No Laughing Matter!

Whatever happened to British television comedy?

Once upon a time, you could always count on at least one or two sitcoms and a clutch of sketch shows each week guaranteed to raise a chuckle or two. From the chilly vantage point of Autumn 2007, those days seem a very long way off in the distance. The great British sitcom has all but bitten the dust, replaced by an increasingly desperate string of fourth-raters usually emanating from BBC Three - maybe it's a generational thing, but the likes of the inexplicably popular Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps [unpleasant 20-somethings shouting loudly at each other for half an hour a week] and Gavin & Stacey have both left me cold and sketch shows like Tittybangbang, Touch Me, I'm Karen Taylor and the truly awful Little Miss Jocelyn are often as incomprehensible as they are unfunny. Even the return of two of the giants of British sketch comedy, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul proved to be agonizingly embarrassing.

But it's not all bad news. Amid the hours of dross that pass themselves off as sitcoms these days [yes Not Going Out, The Green Green Grass, After You've Gone, Ideal et al, I am looking at you] there are the occasional gems to be found, chief among them the brilliant The Mighty Boosh [returning for a third series this very week] and the subject of one our current competitions, Peep Show.

A vehicle for David Mitchell and Robert Webb, it takes the same basic ideas as The Odd Couple and takes them off in unexpected directions. The basic idea is that two twenty-somethings, Mark [Mitchell] and Jeremy [Webb] who met at university are now sharing a flat in Croydon, south London. What makes the show stand out is the way that the various stories are all told from a first person perspective, the camera switching backwards and forwards between the viewpoints of the two main characters as they go about their daily lives.

Peep Show could so easily be dismissed as unnecessarily gimmicky on first viewing which would be doing this marvelously inventive and often incisive show a grave disservice. And far too many people did it seems - Series Four [currently running as a competition prize over at the main EOFFTV site] almost didn't happen at all when bosses at broadcasters Channel Four were unsure of commissioning a fourth batch of episodes due to consistently low viewing figures. Thankfully, they opted to go for it and Season Four proved to be a much stronger set of episodes than those in the rather tired-looking Series Three.

The themes of loneliness and alienation that ran through the first couple of years of Peep Show have here been replaced by the fear of being trapped in a relationship that is patently doomed from the very start. The series kicks off in high style with the wonderful Sophie's Parents, in which Mark reacts to a weekend at the country estate of his new girlfriend's parents in the only way he know how while Jeremy adds to the chaos by sleeping with Sophie's mum. From there on, Series Four charts Marks increasingly horrible realization that he's heading for a marriage to someone he actually hates.

Series Four ends with closure of a sort which makes it odd and perhaps regrettable that a Series Five has already been commissioned - great news that we're going to get to see more of Mark and Jeremy but worrying that it might undo the sense of an ending that Series Four provided.

Peep Show has been running on Channel Four since 2003 and demonstrates that the once daring and innovative channel [celebrating its 25th anniversary this year] hasn't entirely succumbed to tedious reality shows and endlessly recycled American imports. Other recent Four winners have included the brilliant Black Books and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Blessed with spot-on performances from Mitchell and Webb [so much funnier here than in their hit-or-mostly-miss sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look] and genuinely witty, always insightful and even sometimes coruscating scripts from Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, Peep Show suggests that there is hope for small screen British comedy, that it's not all going to be talentless people shouting at each other in silly voices or lame retreads of already well-worn sitcom ideas.
KEVIN LYONS

Men on the Run

The Fugitive (1963 - 1967), as well as being a very fine thriller series in its own right, exerted an extraordinary influence over small screen science fiction in the 1970s, so much so that at one point one might legitimately have questioned if the studio heads actually realized that other formats may have existed at all.

For those unaware - and there must surely be a few - The Fugitive featured David Janssen as Dr Richard Kimble, wrongly accused of the murder of his wife, who goes on the run from the law while tracking down the mysterious "one-armed man" who really committed the crime. Created by Roy Huggins and produced by the legendary Quinn Martin, The Fugitive ran for four seasons, was turned into a movie in 1993 and had a short-lived (one season of 22 episodes) remake in 2000.

The appeal of the format was simple and obvious - it took the chief strength of an ongoing drama series (a recurring character that the audience could come to know and care about) and the flexibility of the anthology shows (a different supporting cast and location each week) and combined them into a durable format that TV execs clearly found impossible to resist.

I was reminded just how impossible while watching episodes from the second season of The Incredible Hulk (1978 - 1982) (available in the UK now from Universal Playback). Kenneth Johnson's superhero adaptation remains one of the best remembered genre takes on The Fugitive - it replaces Richard Kimble with David Banner (the original comic character's name Bruce was replaced, allegedly because the producers thought it sounded too 'gay'!) and Lou Ferrigno as the monstrous Hulk, but in all respects it was exactly the same format: an innocent man goes on the run, drifting from one town to the next changing the lives of those he meets along the way.

The second series of The Incredible Hulk kicks off with a two-parter which seems to mark an end to Banner's wandering ways - Married finds him seeking help from experimental hypnotherapist Dr Carolyn Fields [70s US TV staple Mariette Hartley] and marrying her in Hawaii. But the Fugitive effect was so great that any chance of happiness was dashed from the off - Fields is suffering a terminal illness and the end is predictable but still rather moving.

