Stuff They Don't Really Seem To Show On Telly Anymore #962:

Those Shows Where They'd Just Show You A Bunch Of Early 90s Movie Stunts

When I was in my late teens, before satellite telly had really taken off and digi-boxes were the stuff of Jetsons-style fantasy, the mid-morning summer holiday / mid Saturday afternoon / day time bank holiday TV schedules were junkyards of US cable network trash. I used to really dig this sorta thing. My faves were Stunt Shows (I've had to come up with that genre title myself). Shows about Hollywood stunts and the 'craft' or 'art' of stunt men. D'you even remember these shows? Until I Googled 'em this week I sorta thought maybe I'd just dreamt 'em or something. Sometimes they'd do a show about the 'magic' of special effects, or animatronics, and they were OK, but not as good as the Stunt Shows. They were called things like 'Hollywood's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'The World's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'Hollywoods Greatest Stunt Men Do The Most Dangerous Things' or 'When Stunts Attack'.

ITV was the really daddy of this kinda programming. It was like they'd bought these shows as part of some package along with the one good show they really wanted, like Knightrider or something, and then when they found themselves with nothing else to show at 2.15 in the afternoon on August bank holiday just threw on whatever other garbage they had left in the box. Often the shows appeared to be part of a series, only you'd only ever see one episode, then you'd never hear of it ever again. Stunt Shows all started like this:

Troy McClure-type smoothie in a sports jacket who nobody in England has ever heard of is hanging out for no reason on the set of a low budget action movie in Hollywood, California. To camera:

"Hey there! I'm here on the set of Final Death Blow 3: The Deathening. Since the earliest days of Hollwood, movies have had stars. Sometimes these stars are real people, like Steve Gutenberg or Fatty Arbuckle or Free Willy. But these days the real stars are the stunts, the hold-on-to-your-popcorn feats of expert engineering, precision timing and all-out GUTS that really reduce an audience to a mindless mass of gibbering automatons willing to go see any old piece of crap just as long as there's a helicopter crashing into an oil tanker at some point in the trailer. Join me now as we go behind the scenes of...HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS!"

Cue credit sequence consisting of multiple explosions, bearded men with walkie-talkies, buildings collapsing, heavy stars 'n' stripes action, more explosions, guys on fire, and HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS spelt out in huge metallic block lettering. Which then explodes.

And I'm like: 'awesome'.

I don't know if they make these shows anymore, and even if they do, I imagine they lack the charming early 90s cable TV gonzoness of the classics they used to make. I bet they're all slick and CSI-ish now. I remember one where they demonstrated how they did 'The Jump' from Speed, and one where they did something with the Golden Gate bridge, and...that's about it, really. They were great. If 'Dave' wants to put one of these shows back-to-back with that old BBC show about a squirrel who runs assault courses to the Mission Impossible theme next Bank Holiday, they've got a loyal viewer in me for an hour.