The Rough Guide to Cult TV [Broché]

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. There is, alas, no hard scientific formula for deciding whether a TV programme is cult or not. You can pore over the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (which will invoke such ideas as religious worship, homage and fashion) but ultimately whether a show is cult or not is as personal a decision as whether you preferred Jenny Hanley to Valerie Singleton, or World Of Sport (with its breathtaking coverage of the World Target Clown Diving Championships from Florida) to Grandstand.

But certain qualities help define what’s cult. An obvious and irritating sign is that ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ moment when your peers quote huge chunks of dialogue to each other and titter. But one besotted viewer does not a cult make; it takes at least two to swap allusions and in-jokes.
Swift and irrational condemnation by the legendary Mary Whitehouse once helped many shows become cult. Since she departed to the green room in the sky, the Daily Mail has done its best. But it’s not the same. The indignation needs to be dispensed by a woman who looks like the result of a genetic experiment involving Dame Edna Everage and Barbara Woodhouse to be truly effective.

Nor is a show’s cult status directly related to its quality. A cult programme can be inspirationally great (like The Singing Detective), so weird that even regular viewers aren’t sure what’ll happen next (Spike Milligan’s Q series) or, like Crossroads, as cheesy and as full of holes as Switzerland’s annual output of Emmental. It takes a certain nerve to set a soap opera in the glamour-free zone that is the Midlands, shooting every scene in one take even if the set began to shake, and start a glorious tradition whereby characters aren’t written out but simply forgotten. In 1967, Benny Wilmott, a teenager who ran the coffee bar, was told by Meg Richardson to ‘go out and buy a bag of sugar’, an errand from which he had still not returned when the show closed 20 years later.

A cult show is usually an original. In 1971, American humorist Fred Allen noted, ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of television.’ The industry’s default mode is to repeat a success until the repetitions stop being successful, which is why most of the time it’s the originals we cherish, Monty Python rather than The Goodies, Morecambe And Wise not Hale And Pace (whom Victor Lewis-Smith accurately described as ‘the world’s only known comedy double act consisting of two straight men’). For most of us, Hamish Macbeth is a work of subtlety and Monarch Of The Glen is a poor copy with the quirkiness removed to make space for extra shortbread.
Catchphrases help, be they as blatant as ‘Nice to see you to see you...’
(there is something almost Pavlovian in the way we all feel obliged to shout ‘nice!’) as apparently innocuous as ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ or even ‘Hands that do dishes can be soft as your face.’

A programme’s cult value isn’t just determined by the show itself – we play our part. Children’s susceptibility to media influence is debated by sociologists, leader writers, programme-makers and politicians. Yet the influence, good or ill, is obvious in the number of programmes, one-liners and slogans that enter our young brains to pop up at random for the rest of our lives. For Britons of a certain age, there was a time in their lives when Biddy Baxter was one of the most important people in the world, almost as eminent as the prime minister, a remote god-like figure who moved in mysterious ways to produce the wonder that was Blue Peter. Many of the shows which have stuck with us were those we saw before we grew up (or before we reached the age at which we are officially deemed to have grown up): Roobarb, Tiswas, The Demon Headmaster, et al. This isn’t always true, but it’s true an awful lot of the time.