The Big Recommendations Sort Out

Rounding off the shameless repurposing of the various review slash recommendations originally written for my non-starting attempt at starting up a mailing list – you can find some similarly reused ruminations on Blake’s 7 series one on Bluray here, Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Road here and Something’s Up! by John Barry here – this is a collection of enthusiasms over a handful of podcasts and mailing lists that I both enjoy and felt deserved a little more exposure, with apologies extended to ALFSplaining who were next on the list but were ultimately denied their moment of inbox-bothering glory; if you’re interested though you can find them here. They’ve had some ALF-affiliated writers from the glory days of The Simpsons and even the voice of ALH himself on as guests recently, and those shows in particular are very much worth a listen for anyone with even a passing interest in television and comedy. Especially if you want an informed opinion on what ALF smells like. Looking back at these recommendations in particular now does cast the resolute refusal of the list to attract very much in the way of attention as something of a shame, as my primary motivation had always been to lend a small but hopefully helpful endorsement to smaller-scale creative endeavours that are far more worthy of attention than anything star name-festooned that gets punted at you unbidden in confusing autoplaying social media ads that invariably make even less sense once you accidentally click on the link whilst trying to scroll past, but if readership was at best inconsistent and it was a distraction from adding new stuff here rather than just hoping that new stuff elsewhere would drive people here – where to be honest any such recommendations would almost certainly find a significantly greater degree of exposure – then its purpose had clearly been served; or not, however that works exactly. If you are still interested in receiving regular additional bits and pieces, including long-lost highlights from the archives, deep dives on fifties and sixties newspaper adverts, occasional audio exclusives and more, then you can find out more about my Patreon here. Anyway, here are a handful of my regular reads and listens that you really ought to be subscribed to. You should also be subscribed to Looks Unfamiliar and It’s Good, Except It Sucks too, of course. That’s just common courtesy.

The Year Of Listing Dangerously

Considering that the now itself sadly defunct original and best online repository for defunct pop culture TV Cream once seemed excitingly technologically cutting edge and forward-looking with its table-embedded frameset, over-compressed jpegs and arkwel.html-level page naming protocol, it is a little odd to remember that when it was first launched back in 1997, pretty much nothing of anything that it referenced, from Pickersgill People and Cloppa Castle to Lyons Maid Haunted House and Pigsticking: A Joy For Life – The Gentleman’s Guide To Sporting Pastimes by Willie Rushton, was online anywhere in any form. If you wanted to know more about even the more familiar corners of Cream-era nostalgia – even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep or otherwise – you had to go rooting around paper-based resources, whether it was rifling through the misaligned bookshelves in charity shops or asking to have a look at the bound volumes of TV Times in your local library, which necessitated signing a very official looking slip and waiting for what seemed like eighteen million hours while the librarian disappeared and returned with a huge trolley containing two volumes that somehow acquired an annoying squeak as soon as you began to push it, causing brow-furrowed academics poring over their theses to throw you scowling sideways looks over the top of some papers. Part of the fun of TV Cream, of course, was that no such research was really involved and the entire ethos behind it was an amusing extrapolation of simultaneously shared and idiosyncratic memory, so once this sort of information did become more easily available and the I Think You’ll Find boys started to pipe up with their actually there were two Charles McHaltenwoods and the one you mentioned isn’t the one you mentioned tedium it never quite seemed as though people were taking it all in the spirit that it was intended again.

