The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour

It's New Year's Eve at Mountpeg Towers, with messrs Velvet, Blackout and Bognops huddled round the Peggy Mount Calamity Hour drinks trolley making vague plans for the future whilst ruminating (as usual) on the past and scrawling optimistic lists of unrealistic resolutions. "Let's never do this again" warbled Mr Hussey famously, and he wasn't even reacting to being a guest on tonight's cavalcade of...

Ho-ho-holy snowballs, is it that time already? Yes, with the cheese and scotch advent calendars already suspiciously demolished, it's open house and time for the Peggy Mount Calamity Hour Christmas Special! Crackers will be pulled, bottles will be emptied, and two entertainment gems from the past will be lovingly dissected... Professor Lionel Ziggy Zucho pops round for the first grinding of the fe...

Ah, the sound of hooves clopping across the rooftops and a smell of pumpkins and absinthe left out for Father Samhain can mean only one thing: it is truly the most woe-nderful time of the year! The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour’s Halloween Special reaches once more into the casket for only the finest knitwear, slacks and bejewelled shawls, because here we dress for dinner... Our hosts begin by venturi...

There was much excitement earlier this week as the Antiques Roadshow film crew pulled into the grounds of Birtley Priory to be met by Pod Producer Ken eagerly clutching a battered C90 cassette, complete with an illegibly scrawled label and browned sellotape over the record-tab. The raw enthusiasm of Fiona Bruce, hoping this could be a secretly recorded rehearsal session of The Beatles, quickly tur...

Horror and hard rock have long gone hand in grimy hand, and this outing of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour's After Dark strand harkens back to an historical moment where three chords and hairspray attempted to go mainstream. Because when the lead singer of the world's largest metal band stars in a Tuesday night BBC One drama, you know it's not long before he'll be recognised in Waitrose. Yes, the vo...

As noted several moons ago, The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour knows that the language of cinema is a little different to that of the small screen, but it’s a lesson they love to revisit nonetheless. This week’s study is of personal pronouns; as in ‘She'll probably regret wearing that’, ‘He made an egg sandwich that should be on trial’, and ‘I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle’… Yes, Doctor Velvet and Blacko...

The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour continues to explore the weekly cultural abyss of what really goes on After Dark. But as so often with the analysis of horror, the story of what scares us isn't quite as intriguing as what in turn reassures. And for a formative mind in the harsh striplights of the 1980s, there are few things so reassuring as the jet slacks, tousled demi-wave and leatherette blouson of...

It's the question asked by anybody of an inquiring mind (and the hosts of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour are no exception) when faced with baffling circumstance and an unexplained outcome: Did that actually just happen? In fact, so determined are they to get to the bottom of it all that they've asked The ExtonMoss Experiment to come round and help solve the mysteries of the universe. Or of Bristol,...

The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour is nothing if not a podcast of juxtapositions and contrasts, like mixing vintage TV shows with digital platforms, and necking Malibu and Quatro out of the antique sherry glasses. And it's this grating collision of 1980s futurism and sepia-toned yesteryear to which the hosts turn once again, because everyone knows it's not really a horror-season if you don't put A Drac...

Fear of the unknown has always been a source of crippling anxiety for puny humans, and it pays to scry the future at any available moment. Whether you've got one eye on the 3:30 at Chepstow, on that recent headline about an escaped leopard, or on that pair of plimsolls in the window of Freeman Hardy & Willis for Saturday afternoon, you simply can't out-run destiny (and those plimsolls look gre...

The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour's concerted foray into televisual horror continues apace, with Doctor Velvet, Blackout and Ozzy Bognops continuing to wade drinks-aloft through the darkness. But into every cobwebbed crypt an ecclesiastical sunbeam must fall, and salvation arrives in the form of The Finest Hair On Television™... Yes, this week our trio of intrepid explorers brace their souls against a...

With the first stirrings of spring on the breeze, an archive-television reviewer's thoughts naturally turn to fresh air, greenery and neolithic menhirs. A quest for savage nature leads to this episode of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour being 33% outside broadcast, as well as seeing the return of a beloved special guest back in the studio! Yes, ancient rituals, cutting-edge science and new age epheme...

