Product Description

`I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts
but I can't stop eating peanuts'
Orson Welles

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. There is, alas, no hard scientific formula for deciding whether a TV programme is cult or not. You can pore over the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (which will invoke such ideas as religious worship, homage and fashion) but ultimately whether a show is cult or not is as personal a decision as whether you preferred Jenny Hanley to Valerie Singleton, or World Of Sport (with its breathtaking coverage of the World Target Clown Diving Championships from Florida) to Grandstand.

But certain qualities help define what's cult. An obvious and irritating sign is that `Four Yorkshiremen' moment when your peers quote huge chunks of dialogue to each other and titter. But one besotted viewer does not a cult make; it takes at least two to swap allusions and in-jokes.
Swift and irrational condemnation by the legendary Mary Whitehouse once helped many shows become cult. Since she departed to the green room in the sky, the Daily Mail has done its best. But it's not the same. The indignation needs to be dispensed by a woman who looks like the result of a genetic experiment involving Dame Edna Everage and Barbara Woodhouse to be truly effective.

Nor is a show's cult status directly related to its quality. A cult programme can be inspirationally great (like The Singing Detective), so weird that even regular viewers aren't sure what'll happen next (Spike Milligan's Q series) or, like Crossroads, as cheesy and as full of holes as Switzerland's annual output of Emmental. It takes a certain nerve to set a soap opera in the glamour-free zone that is the Midlands, shooting every scene in one take even if the set began to shake, and start a glorious tradition whereby characters aren't written out but simply forgotten. In 1967, Benny Wilmott, a teenager who ran the coffee bar, was told by Meg Richardson to `go out and buy a bag of sugar', an errand from which he had still not returned when the show closed 20 years later.

A cult show is usually an original. In 1971, American humorist Fred Allen noted, `Imitation is the sincerest form of television.' The industry's default mode is to repeat a success until the repetitions stop being successful, which is why most of the time it's the originals we cherish, Monty Python rather than The Goodies, Morecambe And Wise not Hale And Pace (whom Victor Lewis-Smith accurately described as `the world's only known comedy double act consisting of two straight men'). For most of us, Hamish Macbeth is a work of subtlety and Monarch Of The Glen is a poor copy with the quirkiness removed to make space for extra shortbread.
Catchphrases help, be they as blatant as `Nice to see you to see you...'
(there is something almost Pavlovian in the way we all feel obliged to shout `nice!') as apparently innocuous as `Are you sure that's wise?' or even `Hands that do dishes can be soft as your face.'

A programme's cult value isn't just determined by the show itself - we play our part. Children's susceptibility to media influence is debated by sociologists, leader writers, programme-makers and politicians. Yet the influence, good or ill, is obvious in the number of programmes, one-liners and slogans that enter our young brains to pop up at random for the rest of our lives. For Britons of a certain age, there was a time in their lives when Biddy Baxter was one of the most important people in the world, almost as eminent as the prime minister, a remote god-like figure who moved in mysterious ways to produce the wonder that was Blue Peter. Many of the shows which have stuck with us were those we saw before we grew up (or before we reached the age at which we are officially deemed to have grown up): Roobarb, Tiswas, The Demon Headmaster, et al. This isn't always true, but it's true an awful lot of the time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #409639 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
Following the same format as others in the same series, this book is organized by genre, covering everything from sci-fi to comedy, 1960s soap operas to Czech animation, Alan Whicker to Alan Bleasdale and "Zed Cars" to "Zoo Time". Meet the real-life characters behind the sitcoms, read about the ones that got away and the ones they couldn't kill. Put on your pac-a-mac and paddle in a timeless tide of tosh, tension and titillation.

Excerpted from The Rough Guide to Cult TV (Mini Rough Guides) by Paul Simpson. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PEANUTS, PARANOIA AND PANICS
A few misguided souls still mock the very idea that television,
a medium famously described as `chewing gum for the eyes', could create anything as powerful as a cult. Orson Welles, who knew a thing or two about the power of the media (and, for that matter, Californian wines and Domecq sherry), got closer to the truth with his peanuts analogy.
Often, the very people who insist on television's terrifying triviality, proclaim it is a deeply subversive force. Moral panics about television date back to 1948 when the New York Times sighed: `the wife scarcely knows where the kitchen is, let alone her place in it, Junior scorns the afternoon sunlight for the glamour of a darkened living room and father's briefcase lies unopened in the foyer. The reason: television.'

The bad publicity never stops: various studies have blamed/credited TV for making viewers paranoid, soothing stressed battery hens and causing a rise in accidents in the home through endless DIY series.
The most significant study was conducted in Germany and the UK in the early 1990s, in which 80 families were paid £40 a week not to watch telly. The pay-per-non-view experiment soon ended as the families gave the money back because without TV they had nothing to talk about. Too bloody right. Where would the art of conversation be if we couldn't speculate about when Mulder was going to kiss Scully, how long Vanessa would last in Celebrity Big Brother, and whether Jerry Springer really wanted to do a show called `I Married A Horse'? (Answer: No, but he did make a programme called `Seven Months Pregnant And Still Stripping'.)

THE BOREDOM-KILLING BUSINESS
The final word goes to Howard Beale, the newsreader who threatens to commit suicide on air in the 1976 movie Network. In one of his shorter speeches, he observes: `Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.' There are times when TV seems to be in the boredom-generating business (dogs saying `sausages' on That's Life, Ray Stubbs, every TV series `starring' Cannon and Ball) but at its best, the box kills boredom almost as effectively as Domestos is said to kill all known germs.