There’s absolutely nothing I can write that will live up to the expectations for this one, so with a few deep breaths:
The Moonbase
(episode 1)
Well, here we are then.
We’ve escaped from the nefarious plots of Zaroff, and now the TARDIS is crashing!
The Doctor desperately tries to stabilise his machine as his companions hold on for dear life, and succeeds.
The TARDIS took this opportunity to land.
Polly thinks the inhospitable landscape seen on the scanner is Mars.
The Underwater Menace
(episode 1)
Right, let's get back to the Troughton era.
It's episode 1 of that story Official Fandom always told us was a bit naff, until Episode 2 got found and it got reappraised as "our kind of naff".
Still, four months on from Gerry Davis murdering the historical, let's see if some B-movie shlock can improve things.
Gerry and Innes kill off the historical, in one final flourish. We are also introduced to a Doctor Who icon, not that you'd know from this.
The Highlanders
(episode one)
I knew sod all about this story, incidentally. Jon Arnold speaks highly of it, Jamie joins the TARDIS crew, and a very young Hannah Gordon appears in it.
It's Scotland! Culloden Moor. And there's a fight going on. Young Frazer Hines drags a man to safety. Another man rushes a red coat and kills him. Lots of people battle.
I thought Gerry Davis was aiming to lighten the historical mood?
Here we are, it's the final episode, the cream rises to the top, the A list.
What we have left is solid TV gold and yet, someone sod still had to rank them.
We are now into the top thirty-five, of all the Columbo episodes. It may surprise some to realise that we have multiple episodes of the nineties era still to go. It's not that the new series era was terrible, it's just that the gems are sometimes disguised by the duds and the weaker stories around them. However, we've got rid of all of those now, so what's left must be great TV.
In the B class, we have the stories which come recommended as enjoyable slices of TV sleuthing, but which just miss the top for small reasons. Maybe there was one loophole too many in the plot, or something about the production didn't quite work. For many, it's just that simple case that there are better stories, but as the top fifteen are among the greatest exhibits of American TV yet made, being just below that is no crime.
Indeed, I think some of these are quite underrated by fans.
And so, while trying to avoid being the enemy of succinct for a moment, on we go:
Last time we saw the least good. This time, let's move up to the C list of Columbo. Those episodes which don't work, for a variety of reasons, but have enough in them to be enjoyable watches if they are on TV. Some might be quite bad, but amusing. Some might fail on a basic plot principle. Some might just miscast badly a crucial role.
Sorry, George Wendt, I know all of those refer to your episode but I'm not picking on you. Honest.
Some even might have gone in Part 1 if not for one thing which raises them from the bottom rank.
Without further waffle, the flawed diamonds in the rough of Columbo!
The mistake was not watching all sixty-nine episodes of Columbo, because that provided many hours of great TV watching. And also Peter Falk saying the word "panties" seven times in a row, but you can't have it all.
The mistake was mentioning this to friends who asked how I would rank those episodes.
Never ask an obsessive to produce a list based on quality. Case in point, I was asked about this in February!
Since then, I did what a responsible research addicted non-writer would do. I rewatched all sixty-nine episodes. I marvelled over Jack Cassidy. I sobbed with Janet Leigh. I tried desperately to derive greatness from that bloody Commodore. And, as I watched each episode, I wrote some quick fresh notes on each story.
From those notes, I gave you this list. Succinct being my enemy, I've had to cut this into a few parts. Also, much like Doctor Who, the biggest crime for me in TV is being dull. This might explain in advance why some stories from the seventies which are worthy but snooze worthy rank lower than some of the flawed but entertaining car crashes.
So without further preamble, here we go!
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)
A man drives, nervously, to a cottage house in the countryside. He’s never visited this part of the country before but is suffering a severe dose of déjà vu. Especially as he is introduced to the other guests, complete strangers, and seems to recognise them.
Our man Walter mentions that he’s seen all of these people before in recurring dreams. As a result of this, he is convinced that something terrible is going to happen in this house. The other guests try to take his mind off it with tales of premonitions they’d suffered in their lives.