Banner is soon back on the road and as ever tenacious journalist Jack McGee [Jack Colvin] is on his trail, just as equally tenacious cop Lt Philip Gerard [Barry Morse] tracked his quarry in The Fugitive. The rest of Season Two finds Banner and his green-skinned alter ego turning up as a mechanic at a racetrack [Ricky], a barman at a disco [Alice in Disco Land - this was 1978 and flares and mirrorballs were all the rage] and even crossed the border to Mexico [A Solitary Place]. Surprisingly, the writers managed to come up with plenty of interesting variations on the well worn theme throughout the year - Banner gets involved with the Black Panthers [Like a Brother], escapes from a chain gang [Escape From Los Santos] and even investigates the possibility that a Hulk-like creature existed in prehistoric times [Kindred Spirits].

The Incredible Hulk was successful enough to run for 5 years and, almost by default, was the best of the rash of small screen superhero adaptations from the late 70s - The Amazing Spider-Man [1978-1979] was anything but amazing, Wonder Woman [1976 - 1970] was more successful but relied on camp to the dismay of hardcore fans and Captain America [1979], Captain America II Death Too Soon [1979] and Dr Strange [1978] remained one-off made to TV movies with not even a hint of a series in sight. The Incredible Hulk was far from perfect - stories concentrated far too much on Banner and not enough on the Hulk himself and tended to stray far too easily into soap territory - but it proved beyond doubt that the innocent-man-on-the-run format was just about irresistible.

It wasn't the first genre TV show to give The Fugitive a science fiction twist - in 1967, just as The Fugitive's Richard Kimble was coming to the end of his run, the baton was picked up by David Vincent [Roy Thinnes] who went on the lam after witnessing the beginning of a covert alien invasion in The Invaders [1967-1968]. Owing as much to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956] as to The Fugitive, The Invaders is fondly remembered as the one where the aliens are smart enough to mount a secret invasion but could never get the hang of those pesky little fingers.

Later, science fiction Fugitive clones were everywhere - in Planet of the Apes [1974], two astronauts are pursued by intelligent gorillas on a future Earth while another big screen spin-off, Logan's Run [1977] upped the ante and gave us three fugitives on the run from a society that systematically kills its residents at the age of 30. In 1981's The Phoenix, the alien Bennu of the Golden Light [Judson Earney Scott] is the man on the run after he's released from a casket discovered in ancient Incan ruins while in 1985's Otherworld a whole family does the Richard Kimble thing, struggling to stay ahead of state bounty hunters in an alternate dimension. Outside the genre, the most successful Fugitive variant was Kung Fu [1972 - 1975] in which David Carradine roamed the Old West dispensing slow-motion justice while hunted by more of those bounty hunters.

The format has proved durable enough to survive into the new millennium - in the much-loved Farscape [1999 - 2003], John Crichton [Ben Browder] is a combination Richard Kimble and Buck Rogers, a 20th century astronaut hurled into the future where he teams up with a whole spaceship full of fugitives; and in the less well known animation The Zeta Project [2001-2003], a robot goes walkabout after rebelling against its creator.

But of all these Fugitive departures, The Incredible Hulk remains one of the most fondly remembered - at the time, it was a huge hit in the playgrounds [go on admit it, you tried to rip your shirt like Lou Ferrigno - and how many times did you use the series' famous catchphrase "Don't make me angry - you wouldn't like me when I'm angry"?] and today it looks slow and a bit quaint but the strength of the format is such that you can still find yourself drawn into the plight of poor David Banner.

Season Two of The Incredible Hulk is out now from Universal Playback - order your copy from Amazon UK here.

Battlestar vs Battlestar

The curious thing about remakes and "re-imaginings" [surely the most obnoxious term to come out of Hollywood in the last few years] is that for reasons that may never be fully understood by we mortals, the Hollywood suits choose to remake films and TV shows that were great to begin with and didn't need another version. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], Black Christmas [1974], Halloween [1978], The Twilight Zone [1959-1964], The Outer Limits [1963-1965] - they were all fantastic to begin with. Did we really need someone to come along and make an inferior copy?

Surely it would make more sense to revisit a production that showed some promise but which, for whatever reason, ended up never quite achieving its potential? That's exactly what happened with Battlestar Galactica and look what a fine job the remake team made of that.

The original Battlestar, broadcast on ABC between September 1978 and April 1979, was one of the earliest and most high profile examples of the effect that Star Wars [1977] was having on popular culture in the late 1970s. Lucas' space fantasy blockbuster revolutionised the way that film and TV producers thought about science fiction - prior to Star Wars, 70s American science fiction cinema produced the likes of Colossus - The Fobin Project [1970], The Andromeda Strain [1971], The Omega Man [1971], Dark Star [1974], Phase IV [1974] and A Boy and His Dog [1975]; even less successful efforts like Silent Running [1972] and Logan's Run [1976] at least made an effort to appear intelligent and look like they'd been made for grown up audiences. Post Star Wars, juvenile space opera was largely the order of the day [the likes of Alien [1979] and Blade Runner [1982] notwithstanding], with the likes of The Black Hole [1979], Battle Beyond the Stars [1980] and Flash Gordon [1980] dictating the way that science fiction was perceived by the general public.

