Cucirca

What Cucirca is

Cucirca is a viewing guide, and its pages hold descriptions in place of video. For each show it gives a summary, the years of broadcast, the leading cast, the number of seasons and a list of episodes with their titles and dates. The Watch now button opens JustWatch, an independent directory of official services, for the country you choose. JustWatch shows which subscriptions include the show and where its seasons can be bought or rented. Older series move between services from time to time, and a good many of the classic westerns are carried by free, advertising-supported channels. The how to watch page sets out the steps.

The selection was made by hand from about 1,560 English-language series. Every summary was read. Police and crime dramas, which fill so much of the schedule, were set aside, together with horror, reality and game shows, cartoons and comedies written for adults. What remained was a catalogue with a character of its own: 112 American shows, 53 British, 20 Canadian and 9 Australian, with an unusual depth in the television of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Many of the older series have only a handful of votes on the public database, which says more about their age than their quality.

Where to begin

Begin with Zorro. Walt Disney's series of 1957 is among the best-made adventure shows of its decade, filmed on a handsome set of old Spanish California with real care for swordplay and music. Don Diego de la Vega comes home from Spain to find Los Angeles under the thumb of a tyrannical commandant. By day he plays a bookish idler, and by night he rides as the masked Zorro, cutting his initial with three strokes of the blade. Guy Williams has the charm and the fencing skill for both halves of the part, Gene Sheldon is his servant Bernardo, who speaks only in gestures and hears everything, and Henry Calvin is the stout, kindly Sergeant Garcia. There are 78 half-hour episodes, and children of six and grandparents of eighty enjoy them equally.

For laughter, choose The Honeymooners. Its 39 episodes of 1955 and 1956 are the foundation of the American situation comedy. Jackie Gleason is Ralph Kramden, a Brooklyn bus driver with a new scheme every week for getting rich. Audrey Meadows is his wife Alice, who sees through each one, and Art Carney is his friend Ed Norton from the flat upstairs, a sewer worker of boundless good cheer. Nearly everything happens in one bare kitchen, played before a live audience, and the timing of the four leads has been studied by comedians ever since.

For wonder, there is Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The producer Irwin Allen built this series around the Seaview, a nuclear submarine with a glass nose, commanded by Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane. Over 110 episodes between 1964 and 1968 the crew meet sea monsters, lost civilisations and visitors from space, and from the second season they have a yellow Flying Sub that leaps from the water into the air. The first season is in black and white and plays as a thriller of exploration; the later ones are colourful fantasy. Either way it is ideal Saturday viewing.

And for something quieter, try Kung Fu. In the 1870s Kwai Chang Caine, a monk trained in a Shaolin temple in China, wanders the American West in search of his half-brother. He owns very little and wishes everybody well, and each episode sets his patience against the roughness of the frontier, with flashbacks to the lessons of his blind teacher, Master Po, who calls him Grasshopper. David Carradine plays Caine with great stillness. The series ran for 62 episodes from 1972 and brought Eastern philosophy to prime time.

Westerns

Thirty-four shows are westerns, and the westerns guide puts them in order. At the end of the 1950s there were some thirty westerns a week on the American networks, and the genre was to television then what the detective story is today. The greatest of them is Gunsmoke, which ran for twenty seasons from 1955 to 1975 and 635 episodes, a record for a drama that stood for decades. James Arness, six feet seven inches tall, is Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City, Kansas. Around him are Doc Adams, the saloon keeper Miss Kitty and a succession of deputies, and the stories are less about gunfights than about the people who pass through a cattle town: settlers, drifters, families in trouble. It began as a half-hour show in black and white and ended as an hour in colour, and its best episodes are fine short dramas.

