The Best Kids TV Shows Ever !!!!!

 

1. “Boy from Space” - “Look and Read” :  This was a popular TV show in the 80’s that kids would watch at about 11 am each day as a break from class.  The host Wordey was a legless red faced little man who would fly around chanting “Magic Magic E”.  Nobody realised at the time that he was a pioneering drug pusher getting ready for the era of raves.  “Boy From Space” was one of the stories featured in the show and it revolved around a couple of alien kids who looked like the children of the damned but with blue suits that appeared to be made from tissue paper and a language that only the teacher from Charlie Brown could imitate.  The actual episodes were all of 5 minutes long at the end of each “Look and read” segment and sci-fi obsessed kids all over Britain waited with baited breath each week for the latest fun installment.  The “Dark Towers” story was also a classic but the little lad from the stars was the pick of the bunch.

2.”Newsround”: with John Craven:  It may seem odd to highlight a kids news show as being a cult TV classic but the sad reality is that Craven and his sidekicks produced a 10 minute show containing more real news items than you’d see after a year of watching Fox and or MSNBC today.  I particularly liked the endless reports on giant Panda’s and space shuttle launches. 

 3.”The Flumps”:  Long before that northern bloke was winning Oscars for dull films about Wallace and his dog the BBC had set the standard for animation with “The Flumps”  This was easily the best show of its genre and one of the all time classic moments of television was when Grandpa flump got stuck in his Flumpaphone.

4.”Mr Benn” :  This guy was the ultimate master of disguise.  Every week he went to some kind of fancy dress shop and disappeared through the dressing room into many weird and wonderful places.  He tried his hand at being everything from a cowboy to a clown but his real brilliance was in his ability to persuade the shopkeeper to let him keep trying on costumes all the time without ever buying a single item from the store. 

5.”The A-Team”:  In this era of cheesy remakes I am surprised that no one has decided to make a big screen version of the greatest US TV show of all time : The A-Team.  I bet George Clooney would like a stint as Hannibal alongside Jim Carey as Murdoch and perhaps Di Caprio as Face.  BA would be harder to cast but perhaps DMX would be the man for the job and it would be the kind of thing that could lead to at least 3 or 4 sequels which is right up Clooneys alley. 

6. “Tim Tyler “(aka Timm Thaler) :  This was a German classic about a kid whose laugh was stolen by an evil Baron in 1970’s Berlin (?)  The show was great because the worst sound editors in the history of television hired some drunk B movie actors to dub it into English and during the whole series not one word was uttered by a character in English at the same time his mouth was in motion.  Aside from the cheap production this show was also memorable for the flairs and hippie hairstyles that defined an otherwise forgettable era.

7. “Degrassi Junior High” :  This was Canada’s answer to Grange Hill and was so terrible that it was actually  good for its utter patheticness.  I remember that one episode caused a stir as it featured the revelation that one of the teachers was a lesbian before the old BBC watershed.  Oddly enough the BBC didn’t buy a lot of shows from the land where people say “aye” after the ratings for this one were compiled but I still have a soft spot for it.

8.”Silas”: The people who dubbed this Polish gem into English did a marginally better job than their counterparts had done with Tim Tyler but the real issue was the fact that phrases that take about two syllables to say in English take 5 minutes to say in Polish and vice versa.  I remember that Silas was harrased by an nefarious harridan who was known simply as “The Old Shrew”.  I can’t remember the plot of the show but basically it involved around a kid riding around on a horse and every  week it had the same cliffhanger ending as he crossed paths with his nemesis and he exclaimed “the shrew”  Brilliant !

9. “Airwolf”: Some people may remember Ernest Borgnine as the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross or as the cop who married a hooker in “The Poseidon Adventure” but I remember him most fondly as the pilot of the best helicopter ever built, Airwolf.  This show had a simple message:  Criminals beware of copters loaded to the brim with machine guns because no matter where you run Ernie will blow your head off.  This was much better than anything you’ll see on CSI, eat your heart out David Caruso.

10. “Neighbours”: Not technically a kids show but try telling that to anyone who grew up in the UK in the late eighties.  So many kids were skipping school to watch this Aussie classic that the BBC moved it to the 5.30 spot after “Blue Peter” which had usually been reserved for shows like “Doctor Who” or “Friday film: The Glitterball.”  I was skiving off school in 1987 when the first episode was broadcast and after I saw Max Ramsey lose his temper, Des fall for stripper Daphne and Shane introduce the southern hemisphere to the mullet there was no looking back.