Television got in early - Glen A. Larson was a veteran TV writer with credits that included episodes for The Fugitive [1963-1967], Twelve O'Clock High [1964-1967] and It Takes a Thief [1968-1970] before turning producer in 1971 with the hugely successful comedy western Alias Smith and Jones [1971 - 1973]. Always a shrewd operator, he was quick off the mark and was the first TV producer to notice the seismic effect that Star Wars was having at the box office. Cannily deciding that this was the start of something big, he pitched his idea for a small screen equivalent and Battlestar Galactica was born - though Larson long maintained that the series was actually conceived as long ago as the late 60s when it was known as Adam's Ark.

Larson originally saw Battlestar as a series of expensive one-off TV movies and indeed what eventually became the pilot film was deemed good enough to get a theatrical release outside the States and reached big screens in its homeland after the series had begun broadcasting. It ran into controversy the minute the first footage was seen, when Twentieth Century Fox, who had bankrolled Star Wars, sued Universal [the studio who had picked up the tab for the very costly Battlestar] claiming that it infringed on its copyrights in no less than 34 distinct ways.

But Universal, Larson and ABC weathered the storm [Universal counter-sued, claiming that Star Wars had lifted much from its Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials from the 30s as well as more recent product like the aforementioned Silent Running] and the series went on to enjoy some success before declining audiences and rising costs put paid to the show in 1979. The two-part story The Living Legends was stitched together to form the 1978 TV movie Mission Galactica The Cylon Attack which was released to cinemas in Europe and Japan and a dreadful revival series, Galactica 1980 limped through 10 episodes before it and we were put out of our miseries - a further cut and shunt job was created out of several episodes and barely bothered box offices around the world under the title Conquest of the Earth.

The original incarnation was very far from perfect - like so much small screen television, it looked cheap away from its excellent effects sequences [most of which were repeated so often throughout the episodes that they ended up feeling like old friends] and insisted that all alien races should wear silly diaphanous gowns, ridiculous uniforms and strange hairstyles. The scripts became increasingly juvenile as it wore on [and they were hardly mature to begin with] and prolonged exposure only highlighted just how slight and uninteresting the characters really were.

However, what Battlestar had - and one suspects that this is why it remains so popular today - was a mythology, a complex and fairly consistent back story that few American genre TV shows had tried up until that time. Even Star Trek [1966-1969] didn't quite manage the epic feeling of the story that underpinned Battlestar which ironically bore resemblance to Trek creator Gene Rodenberry's desire to create a "Wagon Train to the stars" than Trek ever did. Drawing heavily from Greek, Roman and Biblical mythologies, Battlestar had a fantastic base on which to build but the episodes that followed the pilot became increasingly formulaic and banal and failed to realise that potential.

When the show was "re-magined" [ugh…] in 2003, it kept much of the epic sweep of the original show but gave the show a harder edge, one informed less by classical mythology than by the events of 11 September 2001 and its fall out. Both shows used the same basic, intriguing premise - the last surviving ships of the Twelve Colonies following a devastating war with the robotic Cylons, flee in a vulnerable convoy searching for the almost mythical lost colony known as Earth.

But the post-Millennial Battlestar departed from its parent show in many other ways and its these changes that makes the remake, for some of us at least, so much better than the original. The crew of the original Galactica were meant to be "the best of the best" but, the new crew are a flawed and very human group who are simply doing the best they can and barely scraping through; the characters are far more appealing and far more identifiable than the unconvincing stock "sci fi" characters that populated the first incarnation; and the Cylons are no longer an alien race [there are apparently no alien races in the universe explored by the new Galactica crew] but human technology that has rebelled and is now bent on slaughtering its creators.

Perhaps the remake's Cylons are its greatest disappointment. Those huge, clunky machines from the original are something of a genre design classic and while I have no argument or issue of any kind with Tricia Helfer as Number Six, the new Cyclons themselves seem a bit… well, just wrong really. Not quite as iconic. Which may explain why the producers decided to go with the notion of the humanoid Cylons, twelve different models that resemble humans so closely that it's impossible to detect them. The notion that these humanoid Cylons [an idea first used, briefly, in an episode of Galactica 1980] have infiltrated the Galactica and that the identity of five of them remained unknown even to the Cylons themselves until the climax of Season Three, forms the greater part of the ongoing storyline in the remake.

Which version of Battlestar Galactica you're going to enjoy the most is largely going to depend on your taste in science fiction - if you go for flamboyant, action-oriented space opera then the original is pretty well unbeatable. If you want darker, more character-driven drama then it's the remake all the way. Neither incarnation is entirely flawless but both have much to enjoy, from the grandiose sweep of the original's mythology to the gritty machinations of the remake.

Battlestar Galactica is the way all remakes should work - take an original that had a serviceable idea but wasn't as well executed as it could have been and do something fresh with it. Not taking something was great to begin with and screwing it up. Not that anyone in Hollywood is likely to be listening…
KEVIN LYONS

Nightmare Neighbourhoods

Small American towns have longed played an important role in science fiction and horror film and television - where would most of Jack Arnold's films be without them - but in the 1990s, American television transformed these sleepy little hamlets into something altogether more sinister. Kicking off with Twin Peaks [1990 - 1991], there was a bit of a fad for 'Small Town Weirdness' that continued throughout the decade and which occasionally pops up even now.