Wagon Train has the best premise for a weekly series ever devised. A train of covered wagons travels from Missouri to California, and each episode tells the story of one traveller, played by a guest star; Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan and Barbara Stanwyck all took the journey. Ward Bond, from the films of John Ford, was the first wagon master, and John McIntire succeeded him. There are 284 episodes. Rawhide follows a cattle drive on the trail from Texas to Kansas, with Eric Fleming as the trail boss Gil Favor and a young Clint Eastwood as his ramrod Rowdy Yates, seven years before he became a film star. Its theme song, sung by Frankie Laine, is among the best known in television.

Have Gun, Will Travel is the most literate of the group. Its hero, known only as Paladin, lives in style at a San Francisco hotel, quotes Shakespeare, plays chess and hires out his services by means of a calling card with a chess knight on it. Richard Boone gives him a dry intelligence, and many of the 225 episodes turn on Paladin finding a wiser solution than the one he was hired for. The Rifleman is the warmest: Chuck Connors is Lucas McCain, a widowed rancher in the New Mexico Territory bringing up his young son Mark, and the heart of the series is the trust between father and boy. Maverick is the funniest, with James Garner and Jack Kelly as Bret and Bart Maverick, two card-playing brothers who prefer talking their way out of trouble to any other method.

Behind these stand the solid half-hour westerns that filled the schedules. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, with Hugh O'Brian, ran for 226 episodes and was the first of the wave aimed at adults as well as children. Bat Masterson gave Gene Barry a derby hat and a gold-topped cane, and Tales of Wells Fargo sent Dale Robertson riding as an agent for the stagecoach line. Laramie is set at a relay station in Wyoming run by two friends, Tombstone Territory in the Arizona town too tough to die, and Trackdown stars Robert Culp as a Texas Ranger in stories taken from the Rangers' files. The Deputy has Henry Fonda as a marshal in Arizona, Riverboat sets Darren McGavin and a young Burt Reynolds on a paddle steamer on the Mississippi, and The Tall Man tells of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon moves north to the gold rush, where a Mountie patrols with his horse Rex and his lead dog Yukon King.

The sixties brought more unusual heroes. Daniel Boone gave Fess Parker 165 episodes as the Kentucky frontiersman, with Ed Ames as his Oxford-educated Cherokee friend Mingo. Branded returned Chuck Connors as an army captain dismissed on a false charge, who wanders the West proving his courage. A Man Called Shenandoah is about a man searching for his own lost memory, Laredo is a good-humoured series about three Texas Rangers, and Hondo is drawn from a John Wayne film. The Westerner, created by Sam Peckinpah with Brian Keith as a drifting cowhand and his dog, lasted only thirteen episodes and is treasured by admirers of the genre. Pistols 'n' Petticoats is a western played for laughs, about a family whose women are the best shots in Colorado.

After 1970 the western became rarer and more thoughtful. Hec Ramsey stars Richard Boone again, as an old gunfighter at the turn of the century who has taken up the new science of fingerprints and magnifying glasses. The Quest has Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson as brothers looking for their sister, and The Chisholms follows a Virginia family, led by Robert Preston, on the long road to California. The Young Riders tells of the teenage riders of the Pony Express, with Josh Brolin as the young Hickok. Lonesome Dove: The Series, filmed in Alberta, continues the story of Newt Call from the famous novel, Hawkeye (The First Frontier) is based on Fenimore Cooper, and The Lazarus Man stars Robert Urich as a man piecing together his past after the Civil War. Harts of the West is a modern comedy with Beau Bridges as a salesman from Chicago who buys a ranch in Nevada, sight unseen, and his real father Lloyd as its foreman. Australia has its own frontier story in Five Mile Creek, about a coach line in the goldfields, with a sixteen-year-old Nicole Kidman in the cast. The gunfights in all of these are of the staged, bloodless kind familiar from any Saturday matinee.