Now of course such reference resources are more easily available, but – as the presenters of BBC1’s Fax would discover to their peril – combining facts and frivolity is not exactly the easiest of arts to accomplish. Thankfully TV Cream’s original founder Phil Norman has stepped into the Bootle Saddles-baiting breach with The Year Of Listing Dangerously, a weekly newsletter in which he casts an amusingly underwhelmed eye across whatever was on television in a certain year on that week in history. As you might expect if you’re familiar with Phil’s work, it deftly straddles the fine line between excitement and exasperation at how they used to fill the schedules back when they did not really know any better – even if the programmes themselves often actually were better; in general however they were very much not – and although it would not be entirely accurate to say that he has watched these programmes so you don’t have to, it is also true to say that his wry observations give enough of a flavour of the assorted quirks and oddities of the blandest corners of BBC1, BBC2, ITV and a chronologically dependent Channel 4 for it to feel like you might as well have sat through them yourself. Of course, it is entirely possible that some of you might well find yourselves left feeling inspired to track down non-animated animated grasshopper-hewn alleged comedy of manners Manfred – a show so obscure that I put the channel as ‘Fuck Knows’ in the entry I wrote on it for TV Cream – after reading Phil’s thoughts on it, but frankly that’s on you.

One of those newsletters that will make you involuntarily cheer every time it arrives in your inbox, The Year Of Listing Dangerously can be found here. Though sadly he hasn’t as yet covered Hey, It’s My Birthday Too!…

The Big Beatles Sort Out

We all know what the best Beatles album is, don’t we? It’s very obviously a Hard Day’s Night. Except for when the critics frown at us that we’re wrong and that it’s Revolver, or Rubber Soul, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or The White Album, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band again, or whatever the tedious enforced consensus underscored with babble about them having been a ‘great live band’ while they were self-imposedly confined to the studio and ‘studio experimentation pioneers’ while they were playing seven or eight live shows per day actually is now. We all know the other rules about liking The Beatles too – Carnival Of Light is best left in the vaults in your humble opinion with out without optional winking emoji, Wings were LOL WRONG GIF OF STEVE COOGAN, The Rolling Stones copied Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) from a song that sounded nothing like it and most importantly of all, they were working entirely independently of everything else that was going on in the sixties and nothing else that was happening around them culturally, socially or politically, from Tich And Quackers and One Way Pendulum to Emil Savundra and The Walham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, had any bearing on the fab gear world of BEATLE whatsoever. It also helps if you write the word ‘Imagine’ and point at it sort of meaningfully. Heaven forbid, then, that anyone should be taking a thoughtful yet light-hearted look at how The Beatles and their music, and indeed their poetry books and their going to see some very serious-looking bloke ‘playing’ some amplified bits of chipboard, fitted in and around everything else that was going on at the time.

Garry and Paul Abbott originally started The Big Beatles Sort Out with the ambitious intention of ranking every officially released song by The Beatles for music, lyrics and production – yes, even 12-Bar Original; you can probably guess how well that fared – and having completed that not inconsiderable task they have also similarly ranked the songs that later emerged on Anthology and other retrospectives, the first decade’s worth of solo Beatle singles and the songs that they wrote for other artists during the sixties (and there are more of them than you might think), and they are currently working their way through all of the UK number ones of the sixties in search of that pesky ‘wider context’ that causes such consternation for so many Fab Four adherents. There have also been specials looking at The Beatles on the big screen, The Rutles, Give My Regards To Broad Street, Live At The Hollywood Bowl and other similarly interesting and rarely analysed diversions. Analysis is a slightly misleading term, though, as while there is indeed plenty of that and it is always full of fascinating takes and fresh perspectives – especially when they disagree with each other – what really makes The Big Beatles Sort Out such tremendous fun to listen to is the sheer character that Paul and Garry bring to what can often otherwise in other hands be repetitive and over-reverential proceedings. There’s the deliciously contrived puns and comedy misunderstandings as they introduce each song, their frequently bafflement-inducing attempts to work out the actual mundane details behind the casually reported events that took place ‘On This Beatles Day’ – a genuinely puzzling amount of which appear to involve crisps – and their exasperation at and ridicule of their own scoring system. Framed by all of this is their infectious delight and intrigue at discovering a song that they have not previously heard, or an artist they have not heard of, or even some little-acknowledged cultural corridor like The Zoo Gang, an early seventies ITV action serial about reunited wartime resistance operatives which Paul McCartney provided the theme music for. Even when they don’t actually like the song in question, their reactions and perspectives are still both illuminating and entertaining and this is why I would especially recommend the current listen through the UK’s chart-topping singles of the sixties and the opportunity it affords for reintroducing such long-lost names as Frank Ifield and unexpected admissions of when The Beatles suddenly sound a little out of touch; and how they invariably come back sounding more in touch than ever.

