Living In The Freezer - A Song For Davros

Living In The Freezer - A Song For Davros

Have just been sorting through some old bits of paper and stumbled across this song I wrote for Davros when I discovered that Terry Molloy is rather skilled on the musical front.

Anyone who can do a better George Formby impression that me might like to have a stab at it!

Here we go...


"I'm living in the freezer,
On the prison ship from Earth.
In case a certain Mister Lytton comes by.
Oh me! Oh my!
I hope that Mister Lytton comes by.

He'll let me out and then we'll see,
If all the Daleks obey me...
If not, I've got a trick up my sleeve.
I've got a Dalek virus,
Cos a civil war would tire us.
Then for lovely planet Necross, I'll leave!

(All together now!)
I'm living in the freezer,
On the prison ship from Earth.
In case a certain Mister Lytton comes by.
Oh me! Oh my!
I hope that Mister Lytton comes by.

Once there, I'll meet the great Jobel,
And make his life a living Hell.
And likewise with that prattling DJ.
I'll make a great plastic statue,
To crush the life from Doctor Who.
And that will be an excellent day!

I'm living in the freezer,
On the prison ship from Earth.
In case a certain Mister Lytton comes by.
Oh me! Oh my!
I hope that Mister Lytton comes by.

Oh, I'm living in the freezer,
On the prison ship from Earth.
In case a certain Mister Lytton comes by.
(He's sweeter than a kitten!)
Yes, I hope that Mister Lytton comes by!!!"

OK, you can unplug your ears now!

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

Crown Court

Crown Court

Last night we decided to watch the 'Crown Court' episodes that are a bonus feature on the DVD of 'Strangers'.

It's from 1977 so years away from being released by Network, though if they would like to make some more available then we'd be more than happy to buy them.

The story 'A Place To Stay' features  Don Henderson as Arthur Barnard alongside Anne Blake as Lady Corrie Stott, who are the plantiffs in a case of libel against Brian Capron as John Wragg and Tim Preece as Richard Livesey.

It also stars John Horsley as Mr Justice Mowbray.

The defendants have alleged that Arthur Barnard (the warden at a hostel for the homeless) treated the women in his care (including John Wragg's wife Tracey) badly, enforcing petty rules and even one time peeping through the keyhole of the bathroom door to watch her while she bathed.

The story doesn't feature Don Henderson very much, even though it is an extra on a series that he headlines.

He does appear in a couple of other 'Crown Court' stories ('Minnie' and 'Triangle') but perhaps someone thought that as this is a Season 6 story it wouldn't be appearing on DVD for quite some time. His earlier 1974 appearances are as Detective Sergeant / Detective Inspector Buzzard and he seems to get a rapid promotion as the stories were broadcast only a couple of weeks apart.

'A Place To Stay' is an interesting story and raises a lot of questions about the issues involved.
We always really enjoy watching 'Crown Court' and I sometimes get quite cross with the jury's verdict as I feel it's the wrong one.

Amongst my favourite stories are 'Persimmons and Dishwashers - Regina V Curl' and 'The Dogs' - the latter featuring Ian Marter, Mary Wimbush (who I once had the pleasure of meeting - she was lovely!) and the wonderful William Mervyn as The Hon. Justice Campbell  who is my favourite judge.

This concerns possible fraud at the Tote betting system at the Greyhound Racing track in Fulchester, where 'Crown Court' is set.

It contains an extraordinary speech about betting odds by Mary Wimbush that sends Ian Marter's Quentin Ingrams into stunned silence and must be seen to be believed.

'Persimmons and Dishwashers - Regina V Curl' is about the aforementioned Curl Brothers who are accused of demanding money with menaces and GBH. The Persimmons  (also known as Sharon fruit) are sold to local club owners to cover the demanding money with menaces part of the charge. Now for some reason when we watched this story for the first the repeated use of the word 'persimmons' made us laugh a lot and we had to stop the DVD for fear of missing what was going on.

Although the subjects covered in this story are quite nasty, they are covered in a light-hearted way which made the story quite fun to watch.

'Crown Court' can also cover some quite dark subjects such as infanticide in the 1973 story 'Infanticide or Murder?' which covers the death of a baby and is a story that we will probably never rewatch as it was extremely dark and disturbing.

But the range of stories and actors in 'Crown Court' is amazing and I really hope that more releases are forthcoming.

If you want to find out more about 'Crown Court' we'd recommend that you take a look at Ivan Kirby's wonderful blog. It's full of details about everyone involved in the cases and can be found here.

 (By Lisa Parker)

Post-Birthday Viewing

Post-Birthday Viewing

If you've been brave enough to have a look at our 'Birthday Bits' video, you'll know that we've got a big pile of stuff to work our way through and it might take some time...

But, with lots of shiny new things to choose from, we at least had to make a token effort, so first into the player was Disc One of 'The Secret Service'. Deep joy!