Science fiction and fantasy

Forty-one shows are science fiction or fantasy, and the sci-fi guide lists them by period. The earliest is Science Fiction Theatre of 1955, an anthology in which a host demonstrates a real piece of laboratory equipment and a story follows from it. Men Into Space, made in 1959 with the help of the United States Air Force, imagines the first flights to the Moon with remarkable sobriety, ten years before they happened. Then came Irwin Allen. After the Seaview he made Land of the Giants, in which a passenger ship of 1983 is thrown through a storm in space onto a world like our own where everything is twelve times larger. Its seven castaways hide under floorboards and climb table legs with safety pins for grappling hooks, and the enormous props, a telephone the size of a car and a cat the size of a house, remain a delight.

In Britain, Gerry Anderson was filming puppets with a seriousness nobody else had attempted. Stingray, made in 1964, was the first British television series produced entirely in colour. Captain Troy Tempest pilots a super-submarine for the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, with the silent sea-maiden Marina beside him, against the undersea tyrant Titan. Joe 90 followed in 1968: a nine-year-old boy whose father has invented a machine that can copy the knowledge of any expert into his mind, so that with a pair of special glasses he can fly a jet or perform surgery for a day. Both are made with craft models and miniature explosions that put many later effects to shame.

The seventies favoured the single extraordinary hero. David McCallum is The Invisible Man, a scientist who wears a lifelike mask of his own face; Gemini Man can vanish for fifteen minutes a day at the touch of his wristwatch; and The Amazing Spider-Man of 1978, with Nicholas Hammond climbing real buildings on real wires, was the first live-action series for the character. Search gives its agents miniature cameras and a control room that sees all they see, and in Salvage 1 Andy Griffith plays a scrap dealer who builds his own rocket to collect the equipment left on the Moon. Canada contributed The Starlost, with Keir Dullea of 2001: A Space Odyssey aboard a vast ship whose inhabitants have forgotten they are in space.

Saturday mornings had their own science fiction. Shazam! sends young Billy Batson around the country in a motor home with his mentor, turning into Captain Marvel when a problem needs solving. Ark II follows three young scientists and a talking chimpanzee who drive a mobile laboratory through the twenty-fifth century, helping villages rebuild. Electra Woman and Dyna Girl are two reporters with gadget-filled wristbands. Each episode ends with a small lesson, kindly delivered.

The eighties brought the computer. In Automan, a shy programmer creates a hologram that can step out of the screen at night: a glowing blue hero with a car that turns corners at perfect right angles. It was the first weekly series to borrow the look of the film Tron, and its thirteen episodes are a time capsule of 1983. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future went further and mixed live actors with computer-generated characters, which had scarcely been tried on television, and Wizards and Warriors is a cheerful send-up of sword-and-sorcery with a prince, a princess and a wicked wizard. Japan's giant hero arrives in two English-language series, Ultraman: Towards the Future, made in Australia, and Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero, made in California.

Among later shows, The Lone Gunmen gives three computer experts from The X-Files a comic series of their own, and Mysterious Ways follows a professor of anthropology who investigates events that science struggles to explain. People of Earth is a gentle comedy about a support group for people who believe they have met aliens, and about the journalist who comes to write them up and stays. The Crossing begins with hundreds of people washing ashore in a small American fishing town and saying that they have fled from a time 250 years ahead. Roar, set in the Ireland of the year 400, was the first leading role of an eighteen-year-old Heath Ledger, and Conan the Adventurer brings the hero of the pulp magazines to the screen for family audiences.

Adventure

Forty-three shows are adventures of other kinds, described in the adventure guide. The British studios of the 1950s specialised in costume adventure, filmed quickly and with gusto for sale to America. The Adventures of Sir Lancelot stars William Russell as the knight of the Round Table and took unusual trouble over its medieval detail. The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel has Marius Goring as the English gentleman who rescues the innocent from revolutionary Paris, and the Ivanhoe of 1958 gave a thirty-year-old Roger Moore his first starring role on television. The stories were revisited later: The Scarlet Pimpernel of 1999 has Richard E. Grant as a witty Sir Percy, and a second Ivanhoe, made by the BBC in 1997, tells Scott's novel in six parts. Both versions of Ivanhoe have pages on Cucirca, listed under I in the directory.