If you need any more encouragement, Chris Shaw – the most successful Beatles podcaster there is – is a noted fan of The Big Beatles Sort Out and you can find it here. Gear!

Drunk Women Solving Crime

We may now live in a world where everyone with a smartphone and more opinions than sense appears to think – or indeed ‘reckon’ – that they are be better at ‘working out’ what ‘really’ happened than actual highly skilled investigators from the comfort of their own sofa that they are probably too lazy and loudmouthed to actually get to in the first place, but even so, there is still something alluring about the old-fashioned view of the noirish detective, with their smoking revolver, smoking cigarette in the ashtray and tumbler of neat whiskey shot so grainily that it to all intents and purposes appears to have smoke coming off it as well. There is still a sense of glamour and and an accompanying sense of intrigue to imagining yourself in black and white with your own voiceover and a percussion-heavy soundtrack trying to figure out why every single clue you find seems to lead back to a jammed desk drawer at City Hall. So what would happen if someone took that old-fashioned manner of mystery-chasing and added a handful of comedians with access to large measures of Pinot Grigio and far too many swear words? Well, that’s Drunk Women Solving Crime.

Billing itself as ‘a true crime podcast with a twist… of lime!’, Drunk Women Solving Crime is hosted by crack investigators Taylor Glenn and Hannah George – their long-serving colleague Catie Wilkins has recently retired from the force after a whopping three hundred cases – who invite a guest to help them solve a real world dastardly misdeed or mystery; if you’re understandably a little concerned about the morality of this, rest assured that – for once – they only trade in historical cases and are more likely to feature fraud, corporate swindles or victimless robberies than anything outright dubious or distasteful. The unexpected twists and turns in otherwise mundane scenarios and the forensic guesswork and reasoning that they inspire are thrilling to follow along with, though the real highlight is when the guest is asked about an occasion when they themselves have been a victim of a crime; the fact that these have ranged from inconsequential pilfering to altogether more sinister events and the team are still able to get albeit sometimes grim laughs out of them says a good deal about just how well judged the tone is, and frankly it’s no surprise that ‘Producer Amanda’ gets so many grateful shout-outs on air. Also, if you’ve ever been to one of their live shows… let’s just say that ‘raucous’ doesn’t even really quite cover it. If you really do have to do the whole armchair sleuth thing, then frankly you really ought to be doing it in the company of Hannah and Taylor. No I’m not using their detective handles here. If you’re curious, though, you can find Drunk Women Solving Crime here.

Buy A Book!

You can find many further cultural recommendations – after a fashion – and plenty of obscure Beatle tangents and arcane televisual ephemera in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Caffeinated Women Solving Crime? Now there’s an idea…

Further Listening

You can find me on The Big Beatles Sort Out talking to Garry and Paul about the Beatles cartoon here and George Martin’s By George! here. You can also find me chatting to John and Ben on ALFSplaining here as well as the ALFtastic duo sharing their thoughts on I Am Groot in It’s Good, Except It Sucks here. Phil has been on Looks Unfamiliar talking about S-S-S-Single Bed by Fox, Leapfrog, The Country Life Christmas Box, Humrush by KMD, Body Contact, Oscar The Rabbit In Rubbidge, Erasmus Microman and Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe And Find True Happiness? here and Over The Moon, Amityville (The House On The Hill) by Lovebug Starski, I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier, WFLA Milkshake, Spy Trap, Mediamind, The Black Tower, Soul Train by Swans Way and Paul And Peta Page’s ‘Hot Dogs’ here, as well as Pipkins on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here.