Lisa makes no secret that Unwinese is not a language that makes her laugh out loud, but there's only one scene in 'A Case For The Bishop' that features Father Unwin going on about the rotatey-most of the engibold, so I don't think she found it too painful,

In one of those weird coincidences that we seem to keep tripping over, there was a Dinky model of Father Unwin's car, Gabriel, that turned up on today's edition of 'Flog It!', that went for a disappointing thirty quid, even though the box was all present and correct.

It's a weird hybrid of puppets and live action that gets a bit confusing when it cuts from one to the other within the same seen, but there's a daftness about it that amuses me and I fully approve of the fact that Father Unwin always looks for oncoming traffic when leaving his driveway. It's one of those silly details that people tend to forget when doing a driving scene, as the road has usually been closed off, so they don't need to look.

Next up was 'Village Hall : Pie In The Sky' which we picked mainly because it stars the formidable combination of John Le Mesurier, Joan Hickson and Anton Rodgers. Shown on 18th May 1975, this concerns unfeasibly large pies at the village flower show. which is not the sort of storyline that features in our usual diet of archive TV, we must admit!

However, having grown up in a village environment, this is quite familiar territory for me although I think I only ever won Second Prize in the Unusually Shaped Vegetable section. I think I had a potato that was shaped like the Loch Ness Monster, or something, though it was a long time ago now. Probably 1975, come to think of it...

I get the feeling that the range of stories along with the great guest cast with make 'Village Hall' a strong contender for a future 'Round The Archives' article, but let's watch a few more before we make any promises on that front...

Finally, this afternoon, we delved into the Jon Pertwee years of 'Doctor Who' to do a DVD commentary on 'The Curse Of Peladon' Episode Two, which may be seen here.

During this,we briefly run through the BBC One schedule for the rest of 5th February 1972 and are surprised to find an episode of 'Whacko!' at 5 pm and Ricardo Montalban starring in 'The Aquarians' as one Dr Delgado, which sounds a little strange when you're thinking about the Pertwee era.

Sam Kydd clocks up two appearances on the telly that night (power-cuts permitting), first in 'Whacko!', then as Knocker White in  'First Offenders', that night's edition of 'Dixon Of Dock Green', which also features Michael Sheard.

We're toying with the idea of returning briefly to the world of 'Crown Court' fairly soon, but we'll see how that goes...

Goodnight all!

(Written by Andrew Trowbridge)

Birthday Bits - Part Two

Birthday Bits - Part Two

When I have a birthday, Lisa's one tends to follow on a couple of days later and this has been happening now for quite a few years. It's rather odd, but at least it means we have a vague chance of remembering, although it means our postman tends to get ridiculously overworked in the period leading up to these fateful days.

As as listeners to 'Round The Archives' might have noticed, we have enough of a crossover in our archive TV interests that some of the stuff we buy for the other is potentially as interesting to the purchaser as it is for the recipient.

Today's video runs through the majority of our new DVDs, but I couldn't resist adding the book 'Medieval Monsters' to the featured items, as although it's not the largest book in the world, it does boast some lovely illustrations of weird and wonderful creatures. Frankly, whenever we see a picture of a knight battling a dragon, we tend to be on the side of the chap with the green scales.

It was about time that we added 'The Ladykillers' to our collection and the 60th Anniversary Collector's Edition adds some extra material which will hopefully fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of the behind-the-scenes details.

'Village Hall' is another of those series I'd never even heard of before it appeared on Lisa's list of possible present, but a quick down the cast list made it an obvious choice. Running to two seasons over 1974 and 1975 it features such names as Ron Moody, Bernard Hepton, Patrick Troughton, John Le Mesurier and Zoe Wannamaker. We might well sample one tonight over our customary cup of tea, this time with a slice or two of birthday cake,

Finally, 'Andrew Marr's History Of The World' is perhaps too recent to immediately feature on an archive TV podcast, but it promises to teach us a thing or two and I was pleased to note it does cover the Nazca lines from Peru. Which not only links it with 'Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World', which covered this subject, but also 'Michael Bentine's Potty Time', as Michael's father came from Peru.
Proof again that the more you cover TV shows, the more weird connections you start to notice. A theory which James Burke would probably raise a glass to...

Happy Birthday Lisa!

Our video detailing our birthday DVDs can be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

Birthday Bits - Part One

Birthday Bits - Part One

As those of you who are friends with us on Facebook will have seen yesterday was Andrew's birthday.

And as it was his 50th birthday I decided to get him a range of DVDs that covered each decade that he had been around for.

So for the 60s I got him 'The Secret Service' starring  Stanley Unwin in human and puppet form as a vicar/spy.

I must admit to not really liking Stanley Unwin, his comedy not being to my liking, but I'm interested to see how the series works and to see if I warm to it and him.

For the 70s I picked up 'Strangers' featuring the much missed Don Henderson as D.S. Bulman. This was inspired by Andrew mentioning in our video covering 'Delta And The Bannermen' that we should watch 'Bulman' as that what Don Henderson was known for at the time of transmission.