There had been precedents of course - American television had already dallied with the notion that beneath the homely veneer of picket fences and all-American values lay something much nastier, more rancid and unwholesome. Satanic cults seemed to have set up shop in small towns all over the States in early 70s TV [Black Noon [1971], Journey to the Unknown: The New People [1969], Ghost Story: Legion of Demons [1973]] and Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956] - itself a classic of small town paranoia - has proved to be the template for many shows and TV movies, among them Jerry Sohl's Night Slaves [1970].

But it was Twin Peaks that really got city folk in a paranoid panic about those strange sorts living out in the country as surreal supernatural shenanigans replaced the hooded Satanists and alien doppelgangers. Lynch had already explored small town nastiness in Blue Velvet [1986] and one can only imagine the pitch meeting between Lynch and the suits at ABC as he tried to sell them on the idea of a surreal soap opera murder mystery about demonic visitors from a parallel dimension being investigated by a psychic FBI agent. Presumably he didn't mention the dancing dwarf who spoke backwards...

ABC were clearly not sure about what they were getting and instructed Lynch, his co-creator Mark Frost and production company Spelling Entertainment to shoot an alternate ending for the pilot that would wrap up the story in the event that they chose not to commission a full series, allowing them to sell it on as a film. The 'film' version was released on video in Europe and the pilot was sufficiently enticing to calm ABC's nerves. They were rewarded with a massive hit as the first series of 8 episodes - ostensibly about the hunt for the killer of Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer - became the most talked-about show of the year. An even weirder second season followed but the increasingly odd storylines [which culminated in a possessed Dale Cooper trapped inside the otherworldly Black Lodge] and dead-end subplots involving minor characters [brought to the fore when a major plot involving Cooper's love affair with high school girl Audrey Horne was scrapped] led to declining ratings and the show ended after 30 episodes, with the much under-rated feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [1992] filling in the back story of Laura Palmer in the days leading up to her death.

Twin Peaks may have been dead but its influence lived on. Though nothing that followed went to quite the extremes that Twin Peaks did [particularly that nightmarish, Lynch-directed final episode, still as unsettling today as when it was first broadcast on 10 June 1991], there were many shows that picked up some of the weirdness of Twin Peaks and twisted it in different directions.

First out of the gate came Northern Exposure [1990 - 1995], its first episode airing just three months after Twin Peaks debuted. Joshua Brand and John Falsey's creation was a much gentler affair than Lynch and Frosts but was no less odd. Rob Morrow starred as Dr Joel Fleischman, a young New York doctor who finds himself forced to relocate to the eccentric Alaskan town of Cicely to pay off his student debts.

Brand and Falsey were both members of the Esalen Institute in California, which promoted a humanistic alternative to mainstream education, drawing heavily on Eastern philosophies and the writings of Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner who was an early leader at the institute. Many of the teachings of Esalen found their way into the scripts for Northern Exposure which also drew on the 'magical realism' of authors like Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez et al and the show frequently diverted into strange fantasy and dreams. It even spoofed Twin Peaks in the 9 August 1990 episode, Russian Flu which sent-up the music and look of Peaks and made mention of the enigmatic Log Lady as well as explicitly referencing the coffee and cherry pie that most of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks seemed obsessed with.

Northern Exposure was a outré than Twin Peaks, less concerned with surreal horror and much happier to play with surreal light comedy, and the characters were generally more likeable. This may explain why it outlived Twin Peaks, running to six excellent seasons packed full of intelligently written essays on the eccentricities of life in a remote, cut-off community.

During the early run of Northern Exposure, producer Joshua Brand was involved in a similar series, Going to Extremes, which sent a group of American medical students to a Caribbean island and again meeting an odd assortment of characters. It proved to be just a bit to much like going over old ground and the show lasted a single season.

Director Joe Dante was just one of the talents involved with Eerie, Indiana [1991 - 1992] a short lived but brilliant comedy that saw young Marshall Teller and his family relocate from New Jersey to the eponymous town which turns out to be "the centre of weirdness for the universe." Among the inhabitants are Elvis Presley, twins who retain their youth by sleeping in Tupperware, a pack of dogs conspiring to take over the world, Mr Chaney the werewolf and many other often borderline-dangerous eccentrics.

Although Eerie, Indiana mostly played it for laughs, it had a more direct line of descent from Twin Peaks than Northern Exposure - it was weirder for a start and despite the jokier tone and feeling that the show was being pitched at a much younger audience, there was still a palpable sense of unease running through the show. The terrors were mostly those that would trouble the under tens [a lot of the creepiness centres around the local school and adults are certainly not to be trusted] but the humour and unpredictability of the scripts proved enough incentive for adults to stay with the show during its criminally short run. It even got decidedly post-modern when, in the episode Reality Takes a Holiday, Marshall [played by Omri Katz] finds a script for a TV show in his mailbox. Suddenly he's in a television studio, playing a character called Marshall, and everyone thinks his name is Omri...

As alluded to above, Eerie, Indiana is similar to Twin Peaks in one main respect - it didn't last very long. A single season of just 19 episodes in fact - a twentieth, The Jolly Rogers, was written by Will A. Akers but was never filmed. It was something of a hallmark of these 'Nightmare Neighbourhood' shows with only Northern Exposure managing to stay the course. Eerie, Indiana was sort-of revived in 1998 with the equally short-lived [it too lasted only a season] Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, shot in Canada and starring none of the original cast.

