Gerry Anderson‘s aliens, Ken Russell‘s demons and a homicidal leprechaun are all arriving on Freeview this August, in what may be the most eclectic month Rewind TV has assembled yet.
The retro channel – now on every major free TV platform in the UK (except streaming) – is bringing UFO to its schedule, the show that marked Anderson’s leap from puppets to people, and giving over four consecutive nights to Celebrating Ken Russell, a season devoted to the most confrontational filmmaker Britain has produced.
And After Hours, the late-night strand, is back with its biggest run yet: a killer wax museum, a British slasher shot in Surrey and pretending to be American, demons in a suburban back garden, and a young Jennifer Aniston being chased around a farmhouse by Warwick Davis in a green hat.
“From Gerry Anderson and Ken Russell to classic sitcoms and After-Hours favourites, August is another month packed with the distinctive television and cult cinema that makes Rewind TV unique,” says co-founder Jonathan Moore.
Where to Find Rewind TV
Since launching on Sky in May 2024 and expanding to Freeview that September, Rewind TV has established itself as a reliable home for classic British programming that might otherwise remain locked away in archives.
Following its arrival on Freesat in June, it now reaches every major over-the-air free TV platform in the country.
You can find it on:
- Freeview Channel 81
- Sky Channel 182 (satellite only)
- Freely Channel 141 (aerial-connected version only)
- Freesat Channel 164
The gap that remains is streaming. Rewind TV still has no app, no catch-up, and no true streamed channel – the Freely listing on 141 is the Freeview broadcast surfacing through the guide on aerial-connected sets, rather than something you can pull in over broadband.
If you miss an episode, you miss it. A number of you have raised exactly this since the Freesat news landed, and for now the answer hasn’t changed.
The Upper Hand
The Upper Hand starts August 6 at 10:30am and 6:30pm, and it’s the most mainstream thing in this month’s lineup by some distance.
Joe McGann stars as Charlie Burrows, a former footballer and single father who leaves London for Henley-on-Thames and takes a job as live-in housekeeper to advertising executive Caroline Wheatley, played by Diana Weston.
Honor Blackman plays Caroline’s mother Laura, and gets most of the best lines – a man-eater who hires Charlie largely on the strength of his looks, then spends years trying to push the two of them together. By this point Blackman had already been Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and she is plainly enjoying herself.
Kellie Bright, who most viewers will now know as Linda Carter in EastEnders, was 13 when she was cast as Charlie’s daughter Joanna. William Puttock plays Caroline’s son Tom.
It was adapted from the American sitcom Who’s the Boss?, and adapted is generous – the early episodes used the original US scripts more or less as written, on a near-identical set. Made by Central for ITV, it ran for 94 episodes across seven series between 1990 and 1996.
It became one of Britain’s biggest sitcom successes of the 1990s.
UFO
UFO starts August 21 at 12:00pm and 7:30pm, and for a certain kind of viewer this is the month’s main event.
Gerry Anderson spent the 1960s making Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, all of them with marionettes. UFO was the moment he swapped strings for actors – his first entirely live-action television series, made by Century 21 for Lew Grade‘s ITC and first broadcast in 1970.
Ed Bishop stars as Commander Ed Straker, head of SHADO – the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation – a secret outfit defending Earth from aliens harvesting human organs.
Its base sits beneath a film studio, with Straker posing as the studio’s chief executive. George Sewell, Michael Billington, Wanda Ventham and Dolores Mantez fill out the cast, with model effects by Derek Meddings.
The series is set in 1980 – ten years into the future when it was made – which gives it a very particular flavour, all silver Moonbase uniforms and purple wigs.
It was written for adults rather than children, with storylines touching on adultery, divorce and drug use, and broadcasters never quite knew what to do with it.
ITV regions scheduled it erratically and in different orders. It ran to just 26 episodes.
There’s a decent postscript. A second series was planned, set on a much-expanded Moonbase, under the working title UFO 1999. When American ratings dipped, ITC pulled it – so Anderson repurposed the pre-production work into a new idea in which the Moon is blown out of Earth’s orbit entirely.
That became Space: 1999, and the Eagle transporters were originally designed for UFO‘s unmade second run.
One footnote: Wanda Ventham, who plays Colonel Virginia Lake, also appeared in Danger Man – which the channel aired in May – and is the mother of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Celebrating Ken Russell
From August 25 to 28, Rewind TV hands four consecutive nights to Celebrating Ken Russell. Russell was the most divisive British director of his generation, and this is not a safe retrospective.
