Tuesday 13 September 2022

Cartoon Crackers


Do they still show Looney Tunes cartoons on ITV? It always felt, when I was a child, that all you had to do was wait 15 minutes and, soon enough, Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck would be popping up on the screen. Sometimes these animated shorts popped up when there was a gap in the schedules, sometimes they were packaged together with linked presentation such as, uh, Rolf's Cartoon Club. Another programme which presented these cartoons in a similar fashion, and one which has a less dubious background, was the short-lived Cartoon Crackers.

Sunday 4 September 2022

Book Review: Tomato Cain and Other Stories by Nigel Kneale


Being one of British television's most innovative, forward thinking and fiendishly skilled writers, Nigel Kneale needs little introduction to the readers of Curious British Telly. However, whilst we're all familiar with Quatermass, The Stone Tape, The Woman in Black and, ahem, Kinvig, Kneale's 1949 collection of short prose entitled Tomato Cain and Other Stories is less well known. But this lack of recognition is less an indicator of quality and more a matter of circumstance, for Tomato Cain and Other Stories has been out of print for over 60 years. Luckily, 2022 has seen its pages (and a few bonus features) resurrected by Comma Press.