Picket Fences [1992 - 1996] was the brainchild of David E. Kelly, later to bring us more small screen weirdness in the shape of Ally McBeal [1997 - 2002]. Picket Fences was set in the seemingly idyllic small town [aren't they all?] of Rome, Wisconsin where the cows give birth to human babies, mayors invariably meet sticky ends, a serial bather is on the loose, breaking into residents homes and leaving unsightly soap rings in their baths, and Sheriff Jimmy Brock [Tom Skeritt] struggles to make sense of it all.

Picket Fences differentiated itself from other Twin Peaks derived dramas by pretending to be a crime drama - every week, some sort of misdemeanour would be committed and Sheriff Brock would dutifully investigate, but invariably the crimes were never quite the sort of things other small screen cops would be expected to deal with. Violent shoot-outs with crazed drug lords? Organised crime on your tail? Bent cops giving you grief? That's nothing compared to the catalogue of bizarre cases investigated by Brock and his deputies, the gung-ho Maxine and former big-city cop Kenny. Murder by steamroller, a Tin Man murdered on stage during an amateur performance of The Wizard of Oz, a mercy-killing nun, a possible UFO abduction and the messy fates of that seemingly never-ending string of mayors were all in a days work for the Rome PD.

Much more in the Northern Exposure vein than of eccentricity rather than the dark surrealism of Twin Peaks, Picket Fences wasn't afraid to tackle 'big' issues [foetal tissue transplantation, the Holocaust and AIDS were just some of the issues it turned its hand to] and as you'd expect from a writer of Kelley's calibre the scripts were intelligent, witty and crammed full of characters that are not easily forgotten. Indeed for some of us, this remains his best work.

Kelley managed to work in a couple of crossover with another of his shows, Chicago Hope [1994 - 2000] - in the 1994 Picket Fences episode Rebels With Causes, two of the residents of Rome travel to Chicago Hope Hospital, while in the Chicago Hope episode Small Sacrifices [1995], one of the Rome residents again seeks medical assistance at the hospital.

More intriguingly, Kelley pulled off a sort-off crossover with The X Files [1993 - 2002], another show that benefited from the space opened up by Twin Peaks and which itself featured a number of creepy small towns [Red Museum [1994], Die Hand die Verletzt [1995], War of the Coprophages [1996], Home [1996], Bad Blood [1998] et al]. Kelley and X Files supreme Chris Carter had discussed the idea of a full-on crossover but as the shows were on rival networks, it simply wasn't going to happen. Instead, they managed to sneak a much more subtle crossover under the noses of the suits - the Picket Fences episode Away In a Manger involves strange goings-on involving the local cows, and one character specifically mentions that something similar had happened recently in the nearby town of Delta Glen. It's absolutely no coincidence whatsoever that the X Files story Red Museum was set in the fictional Wisconsin town of Delta Glen and also featured odd happenings with cows. The Picket Fences episode even namedrops the very same Dr Larsen who appeared in The X Files - and amazingly no-one at CBS, home of Picket Fences and the network most against the crossover, noticed!

Sticking much closer to the Twin Peaks formula was the wonderful American Gothic [1995 - 1996], another criminally short-lived show, this one created by Shaun Cassidy and exec produced by Sam Raimi. The Evil Dead director was busy on the small screen for some while from the mid-1990s [Hercules The Legendary Journeys [1995 - 1999], Young Hercules [1998 - 1999], Xena Warrior Princess [1995 - 2001], Cleopatra 2525 [2000 - 2001]] but American Gothic was by far and away the best TV show to bear his name.

Gary Cole, hitherto best known for his role of late-night radio presenter Jack Killian in the excellent Midnight Caller [1988 - 1991] turns in a terrific and terrifying turn as Sheriff Lucas Buck, the corrupt and possibly demonic lawman of Trinity, South Carolina who starts to pursue his estranged young son Caleb as the town's twisted network of sometimes unfathomable relationships starts to unravel. Caleb is watched over by his dead sister Merlyn [whose repeated cry of "there's someone at the door!" remains the show's most chilling memory] but even her motivations are called into question in a show where the line between Good and Evil is extremely hazy.

Blessed with an excellent cast [which also included Paige Turco, Brenda Bakke, Sarah Paulson and, in the episode Meet the Beetles, Bruce Campbell], directors who knew how to work up and sustain an atmosphere of dread and unease [among them TV veterans James Frawley, Bruce Seth Green and Mel Damski] and clever, sharp scripts [from the likes of Miracle Mile's [1988] Steve De Jarnatt and Stephen Gaghan, future Oscar winner for Traffic [2000]], American Gothic should have been the one that broke the Nightmare Neighbourhoods duck and joined Northern Exposure in a long lifespan. Sadly it wasn't to be - network CBS seemed to have no idea what they'd been given by Cassidy and Raimi and constantly moved it around the schedules, pre-empted new episodes and finally pulled the plug with four episodes still unshown.

American Gothic deserved a better hand than the one it was dealt - today it's still creepy as hell, it's multi-layered scripts ensuring that it remains repeatedly watchable over a decade later. The characters are the best drawn of any of the post-Twin Peaks shows and the eternal story of Good vs Evil is given enough new wrinkles to ensure American Gothic a devoted cult following who are still prepared to fly the flag for a show that deserved so much more from a network who simply didn't seem to understand what it was trying to do.

