Stuart Millard

A Prince Among Men

The latest Shitcom to fall under my gaze has a lot in common with the previous entry, Captain Butler. It too hails from the 1990s as a star vehicle for a Red Dwarf actor, and just like Butler, is an absolute clogged toilet of a show. Like Faith in the Future, Not On Your Nellie, Life of Riley, and N...

You Are Haunted - Episode 3

Nobody wants to stay dead.---Theme is Comascape - Chant, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. The rest of the music and SFX are via freesound.org.

Gone To Pot

Though ITV's 2017 reality show, Gone To Pot – a series that sends celebrities to learn about marijuana – looks like classic Patreon material, I must admit, I've been putting it off. I usually cover things I've at least some cursory knowledge of, and as someone who doesn't even dr...

The Accursed 90s: The Word

Unlike a lot of what I cover on here, The Word isn't some forgotten piece of pop culture, but one of the most frequently reviled, having fully earned its place in the history book of very, very smelly telly. But for each of its oft-cited moments of viewer outrage – members of the public drinki...

Who Do You Do?

Having looked at Freddie Starr during the arse-end of his television career, it's time to examine his peak, when – legend states – he was a comedic force of nature, like Robin Williams, Johnny Rotten, and Norman Wisdom rolled into one. Freddie's early rise occurred during his time on LWT...

Bruce Forsyth's Big Night

In the late seventies, Bruce Forsyth was riding high at the BBC with The Generation Game, when he suddenly announced he was quitting television for a return to the stage, in a jukebox musical of Anthony Newley tunes, The Traveling Music Show. Following bad reviews, it closed after four months, and B...

You Are Haunted - Episode 2

Fathers and sons, crime and punishment.---Theme is Comascape - Chant, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. The rest of the music and SFX are via freesound.org.

Miss Great Britain 1984

There's something inherently 1970s about the great British beauty contest, and though this is the 1984 edition of Miss Great Britain, both aesthetically and ideologically, it already feels a decade out of time. While the outside world was in thrall to Boy George, Madonna and Mr. T, and Ghostbust...

The Accursed 90s – Craig Charles' Funky Bunker

This is going to be unpleasant. Take the nightmare of 90's ITV's post-pub programming – Get Stuffed, The Good Sex Guide, Carnal Knowledge, James Whale – then throw in the era's most irritating screen presence in Craig Charles, and cut him loose from the binds of the watershed. 1997 w...

"Grant, please..."

Cool Britannia feat. Freddie Starr

The mid-90s were an incredibly exciting time for British comedy. Among others, '94 gave us the television debuts of The Day Today, The Fast Show, and Knowing Me, Knowing You, while the following year had Fist of Fun, Father Ted, and The Mrs Merton Show. These were exciting new voices who'd d...

The Unpredictable Michael Barrymore

Lets go back to a time before Michael Barrymore was alleged to have done or covered up a murder, when he was arguably Britain's most beloved entertainer. It's 1994, at the peak of his popularity, when everything truly was awright. Well, almost, as he's fresh off a highly-publicised drink...

Podcast Launch: You Are Haunted - Episode 1

To celebrate our moving into the 3rd year of this endeavour, here's the first episode of my new podcast, You Are Haunted. What's it about? It's better if you go in blind. This isn't replacing any of the current content, and for the forseeable future, these will just be bonus posts.I&...

That Yellow Bastard – The Occult Whimsy of Wizbit

As I've addressed before, I detest the lazy way of looking back at kids TV and importing adult sleaze onto it – “The Magic Roundabout were all on drugs! Mr. Benn rented those costumes so he could sniff the shoes for a wank!” But undeniably, there are shows where there's no need to go f...

The Accursed 90s: James Whale on Television

Few things encapsulate the feel of 90's Britain quite like the 'tell it like it is' tabloid columnist or DJ; beer garden philosophers 'putting the world to rights' who were inexplicably popular at the time; men like Garry Bushell, Richard Littlejohn, Ceaser the Geezer and James W...

1988 Children's Royal Variety

It speaks of how comparatively little media there was back in the eighties that the Royal Variety Shows were such a big deal. Was it a thing in anyone else's house to watch along with a copy of the Radio Times and a pen, crossing off celebrities from the cast when they appeared? “Show's al...

