Read the full story article over at Sabotage Times.

Frank’s Fantastic Shed Show was just about the closest he got to the mainstream – a 1991 Yorkshire TV production aired late night in various ITV regions. Now released on DVD, it’s a typically curious, hit-and-miss affair that perfectly illustrates why Frank is so fondly remembered but never made it big.

The format is pretty awkward. It’s essentially a chat show, with a small audience gathered in a back garden set, and various underwhelming guests dropping by. The guests don’t know what to make of Frank, and Frank seems to have little to no idea of who they are, which makes for a few laughs, but does get tiresome over the course of six episodes.

A good few familiar faces pop up as regular characters, including Mark Radcliffe, on Bontempi organ duty, and Caroline Aherne, making her first TV appearance, as Mrs Merton. Marc ‘Lard’ Riley and Phil Cornwell also turn up. There is some great banter and a few funny video inserts, and this is where most of the laughs are.

But those guests… The desperately dull cavalcade includes Nicholas Parsons, Adamski, John Stalker, Bob Holness, Dennis Locorriere out of Dr Hook and, almost inevitably, Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin (making ill-advised gags about drinking). Of course, they’re just stooges for Frank’s gags, but we would much rather be alone with Frank and the other regulars.

The musical guests are the real low point. Each 20-odd minute show features two tedious mimed performances by the likes of London Beat, Oceanic and latter-period Farm. Thankfully, the DVD chapter breaks mean they can easily be skipped. They don’t half date the show.

Tellingly, the most enjoyable episode is the unaired pilot, which is light on guests, and lets Frank do the two musical numbers (Wild Thing and Guess Who’s Been on Match of the Day?). It’s the closest this DVD gets to representing the Frank Sidebottom live shows. The forthcoming Fantastic Showbiz CD and DVD Box Set is likely to do a much better job.

So the Shed Show is funny, endearing, and completely shambolic. It’s never going to convert any newcomers, but Frank fans will find plenty here to enjoy. Just remember to skip past the musical guests.

Frank Sidebottom’s Fantastic Shed Show [DVD]

Frank Sidebottom’s Fantastic Show Biz Box Set (4CD+DVD)

Previous post: Chris Sievey, Frank Sidebottom and The Biz

No, I didn’t get up at 5AM to watch the Lost finale, clever piece of marketing though that scheduling was by Sky. If I had hauled myself out of my pit at that unlikely hour I’d have been mighty annoyed when, after the ‘previously on Lost’ preamble, up popped a ‘TEMPORARY FAULT’ card. A few moments of sound sync problems followed. Early risers must have been choking on their Bran Flakes.

Instead I watched it on Sky+ in the evening. It still felt like a proper TV event – the end of an era and all that. Because, whether or not you enjoyed it, Lost was an important TV show, a network offering that threw away the rulebook, playing free and loose with genres, narrative structures, and pretty much all the conventions that are used in making stuff that appears on that box in the corner of your room.

Lost wasn’t afraid to kill off lead characters, introduce a myriad of new ones, switch and ditch plot strands, play with polar bears, ghosts, time travel and mysticism, use flashbacks, flashforwards and, erm, flashsidewayses… they even made an entire episode in Korean for God’s sake. An entire hour of primetime US network television in the Korean language with English subtitles. Astonishing.

Not that it has all been great. I briefly gave up on watching Lost regularly somewhere around the middle of season three when it got bogged down in its own nonsense, but, like Jack and co, I ended up being drawn back to the island.

It has been pretty daft, and relentlessly introduced new twists and turns, often without properly exploring the plot strand that were already underway. Most frustratingly, entire storylines were regularly dismissed by subsequent twists, rendering entire strings of episodes that the viewer had spent hours sitting through completely pointless.

But, despite that, Lost produced more than enough excellent episodes and memorable moments to have made it worthwhile. Off the top of my head I’m remembering Charlie’s death scene, the first appearance of the Others, the introduction of Desmond in the hatch to the strains of Mama Cass, the reveal that Jack and Kate would escape the island, Ben allowing his daughter to be murdered…

As for the finale itself, personally I could have done without season six’s sideways flashes in which the now-deceased characters are in a sort of purgatory trying to ‘let go’ and head into the light. My attention always wavered when the show headed off into spiritual territory.

And, let’s face it, the whole thing with the light and the plug was pretty dumb. This was a device that had only been introduced a few episodes earlier, so it didn’t feel like the mysteries of the island that had built up over the previous six years were properly addressed.

As for the claim that the creators knew from the beginning how the show would pan out, I am simply not having it. The show headed down far too many blind alleys along the way for that to have been the case.

That said, the final scenes on the island, where Jack sacrificed himself to save the island and his friends were pretty good. The final shot of his closing eye, echoing the opening shot from the pilot, was fitting and memorable.

There were loads of questions left unanswered of course. Did Desmond make it off the island? Why didn’t the likes of Michael, Walt and Ecko appear in the ‘purgatory’? And what about all of the non-speaking Oceanic 815 passengers who died on the island?

But while we didn’t get all the answers, we did get a resolution, and one that is left open to debate – perfect for blog writers with too much time on their hands. So goodbye Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer and co. It was interesting, occasionally annoying, but ultimately a lot of fun.

Previously by me: The mystery of flight 574: In 2007, a Boeing 737 carrying 102 people vanished off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. No distress signal was received and no wreckage could be found. Read more about the ‘real Lost’ here.

FBI Special Agents investigating unexplained events? So far, so X-Files. It’s inevitable that Fringe, the new TV show from Lost and Alias creator JJ Abrams, will be compared with the much-loved adventures of Mulder and Scully. But while The X-Files was rooted in the supernatural and the extraterrestrial, Fringe, as its title suggests, concerns itself with fringe science – theoretical research outside of the mainstream that throws up a fascinating range of story possibilities.

Read the full 800-word review in the December 2008 issue of Fortean Times.