Dick Turpin, from 1979, turns the highwayman into a dashing friend of the poor, in half-hour episodes with a great deal of riding. Covington Cross is the story of a widowed knight and his five spirited children in fourteenth-century England, filmed in real castles. When Things Were Rotten is Mel Brooks's comic version of Robin Hood, thirteen episodes of puns and pratfalls made in 1975, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp is surely the only series in which every part is played by a chimpanzee, dubbed with human voices, in a parody of the secret agent films of its day.

The sea provides the rest. Sea Hunt made a star of Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, a former navy frogman who hires out as a diver. Its 155 episodes were filmed largely under water, which had seldom been attempted, and they inspired a generation to take up diving. Thunder in Paradise gives the wrestler Hulk Hogan a futuristic speedboat in Florida, and Return of the Saint sends Ian Ogilvy, as the gentleman adventurer Simon Templar, around the south of France and Italy in a white Jaguar. Crusoe retells Defoe's novel with an ingenious tree house, Tarzan brings the jungle hero to modern New York, and The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne imagines that the young novelist lived the marvels he later wrote about, in a steam-powered airship.

American comedy

Seventy-seven shows are comedies, and the comedy guide sorts them by country and period. After The Honeymooners, the most durable American sitcom of the early years here is Hazel. Shirley Booth, who had already won an Academy Award, plays the maid who runs the Baxter household, and her employer with it, across 155 episodes. The Ghost & Mrs. Muir is a romance and a comedy at once: a young widow rents a cottage on the coast of Maine and finds that its builder, a sea captain dead for a century, still considers it his. Hope Lange won two Emmy awards for the part. Julia, which began in 1968, stars Diahann Carroll as a nurse bringing up her small son alone; it was a landmark, as the first American series built around a Black professional woman, and it is also simply a charming family comedy.

The seventies belong to One Day at a Time, produced by Norman Lear, which ran for nine seasons. Bonnie Franklin is a divorced mother who moves to Indianapolis with her two teenage daughters, played by Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli, and Pat Harrington is Schneider, the building superintendent who lets himself in with his own key. It treated the worries of a single parent honestly and stayed funny. That's My Mama is set in a family barber shop in Washington, and The Tony Randall Show casts the fastidious actor as a judge in Philadelphia with an unruly household.

From the eighties come several series that were cancelled early and remembered fondly. It's Your Move gave a fourteen-year-old Jason Bateman his first lead, as a schoolboy schemer who meets his match in his mother's new neighbour. 9 to 5 continues the film about three office workers, My Sister Sam stars Pam Dawber as a San Francisco photographer whose teenage sister comes to live with her, and Day by Day is about a couple who leave their careers to open a nursery at home. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, with Blair Brown as a New Yorker in her thirties, was among the first half-hour comedies made in the style of a film, with a single camera and room for quiet moments. Doctor Doctor stars Matt Frewer as an eccentric physician, and The Famous Teddy Z has Jon Cryer as a mailroom boy who becomes a Hollywood agent by accident.

The nineties offer two of the warmest family comedies in the catalogue. The Torkelsons is about a mother of five in a small Oklahoma town who takes in a lodger to keep her house, seen through the eyes of her bookish eldest daughter. Brooklyn Bridge, created by Gary David Goldberg from his own childhood, is set in 1956 among three generations of a family in one apartment building, with Marion Ross as the grandmother who rules them all. Hearts Afire pairs John Ritter and Markie Post as a senator's aide and a journalist. Thea gave the fourteen-year-old singer Brandy her first acting part, My Brother and Me was a favourite on Nickelodeon, and The Norm Show stars the comedian Norm Macdonald as a former ice hockey player working off a sentence as a social worker, with Laurie Metcalf as his long-suffering colleague.

