Q Volume 1: Series 1-3 (15)

Simply Media, £14.99

In 1969, Spike Milligan launched the most absurd, surreal and inventive comedy series British television had ever seen. Even today, not much has matched it. Admittedly Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted in the same year, but it six months later before it aired and Michael Palin has long acknowledged the debt the Python team owe Milligan and Q5 which, confusingly, was the name of the first series. This release presents all surviving episodes of Q5 as well as the complete second and third series, called Q6 and Q7 respectively, which were broadcast in 1975 and 1977.

To modern eyes, some scenes and sketches will be in poor taste. Milligan dresses his sidekicks in t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Boil All Cats” or in badges saying “Hitler For Pope”. Sometimes he dresses as the Nazi dictator himself. Sometimes he and others black up to mimic an Indian doctor, say. Elsewhere he decorates his sets with bikini-clad women who are sometimes chained and who have little or no purpose other than to challenge contemporary sensibilities and (presumably) titillate 1960s and 1970s ones.

At the same time, the show's shambolic, free-wheeling style, its looping references, its complex construction and the way it plays with and subverts the norms of TV drama and comedy, will have viewers' jaws dropping for all the right reasons. A second volume of Q, containing Q8, Q9 and There's A Lot Of It About, and covering the years 1978 to 1982, will be released next year. Much of Q is available for free on YouTube, but fans and students of offbeat, high concept television comedy, this is a must.

Assault On Precinct 13: 40th Anniversary (15)

Second Sight, £15.99

For services to soundtracks alone, John Carpenter deserves his place in the pantheon thanks to the brooding, synth-heavy score he composed for this, his second feature after stoner sci-fi black comedy Dark Star. But like Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13 has become a cult classic for reasons other than its music, in this case Carpenter's ability to take two apparently incompatible genres – the western and the horror movie – and blend them into a single, powerful drama. As with one of the director's two main influences here, George A Romero's The Night Of The Living Dead, Assault On Precinct 13 has an African-American hero: Los Angeles cop Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), sent to sit out the night at a soon-to-be-abandoned police station in the gang-infested Anderson neighbourhood. When those same gang members set out to attack the station with an arsenal of automatic weapons fitted with silencers, Bishop battens down what hatches haven't already been shot to pieces and tries to make it through to morning with the help of a few other defenders - including convicted murderer Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), who's on his way to Death Row and whose prison convoy chose the wrong time to stop at the station. Tense and menacing, it's a terrific siege movie, though its most notorious scene comes in the opening scenes and before night even falls: the shooting by the gang members of a young, pig-tailed girl as she buys a cone from an ice cream van.

Carpenter's original title was The Anderson Alamo: the title was changed by the distributor, though alert viewers will hear the police station referred to as “Precinct Nine” on the fateful radio message instructing Bishop to go there.