Browse Sections

• Magazine 
• Food and drink

Nostalgic trip and a digi box

by Chris Osuh
5/ 5/2005

SOME people have eschewed the delights of proper digital telly in favour of the supermarket, Freeview digibox.

These little silver boxes are pretty limited but do yield some cheap treats to the viewer, like Aussie comedy Kath and Kim, via slightly budget, cult channel FTN. Now Kath and Kim (Thursday, BBC2) is coming to terrestrial.

Kath and Kim is Neighbours' rebellious cousin (or it was until Neighbours became strangely self-aware and contemporary) and tells the story of a mother and daughter in Melbourne's bland, featureless suburbs. The characters wear strange wigs and mangle the English language. It has a lo-fi, fly on the wall feel and it will update your knowledge of Australian slang beyond the Ramsay Street staples of "rack off" and "he's a real spunk". Watch it now before it becomes fashionable and the catchphrases get boring.

It was a sad, if epic day in soap when Emmerdale villain Chris Tate keeled out of his wheelchair. Now, actor Peter Amory is back, as dastardly Richard Bentham in Heartbeat (Sunday, ITV1). If his Emmerdale track record is anything to go by, Amory will be an excellent villain.

Shows like Heartbeat will try and convince younger folk that the 1960s and 1970s were a golden age, a sunny haze of pop, quirky fashion and real confectionery.

Maybe so, but they were also dark times, in the opinion of someone who wasn't there, when anyone great seemed to end up dead from self-abuse or assassination, and hordes of serial killers, like the Moors Murderers and New York's Son of Sam, prowled the streets. If there's one Yorkshireman more malevolent than Chris Tate its the quintessential retro-fiend, the Yorkshire Ripper.

The curly-bearded freak struck terror across the North with his hammer, creepy looks and "dressed to kill" get-up, and is still striking terror into the hearts of Sun readers with his juvenile love letters to pen pals.

One Life: Orphaned By The Ripper (Tuesday, BBC1) tells the incredible story of Richard McCann, son of the Ripper's first victim. Well worth a butcher's.