After 2000 come Life with Bonnie, in which Bonnie Hunt plays the host of a morning programme in Chicago and improvises her interviews, I'm with Her, about a schoolteacher who finds himself dating a film star, Rock Me Baby, about a radio host and a new baby, Quintuplets, with Andy Richter as the father of five teenagers of the same age, and The Bill Engvall Show, whose eldest daughter is played by a seventeen-year-old Jennifer Lawrence. The best of the recent comedies is Detroiters, in which two best friends run a tiny advertising agency in Detroit and make gloriously bad local commercials. It is a show about friendship and about love for a city, and it has a sweetness that is rare in modern comedy.

British comedy

Fifty-three shows come from the United Kingdom, introduced in the British guide, and many are comedies of a gentle, well-crafted kind. The oldest is The Larkins, from 1958, with the formidable Peggy Mount as the head of a London family. Sykes stars Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques as a brother and sister who share a house at 28 Sebastopol Terrace and get into trouble over the simplest things; it ran through the seventies and is still a model of visual comedy. The Complete and Utter History of Britain, made in 1969, was written and performed by Michael Palin and Terry Jones a few months before they helped to form Monty Python, and it reports great events of the past as if television had been there, with interviews in the dressing room after the Battle of Hastings.

Two's Company sets a brash American writer, played by the Broadway star Elaine Stritch, against her impeccably English butler, Donald Sinden. A Sharp Intake of Breath gave David Jason an early lead as a man at odds with officialdom, and That's My Boy stars Mollie Sugden as a housekeeper who discovers that her employer is her long-lost son. After Henry, with Prunella Scales, is about three generations of women living on three floors of one house, and May to December is a tender comedy about a widowed solicitor and a much younger teacher. French Fields sends a London couple to live in France, The Upper Hand has a former footballer keeping house for a businesswoman, and On the Up stars Dennis Waterman as a self-made millionaire who treats his staff as family.

Chelmsford 123 is set in Roman Britain in the year 123, and its first scene is played entirely in Latin with subtitles before the characters agree to carry on in English. Mulberry is a fantasy comedy about a mysterious manservant who brings an elderly lady back to an enjoyment of life, and Second Thoughts and Kiss Me Kate are comedies of the nineties about a couple merging two households and a counsellor with chaotic neighbours. Two comedy-dramas complete the list: At Home with the Braithwaites, in which a mother in Leeds wins thirty-eight million pounds on the lottery and tells nobody, and William and Mary, with Martin Clunes as an undertaker who falls in love with a midwife. From Australia come All Together Now, about an ageing rock singer who discovers he has grown-up twins, and Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures, a very funny parody of outback travel programmes in which the confident host gets everything wrong.

Drama

Thirty-six shows are listed as drama, set out in the drama guide. The medical series form a line of their own. Marcus Welby, M.D. was the most watched programme in America in 1970. Robert Young plays a family doctor in California who treats the whole person and makes house calls, and James Brolin is his young partner, who arrives on a motorcycle. Medical Center, which ran for the same seven years, is set in a university hospital in Los Angeles with Chad Everett as a surgeon. Trapper John, M.D. picks up a character from the film MASH nearly thirty years on, now chief of surgery in San Francisco, with Pernell Roberts in the role. The Flying Doctors is Australian, set in the outback town of Coopers Crossing, where the doctors of the Royal Flying Doctor Service reach their patients by light aircraft; it ran for 221 episodes and was shown around the world. Peak Practice follows a country surgery in the Derbyshire hills through twelve series, and Hawthorne stars Jada Pinkett Smith as the head of nursing at a hospital in Virginia.

Family dramas are well represented. Providence brings a successful surgeon home from California to Rhode Island, to her father's veterinary practice and her family's kitchen table, and ran for five seasons. A Year in the Life follows a widowed father and his four grown children in Seattle. The Beachcombers, set among the log salvagers of the British Columbia coast, was the longest-running drama in the history of Canadian television, and Crocodile Shoes tells of a factory worker from Newcastle, played by Jimmy Nail, who goes to Nashville with a tape of his songs. Remember WENN is a comedy-drama about the staff of a small radio station in Pittsburgh around 1940, written by the songwriter Rupert Holmes with real affection for the days of live radio.

