TV: The Want List

I spent too many minutes tonight reading through my doodle notes book trying to remember the name of a singer and a particular song. It's NOT "I Wrote Him a Letter," nor "He Wrote Me a Letter." But it's something like that. It's sung by a young blonde-haired lady from Western Canada. I think she toured Ontario within the last year, and she has two-tone coloured hair, blonde on top. And I cannot remember her name for the life of me. Amanda something, maybe?

At any rate, while combing through the notes, I happened upon my Want List for TV shows. I've done pretty good over the last couple of years, and the list is greatly reduced. Sometimes, the shows are on there for a single episode.

For example, I wanted Otherworld's episode entitled Rock and Roll Suicide, where the heroes introduce Rock and Roll to a brand new world that's never heard of it. They sing Beatles, Rolling Stones and David Bowie tunes in the show, probably the reason it's never been released on video. I mean, did they REALLY get all the right permissions to have their actors sing The Beatles' I Wanna Hold Your Hand? At any rate, last summer, I got the whole series, including the show. And you know, for a 22-year old SF series, it sort of held up. But the gem was the Rock and Roll Suicide episode.

As I said, my list is greatly reduced. Sometimes, as in Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased, the shows aren't quite as good as I remembered. In fact, the first season of the original Randall & Hopkirk is laughably bad, 40 years later. Others, like Dempsey & Makepeace, stand up to time quite well.

Right now, the top item on my list of missing shows is the 2004 summer-time short-run series, The Days. This one starred Marguerite MacIntyre, who now plays the mom on Kyle XY. It ran for six episodes in all. A 1996 fall series that bombed, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, starring Maria Bello and Scott Bakula supposed had 13 episodes made (nine made it to air). Mann and Machine ran for nine episodes back in 1992 and starred the always entertaining David Andrews and troubled beauty Yancy Butler. It would be third on my list of American shows.

The second and third seasons (1985-86) of Dempsey & Makepeace top the British portion of my want list. The show that led the way for Keen Eddie, D&M starred gorgeous English starlet Glynis Barber and Bronx ex-pat Michael Brandon. They even got married in real life, so I imagine most of the on-screen arguments had some basis in reality. I've come close to breaking down and grabbing the Jon Pertwee seasons of Doctor Who (early 70's), as well as the Tom Baker season of Doctor Who that featured the Key of Time sequence. And I would really like to find Me and My Girl (1984-88), as well as the Faking It shows from both Britain and the U.S.

From Australia, I'm really only currently hunting for Raw FM, which ran for 13 episodes in 1997.