Looking at my relatively recent list of top twenty-five favourite TV shows, there’s a very healthy representation of what you might collectively call Saturday afternoon TV from the 1980s, including a few that span the seventies and eighties, just to be accurate. Highest-ranked of these – at number seven – is Airwolf, about a high-tech military helicopter and its crew on ever-exotic espionage-type missions that just oozes eighties style! Unlike The Dukes of Hazzard, two places behind, that’s full on redneck moonshine-running, generally involving madcap car chases across rural Georgia in the iconic General Lee, and not forgetting the even more iconic Daisy Duke!

Just outside the top ten, which I’ll list in full with the rest later if I remember, we’ve got The A-Team, and the adventures of four perfectly cast ex-special forces soldiers of fortune on the run from a military prison, trying to clear their names for a crime they didn’t commit while taking on helpless causes – usually involving crazy homemade weaponry that famously never killed anyone! Right, next up is Streethawk at number fifteen, which, in total contrast to everything we’ve seen so far, is one more than the total number of episodes that ever got made! Still super-cool though – like RoboCop on a sci-fi motorbike, fighting urban crime the police can’t handle! One of the all-time great ZX Spectrum loading screens too, even if the game itself leaves a lot to be desired!

Possibly the most iconic of all the eighties icons here, Knight Rider, follows right behind. David Hasselhoff fighting crime with the help of an indestructible, self-aware, artificially intelligent car from before that was even invented! (I know, I know)! And now I’m wondering why it’s only at number sixteen. For further review later! CHiPs rounds out the top twenty, and, Miami Vice (number two!) aside, no TV show ever made being a cop more glamorous than this pair of California Highway Patrol officers on their big motorbikes. On empty highways because it had to be filmed as soon as the sun came up! I think it’s the earliest of our “eighties” TV shows here too, running from 1977 to 1983. Two to go, and it’s all the twos, twenty-two, for Blue Thunder, which is the shortest running of everything covered here, lasting only eleven episodes first shown over a couple of months in 1984. It’s based on the movie of the same name starring Chief Brody out of Jaws, is mostly made from footage from that, and is effectively Airwolf but less cool. That would have been a great place to move on but at the bottom of the top twenty-five is Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and we can’t not mention this present-day astronaut coming out of suspended animation in five hundred years and becoming Earth’s greatest action hero, even if it does spoil the flow!

That rounds out the Saturday afternoon TV from the eighties in my favourites list, but as much as I did and still do love the likes of Blue Thunder, and will always argue that there’s plenty of room in our lives for two super-copter shows, there’s undoubtedly a case to be made for the existence of (at least) two tiers of this fantastical, period-action TV! Even an uber-apologist like me cannot deny that for every Airwolf there was, indeed, a Blue Thunder, and for every Buck Rogers there was a Starman, and for every Knight Rider there was an Automan. Although I do really like Automan too! Conversely, I really didn’t like Manimal, about a private detective who can turn into animals to solve crimes, and deservedly only lasted eight episodes, although to raise the curtain here, that’s actually the show that inspired me to start writing what you’re reading now when I came across it again a couple of weeks ago! And from there it was just a short journey through YouTube’s rabbit holes to another show I really liked but also probably fits into the second tier, if only because I’d totally forgotten it even existed, and that would be The Fall Guy…

If we were just talking seventies action TV, we’d no doubt be covering The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1973 to 1978 and was a huge hit with me and my eldest younger brother later in that period and then into the early eighties as it was re-run. Anyway, it starred Lee Majors as a NASA astronaut kitted out with superhuman bionic implants after an accident, and both him and his character, Steve Austin, were like prototypes for David Hasselhoff and Michael Knight – pop culture icons one and all! From there, Majors starred in a handful of movies, such as the classic 1979 horror Killer Fish (which, by total coincidence, I was also watching on YouTube a couple of days ago as I write) but it was the coming of The Fall Guy in 1981 that really put him back on the map again, running for over a hundred episodes all the way through to 1986.

When I said this one was maybe second tier, I’m now having second thoughts. Maybe! I mean, it went on for ages, it had all the toys and a board game, it had the video game… Heather Thomas coming through those saloon doors in a tiny bikini in the opening credits too. Phew! Quite the theme tune behind her as well, with Majors himself singing Unknown Stuntman, which was also released as a single in 1984 – the greatest of all musical years! Anyway, he was the titular Hollywood stuntman, Colt Seaver, who moonlighted as a bounty hunter, aided by trainee stuntman Howie Munson and stuntwoman Jody Banks, played by the none-more-eighties Thomas. And all that stunt know-how generally contributed to all the crime-solving they got up to, or at the very least all the car chases – never seen a car in the air as much as his pickup was! All adds to the spectacle though, and this was as spectacular as it was dramatic. Not to mention cheesy!