The BBC and ITV excelled at history. Fall of Eagles tells in thirteen parts how the three great dynasties of central and eastern Europe, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns, moved towards their end between 1848 and 1918, with a remarkable cast that includes a young Patrick Stewart as Lenin. Edward the Seventh gives the same span to the long life of Queen Victoria's eldest son, with Timothy West as the king and Annette Crosbie as his mother. The Onedin Line ran for 91 episodes on the fortunes of a Liverpool shipowner in the age of sail, filmed aboard real tall ships to music by Khachaturian. Lilies follows three sisters in the Liverpool of 1920, and the Australian series Bodyline dramatises the cricket tour of 1932 that nearly broke relations between two countries, with Hugo Weaving as the England captain.

From the page

The classic serial is a British invention, and the books guide gathers the adaptations. Dickens leads with three: Bleak House of 1985, with Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock and Denholm Elliott as John Jarndyce, Oliver Twist in twelve Sunday teatime episodes from the same year, and Great Expectations of 1989, in which Anthony Hopkins is the convict Magwitch and Jean Simmons, who had played the young Estella in the famous film of 1946, returns as Miss Havisham. The Pallisers turns six novels by Anthony Trollope into twenty-six episodes of Victorian politics and marriage, with Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora. Emma, from 1972, was the first full-length Jane Austen serial in colour, and Flambards tells of an orphaned heiress, a decaying country house and the first aeroplanes, in the years before 1914.

The newest show in the catalogue belongs here. The Other Bennet Sister, made in 2026 from the novel by Janice Hadlow, takes Mary, the plain and bookish middle sister of Pride and Prejudice, and gives her a story of her own, from her mother's drawing room to London and the Lake District. Ella Bruccoleri plays her with humour and feeling, and viewers have given the series one of the highest scores on Cucirca.

For children there are The Secret Garden in seven parts and Anne of Avonlea in six, both from the BBC in 1975, and from Canada Emily of New Moon, after the novels by the author of Anne of Green Gables, filmed on Prince Edward Island, and Little Men, which continues Louisa May Alcott's story at Jo's school for boys. Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, a Canadian and German production of 1980, covers both of Mark Twain's great novels in twenty-six episodes and has one of the highest ratings in the catalogue. Swiss Family Robinson was filmed in Jamaica by a Canadian company, Mysterious Island comes from Jules Verne, Just William from the stories by Richmal Crompton, and Shirley Temple's Storybook has the former child star introducing fairy tales with famous guests.

Shows for children

Twenty-two shows are marked as family programmes, and many more suit young viewers; the family viewing guide arranges them by age. British children's drama has a reputation for treating its audience as intelligent, and the fantasy serials show why. Timeslip, from 1970, sends two teenagers through a hole in a fence to other times, with real scientific ideas behind each story. Into the Labyrinth follows three children through history in pursuit of a stolen source of magic. Dark Season, written in 1991, was the first television drama by Russell T Davies, who later revived Doctor Who, and the first screen role of a fifteen-year-old Kate Winslet. In Aquila two boys dig up a small flying machine left behind in Roman times and have to learn its controls from the Latin labels. Davies returned to children's television with Wizards vs Aliens, and the robot dog from Doctor Who has a series of his own in K-9.

For laughter there are Rentaghost, about an agency that hires out a troupe of hopelessly inept spirits, which ran for nine years, and The Ghosts of Motley Hall, in which five phantoms from different centuries defend their old house against buyers. Tracy Beaker Returns brings Jacqueline Wilson's heroine back as a young care worker at the children's home where she grew up, and it handles its subject with honesty and warmth.