Power of the Daleks
(episode 1)
Apparently, this show renews the lead character. That’ll never catch on…
Luckily we’ve got Ben and Polly to talk us through the change. Ben is very sceptical, like a normal person. Polly is more encouraging, because the script needs someone to be, else the show will get axed. And they can’t axe the bloody thing before The Moonbase has even been broadcast!
THE WITCHES (1990 version)
Did you enjoy the Roald Dahl book when you were a kid? Well, I was scared by it. Even the soothing sounds of Emma Thompson reading the audiobook on my Walkman was a thrilling event, as she went into agreeable detail with the nasty things the witches did to kids.
Another person who loved the book was Jim Henson, who bought the rights to the film almost immediately. Henson decided that the best person to film a kids book was Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg, and we get a film full of his usual POV shots, quick cuts and handheld camera. In short, Nicolas Roeg shoots The Witches like a horror film.
Death Watch (1980)
Bertrand Tavernier, the great French director, died in 2021 aged 79. This is his slightly mentalist futurist horror - which, despite being far more popular in France, has gained a sort of cult reputation in the decades since.
And as we open to a child skipping around the Glasgow Necropolis, you might see my interest in the film! For it was shot in Glasgow in 1980, and while the outdoor scenes are far too brief, we get to see an intrusion into a snapshot of the city, shortly before it was restored.
Hellraiser (1987)
"I've seen the future of horror - his name is Clive Barker" said Stephen King once. Which is high praise in marketing terms, and in literature terms, if you like Stephen King.
A guy plays with a puzzle box, then is ripped apart in FX that would have freaked me out if I was still 8 years old, but looked very goofy now. This was Frank, whose lust for pleasure starts the whole plot in motion.
TRAIN TO BUSAN
During the Korean War, pivotal battles were held around the province of Busan to hold back the North Korean army. So the area has a long held role in the legacy of South Korea, as being the place where you hold out until reinforcements come. Here a commuter train to Busan becomes the last refuge against a sudden and virulent zombie attack.
Zombie films are everywhere nowadays. They have been to the 21st Century what vampires were to the early 20th. As metaphors for all of the ails of society, there is a never ending source of metaphors. The Rezort took on the world's blind eye to refugee rights. Others play with commercialisation.
Halloween IV (1988)
Ten years on from the first Hallowe'en film, everything's changed. The Sherriff retired. Jamie Lee Curtis has gone (read: doing well in non-horror films). Well, not everything has changed - Michael Myers survived his imminent death, has returned to Haddonfield, and is murdering lots of folk again. And he's got the increasingly frail Dr Loomis after all.
SINS OF OMISSION
(Michael S. Collins, 2016)
From the taxi, Alice looked, dead-eyed, at all the merriment on the streets of Glasgow as they passed. It seemed like, from every corner as they passed, she could see, mixed in with the joyous and merry, the singed faces of hatred, and the static threatened to overcome her ears. But no one approached the taxi, even when it stopped by a red light, and their dead faces gazed at the occupants on each side of the street. They weren’t even following her; it was more like the people at the side of the road watching a hearse slowly weave its way to the crematorium. The lights turned green, the taxi moved on, and Alice blinked and missed the faces of the dead...
HOUSE OF 9
"Only the most passionate genre fans will be able to sit through House of 9 and be able to semi-recommend the thing to anybody else."
Scott Weinberg
Turns out I'm a passionate genre fan, because I'm delving into good old shlock here.
I saw this film when it came out and I loved it. You should understand that I have a weakness for anything pretending to be And Then There Were None. And this film takes all of its cues from Christie, from Saw, from numerous other sources. It's entirely unoriginal B-movie stuff.
So, for those who don't know the score with this glacially progressing project...
A number of years ago, when the BBC4 Top of the Pops repeats reached 1984 (they are currently on 1994) I realised that, if you took the best forty songs which made the Top 40 in that year, you would get an amazing playlist. Which you did. The challenge was then to create such a list for each year of the charts. To gnash in fury when favourite songs only made it to forty-two in the charts, and were thus ineligible. To try and get forty good songs out of a year dominated by Jive Bunny.
This is the 2005 edition of this project. 2005 was not a brilliant year for charting music in the UK. There are songs which qualified for this list which wouldn't make the Near Misses list in better years. Why did I pick 2005 then?
