Holy Habitual Viewing, Batman, He'll Have Square Eyes!

With this morning's screening of Minerva, Mayhem and Millionaires, I have now watched every episode of the classic Batman serial from '60s in the order they were originally transmitted.

Thanks to the great Talking Pictures TV channel here in the UK, this has been my Saturday morning ritual for the last 28 months or so.

While the idea was to simply ensure I saw all the episodes of this magnificently camp crimefighting show, I can't help but pass comment on the third - and last - season, when the show's makers swapped out Aunt Harriet (Madge Blake) for Batgirl/Barbara Gordon (Yvonne Craig).

Clearly, they felt a '60s audience of (mainly) young boys couldn't cope with two lead female characters at once. It's a pity because as much as I welcome Craig's take on Batgirl, I did miss Aunt Harriet's obliviousness to the Bat-centric shenanigans going on under her nose in stately Wayne Manor.

It was also a bit sad - but emblematic of episodic TV at the time - that Dick Grayson/Robin's  (Burt Ward) aunt wasn't even mentioned this season.

Then again, perhaps she left Gotham at just the right time as the storytelling took a massive nosedive, thanks to attempts to mix things up.

The show largely abandoned its winning two-part story formula (thus eliminating the highly entertaining cliffhangers at the end of part one of every tale) as well as bringing in a host of bland new villains instead of relying on the iconic comic book antagonists (Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman etc).

The many, wildly popular, comic book continuations of the show have shown that with the right writers and characters, Batman '66 could have run and run.

Batman '66 #1 from 2013

This isn't to say, however, that the TV show was ever less than perfect Saturday morning entertainment.

No matter what silliness was unfolding onscreen, you could always guarantee that Adam West's Batman would take their circumstances seriously... and always have exactly the right Bat-doohickey in his utility belt to help him, Robin, Batgirl, and Alfred (Alan Napier) out of any sticky situation.

But Batman isn't the only vintage show I've watched from start-to-finish in the last couple of years.

I started with all the available episodes of Dad's Army, being shown on U&Gold.

This has always been a very special show to me (and warranted its own article here), because of its connections to my dad.

Then, thanks to Legend, showing four episodes each weekend, I saw every episode of the original Twilight Zone.

Most recently, thanks to the BBC, I watched the entirely of the sublime I, Claudius from the 1970s. I remember watching some of the episodes when I was a child and some, much later, when I was in hospital recovering from my aneurysm. But I'd never seen the entire show from start-to-finish before.

The thing is I have Blu-Rays of the complete runs of both Batman and the Twilight Zone, but it felt somehow more 'authentic' to watch them weekly as new episodes were released on standard definition channels.

I'm also a great believer in the concept of "appointment television". I've a ton of shows on Netflix (where all the episodes drop at once) that I've started, but then felt no incentive to push on with.

However, knowing I'll have to wait a week for a new episode keeps the flame of enthusiasm lit.

Of course, I do binge shows. I'm not a luddite. But weekly shows are still my preferred form of delivery. Because I'm that old.

It did strike me that there was possibly something a tad morbid about this particular project of mine: ensuring I'd seen every episode of select great shows before I pop my clogs.

But I can assure you my motives are a lot more positive. There's so much great television being made all the time that it's easy to overlook the classics of old in the rush to embrace the new.

This is especially true for shows that - over the years - I've dipped in and out of, rather than watching religiously.

With my increasingly unreliable memory, I want to make sure I'm not missing great television from earlier decades while consuming the current crop of high calibre entertainment.

I'm now contemplating what show I might tackle next.

The original run of Star Trek is definitely a contender, although that will be a binge rather than appointment viewing as it's on Paramount Plus these days.

It's actually being shown on Legend as well, but that channel is in the middle of the second season and I don't want to have to wait for them to get round to the start of season one again if I'm going to go "where no man has gone before" as soon as possible.

Will I be boldly going from start to finish on the Final Frontier next?

Jabberwocky (1977)

A Dark Age kingdom is being terrorised by a mysterious monster, driving much of its populace to seek shelter behind the walls of the main city.

Eventually doddery, old King Bruno the Questionable (comedy legend Max Wall) decides to organise a brutal jousting tournament to find "a champion" to slay the beast.

This is despite appeals by his equally aged Chancellor, Passelewe (the always excellent John Le Mesurier of Dad's Army and the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy radio plays) who would rather the search was conducted in such a way as to not keep killing off the land's knights.

Meanwhile, upon the death of his father, clueless and clumsy Dennis Cooper (future national treasure Michael Palin) decides to leave the village where he grew up and move to the city, to start afresh.

This leads to a series of chaotic, often slapstick, set-pieces as he bumbles his way through every encounter from trying to get into the city to being mistaken for a prince-in-disguise by Bruno's daughter, the princess (Deborah Fallender).

Her hand-in-marriage and half the kingdom are being offered by the king to whoever kills the troublesome monster.