The video game came from Elite in 1984 for Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, but was more about the stunts than the bounty hunting as you filmed a series of five scenes for a movie, mostly involving jumping over trains, boats, tanks and stuff while avoiding various projectiles and falling off. It’s all painfully average, I’m afraid, and while it’s always nice to look at, there’s just not a lot to it. Which is why I’m struggling to even fill a whole paragraph on something that was a 1984 dream come true on paper! Would have been a cool budget release later on I guess, but for some real super stuntman action we were going to have to wait a bit longer, for an original, £1.99 budget release from Codemasters in 1988, no less! Let’s check out the back of the box… “Amazing Playability!! A brilliant stuntman simulation. Featuring fantastic desert car chases – Power speed-boat racing – Frantic forest rallying and turbo boost Grand Canyon jumping!! These are just a few of the amazing stunts included!” Sounds more like it – proper stunting stuff – so let’s delve inside the box…

“As SUPER STUNTMAN, you must fight your way through fires, explosions, cannonballs and more to complete each scene. All the while, the bad guys try to barage you into the blazing fires.” Okay, first up, it needs to be either Super Stunt Man or Super Stuntman. Not both. Happens all the time with games and it drives me mad! But that aside, this is more like it – the greatest movie in history and you’re a part of it! It goes on to tell us about the seven scenes we’ve got to complete, with each presenting a different challenge, which I’ll quote directly, just so you know it’s not me with the continued weird use of upper-case characters…

Scene 1) Deadly CAR CHASE through the boulder strewn desert.

Scene 2) Ultra-fast POWER BOAT race.

Scene 3) Weave your way through the trees of a forest at break-neck speed.

Scene 4) Use turbo-boost to jump the GRAND CANYON… or face a grizzly death on the rocks below.

Scene 5) Battle it out with the violent street gangs at midnight on the streets of New York.

Scene 6) Steer your boat through the rapids in the rough white water chase.

Scene 7) The GRAND FINALE

As if 90% of what you’ve just read wasn’t just one massive aside, here’s a quick aside! If we properly unfold the inlay, as well as an invitation to write to David Darling if you’re one of the best programmers because you deserve the best rewards, there’s a “not to be missed” section featuring six of the company’s other games, together with some review highlights. I’d mostly agree they’re not to be missed too, especially BMX Simulator, which remains second only to Super Sprint as my favourite top-down racer! I think Pro Snooker Sim is a rerelease of a barebones old Hard Software snooker game that seems to do the job alright. Dizzy should need no introduction as the eggy platform-puzzler that kickstarted a gaming icon. Star Runner is an alright Metro-Cross clone with you auto-running through flip-screen sci-fi obstacle courses. I don’t have a copy of Super G-Man – the closest I’ve got is Super Gran, and the less said about that the better! Finally, Super Robin Hood is a very forgettable platformer, and again, it’s alright at best. Overall alright too, but I’ll probably stick with BMX Sim and Dizzy if it’s all the same to you!

Right, that aside aside, let’s finish off with the instructions. It’s all very basic to control, with up and down to accelerate and brake, left and right for left and right, and fire to shoot your weapon. The latter is actively encouraged to hot-up the on-screen action, as it just bashing into other cars or boats. Nothing about violent street gangs at midnight on the streets of New York yet but we’ll worry about that when we get there! What we are told, though, is that hitting other cars or boats shouldn’t do you any damage, and neither will crashing into rocks. If you hit the red fires, however, or if a cannonball hits you, you will crash or just spin around a lot. In each scene you can crash twice, and will actually get a big points bonus for doing so, but crash a third time and you’re dead. Game over. And with that, I do believe we’re suitably equipped to step into scene one and its deadly car chase (or CAR CHASE) through the boulder-strewn desert!

Before that though, a quick note on the cool 48K chiptune blasting out of the title screen – it’s a raspy but ambitious piece of Spectrum synth-rock that reminded me of the awesome Agent X title music, which is no bad thing as I’d consider that the best on the system! Anyway, the polish doesn’t stop there, and as you jump behind the wheel you’ve got the movie clapper board on the screen to see you off. The sound in-game is nothing to write home about – just standard Spectrum engine noises and so on – but the game is a real looker from the outset, with a real desert feel to the mostly monochrome black on yellow, with some great shadowing and a lot of detail in the variations of rock and cactus. There’s the occasional flourish too, like the mysterious red fires that make you spin around or the lovely blue river you jump over, while your car is different to the enemy ones but is nothing spectacular. Controlling the car takes a bit of getting used to, mainly because it drives just like a boat – maybe just like the boat in the second scene, for example… The level design is a bit maze-like, meaning you’ll be reversing back up rock formations until you learn it, and there’s the random danger of all the other cars bashing you into stuff and shooting at you, but the main challenge is getting to the end before the time runs out. A few goes and you’ll be having a modicum of fun breezing into scene two though!

