TV ARCHIVE LINKS

It’s been something of a week for telly links as I spent a lazy week at home mostly watching old DVDs in preparation for some audio articles I have in mind for later in the year, or maybe next year, or maybe never.

Kicking off was the article that I did actually write featuring two episodes from well-known TV series that I try to find time to watch each and every Christmastime these days. This led me right back to “Quatermass and the Pit” (which is one of my all-time favourites) and I recently made the connection that the first episode was transmitted just before Christmas in 1958 which immediately makes it traditional Christmas telly, and therefore worthy of mention in that article.

And so, with little excuse, the disc came off the shelf and episode one, “The Halfmen” got a good old airing and note-scribbling, and will be written about at greater length another time.

One of the features of “Quatermass and the Pit” is that, a dozen years after the end of the Second World War, one of the plot elements involves the investigative and excavation skills of a bomb Disposal Unit headed up by one Captain Potter played by a rather young and dashing John Stratton.

John Stratton had a long and illustrious career in (mostly) British Film and Television, one of which was a memorable later appearance opposite Colin Baker’s “Doctor Who” playing Shockeye o’the Quawncing Grig, a cannibal chef.

Captain Potter and his men are called in when something unusual is found buried at the Hobb’s Lane archaeological dig which is initially suspected of being a Second World War unexploded bomb, but which turns out to be something far older and far, far more dangerous.

Mentions of unexploded bombs led me back to a recent episode in my (currently stalled) marathon rewatch of “Dad’s Army” in which an unexploded bomb is found one morning in the vault of the bank managed by Captain Mainwaring and ends up resting in the arms of both him and Sergeant Wilson, with a little hilarity ensuing, in one of the show’s more thoughtful early colour episodes.

This also reminded me of “Danger UXB”, a drama series from the late 1970s, which told of the exploits of Anthony Andrews as Brian Ash and his team as they dealt with unexploded bombs in and around London during the Second World War.

It’s a tense and gripping thirteen episodes of quality drama from Thames Television, in which it is unwise to get too attached to any of the characters in case they don’t make it through to the end credits that week. It has a quality cast, too, featuring great character actors like Iain Cuthbertson, Judy Geeson, Deborah Watling, and Kenneth Cranham in relatively minor roles.

Coincidentally, one of the sappers throughout the series is played by George Innes, who also turned up in the first episode of “Hazell” which I unwrapped from the cellophane on the same day I decided to try out “Danger UXB”. A few years later, George Innes tried his luck in Hollywood and turned up in episodes of both “Hill Street Blues” and “M*A*S*H” which makes for an interesting connection worthy of further thread pulling.

Also featuring in “Danger UXB” was Maurice Roeves, who you may know from programmes as diverse as “The Nightmare Man” and “Tutti-Frutti”, an actor who also had a touch of Hollywood in his life during the eighties and nineties, featuring in shows like “Remington Steele”, “Magnum PI”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, and “Jake and the Fatman”, as well as finding time to assist in finishing off Peter Davison’s “Doctor Who” in 1984.

There aren’t too many crossovers between “Dad’s Army” and “Doctor Who” despite the fact that Jon Pertwee always claimed to have been offered the part of Captain Mainwaring, and Bill Pertwee played Hodges, the ARP Warden. That said, I was watching “Put That Light Out” (the one set in a lighthouse) the other day and it crossed my mind that the set for the light room itself looked remarkably similar to the one in “Horror of Fang Rock”, a Tom Baker “Doctor Who” tale made half a decade later in Birmingham.

I imagine that the scenery store of the BBC was unlikely to need to contain two complete lighthouse sets, and so I imaging that a lot of it was recycled. Certainly those tiny vents on the walls underneath the window glass look extraordinarily similar to me, and that big rotating lamp prop looks unlikely to be duplicated… although the one in “The Goodies” episode “Lighthouse Keeping Loonies” looks very different indeed.

So maybe they built three of the things after all.