Stuart Millard posts
Posts: 334
Files: 300
Treasure Hunt
In my gigantic list of horrible stuff to cover on here, I'd always planned on hitting 3-2-1, but I snoozed and losed, and Limmy beat me to it. So instead, let's get into the era's other weird as shit riddle-me-ree gameshow. Like Crystal Maze and Fort Boyard, Treasure Hunt is an adaptation of a French property, but the resulting series is so achingly British, it feels like something specially put together to rouse the Queen out of her room during a bout of depression. This isn't a gameshow, it's a roving Olympic opening cerem...
The Accursed 90s – Endurance UK
Before British television became uniformly embarrassing, home audiences had to ring second-hand cringe-laughs from the clip shows of Clive James and Chris Tarrant, shrieking at pre-watershed cereal ads from Europe which casually featured bare breasts, and game shows that tormented their contestants – often half-naked and crying – to physical and mental breaking point. This was the era when home-grown quizzes consisted of Lennie Bennett and Paul Daniels reading questions off cards and swapping light banter with people in lovely knitwear, pre...
The Larry Grayson Show
Larry Grayson is another performer who exists in my mind, and perhaps in modern pop culture, more defined by other people's impressions of him than his actual self; an entire historic essence boiled down into the catchphrases “shut that door” and “what a gay day!” Mike Yarwood and co drained a great many hours of mileage from Larry, sucking in their cheeks and cocking their wrists, but outside of clips, the man himself is a bit of a blank spot in my knowledge base. It's time to rectify that. Sounds a bit rude, doesn't it? Li...
Jim Davidson’s Adult Pantos: Closing the Cursed Trilogy
As this is the final post of 2020, without wishing to come across all 'Bill Murray at the end of Scrooged,' I'm afraid I must drop some unironic earnesty, and sincerely thank you all for sticking with me through this Hell-year. I hope i've been able to provide a little distraction from the grim world outside, and having an audience to make content for has kept me sane and motivated.I figured what better Christmas present to my beloved Patrons than a near-half-hour video essay about Jim? Hopefully this will find its way into the ...
An Accursed 90's Christmas
It somehow feels dirty letting the horrible 90s get their lager and spunk-covered hands on Christmas, but I regret to inform you there were at least ten of them held in that decade. To get a sense of what a 90's Christmas was truly like, I'm afraid we must return to some of our previous haunts from that most desolate period, beginning with the televisual stylings of James Whale.If you read the original piece, you'll recall Whale's presenting style is that of a man who neither knows nor cares what's happening on his own show....
You Are Haunted - Episode 5
Christmas special.---Theme is Comascape - Chant, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. The rest of the music and SFX are via freesound.org.
The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show
In the history books of light entertainment, the name Mike Yarwood is invoked almost entirely as an example of being massively famous and successful before suddenly disappearing, never to be seen again. I've only the vaguest memories of watching at the time, aware of his work mostly through retrospectives, which cover the swiftness of his retirement, peppered with clips of him taking off now-long-dead politicians. In my head, Yarwood's is the beige coloured comedy of centrist dads; a torch picked up off the floor by Rory Bremner, whose ...
Noel's Christmas Presents
With my distressing fixation on Edmonds, Noel's Christmas Presents is one of those suggestions that comes up a lot, and I almost went there last year, only to decide against it at the last moment. How could I possibly write about the cultural byword for kind-hearted event television which left its audience weeping, and to this day, remains embedded in our national psyche, both as entertainment and as the most powerful Christmas spirit Broken Britain had to offer? Noel's only desire – like Scrooge on Christmas morning – was to bring ...
Runaround at Christmas
As a little behind the curtain goss, I had intended to cover Mike Reid's adult panto, Pussy in Boots this year, but then something else came along, which I simply couldn't refuse (to be posted just before Christmas). But Reid's such an iconically bizarre figure, I still needed to see what Christmas was like, as viewed through the yellow-tinted medallion-man specs of his cockney eyes. When I think of Reid, I always recall the time a sadly out-of-it (and much missed) Tara Palmer-Tomkinson appeared the worse for wear on Frank Skinner&#...
