Featured Blog Posts
Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) As the episode begins, Mary is talking excitedly on the phone at her office desk, planning her Christmas visit with her mother. Right afterwards, her boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner) informs her that…
In the movies, few brand names are as instantly recognised or as redolent of a certain genre of filmmaking as that of Hammer. What Disney is to animation, Hammer is to English Gothic. The ‘Hammer’ moniker actually comes…
On 12 October 1969, out of the blue, a Detroit radio station began announcing that Paul McCartney was dead. The shock claim was picked up by coast-to-coast newspapers and conspiracy theorists, who scoured Beatles lyrics and photographs for…
Steptoe and Son (1962 – 1965) Happy Days (1974 – 1984) The Dustbinmen (1969 – 1970) Bewitched (1964 – 1972) George & Mildred (1976 – 1979) I Love Lucy (1951 – 1957) Blue Peter (1958 – current) The…
The Ramones & Toto This is just one of those lineups that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, but The Ramones supported Toto, who were big in the ’70s and ’80s with cheesy,…
Featured Television Posts
1 9 6 6 (UK) 13 x 15 minute episodes Here is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready to play. But this box can hide a secret inside. Can you guess what is in it today?…
1 9 6 5 – 1 9 6 7 (USA) 65 x 30 minute episodes This military farce about the gallant incompetents of F Troop at Fort Courage was set in Kansas in 1866, during the final days of…
1 9 6 5 – 1 9 7 1 (USA) 168 x 30 minute episodes By 1967 CBS believed that enough years had passed to diminish the memory of many of the horrors of World War II, which had…
1 9 6 4 – 1 9 6 5 (USA) 30 minute episodes This daytime drama series from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation debuted on 28 December 1964 and aired five days a week. In the US, NBC began…
1 9 7 6 – 1 9 8 3 (USA) 178 x 30 minute episodes “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” Laverne and Shirley was the first spin-off from Happy Days, where the characters Laverne De Fazio and Shirley Feeney had made their debut…
Featured Music Posts
Six and a half feet tall and uglier than he could be, Kim Fowley was born – in the Philippines – on the day Hitler invaded Poland. He grew up in the last Babylonian days of tarnished Hollywood.…
When Australian band Zoot moved from their hometown of Adelaide (where they had played as Times Unlimited and Down The Line) to Melbourne in 1968, their management gave them a bubblegum image, centred on the slogan “Think Pink, Think Zoot”.…
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In 1969, a young Dutch millionaire called Stanley August Miesegaes (‘Sam’ to his associates) gave vocalist and keyboard player (and – at the time -drummer) Rick Davies an opportunity to form the “band of his dreams” and Miesegaes…
1 9 8 7 – 1 9 8 9 (Australia) 72 x 180 minutes The Factory was an Australian music programme that aired for three hours on ABC TV on Saturday mornings from 1987 to 1989. The show…
Featured Movies Posts
Newlyweds Tony Hudson (John Gregson) and young wife Jane (June Thorburn) are invited to join their industrialist friend Dudley Partridge (Cecil Parker), his absent-minded wife Valerie (Avice Landone) and a few friends on a battered old yacht for…
When astronauts land on the Moon in 1964 they are surprised to discover a British flag and evidence that the place was first visited in 1899. On Earth, the last surviving member of the Victorian lunar expedition space…
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island begins in Richmond, Virginia at the siege of 1865 during the Civil War, with a group of Union prisoners of war – led by the dashing Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig) – escaping in an…
Lemuel Gulliver (Kerwin Matthews) is a hardworking but not very wealthy doctor who wants to make a success of himself in order to provide for his betrothed, Elizabeth (June Thorburn). Leaving his home in Wapping (London), Gulliver takes…
Hero research scientist Dr Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe, back in the nation’s capital after surviving The Day the Earth Stood Still ) tries to prevent an invasion of the Earth after aliens abduct his father-in-law. He slows down…
Featured Pop Culture Posts
On Sunday 25 May 1986, Americans were asked to simultaneously hold hands across a 4,137-mile route stretching from California’s Santa Monica Pier to New York’s Battery Park in an effort to raise from $50 million to $100 million…
“Awesome” is equal to or slightly better than “Cool”, certainly better than “Bad” (or “Bitchin”) and about on a par with “Gnarly”, but definitely nowhere near as good as “Tubular”. . . well, that totally, like, rocks my…