Over four nights, the channel is running a snake-priestess horror, Oscar Wilde’s banned play restaged in a brothel, a film that was rated NC-17 in America and banned outright in Ireland, and a D.H. Lawrence adaptation.
Three of these four films came from a single deal – a three-picture contract Russell signed with the American company Vestron in the late 1980s. Only Whore sits outside it.
The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
August 25. Loosely – very loosely – adapted from Bram Stoker‘s final novel, published in 1911, the year before he died. Russell folded in the old English legend of the Lambton Worm and set the whole thing in the present day.
Amanda Donohoe plays a snake-worshipping priestess terrorising an English village. Hugh Grant appears as Lord James D’Ampton, years before the rom-com era, and Peter Capaldi is a Scottish archaeologist who charges into the finale in a kilt with a set of bagpipes.
Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis complete the ensemble, with a young Gina McKee in a small role.
Gothic horror played with a straight face and a completely absurd script, and it has aged into one of Russell’s best-loved films precisely because of it.
Salome’s Last Dance (1988)
August 26. Russell’s take on Oscar Wilde‘s Salome, and the history matters here.
The play was banned from the British stage by the Lord Chamberlain in 1892, on the grounds that biblical characters could not be depicted in the theatre. It premiered in Paris four years later, while Wilde was in prison, and he never saw it performed. It was not staged publicly in Britain until 1931.
Russell’s conceit is to imagine it staged anyway: in a brothel, in 1892, as a private performance for Wilde himself, with the roles taken by the staff and their clients.
Glenda Jackson appears, Nickolas Grace plays Wilde, Douglas Hodge is Lord Alfred Douglas, and Imogen Millais-Scott takes the title role.
Theatrical, feverish, and not remotely interested in restraint.
Whore (1991)
August 27. Theresa Russell – no relation – plays a Los Angeles street prostitute who addresses the camera directly throughout.
The source is a monologue play called Bondage, written by David Hines, a London taxi driver who based it on stories told to him by women who hailed his cab late at night.
Russell made the film as a direct answer to Pretty Woman, released the previous year, which he considered a lie.
British financiers would not touch it because of the language, so he took it to America, moved the setting from London to Los Angeles, and made it there. It was rated NC-17 in the States and banned outright in Ireland.
It is not a comfortable watch, and it isn’t meant to be.
The Rainbow (1989)
August 28. Russell returning to D.H. Lawrence twenty years after Women in Love, this time adapting the novel that precedes it.
Sammi Davis plays Ursula Brangwen, a young woman finding her own way in late-Victorian England, with Amanda Donohoe as the teacher who takes her under her wing and Paul McGann as the soldier who wants to marry her.
The link back to the earlier film is deliberate and rather lovely: Glenda Jackson appears as the mother of the character she herself played two decades before.
It’s also the calmest film Russell made in this period, which after Whore the night before will come as some relief. And if the McGann name rings twice this month, that isn’t a coincidence – Paul is Joe’s younger brother.
After Hours
After Hours returns for August, and it has drifted a long way from where it started.
When it launched last autumn, the strand was built around British cinema of the 1960s and 70s – Russ Meyer, Mary Millington, two Kenny Everett specials that had never aired on British television.
In July it swung to American drive-in fare, all beaches and custom vans. August is different again: this is the horror shelf of a 1980s video shop, with a run of late-night comedies alongside.
No broadcast dates or times have been announced. Expect the usual small-hours slots with warnings attached.
Leprechaun (1993)
The one most people will have heard of, and the reason is Jennifer Aniston.
Leprechaun was her first credited film role, made for under a million dollars and released the year before Friends premiered. Warwick Davis plays the title character, a murderous leprechaun hunting the family he believes stole his gold, and the film took more than eight times its budget.
The studio wanted to option Aniston for the sequels. She declined, and has spent the decades since being politely embarrassed about the whole thing.
Rewind TV is running the first four films regardless – Leprechaun, Leprechaun 2, Leprechaun 3 and Leprechaun 4: In Space, the last of which is exactly what the title suggests.
Waxwork (1988)
The pick of the bunch.
Zach Galligan, best known for Gremlins, leads a group of students into a wax museum where the exhibits pull them into the scenes they depict – werewolves, vampires, mummies, the lot.