Bad Influence!
I simply couldn't cover GamesMaster without looking at its opposite number, CITV's Bad Influence! “I have observed, Millard,” you sniff, “the exclamation point denoting your wild excitement. I'd venture we're in for quite the thrill ride?” Please be aware, you idiot, that this punctuation is not an endorsement, but part of the show's title; like Airplane! or That Darn Cat!, in reference to the shrieking moral panic around videogames in the early 90s. With this 'owning it' reclamation of the medium's bad-b...
Uri Geller's Cursed
Ah, Uri Geller. For a man so spectacularly up my alley, at the exact convergence point of naff paranormalism and television kooks, it was inevitable we'd meet on these pages for a deep dive. I have touched on Geller before, briefly in my book Smoke & Mirrors and Steven Seagal, and in his appearance on Gamesmaster. He is, to put it in a way he won't sue me for, an interesting man. Famously litigious, I'd like to state for the record, Uri is definitely real, and bends spoons with his mind and not just his hands when people aren't ...
Michael Jackson's Ghosts
A recent story in the Hollywood Reporter about Bryan Singer's toxic sets on the X-Men movies opened with a brief anecdote, meant to demonstrate the general disarray of production. In it, Michael Jackson showed up at the studio, to pitch himself for the role of Professor X; an old, bald white man, who'd eventually be played by Patrick Stewart. Initially this seemed so wacky to me as to be unbelievable, but in the context of Jackson's life and career, it's decidedly standard behaviour.Though history will remember Jackson as a sing...
The Dukes of Hazzard & CHiPS - Science Fiction Double Feature
Is it Halloween already? Like your most annoying Facebook friend from school's birthday, our greatest festival now takes up a full month. It seems to get earlier every year, although it only starts to feel like Halloween when you see the Coca-Cola hearse. October is the perfect time to march through the streets, eyes black as coal, chanting the name Aleister Crowley, in the exact cadence and tune of "have a banana!" But it's also the most prurient month to examine episodes of TV shows which brought real paranormal elements into ...
And There's More...
In digging around weird old shit off the telly, I spend half my time falling off the end of the pier down various light entertainment wormholes. One minute, it's the height of summer and you're watching the Krankies Christmas special, then you realise it's been uploaded by Jimmy Cricket himself, as was the 1988 Children's Royal Variety, in an admirable attempt to preserve his own legacy for the aliens who'll eventually stumble on the ruins of our civilisation. And in rummaging through the rest of his videos, you find a sketc...
Bonus Post: The Time I Didn't Meet a Gnome
This is about a teacher I had at the age of eight, but as he's not consented to be written about on here, to protect his privacy, I'm going to call him Mr. Diarrhea. Hm, on second thoughts, that's a bit too... diarrhea-y. Let's call him Mr. Monk, because the young me believed his bald spot was a deliberate haircut, meant to mimic those of medieval monks, as seen in my gran's collection of weirdly specific monk-themed egg cups and kitchen bric-a-brac. Mr. Monk was an inventive teacher, who'd quieten down noisy pupils by s...
Dream Stuffing
Shitcoms #11
Our Show
Lasting two series from 1976-77, ITV's Our Show was the Bugsy Malone of television, the very Our of the title a metaphorical 'NO ADULTS ALLOWED!' sign swinging from the door handle. Surely intended to be a proto Why Don't You?, using a team of child presenters the same age as its audience, the result was closer to CBS's infamous Kid Nation, with a disjointed level of chaos not seen outside of the 1989 Brit Awards. These were not kids off the street, but from the stage school breeding grounds that filled the casts of Grange H...
The Accursed 90s: The Girlie Show
As a frequent stablemate on lists of Britain's worst ever television, The Girlie Show was essentially sold as The Word, except instead of Terry Christian, there were a trio of female hosts talking about boozin' and shaggin'. Wait, that can't be right?! That's exclusively men stuff isn't it? Sorry pal, this is the nineties, and the ladies – sorry, ladettes – enjoy sex now too. Subsequently, like many of the things we've suffered through on here, it's firmly placed in that post-pub wanking slot. The three prese...