After his only friend, Ethel the lusty squire (Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett), is accidentally killed, Dennis ends up as the squire to the eventual champion of the joust, Red Herring (Dave Prowse aka Darth Vader), and the two brave men set out into the mist-dappled lands, looking for the fearful monster.

However, the church and the rich merchant-nobles of the city aren't so keen to see the creature murdered because it is surprisingly good for business, as people are buying and praying more.

Therefore, they engineer an ambush by the Black Knight (also Dave Prowse), and his small gang of thugs, to take out Red Herring - and Dennis - before they actually reach the monster's lair.

I can't believe I was halfway through my sixtieth cycle around the sun before I made time to see Jabberwocky, a wonderfully, very British, dark comedy with smatterings of gory Grand Guignol.

While strictly not a Monty Python movie, it is written and directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Michael Palin and features several Python regular collaborators, as well as a host of British comedy faces of the era.

There's also the visual, grimy Medieval verisimilitude of 1975's Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which Gilliam co-directed) and a similar picaresque throughline to 1979's Life of Brian.

The monster - which may be the Jabberwocky of the title, but is never directly called that - remains unseen until the climax, with Gilliam instead employing canny, low-budget camera techniques as would be used in Sam Raimi's 1981 Evil Dead (and then the rest of that gore-drenched franchise).

Once we finally see it, the Jabberwocky (a man in a costume) is more Classic Doctor Who era alien than glorious Sir John Tenniel illustration, but that just heightens the surreal craziness of the film.

The film's title, and monster's possible name, comes, of course, from the famous nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Snatches of the poem are heard, Greek Chorus-like, throughout the film, recited by an unseen - and unidentified - Punch and Judy puppeteer, heightening the mythological - or fairy tale - nature of the adventure.

Ultimately, the 105-minute Jabberwocky may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as much of Gilliam's other work, but it still manages to be subversive and smart behind its veneer of blood, guts, and toilet humour.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: "Don't Tell Him, Pike!"

Graduation Day (left to right): Paul, JJ, Pricey, Me and Rose

Our graduation ceremony took place in November 1998, in the vast arena of Bournemouth International Centre.

After receiving my degree certificate from Formula One commentator Murray Walker, I was milling around in the venue foyer when I was approached by a nice woman who explained that, due to the size of the venue, she and her husband had accidentally taken pictures of me going up on stage before realising I wasn't their son!

She said if the pictures turned out okay did I think my parents would like copies? Naturally, I said yes, although my parents were taking snaps, it never hurt to get extras I reasoned.

The lady and I were chatting while she took note of my parents' address to mail the pictures to (yes, folks, this was still the age of snail mail - especially for sending photographs) and she asked what course I had taken.

When I said Scriptwriting for Film and Television, she replied with words to the effect of: "Oh, my husband's an actor. You may have heard of him. Ian Lavender."

Mind. Blown.

I was talking to the wife of Private Frank Pike!

Naturally my dad, a lifelong Dad's Army fan, was suitably impressed when I told him later.

I remember the pictures turned up at my parents' house and are, no doubt, neatly stored away in the many, many photo albums Rachel and I inherited from them when they died.

A larger selection of the merry reprobates on my Scriptwriting For Film & TV course

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Dad's Army

Dad's Dad's Army - miniatures painted by a friend in Sevenoaks as a present for my dad

Dad's Lance-Corporal Jones and his famous butcher's van

When I was growing up, Dad's Army was a hugely popular show in our household, both mum and dad having been kids during the war, and dad later serving - courtesy of National Service - in the Royal Corps of Signals.

Knowing his love for the show, over the years, I got dad a number of Dad's Army themed gifts, which, when he died, I inherited and have loving cared for since.

The documentary for the show's 50th anniversary in 2018, hosted by Pointless's Alexander Armstrong, also got me thinking about a series of articles I read as a child - in my father's collection of Airfix annuals - about staging Hitler's aborted invasion of Britain (aka Operation Sealion) as a wargame.

This was my first introduction to the idea of wargames and, although I never pursued it further (instead being drawn to the Battle of Waterloo with my giant Airfix box set of soldiers and the Wild West with my larger Britains toy soliders), it stuck with me ever since.

Selection of pages from the original series of articles in the Airfix magazine

However, the Saluting Dad's Army documentary briefly reignited my childhood fascination with Operation Sealion and wargaming a "what if..." Nazi invasion of the UK.

I immediately started trawling through the Warlord Games' website - knowing they had the licence for official Dad's Army miniatures - and was dreaming about creating my own miniature Home Guard regiment to fend off the German invaders.

Official Dad's Army miniatures from Warlord Games

My flights of fantasy even embraced the idea of creating a scale replica of Walmington-on-Sea for the Home Guard to defend, but thankfully that's as far as my wild ambitions went, and I didn't pull the trigger on any miniatures or terrain (it quickly dawned on me that my scenery building skills weren't anywhere near good enough to build a 1940's town that I would be happy with).