Ever keen to multi-task, The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour's After Dark season is at this point so blasé with unseasonally ticking off items from the Hallowe'en schedule that they've started on the Christmas telly as well. Naturally, ghosts have no real concept of earthly time and so tend to turn up impromptu and behave appallingly. Much like dinner guests... Yes, this week the hoover gets pushed roun...

Creepy cartoons and high-ectoplasm action series are all well and good to satisfy a 21st century lust for arcane entertainment, but sooner or later what's required is actual, verified, hard evidence of the afterlife. And with that in mind, The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour turns - once more - to Auntie Beeb for some documentary fact.  This comes packaged in the form of 40 Minutes' Ghost Train: Haunted...

This entire series of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour focuses on the more macabre facets of the magic lantern partly in a bid to help clear the supernatural backlog, and because sometimes a Halloween-themed programme crops up that's just too good to leave until Spooky-Season! (or is just too awful to take that coveted slot in the review-schedule, but let's try to be optimistic) Worlds collide at Mou...

The hosts of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour are well known for chasing the boundaries of terror and for crossing the streams, and tonight's lecture illustrates that just because something appears brightly coloured, that doesn't mean it can't also be steeped in darkness. Yes, the new series' exploratory jaunt into televisual devilry begins in earnest, and what better way to brush aside abandoned cob...

Spring may be round the corner, but it's always winter in our souls! Yes, as most normal people dare to celebrate the evenings getting ever so slowly lighter, The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour draws the heavy brocade curtains, lights a candle or two and reclines further into the misanthropic gloom. It certainly beats going outside, where the real horror lies. In this extended trailer for their NEW SUP...

As the annual festive battle wears on to decide whether the family will spend this evening watching new spangly Content™ from a surfeit of modern entertainment platforms or the much-loved VHS tape of yuletide specials from yesteryear instead, it is a time of high resolution - it is a time of low resolution - and it is of course time to try and forget about making New Year resolutions altogether......

Well the halls are decked, the porches have been lamped and the back passage is well and truly stuffed, which can mean only one thing: it's time once again for The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour Christmas Special! Yuletide is a time for extravagance of course, when year-end budgets are well and truly blown in the name of celebration and merriment. So naturally, our hosts have found two exceptions. Firs...

Ah, the haunting season seems to arrive earlier every year, and what better way to avoid the hustle and bustle of shoppers laden with absinthe, last minute pumpkins and Tripe Trifle™ than to join the hosts of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour as they lean into the dark nights with some terrifying television? This year's Hallowe’en special is a callback to the podcast's formative roots, as Murder She W...

Not quite ready to surface from hibernation, The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour ekes out the last of the dark nights by curling up at the fireside with a good book. Well, the hosts welcome a new guest, crack open a bottle or two and watch a version of that book on the telly. Obviously... Coming under subaquatic scrutiny this week is 1975's Canadian animated odyssey, The Undersea Adventures Of Captain N...

JINGS! They said it couldn't be done! Well, they said it *shouldn't* be done, and they turned out to be right. Yes, it's another edition of The Peggy Mount Hogmanay Hour, and drunken sassenachs Velvet, Blackout and Bognops have stormed the passport control booth at Hadrian's Wall on a haphazard hunt north of the border for some Caledonian culture... Unfortunately that all sold out a week before Ch...

Christmas comes but once a year, yet thrice it 'casts into your ear(s)! Yes, with the dinner eaten and the games over, the party is in full swing as The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour's festive delving culminates its way to the yuletide jamboree! Approaching an advanced state of refreshment, Doctor Velvet, Blackout and Ozzy Bognops are in the mood for some salt-of-the-earth tinkling of The Old Joann-oh...

No, you're not seeing double - this is the second of the Peggy Mount Calamity Hour Christmas Specials! Although given that trouble co-ordinating and an inability to communicate clearly are the order of the day with this festive viewing, blurred vision just feels par for the course frankly. To get them in the mood for games, our hosts revisit ITV's 1979 Christmas-edition of Give Us A Clue, a show w...

"And hark", proclaimed Producer Ken, "before the clock strikes Christmas Day, you will be visited by THREE podcasts!". 'Oh here we go' thought Scrooge, just wanting to get on. "You must learn from the pod of telly past, the pod of telly past and then the pod of telly past." Well, he'd expected repeats at this time of year, but Scrooge didn't argue because he'd looked through the Radio Times and ha...