Owt Good On, Mam? – The Three L's
In trawling through the worst of pop culture, I always want to give my beloved Patrons their money's worth, but often come across something which is fully on-brand yet too short or singular for a deep dive. So, I figured I'd start a series bundling some of these orphans together, like Hell's pick 'n mix. If this was the 80s, it'd have a trendy name like Millard's Channel Surfing!, with a picture of me riding the waves on a giant TV remote, but it's 2020, we're all boiling to death on a planet full of racist thick...
Wacaday
Wacaday's something which crops up a lot in suggestions, but like much of the stuff I cover, very little footage has survived. In this case, that's not surprising, given even even The Upper Hand would slink off defeated at Wacaday's genuinely incredible tally of 455 episodes. Barring all those creepy drama series from the 70s and 80s which got rebranded post-millennium as hauntology, there's a real dearth of old kids TV online. I've always wanted to do a run on the Saturday morning shows, but even full episodes of the big bo...
You Are Haunted - Episode 4
Travellers and guests.---Theme is Comascape - Chant, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. The rest of the music and SFX are via freesound.org.
Bill & Ted: The Series
As 1990 was the era of the animated spin-off, it's a given that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure landed a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. More surprising is the original cast reprising their roles, with Keanu, Alex Winter and George Carlin all returning as voice actors. Season two of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (plural) saw a move from CBS to Fox Kids, with production switching from Hanna-Barbera to DIC, who we all remember from the logo where a little kid yells “dick!” But Fox recast, binning Keanu and co, and the show was cancell...
The Cannon and Ball Project: Episode I
A few quick notes:- I've been wanting to get into video essays as $3 content for a while, and this felt like a good way in.- I know you're specifically paying for written work, so some of you may not be super into yet another site pivoting to video. Eventually, these will be more of a thing, but for the foreseeable future, *at most* there will be one a month. Let me know in the comments what you think of videos as a $3 post. I'll be aiming for about 15 minutes apiece. Yes? No? Good value? Too short?- As an example of future stuff, t...
The Mystery of The Upper Hand
If you've been reading my work regularly over the last few years, you'll recall I've a specific bar for things which ran a really long time while simultaneously leaving no cultural mark. Remember 90's ITV sitcom The Upper Hand? You should, having racked up 94 episodes. Go on, quote a line. A scene. Give me anything beyond humming a few bars of the dreadful theme tune. You absolutely can't. Nobody can. There are other examples – the similarly unquotable Birds of a Feather with an astonishing 128 episodes – but The Upper H...
Naked Jungle
Without question, Channel 5's nude gameshow, Naked Jungle, is one of the most infamous programs ever broadcast. You'll find it cited at or near the top of every article or clip show about Britain's Worst Television, but like a lot of things on those lists, outside of brief snippets, few have actually seen it, especially since its initial broadcast. At this point, it almost exists as pure folklore, with the mere knowledge that Keith Chegwin got his cock out enough to condemn it to cultural Hell. As such, it's long been on my list...
GamesMaster II: The Wrestling
Growing up a wrestling fan in early 90's Britain, you had to take what you could get. Nowadays, you'd have to retire to free up enough hours for the endless dreck they're pumping out, but back then, everyone had to wait their turn for the VHS tape off the one kid in their class who had Sky. But while we didn't have the matches, what we did have were plenty of promotional appearances, which were so weird, awkward and wild, the resulting footage was usually 18 carat TV gold.The WWF lads regularly showed up on Saturday morning kids...
O.T.T.
All the best Saturday morning children's TV had elements which appealed to the adults lounging around on their days off, be it Trevor and Simon on Going Live, pretty much all of Dick 'n Dom in Da Bungalow, or female presenters the dads fancied. ITV's Tiswas straddled that generational line perfectly, with an anarchic unpredictability which marks it as one of the all-time greats, even four decades on. It must've seemed a natural fit for a grown-up spin-off, taking the leap in 1982 for a live 11:15pm slot on Saturday nights. The c...