1 9 7 4 – 2 0 1 2 (UK) Before the rise of 24-hour networks and readily accessible internet access, bored television viewers in the UK seeking entertainment at 3 AM would have to make do with…
Learning to ride a bicycle was always a significant childhood milestone. So was acquiring a bike suitable for road use. This often came as a present to mark a special birthday or passing the 11-plus exam. Owning a cycle…
The peppermint flavoured Polo was first manufactured in Britain in 1948. The mint had been invented by Rowntree employee John Bargewell at their Factory in York but the launch of the sweet was delayed due to the onset…
Featured Social History Posts
At 2.30 am on 17 June 1972, during the lead-up to the 1972 American presidential elections, five intruders broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington. They were caught trying to install…
In 1959 a revolution took place in Cuba and Fidel Castro came to power. He introduced a Soviet-style government on the island and he looked to the Soviet Union for support. In May 1960 the Soviet Premier vowed…
In one of the most horrific incidents of violence against civilians during the Vietnam War, a company of American soldiers brutally killed the majority of the population of the South Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai on 16 March…
January 01 – French singer Maurice Chevalier dies (b. 1888) in Paris. He is 83. 03 – An IRA bomb injures 55 women and children when it explodes in a Belfast department store. 04 – Rose Heilbron is…
What were the 80s? . . . Bueller? . . . Anyone? New Wave, Big hair, Pac-Man, the Sinclair ZX computer, Dallas, Dynasty, Thatcherism, the Phillips 2000 VCR, Ronald Reagan, skinny ties, Hands Across America and starving Ethiopians…
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Latest Posts
1 9 8 4 (USA) 10 x 60 minute episodes Chicago police officers Mac Riley (Robert Ginty) and Andy Senkowski (Jeff McCracken) leave the cold climate of their home town…
1 9 8 3 – 1 9 8 5 (UK) 20 x 50 minute episodes This epic BBC series presented the split loyalties of the Lacey family (brought about by…
After an encounter at sea with an unknown underwater creature stalking an “atomic” submarine, Commander Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) of the US Navy works with scientists Professor Joyce (Faith Domergue) and…
1 9 8 6 (UK) 8 x 50 minute episodes This eight-part biographical drama from the BBC starred Carolyn Pickles as the Dublin orphan Margaret Kelly who was raised in…
1 9 9 7 (UK) 6 x 30 minute episodes Set in the late 1940s, the central character is 20-year-old Roy Osborne (Matthew Cottle), a young man struck with tuberculosis…
1 9 9 2 – 1 9 9 3 (UK) 12 x 30 minute episodes This BBC comedy series featured a three-generation West Indian family living together in North London.…
Latest News
4 November 2021 Lionel Blair, the veteran actor, dancer and entertainer, has died at the age of 92. Born Henry Lionel Ogus, he grew up in Stamford Hill, north London…
9 October 2021Canadian-born Rick Jones began his TV career in Britain as part of the Play School team before starring as “Yoffy” in Fingerbobs, presenting stories featuring paper finger-puppet characters…
26 September 2021. Alan Lancaster, founding bassist of rock greats Status Quo, has died in Australia, aged 72. He had been suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for some time.
16 September 2021. Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.
Featured Aussie Posts
1 9 9 5 – 1 9 9 8 (Australia) 56 x episodes 10 x episodes A blend of variety, talk show and sketch comedy created and hosted by ‘Rampaging’ Roy Slaven…
1 9 6 7 – 1 9 7 8 (Australia) Commonly abbreviated to TDT, This Day Tonight was Australia’s first nightly current affairs television show. Based on the BBC daily current affairs…
1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 0 (Australia) 52 x 10 minute episodes This children’s drama serial from GTV-9 (Australia) followed the exploits of a group of children…
1 9 5 7 – 1 9 5 9 (Australia) 70 x 15 minute episodes Australia’s first TV sitcom and the first in the long line of Crawford drama productions,…
Featured Canadian Posts
1 9 7 6 – 1 9 8 4 (Canada) 72 x 30 minute episodes 42 x 90 minute episodes 18 x 45 minute episodes Second City Television (SCTV) was a popular…
Bob Clark’s imaginatively nasty low-budget Canadian slasher traps a group of college students in the snow-dusted sorority house of Sigma Lamba Chi, where they are terrorised by an obscene phone…
Since co-founding Buffalo Springfield in 1966 (and then splitting after two albums), Neil Young rarely stopped moving. Born in Toronto in November 1945, Neil Perceval Young worked in Canada as a folk singer…
Roberta Joan Anderson was born on 7 November 1943, in Fort Macleod in the prairie province of Alberta, Canada. She was the only child of William Anderson, a flight lieutenant in…