“Ultra-fast POWER BOAT race” is that scene two, indicated by the clapper board at the start, and this one feels really good – not only like the car in the last scene, meaning you’re already a dab-hand at piloting it, but it’s on water and you’re negotiating islands and coastlines that aren’t maze-like at all. Slightly suspect collision detection, but this is compensated by how innocuous the other boats are, despite there being loads of them, as well as a far more generous time limit. Good looking boats also compensate for less going on in the backgrounds too. I really enjoyed this one and my only complaint is it was over too soon; I’d play this over their Pro Powerboat Simulator any time!

Scene three sees us in a forest, and while the instructions might put us in mind of the race across Endor in Return of the Jedi, the reality is it’s the first level again but in a different but similarly polished skin. More variety this time though, and it plays a bit faster too, even if the car feels even more like a boat having just been in one! I did notice one quirk here where there are some gaps between trees – which can be hard to judge at the best of times – that act like a brick wall if you approach them head-on but are no problem to reverse through, although I only know that because I was trying to line-up a screenshot, otherwise you’d have no reason to be doing it!

Scene four, Evel Knievel’s unfulfilled dream Grand Canyon jump, is understandably built on the first level’s desert design but is a much simpler case of building up speed while avoiding sparser rocks and stuff then hitting the turbo button (as instructed on the clapper board) as you hit the ramp. A split second too early and you’ll end up spinning around all over the rocks below but as long as you’re at relatively decent speed (i.e. you didn’t hit the final obstacle before the ramp) and time it right you’ll soar across and over the finish line. By the way, a quick plug for my deep-dive into Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge where I go deep into that Evel Knievel stuff as well!

It turned out that our midnight scrap with the gangs of New York was just another car chase, this time against a darkened cityscape. The difficulty definitely goes up a notch here, with far more aggressive enemy cars and loads of fire hazards to negotiate. The time limit is less aggressive though, and there’s almost no backwards and forwards driving up and down dead-ends, so with a bit of care and a bit more luck you should manage this one with a few seconds to spare. Weirdly, while I vividly remember the big jump in the last level at the time, I don’t remember this one at all, which is why I was half-expecting an unannounced side-scrolling brawler here, although I wasn’t disappointed with seeing some good looking buildings, lots of texture and plenty of thoughtful colour-pop.

That difficulty is about to go up several notches with scene six and the white water chase, and as much as I do enjoy this game, it’s hard to forgive the unpredictable white water physics combined with some really poor collision detection, as well as several totally blind jumps that will have your boat unceremoniously beached if you don’t get them spot on. Which can be almost impossible if you are on the wrong end of the water physics or an unruly enemy boat (of which there are many) just beforehand. And that collision detection! I measured pretty much a full boat-width away after a supposed crash with an island! The water effects are nice though, but they just need toning down to make it a thrill ride rather than a chore that takes a lot of effort to get to and try to learn, let alone scrape through once you have.

The final scene seven, or The Grand Finale, arrives without any explanation whatsoever, so you find yourself back in a car (thankfully!) in a very mean looking, very black and white kind of city construction area covered in big (and lethal) sand pits, rocks, fires, buildings and loads more blind jumps, preceded by a selection of striking yellow ramps (which reminded me of that Sin City movie). Make the wrong choice and it’s take two, so this is another one you definitely need to learn before you’ve got a chance of beating it – the clock is no issue here, it’s just the potential for making a wrong choice and crashing. Or just crashing! I get it though – you could probably breeze through the whole game in under ten minutes but learning how to do it is where you’re getting your money’s worth, especially when it’s only £1.99’s worth of money!

Super Stunt Man or Super Stuntman or even SUPER STUNTMAN might not be perfect but it might be the perfect budget title! Appealing subject matter, more polish than you’re paying for, loads of variety and mostly loads of fun while it lasts. And it’s going to last a while because as frustrating as some of the level designs can be, you always know you can beat it if you can learn it, and it’s really not rocket science! What it is, though, is that super stuntman game The Fall Guy wasn’t. Which reminds me, I need to go back and reappraise my position on The Fall Guy now as well, and who knows, it might even end up in my top thirty TV shows list when that inevitably succeeds this top twenty-five one I almost forgot I promised I’d share earlier…

1. Bottom

2. Miami Vice

3. Scooby Doo, Where Are You!

4. Steptoe & Son

5. On The Buses

6. The Munsters

7. Airwolf

8. The Ghosts of Motley Hall

9. The Dukes of Hazzard

10. Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out

11. The A-Team

12. Batman (1966)

13. Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em

14. Top Cat

15. Street Hawk

16. Knight Rider

17. The Flintstones

18. Absolutely

19. The Inbetweeners

20. CHiPs

21. The Pink Panther Show

22. Blue Thunder

23. Hammer House of Horror

24. Dick Turpin

25. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century