year at a convention in Solihull. There is a packed guest list including Peter Tork (the former Monkee) and Philip Madoc (who played the U-boat commander in Dad's Army).
The relative lack of funding today in TV for cutting-edge programmes is edging out quality dramas which were already suffering from the same kind of Hollywood conservatism that has famously seen ITV producing programmes mainly starring soap stars with a law, police, vet or hospital theme. If 90s TV was about 'uniformed soap stars', then this decade is definately all about Big Brother and its clones.