CBS KILLS JERICHO

 

 

There are times when I wish that I hadn’t tempted fate and one of those times occurred this past week.  A guy at my work with whom I regularly discuss television news was asking me about the season finale of my best show “Jericho”.  After giving him a run down of the thrilling cliffhanger I couldn’t help but take a swipe at “Entertainment Weekly”.  Back in August that magazine had proudly declared that of all the new shows being broadcast in the fall that “Jericho” was the most likely to be cancelled.  They had also predicted great success for “Smith” (haha 3 episodes and scrapped) and “Sunset Strip thing with Chandler from Friends” or whatever it was called but either way it was also a flop.  I knew “Jericho” had been popular earlier in the year but it turns out that after CBS decided to give it a prolonged break mid season that some ungratfeul good for nothing selfish bastard viewers didn’t bother to watch the most recent episodes because they were too busy mowing their lawns, attending PTA nights or having “American Idol” parties.  As a result CBS have decided to send the show to the scrap heap where all great shows seem to end up these days.  The same thing happened to “Invasion” and I am sure that long before the next 48 padded and pointless episodes of “Lost” have been broadcast that all of the broadcast delays will ultimately lead to a sad demise for that show as well.

“Jericho” was bloody brilliant though and I am furious that that the network that thinks having a crappy actor in a black suit with bright orange hair putting on and takingoff his sunglasses repeatedly for an hour at a time constitutes “drama.”  CBS needs to be shut down for crimes against television.  Anyone could have told you that an old git who uses expressions involving “tornadoes and trailer parks” to describe elections would be far more liked than some kind of 50 year old Olsen twin wannabee as the host of the evening news.  CBS don’t know what the hell they are doing when it comes to quality programming.  “Jericho” had everything you could ask for : a failed movie actor in the lead role, gun wielding yanks, terrorism, love triangles, a bar, a bald headed villain and even a pumpkin patch that Charlie Brown would be proud of and yet we will never ever know the fate of Skeet and the boys now as someone has decided that it would be better to show a new drama about Swingers in 1970’s Chicago instead.  For anyone who thinks that new show sounds interesting I wouldn’t even bother wathcing it because the only shows that last past one season these days are reality shows and cheapskate quiz shows.  Whoever made the decision to cancel “Jericho” will have to smoke a turd in hell for sure but instead of cancelling the show they should have maybe fired the person who decided to interrupt its broadcast for a few months mid season and therefore lost it half of its audience base.

I really have no use for CBS now so I don’t expect to be watching it ever again.  I used to watch “King of Queens” when it was funny but after about 57 scheduling changes that show has now become nothing more than the unfunny show featuring the fat guy and the miserable, old looking Scientologist chick.  They should have cancelled that before it died it’s slow tedious death but no that would have required some intelligence on CBS part.

I guess I will start a new life based around the Discovery Channel and CMT whilst CBS can carry on being mismanaged and firing folks like Imus for being innapropriate whilst saying nothing about the vulgar content of their music channels.    One day pretty soon they will get their just desserts when David Caruso loses his sunglasses on the way to work and everybody realises that they were the only thing that held the whole “CSI” franchise together. 

 

The Amazing Race All Stars

There was a spoiler online a while back which suggested the final four of the “All star Amazing Race” would include team Cha cha cha as well as Charla and Mirna.  Everybody who had ever seen the show knew this was a complete lie as there was no way in hell these teams would actually be in contention for the grand prize.   How could we all get it so wrong ?  I never had anything against the boys from Miami but I never imagined that stopping to buy fruit or taking lemonade breaks would be prove to be winning tactics.       I don’t have anything against Charla either but Mirna is something else.   For some odd reason she seems to find it necessary to imitate peoples accents in whichever country she happens to be in even though she is speaking English.  A few weeks ago we heard her doing an African accent and most recently she was trying to do a Chinese accent.  I don’t know if she realises that the key to being understood is in speaking either your own language or someone elses language properly and not in speaking your own language whilst doing a bad impersonation of Nelson Mandela or Fu Manchu.  Mirna must have inspired more reality TV fans to throw bricks at their televisions than anybody since Mike Boogie first wandered onto our screens several years ago and made our lives miserable for a few weeks one summer until thankfully he got the boot from “Big Brother 2″. 

The “All star” as a whole has been a heck of a lot better than the “Survivor” version on which half the cast either quit or made it obvious they wanted to be on the first plane out of there.  Everyone on this show seemed to want to participate except for one of the NYC baldies who did a pathetic impression of Charlie Chaplin as he “accidentally” stumbled and hurt himself more than once to waste time and ultimately decided to drive at the speed of a milk float until finally Phil the half alien/ half South African host put him and his buddy out of their misery.  I was pretty annoyed about that because on their first season the lads had been pretty entertaining.  Perhaps they were lost without Emily and Nancy who were much tougher and far funnier than most of this shows participants but were sadly overlooked by the casting director. 

The old gay guys didn’t live up to there evil ways either and in fact they evolved into a couple of sentimental old windbags who spent more time hugging than cooking up inventive skullduggery which was the only thing that made them “Allstars” to begin with.  Overall though Miss California is pretty cute but I think Miss NY odd looking and of the teams left I wish Miss C would team up with Oswald since they are the two most stylish and like-able folks left.