SCHEDULING NOTE: The Tomorrow People will be back in two weeks’ time, taking over Sky‘s slot once it finishes next week.
18:00 – Opening music.
18:03 – Sky S01E06 – Life Force – More HTV children’s science fantasy weirdness, written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin. This week, finding a safe place for Sky to recover, Arby and Jane are lured away and trapped. Goodchild tries to attack Sky again – but Sky has now metamorphosed into his true form. First broadcast on Sat 10th May 1975 by ITV.
18:29 – Star Trek (The Original Series) – S01E05 – The Enemy Within – This week, a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into two halves: one meek and indecisive, the other violent and ill tempered. The remaining crew members stranded on the planet cannot be beamed up to the ship until a problem is fixed, because they hadn’t invented the shuttlecraft yet. Wikipedia adds: “Leonard Nimoy, unhappy with part of the script that called for Spock to hit ‘evil’ Kirk on the head with a phaser to render him unconscious, suggested the idea of the Vulcan nerve pinch. Director Leo Penn had a difficult time understanding the idea, but William Shatner got it immediately and helped demonstrate Nimoy’s concept. This episode is one of the small group for which a full score was written, in this case by New York composer Sol Kaplan. Although he wrote only two scores for the series, Sol Kaplan’s music was tracked endlessly throughout the show’s first two seasons. ‘The Enemy Within’ is a thrillingly intellectual score, by turns overcome with compassion for Kirk’s plight and clinically detached in its melodic experimentation with the situation. The aggressive, threatening ‘evil Kirk’ music made major contributions by being tracked into other episodes.” Looks like this is the first episode to have Balok in the closing credits, which had me covering my eyes as a kid far more than the Daleks ever did. First broadcast in the USA by NBC on Thu 6th Oct 1966.
19:19 – …And Mother Makes Three – S01E06 – A Pound of Flesh – More gentle middle-class Thames sitcom, starring Wendy Craig as the newly-widowed Sally Harrison, doing her best to bring up her two boisterous sons, Simon and Peter. This week, Sally’s utterly horrified when Peter tells her that she’s got a wobbly bum, the boys bet her that she won’t be able to lose as much weight as Auntie, and things quickly get tough when hunger starts to get the better of her. First broadcast Tue 1st June 1971 by ITV.
19:40 – Brass – S01E03 – More Granada-made northern-drama-satirising comedy, starring Timothy West. This week, Agnes encourages the now-hungry strikers, whilst Charlotte is “doing good” at the soup kitchen. As Bradley is making sure George can leave the hospital (to use him for the SBD experiments), Jack and Isobel are again found in the stables, and Agnes discovers that her son Matt has lost his good job and is now digging coal. She then sees her husband George being driven in Bradley’s car: a blackleg!!! First broadcast on Mon 7th March 1983. As noted previously, after the rather lacklustre opening two episodes of Brass, three weeks ago I moved it – with the impatience of a bad BBC3 scheduler – to the opening slot at around 5.30pm. However, the two episodes that followed were instantly back to the fantastic broad satire that I remember from my youth, however only Phil and I saw episode 3 that week, and only I got to see episode 4 the following week. So I’ve decided to reinstate it back into its original timeslot, restarting from episode 3 (with apologies to Phil!). I hope you enjoy it, if not, next week’s is even better.
20:05 – Van der Valk – S01E06 – The Adventurer – More Thames-made Amsterdam-based crime drama, starring Barry Foster. This week, in the last of the first series, a deadly car crash has Van der Valk flummoxed – and fearful. Why was the victim carrying a gun and a photo of a local stonemason? No one shares his concern, however, including the mason, who dismisses the offer of police protection. But Van der Valk can’t walk away just yet. With Paul Eddington (The Good Life; Yes, [Prime] Minister) in a fantastic early role as the aforementioned stonemason. First broadcast on Wed 18th Oct 1972 by ITV.
20:56 – Sheepy’s Unwatched FILM Project #6: What Lies Beneath (2000) – an American supernatural horror thriller film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. The wife of a university research scientist believes that her lakeside Vermont home is haunted by a ghost – or that she is losing her mind. It was the first film by Zemeckis’ production company ImageMovers. The film opened in 2,813 theaters in North America, and grossed $291 million at the worldwide box office, becoming the tenth-highest-grossing film of the year. It received mixed reviews, but was nominated for three Saturn Awards. A good friend of mine lent me the DVD of this shortly after release, saying it was one of the best horror films she’d ever seen. Me being me, I never got round to it, and eventually had to return it unwatched. However ever since I discovered it was the first of three films to be written by Clark Gregg (who played Agent Phil Coulson in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. etc.), I’ve been even more keen to see it, so having since picked up my own copy of the DVD for 50p in CEX, here we go…
23:01 – Snub TV S01E04 – This week featuring The Sundays, Boogie Down Productions, The Wolfgang Press, The JAMs/KLF, Slab, King Blank, and Thrill Kill Kult. First broadcast on Mon 30th Jan 1989 at 7pm by BBC2.
23:30 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Original Radio Series) – Fit the Sixth – Original Radio Times listing: “(the final): Will the Ultimate Question to Life, The Universe and Everything (to which the answer is 42) be discovered? Will our heroes be able to control their newly stolen space-ship and the enormous fleet of black battle cruisers that is following them? Will it end happily or in the certain death that has threatened them so persistently? Starring Peter Jones as The Book, with David Jason as Captain of the ‘B’ Ark and Jonathan Cecil as his Number One and Management Consultant. Special effects by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.” First broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on Wed 5th Apr 1978 at 10.30pm.
00:01 – Closedown music.
00:05 – Closedown.