Such a simple idea - yet so fiendishly complex in the execution. 24, as surely everyone knows by now, is a thriller that takes place over 24 hours, midnight to midnight, in 24 one-hour episodes (well, 45-minute episodes if you extract the ad breaks). Everything to take place in real time - on-screen and off-screen time the same - which means no flash-backs, no flash-forwards, no nice handy time-dissolves. Every strand of the plot has to be dovetailed and interlocked to make sure that things happen just when they should, in the right amount of time. Not that easy.
To date there have been 3 series with a fourth and possibly more in the pipeline. None has so far disappointed.

'24' on DVD from the BBC Shop

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

A group of soldiers who were jailed for a crime they didn't commit escape and set up an organisation which helps out people in trouble. Constantly on the run from capture by the military, these guys are called in when all else has failed.
Great action TV series from the 80s where no-one ever got killed. The plots weren't the greatest but the explosions, dangerous driving and superb character interaction more than made up for it. The A-Team had the most indestructible set of wheels on the planet, and with just a haircomb and tube of toothpaste they could convert it into a battle-worthy super-tank. Those 80s Musketeers The A-Team were renegades but fought for justice, and we loved them for it.

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

The Avengers is a stylish blend of espionage, fantasy and quasi-science fiction that appeals to people who enjoy witty, sentimental, slightly off-beat television. The Avengers centres on the adventures of two extraordinary agents: The most famous and enduring of the partnerships were between John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). Other notable partners for Steed included Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) and Tara King (Linda Thorson).

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

The Complete Avengers: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Avengers

Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), a tennis pro, suffers a parachuting accident. She is saved by a special surgery replacing her ear, an arm and both legs with bionic ones. Like Steve Austin in the Six Million Dollar Man, she becomes a government agent using her special powers to fight the bad guys.

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Price Compare:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Craig Stirling, Sharron Macready and Richard Barrett were agents for Nemesis, an international intelligence organization based in Geneva. Their first mission as a team was to investigate some potentially lethal experiments in Communist China, but when they were escaping, their plane was damaged. They crashed into a remote part of the Himalayas where they were rescued by members an unknown civilization. They came away from the encounter with superhuman powers--telepathy, superior strength, memory, etc.--and returned to the outside world as "Champions of law, order and justice", to quote the series' opening.

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Pre-dating James Bond by a couple of years, Patrick McGoohan is definitely in a class of his own in this series playing the character John Drake. Drake's cover was that he worked in the travel business, but in reality was a top British secret agent. With McGoohan's undoubted quality (he was soon to become Britain's highest paid TV actor), it is easy to see how Danger Man was catapulted into what is known today as Cult TV and paved the way for McGoohan's triumph in The Prisoner.

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

One of TV's more interesting tough-girl action shows, Dark Angel is a distinctive blend of the personal, the adventurous and the politically aware. Cocreators James Cameron and Charles Eglee present a complex scenario of biological super-science and social collapse in which their gene-manipulated heroine and hacker/journalist hero can genuinely make a difference.
Jessica Alba is impressive as Max, bred and trained as a super-soldier but reclaiming her individual humanity; Michael Weatherly is scruffily attractive as Eyes Only, who sits semi-paralysed in his eyrie above Seattle uncovering crime, corruption and other skulduggeries and sending the woman whom he hopelessly loves out on deadly errands...

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

The hit of the 1969-1970 season, Department S was an attempt on the part of television company ITC to create a "with-it" follow-up to the The Saint and Man in a Suitcase series which were starting to look staid by then. The department of the title is notionally part of Interpol, a group managed by the first of many black TV top cops (here Denis Albana Peters), and assigned all the bizarre cases The Avengers hadn't handled. Often they would come up against modern variations on the classic "locked-room" or "paradox" mysteries so favoured in crime fiction, mysteries which verge on the sort of phenomena The X Files would later specialise in (except no aliens appear in Department S).

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

We weren't really sure whether we should be including the Dukes of Hazzard in a cult compilation - they're just a couple of good 'ole boys after all - but this series will surely stand the test of time as a glorious romp through redneck America where the girls are sweet, the cars are fast and the law is just there to be broken...

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Although crime-writer-turned-detective Jason King, as played by the deep-voiced Peter Wyngarde, was the star supporting character of the 1969-70 series Department S, he seemed rather diminished when given a show of his own, thus robbing him of the straight characters necessary to show off his flamboyance. Jason King also ditched the impossible mysteries of the parent series in favour of more ordinary puzzles that the Saint or any other two-fisted hero could have solved without having to spend so much on fabulous fashion gear. That said, Wyngarde is well-matched by his foils, the value-for-money hams Dennis Price and Ronald Lacey, as the government agents who forced Jason to catch villains for them by threatening to turn him in for failing to pay his back taxes on the earnings of his bestsellers. Jason King was also the only hero on television who would take any brutal beating from the bad guys and shrug it off, only to become quite agitated when they threatened to slice his suits to bits.

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Dr. Peter Brady (Tim Turner) is a brilliant English scientist who, working with the principles that govern the reflection of light, has developed a theory that every form of matter can be reduced to invisibility, just as a jellyfish becomes invisible in water. During an accident in the laboratory, Brady himself becomes invisible, but his experiments have not yet gone far enough for him to reverse the process and regain visibility..

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit

Taking the well-travelled outlaw hero format of The Saint and reinventing the hero as a Mickey Spillane-like Yank, this tough-edged but trivial detective series stars the brick-like Richard Bradford as McGill as a former CIA man who owns only a gun and a change of clothes (hence the title) and wanders about foreign locales, using two-fisted methods to protect beautiful women or foil dastardly plots. Ron Grainer's title theme is among the best 60s TV tunes, and the intense, serious Bradford makes a refreshing change after so many breezy, unflappable, eyebrow-cocking heroes, but the mix of postcard backdrops, character villains and drama-school totty is much the same as in The Saint, Danger Man, The Persuaders, and their ilk.

Compare price:

Amazon
Benson's World
Sendit