Shaun Cassidy - a former musician, half-brother of pop star David Cassidy - returned to small town America in 2005 for Invasion which saw a small community under threat from aliens who infiltrate the town in the wake of a hurricane.

The thread of American 'Small Town Weirdness' shows largely petered out after American Gothic, though their influence can still be detected today - the bizarre Carnivalé [2003 - ], though set mostly in a travelling circus, has some of the same sense of all not being well beneath the smiley veneer of small town America and the Sci-Fi Channel's recent Eureka [2006 - ongoing] [A Town Called Eureka in the UK] revived the formula to great success. Jericho [2006 - 2007], although much more concerned with post-9/11 fears of terrorism, also had some of that 'Small Town Weirdness' about it.

Even British television got in on the act, though given that it's a smaller country and towns tend to be less remote than some of those in the States. Springhill [1996 - 1997] was a 26 episode / two series show shown on satellite/cable channel Sky One. Set not in a remote town but a suburb of Liverpool, it featured the Freeman family whose already complicated lives [here of their five children were actually mothered by Eva Morrigan with who Jack Freeman had once had an affair] were made even more convoluted when Eva returns and seems to be a witch and angels seem be watching over the family as a full scale war between Good and Evil threatens to tear the family apart.

Much later, the ITV soap opera Night and Day [2001 - 2003] transplanted the basic premise of Twin Peaks [the tragedy of a young resident, in this case 16 year old Jane Harper who vanishes without trace, and its devastating effects on a community] to Greenwich in south east London. It featured a mysterious stranger who could stop time and, in the last episode, a ghost and drew heavily on the "guilty-secrets-uncovered-by-tragedy" theme that had run through Twin Peaks but the inner city setting worked against it and it simply wasn't as creepy, effective or memorable as Lynch and Frost's original.
KEVIN LYONS

Thanks to Tise Vahimagi for his ideas and help - and for the title!

To win a copy of Season Six of Northern Exposure, visit our competitions page here.

Down Dark Alleys and Through Darker Minds...

What, I hear you ask, is EOFFTV doing giving away a film noir box Set? What does this hard-boiled crime genre have to do with the sort of films we cover here? More than you might think...

Film noir and the horror film in particular have much in common - not only did they share many of the same writers and directors [Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Irving Pichel et al] but also shared many of the same concerns. Both genres hold a mirror up to the society in which they were made and reflects back some of the more unhealthy and unpalatable truths that society would rather remained repressed. Both are far better equipped to deal with the seamier and more confrontational side of modern society than any other genre which probably goes some way to explaining the longevity of their popularity - despite claims to the contrary, noir still gets made though its tropes and techniques have generally been subsumed into other genres.

Film noir is often discussed as though it were a genre in itself and has become a useful - if often mis-used - label to hang on a certain type of film. But it's probably more useful to consider noir as a collection of themes, techniques and styles that have proven themselves remarkably adaptable, able to be applied to films of other genres to give them that unmistakable noir feel. We've can science fiction noir [Alphaville [1965], Soylent Green [1973] and most notably Blade Runner [1982]] and the whole cyberpunk movement channelled the greats of literary noir into a whole new form of science fiction literature; animation noir [watch either of the Ghost in the Shell films and you'll see many of the noir tropes in anime form]; even, arguably, film noir westerns [Lust For Gold [1949], The Return of Jesse James [1950], Dead Man [1995]].

Quite often, the most interesting films are those born when genres collide and the fusion of horror and film noir in particular has spawned some truly impressive and unique films. The cross-pollination of the two genres began early - in 1943, Reginald LeBorg directed Lon Chaney Jr in Calling Dr Death which displayed many of the iconic techniques associated with noir and many of the low budget 40s offerings from Poverty Row specialists PRC employed the same style PRC of course made one of the seminal 40s noirs, Edgar G. Ulmer's wonderful Detour [1945]].

The first truly great horror film to make use of noir's signature look, feel and attitude was Charles Laughton's still extraordinary The Night of the Hunter [1955] which drew heavily on German Expressionism, another of the factors that unites horror and noir - both genres have solid roots in the form and drew many of their early practitioners from adherents of Expressionism.

Curiously, more horror films have made use of noir in the years since the form's heyday - the TV movie Cast a Deadly Spell [1991] is a deliberate pastiche of film noir in a horror setting; Lord of Illusions [1995], based on the Clive Barker novel, and Alan Parker's extraordinary Angel Heart [1987] both mix the hard-boiled detective genre with noir styles and horror themes; even higher profile, more mainstream horrors got in on the act - Fatal Attraction [1987], Se7en [1995] and Silence of the Lambs [1991] all called on the noir tradition to varying degrees. And on the small screen, The X Files [1993 - 2002] directors were clearly well versed in the history of film noir.

So horror and film noir are no strangers to one another and anyone interested in horror should do at least a superficial delve into the murky, sordid world of noir. The box set we're giving away at the moment contains four of the best, particularly Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity [1944] which would be as good a place as any to start of you haven't tried noir yet. Convinced? Then why not enter our Film Noir competition here - and if you can't wait, the Classic Cuts: Film Noir collection is available to buy from 26 March 2007.
KEVIN LYONS

Hitchcock's Hidden Secret?

If there's one director who's already had more than enough written about him and his films, it's probably Alfred Hitchcock. But re-watching old tapes of the classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show in advance of their Region 2 DVD release, I found myself, as I often do, wandering again about the man behind some of the most iconic of all cinematic images. Again, much has been written about what Hitchcock's films and TV work revealed about the man himself, most notably Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1999).

