Most Popular Posts of 2021!

Looking back on Rusty Staples' most popular posts of 2021!

Comics on TV: Dempsey and Makepeace

He's a gruff New York cop, she's a cultured British police officer... together, they're featured in this episode of Comics on TV!

Comics on TV: The Young Ones

Once in every lifetime comes a sitcom like this...

Comics on TV: Call the Midwife

Let's hop in our time-machine and travel back to 1960s Poplar in the east end of London...!

Comics on TV: Dr. Who & The Daleks

OK, so Dr. Who & The Daleks was a movie, not a TV show, but I first saw it on TV so that counts... The movie -- loosely based on the second story of the then-relatively-fresh smash-hit BBC science fiction show -- was released in 1965 and stared Peter Cushing as the title character... a …

Comics on TV: Eastenders

British comics fan Brian Meenan has spotted Arthur Fowler (played by Bill Treacher) reading a copy of Cor!! in a repeat of the BBC soap opera Eastenders... The issue in question is cover-dated 27th April 1974... On his Facebook post, Brian mentions that this episode is the one in which Arthur dies. According to Wikipedia, …

Oddities: Goody Goody comic

Long before The Young Ones deigned to (dis)grace the TV airwaves, and longer before I'd even heard of Monty Python's Flying Circus, my comedy heroes were Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, AKA The Goodies. They were silly, inventive, childish, slightly subversive, much more accessible to younger people like myself, and above all they …

Comics on TV: The Deceived

The Deceived is a four-part contemporary thriller created and written by Lisa McGee (of Derry Girls fame) and Tobias Beer. It's recently finished airing on Virgin Media One here in Ireland, and for me, personally, it was an absolute triumph. Not because of the story or the acting or the scenery or whatever, although there …

Comics on TV: Life on Mars

In the 2006 TV show Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song that was released on the 1971 album Hunky Dory) Manchester-based police officer Sam Tyler is struck by a car and wakes up in the year 1973. He doesn't know whether he's going crazy, in a coma, or has travelled back in …

Comics on TV: Back in Time for the Corner Shop

BBC2's excellent Back in Time for the Corner Shop is a show that sends a modern family "back in time" to run an old-fashioned corner shop, with all the restrictions and rules commensurate to the era, including having to deal with imperial measurement, food-shortages, ration books, pre-decimal currency, etc. It's an extremely engaging show, chiefly …