Flash Fiction Month #1 – Bird

As we're approaching the 2nd anniversary here, I thought I'd do something special for the $5 tier, so for the whole of February, I'll be posting a tiny story every single day. As it's a leap year, that's 29 self-contained stories, for a total of roughly 8,000 words, mostly in the...

GamesMaster: Snapshots of a Decade

I can't be delving into the cultural lawlessness of the 1990s without looking at GamesMaster; a jumbled package of clunky 'modern' tech, confused celebrities, and a revered elderly astronomer and 'Sir' who'd been digitised into a giant, Zardoz-style head; all held together by...

Captain Butler

Your early teens are that feet-finding period when you're discovering things – movies, music, fashion – that didn't come from your parents or siblings, but belong to you; a period when you like things so intensely, they become a defining part of your personality. For me, one of those thi...

It's a Royal Knockout

The perception of the Royal Family is in an odd place right now. While thousands die of austerity, it's hard to look favourably on anyone who takes their shits on a gold toilet, but on the other hand, remember how excitedly the nation's gran pointed at some cows? Everyone loves The Crown, bu...

I Watched Jim Davidson's Adult Panto II - Boobs in the Wood

Seeing as the response to my original piece about Jim Davidson's adult panto, Sinderella, was the thing that pushed me into starting a Patreon, I figured I'd ruin another Christmas for myself, and sit down with its sequel, Boobs in the Wood. Though he shares a script credit with Bryan Blackb...

Les Dennis and Russ Abbot at Christmas

The Christmas edition of The Les Dennis Laughter Show aired on 22nd December 1990, between Challenge Anneka's restoration of a Romanian Orphanage and the TV premiere of Innerspace. Originally titled simply The Laughter Show, and featuring the double act of Dennis and Dustin Gee, the series was r...

Noel's Live, Live Christmas Breakfast Show

For a good while, Noel Edmonds was Christmas television manifest. More than just his seasonal first name, Noel's Christmas Presents became as much an annual tradition as World's Strongest Man, premieres of the big American film from five years ago, and your grandad ruining dinner by saying s...

Emu and Orville at Christmas

This tale of two birds begins with Emu at Christmas, a festive episode of Emu's All Live Pink Windmill Show from Christmas Day, 1984. I've a vivid memory of receiving a Pink Windmill filled with sweets that year, so I'm certain I was watching at the time. As a brief explanation for those...

The Krankies at Christmas

For non-Brits or millennials unaware of the Krankies, how best to describe them without seeming like I finally ran out of material and made up the sickest thing imaginable? A wildly popular double-act throughout the 1980s, the Krankies were a real-life married couple from Scotland, Ian and Janette T...

Scavengers

After tackling Cyberzone, I felt culturally obliged to cover another stinky futuristic game show from the same period. Scavengers went out on ITV in the summer of 1994, thrust into the prime Saturday tea-time slot where Gladiators had become a national obsession, with huge expectations. What's i...

I'm Famous and Frightened

The mid-2000s were an amazing time for good-bad paranormal television, with Most Haunted in its glory years, and Living TV churning out a constant stream of weirdo psychics in green-o-vision pretending to be choked by dead jailers. Barring Most Haunted itself, the majority of these hundreds of hours...

Baywatch does Monsters and Mermaids

The weird talking-point trivia about Baywatch is the way it eventually rebranded into paranormal detective series, Baywatch Nights, as though this marked a great tonal shift from a previously grounded drama. Dear reader, this is very much not the case, with half the back catalogue seemingly consisti...

The Accursed 90s: Talk Show Goths

So much of 90's trash culture either emanated from the raft of American afternoon talk shows, or used them as fertile breeding ground, like germs fucking in an old yoghurt. From “you ain't all that!” to talking to the hand, cos the face ain't listening, these series left a terribly b...

Cyberzone

Nowadays, with all the videos of dads wearing goggles smashing their heads on the living room floor, it's clear that Virtual Reality works, but its first iteration in the early 90s? Not so much. Graphics consisted of looming, brutalist blocks, allowing players the fun of slowly waving a disembod...