BLOG The 1980s TV shows the UK never saw

sfx | Blogs | 27/09/2009 07:00am
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British TV missed out on some treats in the 1980s, as John Cooper discovers during a recent nostalgia trip:

Saturday Nights in a Parallel Childhood

Television today is fast and broad, you can read a review of the latest buzz inducing US show before you even knew it existed. Defying Gravity? Where did that come from? As a died in the wool Star Cops fan this should have been on my radar, but I’ve never heard of it and it’s up to episode four already!

A fellow geek pal of mine was a child of the ’90s and has fond memories of Babylon 5, Quantum Leap and Space Above & Beyond. Me being an older child of the ’80s, it’s my God given right and duty to espouse to him just how much better the ’80s was for sci-fi at every opportunity, regardless of taste or accuracy.

Back in the days of four-channel television we got what we were given and thought nothing of it. I hazily recall a time around 1984 when Peter Davison’s doctor was suffering from spectrox poisoning, my beloved world of Doctor Who was about to go spectacularly pear shaped and ITV started showing cult programmes like Knight Rider and The A-Team on Saturday nights. It was all impossibly glamorous and helped ease the pain.

Recently I’ve been thinking, quite paradoxically: whose job was it at ITV to decide what shows to buy and broadcast? Did TV execs know back then that the shows they aired would have a domino effect on future TV creatives, arriving where we are today with new incarnations of Doctor Who and Knight Rider? Probably not.

There’s a reason I picked on these shows in particular. TV producers look for similar shows to run back to back, when one finishes the similar neighbour airs in the same spot, in an attempt to maintain the audience figures. So it came as a bit of shock to my supposed geek knowledge of old TV to come across not one but two shows that filled the scheduling gaps left by Knight Rider and The A Team over in the states, but were never picked up over here.

So imagine for a moment if you will: it’s Saturday night in a parallel dimension, you’ve tuned in and coming up next is… Misfits Of Science.

Starring Courtney Cox and Kevin Peter Hall (who would later don the costume of the Predator), a group of super-powered “misfits” drive around at high speed in an ice cream van fighting crime.

Then coming up next it’s… The Master.

Lee Van Cleef is the only western-trained ninja and travels from town to town (in the A-Team’s van) righting wrongs and looking for his lost daughter. A bit like the Hulk TV show… but with Lee Van Cleef. As a ninja.

I watched some episodes of both recently and it was like being transported back to a bizarre parallel dimension, only it wasn’t as it actually did happen. They’re none too shoddy either, Misfits particularly rattles along at a healthy pace for genre TV of its time.

If only it really was TV being transmitted from a parallel dimension, then I could have switched channels just in time to see Colin Baker, dressed in blue, step out of the TARDIS into Blackpool pier.

This is a personal article by blogger John Cooper.

Have you ever seen these US shows? We’re having weird flashbacks to Whiz Kids this afternoon. What are you favourite ’80s TV memories? Comments and suggestions welcome as always…

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