Australia's finest children's series is Ocean Girl. Two brothers living on an underwater research station off the Queensland coast meet Neri, a girl who swims like a dolphin and talks with a humpback whale, and over 78 episodes her origin is revealed. It was filmed on the Great Barrier Reef and carries a strong feeling for the sea. Mirror, Mirror links a girl of 1995 with a girl of 1919 through an antique mirror, and Shoebox Zoo gives an eleven-year-old in Edinburgh four carved animals that come to life.

North America supplies the comedies. California Dreams is about a teenage band and their songs, and City Guys about two unlikely friends at a New York high school. Taina follows a girl at a performing arts school who daydreams in musical numbers. In Darcy's Wild Life a film star's daughter is moved from Malibu to a farm and takes a job with the local vet. Radio Free Roscoe has four friends running a secret radio station, 15/Love is set at a tennis academy, and Life with Boys gives a girl a father and three brothers to manage. I'm in the Band, the most voted show in the whole catalogue, lets a fifteen-year-old guitarist join his favourite rock group, three overgrown children who move into his family home. Supah Ninjas, with George Takei as a holographic grandfather, The Troop, Spooksville, Dark Oracle, Ruby & The Rockits, Bucket & Skinner's Epic Adventures and The Bad News Bears, from the baseball film, complete the group.

Canada and Australia

Twenty-nine shows were made in Canada, Australia or New Zealand, often with partners in Britain or the United States, and they have a list of their own. Canadian television has long been strong in programmes for the young. Emily of New Moon and Little Men share the careful period detail that made the country's literary adaptations famous, and Radio Free Roscoe, 15/Love, Dark Oracle and Life with Boys show the same industry at work for teenagers, with young casts who went on to long careers. The Beachcombers made the village of Gibsons, with its cafe on the wharf, known to viewers in dozens of countries, and The Starlost, Swiss Family Robinson and Mysterious Island were filmed in Canadian studios for the world market.

Australia's contribution is equally distinct. The Flying Doctors and Five Mile Creek are filled with the light and distance of the interior, and Ocean Girl and Mirror, Mirror are among the most imaginative children's serials made anywhere in the nineties. Bodyline treats a chapter of sporting history as high drama, and All Together Now and Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures carry the national sense of humour, dry and self-mocking. Even the robot dog of K-9 and the giant hero of Ultraman: Towards the Future were filmed there. Viewers who know only the American and British schedules will find this corner of Cucirca full of discoveries, and each show has a Watch now button like the rest.

Seven decades in five steps

The lists by decade offer another way through. The fifties and sixties hold 44 shows, described in the fifties and sixties guide. These are the years of the western and of filmed adventure, when a season could run to thirty-nine episodes and a popular series might pass two hundred. Most are in black and white until about 1965, and the photography is often beautiful. Beside the shows already named, the period includes Adam Adamant Lives!, a BBC adventure about an Edwardian gentleman frozen in 1902 and thawed out in the London of 1966, where he applies the manners of his own age to the mysteries of the new one. Several of its episodes were directed by a young Ridley Scott.

The seventies and eighties, with 39 and 25 shows, have a guide of their own, the seventies and eighties guide. Colour was universal by then and seasons grew shorter. The period is rich in science fiction with a single hero, in British comedy and in the classic serial. The nineties add 38 shows, set out in the nineties guide, among them the best of the Australian and Canadian children's dramas and a run of family comedies. The years since 2000 contribute 35, introduced in the recent guide, from The Lone Gunmen in 2001 to The Other Bennet Sister in 2026.