David Warner is the curator, John Rhys-Davies turns up as a werewolf, and Patrick Macnee plays the occult expert who works out what’s going on.
Directed by Anthony Hickox from a script he wrote in three days, Waxwork is a gleeful tribute to the classic movie monsters, and the practical effects hold up far better than they have any right to.
The Gate (1987)
Two boys dig a hole in the back garden and accidentally open a portal to hell. Small demons emerge. Things escalate.
It’s the first film Stephen Dorff ever made, and it has become a fixture of the video-shop-generation canon, largely on the strength of its stop-motion creatures and forced-perspective sets.
Directed by Tibor Takács, and rather sweeter than the premise makes it sound.
Slaughter High (1986)
The most quietly British thing in the strand.
It’s set in an American high school, the cast are all doing American accents, and it was shot in London and Virginia Water in Surrey. Caroline Munro stars as one of a group of former classmates lured back to their old school by a man they wronged.
Munro is horror royalty – the only performer Hammer ever put under a long-term contract, seen in Dracula A.D. 1972 and Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, and later Naomi, the helicopter pilot, in The Spy Who Loved Me.
The film was made under the title April Fool’s Day and hastily renamed when Paramount announced a slasher of its own by the same name.
Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
A loose prequel to the haunted-house original, going back to the family who lived at 112 Ocean Avenue before the Lutzes – here renamed the Montellis, and fictionalised from the real-life DeFeos.
Burt Young, Rutanya Alda and Jack Magner star, under the direction of the Italian film-maker Damiano Damiani. It is comfortably the nastiest entry in the franchise, and a long way from the relatively restrained 1979 film.
Galaxina (1980)
A knowingly silly science-fiction spoof with a genuinely sad story attached.
Dorothy Stratten stars as the android of the title. She was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1980, and shortly after the film’s release she was murdered by her estranged husband. She was 20.
For anyone who caught July’s drive-in season, there’s a thread worth pulling here: Galaxina was made by Crown International Pictures, the same studio behind Malibu Beach, Van Nuys Boulevard and the rest of last month’s sunlit teen comedies. The strand hasn’t wandered as far from home as it looks.
Black Magic Woman (1991)
Mark Hamill in a supernatural thriller, which is not a sentence most people expect to read.
This comes from the long stretch between Return of the Jedi and the voice work that would eventually make him famous all over again, when Hamill was taking more or less whatever came along. Apollonia Kotero and Stella Stevens co-star.
A curiosity, and worth it for the double-take alone.
The Specialist (1975)
An oddity even by this strand’s standards – a courtroom thriller with a heavy dose of conspiracy, starring Adam West some years after hanging up the cape, alongside John Anderson and Ahna Capri.
The kind of film that only exists because 1970s American independent cinema would greenlight almost anything.
Bad Girls from Mars (1991)
A low-budget science-fiction comedy set on the set of a low-budget science-fiction film, which is at least honest about what it is.
Elizabeth Kaitan and Cindy Beal star in what amounts to a very knowing bit of self-parody.
Party Camp (1987)
The closest thing here to a leftover from July’s drive-in season – beach parties, flirtation and the general mischief of the 1980s teen comedy.
If you enjoyed The Pom Pom Girls and Malibu Beach last month, this is more of the same, arriving a season late.
Sex Appeal (1986)
A bawdy comedy about an awkward young man determined to reinvent himself as a sophisticated ladies’ man, with predictably chaotic results.
Louie Bonanno stars, with Tally Chanel, Jerome Brenner and Marcia Karr. Very much of its late-night era.
Takin’ It All Off (1987)
A light comedy of nightclub performers and romantic mix-ups, starring Kitten Natividad.
There’s a neat bit of continuity here for anyone paying attention. Natividad was Russ Meyer’s leading lady and long-term partner – and Meyer’s Fanny Hill was one of the titles that launched After Hours last autumn. She also had a small part in My Tutor, which the channel aired only last month.
Wildest Dreams (1990)
A fantasy comedy in which one man’s imagination starts spilling over into his actual life, with the complications you would expect.
Cindy & Donna (1970)
The oldest film in the strand by some margin, and the closest in spirit to the original After Hours run – two young women on a European holiday, and the misadventures that follow.
A period piece more than anything else, and a reminder of where this whole late-night experiment began.
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