It’s January. For all us normal sods that means it’s a time of financial hardship, straining shirt buttons and illness. Apparently all the stress, sleepless nights of festivities, bad weather and The Fear, overall aren’t terribly good for you and may see you suffering from every winter related illness known to man. If like me, you pleasant folk find yourself at home, feverish and sounding like Darth Vadar at the final stages of lung disease, then the only thing to do is watch some nostalgia inducing TV.
Put down the tissues cause I have you covered.
Hex: Season One
Set in a British school out in the picturesque countryside, Hex is the story of a fallen angel’s clamber to return to his former power. Human sacrifice, witchcraft and the trials of being unpopular are on the menu with this one. While I personally feel the second season was a let down, a few hours of Thelma and Cassie’s banter, all the while staring into Michael Fassbender’s guylined eyes with drool stained t-shirt, and season one is enough to make me forget and forgive everything that followed.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth a watch. You might even be brave enough to check out the second season. What makes this good sick-time TV is that season one only has six episodes, so you can easily get through in a day without having it disrupt your normal viewing routine in the evening.
The X-Files
In my opinion one of the greatest unsung love stories of the 20th Century is the on screen chemistry between Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
For any who might have only just emerged from their cryogenic sleep and not already know the show, The X Files is TV at it’s best. Combining horror, humour, mystery and often times high quality thriller, it tells the stories of two FBI agents assigned to the unexplainable X-files; the cases just too spooky for the average Agent to handle. Everything from alien abductions, spontaneous combustion and the terrifying character of Tooms that will live on in the shadows of my mind till the day I die. I still check the screws and bolts on vents. You’re sure to be too transfixed on this show to notice those aches and pains.
The Twilight Zone
Maybe you’re fatigued, feverish and taking medication. Or it could just be the fact that you’ve just tuned into The Twilight Zone.
No, you aren’t having an aneurysm. Part of what makes the Twilight Zone such a good show to watch when you’re out of it is the fact that you don’t need to remember what happened in the previous episode. This anthology of short, mind bending stories is what possibly attributed to the growth of fantasy, sci-fi and horror in the last fifty or so years. There’s a lot of modern films that have drawn inspiration from the stories brought to us through this series. Pretty perfect to watch at the hallucination stage of your fever.
Blackadder: Any season
“Baldrick, does it have to be this way? Our valued friendship ending with me cutting you up into strips and telling the prince that you walked over a very sharp cattle grid in an extremely heavy hat?”
Rowan Atkinson at his absolute, unquestionable finest. Only surpassed possibly by Tony Robinson who plays Baldrick in the show. Follow Blackadder through the ages as he bluffs, lies and stumbles his way through History in spectacularly hilarious fashion. If it’s not on your watchlist, it really should be. Guaranteed to cheer you up and get you laughing your way to recovery.
Sliders
Parallel Universes are as plentiful as grains of sand so imagine my sadness when Sliders came to an end in 2000. As much as it introduced a generation to the rather complicated concept of multiple realities, it was still just a story of people trying to get home.
Having left their own Universes, unable to find the back button on their wormhole, Sliders tells the story of a group of individuals reality hopping in the hopes of landing in the right one. In the show we saw worlds of tribal cannibals, frighteningly large genetically altered wasps and one where the gender roles were completely reversed. It was sci-fi at it’s best and a show ahead of it’s time. Regardless of where you jump to in the five seasons of this you won’t be lost for long.
Whether you’re curled up on the couch with a bucket or blanket this season, hopefully these timeless classics will keep you entertained till you’re well enough to venture out into the big wide world.
“I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.”
Blackadder, telling it like it is this January.
