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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Before Mulder and Scully

09:15 / 21.11.03

Before Mulder and Scully there was a BBC TV series about a college lecturer and his wife who would investigate weird and paranormal occurances. It ran for 6 episodes and was on BBC1.

In one episode they investigated a virtual reality machine that fired lasers onto a persons retinas so that they would see the world. If you died in the world the lasers then burnt through the persons eyes and fried their brain, killing them.

In another episode they were up against a Vampire and met up with a guy who claimed to be Van Helsing.

They spent a lot of time scribbling theories on a blackboard to solve the mysteries.

As far as I am aware the show was only shown once an dnever repeated.

Does anyone have any idea what I am talking about? What was the show called? Who was in it?

10:00 / 21.11.03

After an extensive search on google I can now tell you that it was called "Virtual Murder".

10:05 / 21.11.03

And after a little more found this good site:
http://www.mjnewton.demon.co.uk/tv/vmurder.htm

10:53 / 21.11.03

I don't recall ever seeing or hearing about that.

Which is strange, as it seems to have aired at a time I would have been prone to watch TV, and I'm sure it would have interested me..

Crap name though.

I remember back when the x-files was rilly popular there was lots of blathering about how it had been inspired by an earlier programme called 'Kolchak: the Night Stalker'.

Which I've also never seen and know nothing about, but man, "KOLCHAK: THE NIGHTSTALKER"! That's the best name of a TV show ever! What could possibly go wrong?

11:20 / 21.11.03

Can't remember it, but it brings to mind only two words:

CRIME TRAVELLER.

11:26 / 21.11.03

This was my poison when I was ten/eleven (and older, when it was in reruns). She-Wolf of London/Love and Curses. Cute British man and a lady with a lot of hair. Woo!

13:08 / 21.11.03

She Wolf of London rocked. It's like the secret mommy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The guy was soooooo Giles...

Here's two others I vaguely remember....

Probe: This was in the late 80s. Parker Stevenson played an eccentric science prodigy that would investigate murders, all with a pseudo-scientific basis, whether it be a locked-room mystery in a nuclear reactor, or homicides committed with holograms.

Spectre: A 1970s Gene Roddenberry series that may not have gotten past the first issue. Robert Culp was a sort of occult Sherlock Holmes. The episode I remember well featured vampires.

06:28 / 22.11.03

The Night Stalker was great, at least it was when I was a kid. It was produced by Dan Curtis, who'd also produced the long-running soap opera Dark Shadows, the only soap to feature vampires, succubi, werewolves, witches and whatnot. That series is out on DVD, though I don't know whether Night Stalker is.

It featured Darren McGavin as an investigative reporter of the old school, with bottle of Scotch and fedora, who was always assigned to the weird stories that nobody else wanted to do.

I saw Night Stalker when it came out, in the early '70s. First there was a pilot episode, a made-for-TV movie called the Night Strangler, then a first episode that featured a vampire hiding out (I think) in the Bradbury Towers (classic Los Angeles building also featured in Bladerunner and the Demon With A Glass Hand episode of Outer Limits). Now I'd find the monsters really cheesy, but kudos to all involved for making my childhood a memorable one.

There was a story in the '90s that Darren McGavin hated the X-Files because he thought it was a ripoff of Night Stalker. I don't know whether that was true, but he turned up in a later episode as a co-worker of Mulder's father who knows about certain events that took place in the 1950s.

07:29 / 25.11.03

Yep, Virtual Murder it was, and the show's title was rendered pretty meaningless if memory serves by the fact that the episode about VR was not the first one shown. The leads were the recently-deceased John Clay (Lancelot in Boorman's Excalibur) and Kim Thomson (I think - 'the other woman' in the Tall Guy).
I always wondered if the fact that she referred to him as 'JC' was a Jerry Cornelius reference.
They kind of took the 'end of Avengers episodes' bit a touch further, with a fairly obviously sexual tone to it, more overt than, say, Hart to Hart.
And as JC was meant to be a lecturer on psychology, there were occasional scenes where he'd be teaching or whatever and you'd see textbooks, one of which was 'Psychology and Crime' by Clive Hollin, which is/was a very good primer to the subject, and I think Hollin was a 'consultant' on the series.
Harmless fun, but like Crime Traveller, the BBC felt it 'didn't engage with the audience'... probably helps if you showed the episodes in an order that made sense, mind.

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

08:59 / 25.11.03

Nightstalker was cool, I liked the pilot where the starangeler (possibly a ghoul, though I may be making that up) had a red cloak so he could camoflage himself with the golden gate bridge.

I thought all JC refrences from Cornelius to Constantine where Christ analogies.

20:55 / 06.12.03

Kolchak was cool - the whole series was repeated a few years back on BBC2 on "Night Train" - a late night cult TV `collection` hosted by Richard O'Brien (of Rocky Horror fame).

Definitely the inspiration for X-Files but X-Files moved on while Kolchak was pretty hammy.