But having discovered that the complete series isn't out until the end of the month I decided on a whim to pick up 'Strangers' as it introduces the character.*

And according to Warren it's a very strange series, so I look forward to watching some of that.
Now when I got to looking for something from the 1980s I must admit to looking for quite some time before decided upon 'Alfesco', which is a comedy sketch show from the early 80s and featuring many future stars, such as Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton.

I must admit to there being a little bit of "oh that will do..." about this choice,  but it also showcases these extraordinary people at the very start of their careers and should be a interesting watch.

And then for the 90s I had already decided upon 'Paul Merton in Galton and Simpson's ...' which features him in remakes of many of Galton and Simpson's most famous episodes and plays as performed by the likes of Tony Hancock and Les Dawson. I thought it would a goood thing to cover for the podcast and also good to see how he plays the parts differently from those the stories were orignally written for.

There is also one more thing to come as one DVD that covers the 2000s and 2010s has gone astray on the way to us and will be resent by the seller. But that is a very diffeerent thing and may be reported on at a later date.

You can of course expect all of these DVDs to be covered on 'Round The Archives' at some point in the future. The very distant future as the next two issues are pretty much planned out.

And all of the mentioned DVDs are available from the Network and other websites.

So stay tuned. as somebody else once said...

(By Lisa Parker)

* Actually Bulman first appeared in 'The XYY Man', which we've also got but haven't got round to looking at either!

'Worzel's Washing Day'.

'Worzel's Washing Day'

This week, we are mostly having birthdays, which gives us an excuse to buy each other even more DVDs, mostly based on whether we think we can wring an interesting article out of them or not.
But although this blog post will therefore be written in a bit of a hurry, we have managed to do a couple of videos in the last 24 hours that we hope will tickle your fancy (wherever you happen to keep it).

Last night we amused ourselves by waving a variety of TV novelisations in the general direction of our camcorder and burbling in the usual fashion.

Shockingly, a few years ago we had never even heard of 'Sergeant Cork', but now we have such delights as 'Sergeant Cork's Casebook' and the follow-up which goes by the somewhat inevitable title of 'Sergeant Cork's Second Casebook'. Both adapted from the television stories by Arthur Swinson, these would have set you back a mere 3/6 on original publication.

This video links in with yesterday's blog post about adaptations of comedy shows, with some extra 'Juliet Bravo' and 'Cagney And Lacey' thrown in for good measure and can be seen here.

We've also widened our horizons when it comes to doing DVD commentaries and this afternoon knocked off one for the first episode of 'Worzel Gummidge', partly to celebrate the recent news about the discovery of the 16mm film negatives.

With references to 'The Worzel Book' and Barbara Euphan Todd's 1936 book (also known as 'The Scarecrow Of Scatterbrook') we were able to keep nattering about things we saw in front of us with at least a vague air of knowing what we were going on about. Even if a bloke from Amazon turns up halfway through to deliver a mysterious package. And you'll doubtless find out the contents in a future video...

OK, that's a bit of a manufactured cliffhanger, but you can hardly blame us!

Our video about 'Worzel's Washing Day' may be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

Available from all good retailers!

Available from all good retailers!

"Here I am ensconced in my old flowery-dell; that means cell for the uninitiated, contemplating the pros and cons of serving a five stretch."

That's the opening sentence of the novelisation of 'Prisoner and Escort', which quickly establishes that the whole of 'Porridge' in book form will be told to the reader through the eyes of Norman Stanley Fletcher.

Now I can understand why you might want to do it like this, but it sets up some problems later down the line. The Season One scripts are adapted by Jonathan Marshall, but 'Another Stretch Of Porridge' and 'A Further Stir Of Porridge' are the work of Paul Victor, who has to tackle 'The Desperate Hours' where Fletcher is unconscious for crucial parts of the plot due to a mix-up over a drugged mug of coffee.

Fletch even points this out in the narrative, assuring us that he has checked the order of events with Lenny/Lennie (the spelling is variable) Godber and Mr Barrowclough.

The 'Yes Minister' / 'Yes Prime Minister' books tackle this problem head-on and the array of diary entries, notes and memos take full advantage of the inevitable clash viewpoints of different characters, each with their own view of their actions and motivations.

Today, we added a couple more books to our tottering collection, with 'Hi-de-Hi!' by Paul Ableman (published 1983) and the 1971 adaptation of the first 'Dad's Army' film by John Burke.

From first appearances, the latter is a pretty straight-down-the line version, though the fact that it retells some of 'The Man And The Hour' means you have the slight niggle of which was the 'real' series of events.

But the 'Hi-de-Hi!' book takes the strange decision to introduced one Charley Binns, the so-called senior camper, who spends a fair chunk of the first few pages describing Gladys in rather-too-fine anatomical detail.

I always like the blurb they put on these sorts of books. "Now a hilarious Columbia picture" or "based on the popular BBC television series", you know the style.

But if they happened to plug any merchandise on the telly, you'd have the familiar expression "available at all good retailers" - which always leads to us add "and at some rubbish ones, too!" for the sake of balance.

Not sure when we'll get round to reading these, of course. But it's nice to know that they're there!

(By Andrew Trowbridge)