Spoto made some extraordinary and fascinating claims about Hitchcock's psychology, presenting his subject as a mixed bag of paranoias, obsessions and pathological urges, among them fantasies of rape, misogyny, a mother fixation and a good many others. But in recent times, we've seen another psychological disorder put forward as a possible explanation some of the neuroses and emotional quirks that Hitchcock seemed possessed by - could Hitchcock have suffered from Asperger Syndrome, a neurobiological pervasive development disorder closely related to autism?

Typically characterised by problems with social and communication skills, it seems to be being used by some writers and even Asperger support groups to explain some of Hitchcock's more eccentric on- and off-set behaviour.

It should be noted that although Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger first wrote about the disorder in 1944, it didn't become widely recognised as a condition until the early 90s and Hitchcock died in 1980, so any attempt at a diagnosis can only be made retrospectively and be based on third-hand information gleaned from the many, many books, articles and interviews that have appeared over the years and should be approached with caution and scepticism.

Whatever you may think of Spoto's well-informed study of Hitchcock's psyche, there was at least some evidence to back up his claims. Looking at the six main characteristics of Asperger in turn, it's difficult to see exactly any such evidence to support the claim that Hitchcock was indeed a sufferer:

1: Difficulty with Reciprocal Social Interactions
This seems to be the key symptom that has led many observers to this conclusion, though if that is the case, they're making a deeply flawed assumption. In essence, it means that the Asperger sufferer finds any kind of "normal" social interaction difficult and fails to understand the "give-and-take" of conversation.

Now while it's true that Hitchcock played sometimes cruel practical jokes on his cast and crew, seemingly oblivious the ramifications of his actions, to suggest that one of the most eloquent and erudite of film directors should have communications difficulties is extraordinary. Indeed, he was known to have worked very closely with his scriptwriters on the initial crafting of his scripts, hardly the behaviour of a man who failed to understand the mechanics of conversation.

2. Impairments in Language Skills
Have you ever seen Hitchcock being interviewed? Or any of those marvellous introductions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents? Again, hardly the work of a man who found using language to express thoughts, feelings, and emotions difficult. Quite the opposite in fact - Hitchcock's witty and often mordant on-screen introductions were often the highlight of the episode and he frequently recorded more than one of them. Special versions were shot for the UK removing some of Hitch's barbed comments about the show's sponsors and during the third season, he even filmed intros in French and German, languages he was fluent in.

3. Narrow Range of Interests and Insistence on Set Routines
Now this one could easily be twisted to suit any truly creative film director - it suggests Hitchcock had a limited range of thematic interests which simply couldn't be further from the truth. Take one of his films from each of six decades in which he worked and no two of them will be alike. Sure, there were themes that he returned to from time to time [particularly the wronged-man-on-the-run] but to suggest that Hitchcock had a narrow range of interests is absurd.

4. Motor Clumsiness
I can find no evidence to support of discredit the notion that Hitchcock suffered any problems with motor skills - other than those one might expect from a man of his build - and would very much like to hear any evidence for or against.

5. Cognitive Issues
One of the fundamental symptoms of Asperger in something referred to as "mindblindness", the inability to make inferences about what another person is thinking, a lack of empathy. Hitchcock's delight in playing cruel jokes on cast, crew, family and friends may suggest to some that he lacked the ability to understand what the consequences of his actions would be on those people, but it's probably more accurate to say that Hitchcock just had a bizarre and bleak sense of humour [one wonders if any of the people claiming that Hitch suffered from Asperger actually watched any of his films].

Mindblindness can also give rise to deficiencies in problem solving, mental planning and the ability to stay focused on a task - hardly qualities one would expect to find in the most influential and widely imitated film director of all time.

6. Sensory Sensitivities
Many children who suffer from Asperger develop issues with their senses, often perceiving what the rest of us would experience as a fairly mild or barely noticeable sensory event as very intense. This might seem a good thing for someone working in the visual arts it would almost certainly cripple any artistic endeavour in actuality.

I've yet to find any actual written evidence anywhere to back up the increasing number of claims that Hitchcock was an Asperger sufferer - his name has simply started to appear on lists of famous AS sufferers, compiled by people who clearly never met him and were therefore unable to make an accurate diagnosis. Chances are that in our increasingly syndrome-obsessed world we're just looking for smaller and smaller pigeonholes into which to fit people and poor Hitch has now been stuck with the AS label.

There's no doubt that he was a fascinating character with a deeply complex psyche and more than his share of psychological baggage. But maybe we just need to accept that he was like all truly great creative people [not just those who merely make films, play music, write books - those who are genuinely deserving of the label creative genius] and was deeply eccentric and emotionally flawed - which is exactly what needed to be to create the work that he did.

When you watch the new DVD releases of Alfred Hitchcock Presents [and you really should - they're even better than you'll remember them] watch those witty, caustic intros with a keener eye. There's definitely something going on behind that portly, avuncular exterior - something dark and difficult, but Asperger's? The jury's still out…

"Just one more thing..."

