Great but forgotten TV shows

Crime Story (late 80s with Dennis Farina)

 

Yes, it was centred around Warwick, but such a madcap cast of characters. It got into some list of top British sitcoms.

I just thought either these writers are on LSD or someone has spiked my drink.

I can remember ''A Very Peculiar Practice'. The writer was a lecturer once at Warwick but they wanted to film it at UEA who refused and it was filmed at Birmingham and Keele Unis (found via Wikipaedia).

What DID happen at the End of Mysterious Cities of Gold? We missed it. 

 

(imagine not knowing the ending of something because you slept in, or went on holiday!)

Dear John.

 

John Sullivan sitcom about the same time as he was scoring hits with OFAH and Just Good Friends, which means this one gets overlooked.  But a great set of background characters.

 

In a similar vein, Ever Decreasing Circles was a work of art.

 

From the kids' TV world, I'm just about old enough to remember Tomfoolery, a surreal set of Rankin Bass cartoon skits based on the poetry of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.  So wish that would get a re-issue, there are only vague hints of how mad it was on youtube.  Animation was done by Halas & Batchelor, who had done the 1984 film a couple of decades earlier (the one with Maurice Denham doing all the voices and the changed ending).

Manimal was awesome

There was a brilliant sitcom with Robert bathurst called love hurts which I think I am the only person to have watched

The bill - every single episode was brilliant

+1 for Mysterious Cities of Gold. That was excellent.

And to answer a question above, at the end both the goodies and the baddies made it inside the city, but it was destroyed by their rapaciousness. A lesson for us all!

I had forgotten what a big thing crappy American imports were in the 80s dominating prime time - Dynasty, Dallas, Heart to Heart, Beverly Hills, Baywatch, A Team etc etc etc.   Must have been an easy time to be British TV exec.

Test cards: the reason they existed, I am told, is that when tv repair men came to your house to 'mend your tv set' they sometimes had to adjust the colour tones etc., so needed some sort of technicoloured test signal during the times of day that there was no conventional programming on air.