Memorable TV

In 1978 ITC decided to revive their much loved Saint franchise with Ian Olgilvy in the lead, this time out although The Saint is still an adventurer always ready to save the country from crisis or help a damsel in distress there was a little more realism with actual location shooting and even one or two actual visits abroad. A real treat, a nostalgia filled blast of classic seventies TV that doesn't take itself too seriously. Whilst still heavy on the Roger Mooresque suaveness and derring do Ian Olgilvy's Saint is a little more action oriented with episodes featuring a plot to blow up London, Arab terrorists, drug rings and assassinations (of course there is also plenty of Saint saving girl in peril style storylines too!). With its great 70's fashions and concerns and a feel similar to shows such as The New Avengers or The Professionals The Return of the Saint is excellent (not to mention one very funky little theme tune). There is also great fun to be had in playing the fa...

Frank Ross...is Out. Tom Bell is just one of those actors with an amazing screen prescence, very much at home playing the hard man and pretty much tailor made for the role of Frank Ross. The plot sees Frank Ross (played by Bell) coming out of prison after serving 8 years for a bank robbery that went wrong, with his marriage in tatters (his wife has had a major breakdown and his teenage son is something of a delinquent) Ross is determined to get his revenge on the ones who grassed him to the law. Opening with a great sequence of Ross coming to terms with actually being out and feeling alienated by the fast moving crowds around him. The 6 part serial, here in a nice two disc set, was a big ratings hit and also won a Bafta award. Written by Trevor Preston, Out was a Thames-Euston production and has that classic shot on location feel and is quite similar in tone to Preston's equally excellent series Fox. Although the series belongs to Bell (he dominates proceedings in much the same way...

By the time of the second season of this missing persons crime show Without A Trace was becoming the first show to give ER a run for its money, fast paced and allowing as much time for the personal lives of the cops as their policing Without A Trace is a much stronger show than any number of strangely unfeeling CSI clones. Anthony La Paglia and Poppy Montgomery (Australians both) play FBI Missing Persons Special Unit operatives Jack Malone and Samantha Spade and each episode sees the team trying to trace another missing person. By applying advanced psychological profiling techniques, the special task force is able to peel back the layers of the victims’ lives and trace their whereabouts in order to determine if the missing person has been abducted, murdered, committed suicide or has simply run away. The team reconstructs a “Day of Disappearance” timeline that details every minute of the 24 hours prior to the disappearance, following one simple rule: learn who the victim is in order to...

Having achieved almost mythic status with the genius of The Aunty Jack Show in the early seventies Grahame Bond, Rory O'Donahue et al were back in 1975 with a quartet of themed specials all designed to make ample use of the new colour TV sets that were sweeping the nation in the mid seventies. This seldom seen since collection has now been released by the always excellent Roadshow. Apart from the first of the four which is pretty much a live in concert special the team prove yet again that they are well ahead of their time with a collection of fake documentaries, mockumentaries if you will, to quote spinal tap. A style that was quite rare back in the day but is all the rage now with shows such as We Can Be Heroes and even The Office. Theres much fun to be had at the expensive of Wollongong, both the Farrelly Brothers and Norman Gunston are local boys and there is some great location footage of the city in its prime. Great fun and still essential. Distributor: Roadshow Home Enterta...

This highly culty spy-crime drama series from the mid seventies has long been on most TV fan's must see list so all praise to Network for bringing us the entire series (including the original 3 part serial which led to the longer series). Besides the fact that the stories are intriguing the show has held interest because of it featuring the first appearance of a certain Detective Sergeant George Bulman who would later go on to appear in the legendary series Strangers and his own series, here (still played by Don Henderson of course) he is teamed with DC Derek Willis (who would also go on to Strangers) Bulman is a somewhat different beast to the character he became in the later series, single minded and dogged in the extreme Bulman has none of the quirkiness that makes him stand out in Strangers but it is more than interesting to see the genesis of a character though. The star of the series is the excellent Stephen Yardley who is probably best known for having played greasy Ken Mast...

Seasons two and three / reg 4 / out now Based on the character created by Leslie Thomas this new release from Time Life stars Peter Davison as Detective Constable Dangerous Davies, a middle aged copper who only gets the cases nobody else wants. Season one had mostly been based on Thomas's original novels but season two and three are fresh stories. This is a surprisingly good series that whilst obviously having to make changes to the Davies character to bring it up to date still manages to stay true to the flavour of Thomas’s original material, combining as it does, proper who-dunnit material and humorous moments.Especially worthy of note is the relationship between Davison’s Dangerous and Sean Hughes’s Mod who is Dangerous’s best friend, in the books Mod is a chubby middle aged Welshman whilst here he becomes a rake thin Irishman, obviously this doesn’t detract in any way from the series as most viewers won’t necessarily be aware of the source material. Guest stars include the lik...

