TV Ten

For those who don't follow me religiously on Facebook(!?!) ... I took part in the "10-Day TV challenge" this month. The task was, once a day for ten days, to post an iconic image from a TV production which influenced me. So here's my roundup, in no particular order...

1)  Blake's 7: 

SF rebels in a dystopian future.The series that taught me that happy endings aren't mandatory. Utterly devastating to watch as a child.

2) Sesame Street: 
 

I grew up with a lot of American TV because we lived in Hong Kong. Sesame Street was a window onto a world that seemed incredibly alien - yet also happy and hopeful and loving. If I'm a liberal now it's because of this early indoctrination 😉


3)  Sapphire and Steel:

 

Creepy, genre-bending, starkly original, and the heroes were *shockingly* ruthless in their determination to fix things (OMG poor Mr Tully!). Also I fancied Steel like crazy👿


4) Game of Thrones: 

 

What can I say? Ground-breaking. Reignited my interest in secondary world fantasy, which I'd nearly given up on since nothing to that point matched The Lord of the Rings. Marked my personal switch from terrestrial TV to those weird pay channels like Sky and Netflix.

5) The Adventure Game: 

The prototype for every Escape Room in existence. Also popularised cute dragon shifters before the Romance genre got there.


6) Arthur of the Britons: 

Aired 1972, and surely the most obscure show I could find for this list ... but it certainly "influenced" me 😉  Here's the blog post I wrote all about it

7) The Storyteller: 

Starring the incomparable John Hurt, this series made fairy tales cool for people other than small children 💖Along with Angela Carter's stories, this greatly influenced my writing.
 

8) Michel Strogoff:

This cheesey French tea-time treat taught me *everything* I know about Romance - to whit, that it needs to take place in the setting of a major war somewhere foreign, that the antagonist's sexier than the protagonist, and that the best bit is when the hero gets tortured. (No wonder I'm a mess.) Another one I wrote a blog-post about

9) Blackadder: 

I am exactly the right age, nationality and class to consider this century-spanning dynastic epic the funniest TV comedy ever written. Because (apologies to all you woke folk) that sneering, world-weary smartarse speaks to my heart.

And I still say "Bob" and "I have a cunning plan," occasionally.

10) I, Claudius: 

I was allowed at 10 yrs old to stay up and watch this witty but very NSFW series because it was Culture 😄  Still love it to bits - along with Rome, its obvious descendant, and Game of Thrones, its secret bastard child. My most influential scene - a famous prostitute and the Empress Messalina have a shagging competition. The prostitute demands to be paid. "For you it's a hobby; for me it's work," she says. "MY hobby is gardening."

I think I raised a wisdom point from that exchange.