Phoenix DVD Blog

By the late 1980s, television was starting to change. Budgets were growing, visual effects were improving, and some TV shows were beginning to feel more ambitious than the simple standalone entertainment many of us had grown up with. For me, Star Trek sits right in the middle of that change. I had seen the original Star Trek when I was in primary school, mostly through repeats. I didn’t watch it religiously. I was young, there were bikes, fields, friends, footballs, and plenty of other things pulling me outside. But it was there in the background, colourful, strange, and instantly recognisable. Even if I wasn’t fully following the stories, I knew the look and feel of it. It was only later, when Star Trek: The Next Generation started appearing on TV, that the franchise really clicked for me. Suddenly, sci-fi on television felt calmer, more thoughtful, and more grown up. I was old enough by then to realise there was more going on than spaceships, uniforms, and alien worlds. Together...

There was a different feeling to television in the 70s and 80s. You didn’t binge watch entire seasons in a weekend. You didn’t pause episodes halfway through to check your phone. And unless you owned a VHS recorder, if you missed an episode, that was usually it. Television felt more temporary back then, but somehow more memorable at the same time. Some of these shows were huge parts of my childhood. Others drift in and out of memory like fragments from weekday afternoons, summer holidays, or Saturday mornings in front of the TV with cereal before the rest of the house was awake. Looking back now, what strikes me most is how different those shows were compared to modern television. Most older series were built around self-contained episodes. Problems appeared and were solved within 45 minutes. Characters rarely changed dramatically. Major story arcs were uncommon. You could miss three episodes and still jump right back in without confusion. That’s very different from modern televis...

Television mattered more in the early 1980s than it’s easy to remember now. With limited choice and fixed schedules, TV wasn’t something you curated, it was something you shared . Families watched together, kids absorbed what was on, and shows repeated often enough to become familiar whether you followed them closely or not. What we didn’t realise at the time was that we were watching television slowly evolve, not just in production quality, but in ambition. Looking back now, the journey from brightly coloured, standalone episodes to fully serialised, long-form storytelling mirrors how our own tastes changed as we grew up. As television became more ambitious, more cinematic, and more willing to tell longer stories, it also made me look back differently at the programmes that first shaped my viewing habits. I’ve written more about those earlier shows and the wider viewing habits of the time in   The TV Shows I Grew Up With - Before Streaming Changed Everything , where I gather th...

I didn’t religiously follow every TV show that aired in the 1980s. Far from it. Most days were spent outside, messing about, only drifting indoors when it got dark, or when the weather turned properly miserable. Children use to do that back in the day. Television filled the gaps rather than dictating activities. But when it rained, and plans were cancelled, whatever was on the screen usually stayed on. That’s where a whole second tier of 80s TV lived for me. Shows I didn’t seek out, didn’t follow closely, but watched often enough that they became familiar and fondly remembered. I’ve already written about the 80s shows that had the biggest influence on me elsewhere. What follows are the ones I saw in passing , enjoyable, upbeat, and endlessly repeatable, even if they didn’t leave quite the same mark. The Shows That Were Always On Looking back through old photo albums, there is often one of these shows playing on the television behind me and other family members. They really were p...

I didn’t grow up glued to the television. Most of the time we were outside, doing whatever kids did before screens followed you everywhere. TV filled the gaps rather than defining the day. When it rained, though, plans changed quickly, and whatever happened to be on usually stayed on. Because of that, my memories of a lot of 1980s TV are a little hazy. I didn’t follow every series religiously, and I almost certainly watched many of them on second or even third runs. In Ireland, shows often arrived well after their original US broadcasts, and episodes weren’t always shown in sequence. RTÉ seemed to buy what was popular rather than what was current, and as viewers we just went along with it. Some shows from that era were merely part of the background of growing up rather than must-watch weekly viewing, and I’ve looked at a few of those in my post 80s TV I Caught in Passing – Still Fun, Still Worth Owning on Disc .

The Shows You Watched Without Planning To Some of the most influential TV shows I grew up with weren’t weekend events at all. They were weekday fixtures, the kind of programmes that just appeared on the screen after school or early in the evening. You didn’t plan around them. You didn’t record them. You simply watched because they were on, and because they were endlessly rewatchable. If Saturday mornings felt like an event, something I explored in Saturday Morning TV – When Entertainment Was Simple (and Worth Owning on Disc) , weekday television was different. It was routine. Reliable. Almost background noise at times, until suddenly a theme tune would pull you in. These shows didn’t rely on long-running story arcs or cliffhangers. They were designed to drop you straight into the action, tell a complete story, and reset everything by the end of the hour. That made them perfect weekday television, and perfect for young viewers. Some of them also overlapped with the sci-fi influences I l...