Sometimes, the work of the fictional detective seems to have more in common with some arcane mystical practice than the rigorously methodical, logic-based process of deduction it is in real life. Real world cops rely on years of experience, methodical procedures and cutting edge technology to get their man, while their fictional counterparts seem blessed with near paranormal abilities that allow them to deduct the truth from facts and clues often overlooked by we mere mortals. Foremost among these uncanny flatfoots is of course the Prince of Detectives himself, Sherlock Holmes, whose ability to deduce the facts from limited clues often seems like the work of black magic.

On American TV, things were generally a lot easier - cops raced around town, roughing up suspects, hanging out with informants and looking good in nifty fashions, pursuing more-or-less routine avenues of detection but doing it a bit more glamorously than you'd find in your average real-life inner-city precinct. In the 1970s, the one exception to the rule was Columbo.

Although best known and loved now as the shabbily-dressed character portrayed by Peter Falk in the long-running series of television films, the character had been created by Richard Levinson and William Link for an episode of anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show, Enough Rope [1960] where he was played by Bert Freed. The character turned up again in a stage version of the same story, this time played by Thomas Mitchell and in 1968, Falk took over the role and made it his own in the pilot film Prescription: Murder, which soon led to a series within the NBC Mystery Movie umbrella, starting in 1971.

Columbo was the most unusual American TV detective show in that it was never a whodunit. The audience always knew right from the opening scenes who the killer and the victim were and what the motive behind the killing was. The earliest use of this technique, known as the "inverted mystery" is widely credited to English writer R. Austin Freeman and the creators of Columbo readily acknowledge the debt to Freeman's work.

With the sense of mystery removed [we already knew from the start who did it], what makes Columbo so compelling is the ensuing battle of psychological wits between Columbo and the killer. The shabbily dressed Lieutenant Columbo [his first name was never revealed on screen, despite what a famous question in Trivial Pursuit might have us believe - see here for more details] never used a gun, and his car certainly wasn't a souped-up penis extension with go-faster stripes, just a rather battered 1960 Peugeot 403, a means of getting him to and from work - and there was never any guarantee that it would manage that. Instead he relied solely on the one thing that so many TV 'tecs seem to lack - his wits.

When he first arrives at the murder scene - often 10 to 15 minutes into the mystery - Columbo would often seem disinterested in the crime scene, seeming befuddled, a bit lost and in danger of overlooking the clues that his more "ordinary" colleagues were carefully combing the scene for. But somewhere, the killer has made a subtle but fatal flaw and it's this weakness that Columbo eventually manages to exploit having managed to deduce the vital clue within minutes of his flustered first appearance.

The secret weapon in Columbo's arsenal seems to be his uncanny ability to read human body language, to be able to tell at a glance when someone is lying. It's actually surprisingly easy to spot when someone is lying to you as the person involved exhibits all sorts of behaviour that gives the game away, but it's something that few of us actually notice. Though Columbo certainly does. He can see when the stiff and limited physical expressions, the avoidance of eye contact, the touching of the person's own their face, throat and mouth while trying to maintain the lie. He can see how facial expressions in liars are limited largely to their mouths instead of using the whole face, can read their defensive and discomfort at being questioned and will spot the way that guilty people invariably place an object [a book, a cup, anything at hand] between themselves and their interrogator as a way for keeping them from the truth.

But what the show's writers all seemed to understand and used so well is the fact that you can catch out a liar very easily by suddenly changing the subject of a conversation, then switching back to the topic at hand with equal rapidity - a liar will gladly change the subject and become more relaxed, but the change back to the subject of the lie will often confuse them enough to tie themselves in knots and allow the lie to be revealed. Week in, week out we saw Columbo exploiting this simple behavioural tic, especially in "Just one more thing..." questions, and using it to tease the truth from his suspect.

In more recent years, as the condition has become better known, some commentators have suggested that Columbo's success as a detective might be down to him suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder [OCD], an affliction that dogs a later small screen detective in a similar vein, Monk. Certainly the man in the mac has a near obsessive near to tie up the loose ends of every case he investigates, but OCD is just a currently rather trendy label to pin on people whose behaviour is seen as a fixated and slightly paranoid. Chances are that Columbo was just a bloody good cop whose abilities make him seem odd and slightly sinister but who really just refuses to give up on a case.

In fact, if Columbo is afflicted with a psychological condition it would seem to be a very slight case of sadism. Witness his masterly playing of mind games with the man or woman he suspects of having committed the crime, especially in his final mental torturing of them, allowing them to believe that they might just be getting away with this before springing one of 70s TV's most famous catch-phrases: "Just one more thing…" Columbo seemed to actively enjoy this mental sparring, allowing the killer enough hope of getting away with it that it will lull him into a false sense of security and trip them up.

These climactic scenes were always the most enjoyable parts of the show, the final pay-off as Columbo solves the last piece of the puzzle and springs his trap. There was never any real doubt that he would actually solve the case [though in one episode from Season Five, Forgotten Lady [14 September 1975], he agrees to allow the killer [played by Janet Leigh] to "get away with it" as she's clearly seriously mentally unwell and dying] but watching the killer initially believing that they were cleverer than Columbo [there's a real class conflict subtext at work in Columbo, with the working class gumshoe invariably taking on mainly middle-class adversaries] before panicking, making mistakes and finally marveling like the rest of us at the tenacity of the scruffy little man's perspicacity and relentlessness.
KEVIN LYONS

Columbo Season 5 is released on UK DVD by Universal on 12 February 2007, priced £29.99.