Old TV Shows

I just happened to be going thru the " Off Topic " forum and saw that someone has a thread on the go about Superheroes and the OP likes Batman for one. Right away the good old " Batman " TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward came to mind, truly a classic comedy. " Holy Cow Batman we must dash off to the Bat-Cave and fire up the Bat-Mobile "! And of course the Bat-Mobile was in a class by itself when it came to Custom cars. 

We have had several British comedies listed here and two more that came to mind recently are " Bless Me Father " & " Dad's Army ". The thing that these two series had in common is that Arthur Lowe was the lead actor in both of them.

Continuing on British comedies another one was " Are You Being Served ? " which ran for several years and seemed quite a success.

I guess we Americans only got to know the Bennie Hill and Monty Python shows from British television comedies.

Nope, I thought "Are You Being Served?" was great..."AbFab" not too much--it seemed to American.  The only great American comedy series was "MASH" & possibly "Survivor."

Thanks for the recent posts. I also liked MASH very much, more so tho when Major Frank Burns was there for Hotlips to play off of. Blakes 7 and AbFab don't ring a bell.

MASH of course came out first as a movie, as did Taxi and I liked that show as well, both TV series had very good Casts I thought.   

In a earlier post I had mentioned that I've been getting more old TV shows on DVDs. The other week I bought a DVD with 14 episodes of " Petticoat Junction " on it, truly a trip down memory lane. Even the opening of the shows is fun as that cute old Steam train goes chugging along. A spin-off show from " Petticoat Junction " was the " Green Acres " TV series. Also one thing that I didn't know was that Paul Henning created " The Beverly Hillbillies " as well as " Petticoat Junction ", quite a busy fellow.   

Watched all the episodes of Columbo with Netflix. They are still great.

Thanks for the post HessianWarrior. Yes I loved Peter Falk as Columbo. I recently came across a funny video clip on Youtube with Peter Falk. On one of the Dean Martin Roasts they were roasting Frank Sinatra and Peter Falk shows up as Columbo and does his whole segment in that character. It was fun to watch a pro at work as I think he just improvised the whole segment.

The first post that I wrote for this tread was in relation to " The Big Valley " and today a bit of sad news came to light about a former cast member of that show. The actor who played Nick ( one of the sons of Barbara Stanwyck on " The Big Valley "  ) passed away at age 82. Apologies as his name does not come to mind, however the show was very poular in it's day.

His name was Peter Breck.  He was also a regular on Maverick & Black Saddle.

Thanks for the info Javan64. When one looks back over many years of TV productions ( & movies too ) there are countless numbers of character actors that one knows as soon as they appear on screen but their names are not well known but they are essential in carrying forward the story that is being presented.

Speaking earlier of Comedies on DVDs I recently got a 2 disc set entitled " Best Of TV Comedy Series ". There are 4 different TV Series featured with at least 7 episodes from each show. The TV Series are: The Beverly Hillbillies; The Lucy Show; The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Giffith Show to make a total of over 12 hours of laughs  lol.   

In a couple of my threads on this site I had mentioned that I used to work a lot of shift-work. This of course had me watching TV at odd hours and I used to peek in on the Soaps sometimes. My favourite drama of that type turned out to be a seriers from England. The CBC up here used to carry " Coronation Street " and I found it quite interesting, I'm not sure if it ever appeared on TV in the USA ( perhaps on PBS ? ). Recently I got a copy of a DVD entitled " Ken & Me " which covered the 40 year career of William Roache as Ken Barlow, I gather that he is the only member of the original Cast still on the series.  

When one thinks back to the pre-cable days of network TV an area of interest that was very successful for a lot of years were the Crime Dramas. There were shows about Private Eyes, Dramas with Lawyers and Police Shows. A couple of my favourites were: Mannix, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, Cannon, and The FBI Story etc, etc.        

Columbo-Peter Faulk, Rockford Files-James Garner, Matlock-Andy Griffith. Some of my favorites.

Thanks for the post HessianWarrior. Yes I really liked Columbo and the Rockford Files as well. Another good show from that era was " Banacheck " ( ??? on the spelling ) with George Peppard.

Yeah Banacheck was great. I hated that it wasn't on that many times.

Good point, if I remember correctly they had a rotating schedule of several different shows once a week on what they called Mystery Theater. For a while I think that they had four different shows to rotate thru so each one only came on once per month.

Early on in this thread I had mentioned Westerns and I now remember a show of that type which would also fit into this post and that was " The Wild Wild West ". They had some interesting stories in that series and I think that it starred William Conrad.