Familiar faces, early on

One of the pleasures of older television is meeting famous people before they were famous. Clint Eastwood spent seven seasons on the cattle trail in Rawhide. Burt Reynolds was a riverboat pilot in Riverboat and Roger Moore a knight in Ivanhoe. Kurt Russell, a child actor for Disney, was twenty-five when he made The Quest. Nicole Kidman appears in Five Mile Creek, Heath Ledger in Roar, Kate Winslet in Dark Season, Jennifer Lawrence in The Bill Engvall Show, Jason Bateman in It's Your Move, Josh Brolin in The Young Riders and Patrick Stewart in Fall of Eagles. Hugo Weaving's first major part was in Bodyline. Behind the camera, Sam Peckinpah learned his trade on The Rifleman and The Westerner, and Ridley Scott on Adam Adamant Lives!. The search box on Cucirca accepts actors' names, which makes these early appearances easy to trace.

The guest lists of the long westerns are a history of Hollywood in themselves. A single season of Wagon Train or Gunsmoke might include a dozen actors who had been stars of the thirties and another dozen who would be stars of the seventies. Each episode page lists its title and date, so a viewer with a favourite performer can look up the right hour.

Seasons and episodes

Every show page on Cucirca carries its episodes, season by season, 9,153 of them across the catalogue. The longest runs are Gunsmoke with 635, Wagon Train with 284, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp with 226, Have Gun, Will Travel with 225, The Flying Doctors with 221, Rawhide with 217 and One Day at a Time with 210. At the other end are serials complete in six or seven parts, such as Emma, Great Expectations, The Secret Garden and Bodyline, which can be watched in a weekend.

A word on how to approach a series of several hundred episodes. Most shows made before 1980 were written so that each story stands alone. A viewer can begin anywhere, and a good method is to sample a season from the middle of the run, when cast and writers were at their most assured, and to go back to the beginning afterwards. Serials taken from novels, by contrast, are best seen in order, and the episode list gives the sequence.

A note for parents

Every summary was read before a show was admitted, and the catalogue leaves out the police and crime dramas, horror and adult comedy that make up much of television. The westerns contain gunfights and fist fights staged in the manner of their time, with clear heroes and little shown on screen. The science fiction is of the adventurous kind; younger children may find the giant spiders of Land of the Giants or the sea creatures of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea exciting rather than alarming, and parents know their own children best. A few dramas deal with illness, as medical series must, and Tracy Beaker Returns is set in a children's home. Each show page gives the certificate where one is recorded.

Search, lists and the Watchlist

The search box sits in the grey bar at the top of every page and looks through titles and cast as you type. The home page directory lists every show under its letter, with a small New! beside those made since 2009, and the tabs lead to westerns, science fiction, comedy, family shows and the top rated list. Fourteen lists in all arrange the catalogue by kind, by country and by decade, and the finding shows page explains each of them.

Each show page has a button that adds it to the Watchlist. The list is kept by your browser on the device you are using, so it works at once and stays private, and the Watchlist page shows how to save it to a file and load it on another device. For a series of two hundred episodes it is a handy bookmark.

The top rated list

Twenty-three shows have a score of 7.2 or more from at least ten voters. Among the best known are Automan, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Kung Fu, Zorro, The Honeymooners, Rawhide, Have Gun, Will Travel and Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. I'm in the Band has the most votes of all, The Other Bennet Sister is the newest, and Huckleberry Finn and His Friends and The Starlost are the surprises. It is a dependable list for an evening when you would rather be told what is good.

A first fortnight

Here is one way to spend two weeks with Cucirca. Start with three episodes of Zorro on the first evening, since the opening story runs across them. On the second, two of The Honeymooners. On the third, the first episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and on the fourth an episode of Have Gun, Will Travel followed by one of The Rifleman, to see two very different westerns side by side. Give the fifth evening to the first part of The Other Bennet Sister, the sixth to Kung Fu, and the seventh, with the children, to Ocean Girl or Stingray. In the second week, try Sykes and One Day at a Time for comedy, Automan for the eighties, The Flying Doctors for drama, Timeslip for the young, Detroiters for something recent, and finish with Gunsmoke, which has 635 episodes ready for the months to come. By then the Watchlist will be full, and the A to Z will have 170 more shows waiting.

Questions and answers

Questions