"You are my sister. You're supposed to drive me crazy." 16 year old Holly is somewhat put out when her father takes a job in Japan, she decides to move in with her 28 year old older sister Valerie in New York City and is soon making a mess of Valeries carefully ordered life with her great career and wonderful boyfriend. It's great to see this entertaining sitcom get a release, Amanda Bynes proving that for someone as young as she is she does have a proper sense of comedy timing and Jennie Garth gets the chance to put Beverly Hills 909210 behind her. There's a bit of a Laverne and Shirley vibe going on here too, many of the episodes revolve around Valerie's attempts to organize her love life and career (she works for and advertising agency) and Holly managing to create a fair bit of typical sitcom chaos. The other regulars in this first season are Valerie's boyfriend Jeff and Holly's best friend Gary (which also echoes the Laverne and Shirley theme). Th...

There's a great moment in recent Will Ferrell comedy Talledega Nights where he mentions his two boys Walker and Texas Ranger which while poking fun at the show also proves how fondly thought of the Norrister series is. Chuck Norris had been making something of a B grade name for himself in martial arts flicks during the 1980's when he was given the chance to star in this crime drama series. Norris is Cordell 'Cord' Walker, a Texas Ranger working out of Dallas and partnered with the younger Jimmy Trivette (Gilyard), Trivette is all new technology and modern methods, totally at odds with Cords good old fashioned way of dealing with criminals, knocking seven shades of you know what out of them. Also on the scene is assistant DA Alex Cahill (Sheree J Wilson). It's all hugely entertaining of course and spread over 23 episodes on 7 discs and is for sure dead pan Chuck's finest moment and although there are violent moments its always quite cartoonish and never glorying...

In the early 1990's there was really only one show worth watching, the mysterious, compelling, beguiling and impenetrable walk through the mind of David Lynch that was Twin Peaks. Paramoount have just released its second season (available in two separate box sets) and its just as hard to fathom out now as it was back then. Ostensibly the series follows FBI agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) who is in Twin Peaks ( a small town near the Canadian border) to investigate the murder of 17 year old home coming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Cooper stirs up a real hornets nest of sex and eccentricities, seemingly everyone in the town is a potential suspect or implicated in some way although its no real; surprise when the killer is revealed midway through this second season. Resolutely non linear, flashbacks are plentiful and the narrative is quite often deliberately obfuscating, which of course is something of a trait of the vague Lynch. Its also extremely quirky with notorious touches such ...

Why be part of the flock when you can rise above it all, well thats what Shaun the Sheep thinks anyway; Welcome to Aardman Animation's rollickly good new pre school series Shaun the Sheep. Kings of stop frame animation, the studios are also home to Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Chicken Run, Aardman have come up with another winner here. This new release from Roadshow features 8 episodes of mayhem as Shaun runs rings around sheepdog Bitzer and drags the rest of the flock into his adventures, the stories themselves are nicely small scale but full of spots of great comic invention such as when Shaun goes on a commando raid to the farmers bathroom to get hot water after being forced to go through a cold sheep dip. The stories are actually mostly silent too so the appeal factor heads across the board and besides Shaun the other characters include Shirley the enormous sheep who thinks about nothing but eating, Timmy the baby lamb and the naughty pigs. An entertaining series t...

After having made her breakthrough on New Faces and appeared on That's Life Victoria Wood had latterly been writing comic plays for ITV, she then moved into what would be her forte, the sketch show, after a well received series called Wood and Walters (co-starring Julie Walters) Wood headed off to the BBC for the now legendary As Seen on TV. A hilarious mix of opening stand up (always of the minutiae of daily life kind), songs, sketches and the faux soap Acorn Antiques. Over the course of two series and one Christmas special (all included here) and armed with her own rep company of players (including the likes of Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Susie Blake and Duncan Preston) Wood became the most important female comic in the UK and easily the funniest. There is so much comedic gold here and it hasn't dated at all from Patricia Routledge's fruity monologues as Kitty, Susie Blake's bored continuity announcer and best of all Acorn Antiques which plunders the style (or lack ...

One of Australia's best remembered sitcoms, Hey Dad at last gets the DVD treatment with 13 episodes from across the show. Created by Gary Reilly who had previously hit big with Kingswood Country this time featured a widowed father bringing up his three young children. While this is pretty much standard American sitcom fare we hadn't really seen the situation domestically overly. Robert Hughes plays Martin Kelly who is running his architects business from home and trying to juggle that with the demands of three growing kids Simon (Christopher Mayer), Debbie (Simone Buchanan) and Jenny (Sarah Monahan), in typical sitcom fashion though help is at hand in the shape of Betty (Julie McGregor), a relative of Martin's wife who not only helps around the house but also helps Martin with his business too. One other mainstay of the series is Simon's best mate Nudge (Christopher Truswell) who ended up becoming the real star of the show, a typical teenager Nudge spends most of his ti...