No Repeat, No Surrender 1

…and we're back with a NEW THRILL, as they used to say on the cover of 2000AD.  No Repeat, No Surrender is our regular (ha!) feature on the bits of TV that were shown once…then shown the door.  The ones that ended up in the vaults.  The tapes that once played, could never be played again.  Dame rumour has it that there did indeed exist stamps reading DO NOT TRANSMIT stuck over some of these; nice image, but I rather doubt it, since it implies that the VT technicians just decided what was going to be on telly about half an hour beforehand, without telling the Radio Times or anything.  That said, check this site out and tell me if the idea suddenly seems considerably more likely.


Steven Moffat recently made a joke about missing a TV show; it was, he said, only achievable with some complicated technology, now lost to us.  And he was right.  Hello everyone who just googled STEVEN MOFFAT DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS.  Sit down, there's plenty of room, between the Test Card Clown and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (HINT: forthcoming attraction, Donald Pleasence fans!)


Where was I?  Oh yeah, missing television programmes.  I'm pushing 40, almost, and ,when I was just a small transmitter, we had no VCR.  Would have laughed in your face, had you mentioned it.  We were not millionaires.  We had three TV channels and they didn't start until four in the afternoon.  The upside was that the programming was as demented as it is possible to get without a self administered trepanation.  I've no idea why, but a I believe a lot of it has to do with the BBC's license fee fundin, which meant that creative teams were free of commercial focus; thus, they could play with the toys as much as they liked.  Meanwhile, ITV would pick up the odd big name who was looking for bigger budgets and up to date facilities, such as Nigel Kneale who wrote Beasts, Quatermass and, um, Kinvig for LWT and Thames in the 70s and 80s.


The downside was that they had a lot of this wonderfully unique programming to ram in to those precious few hours, plus a lot of Will Hay films.  Which was a good thing; go watch Ask A Policeman if you don't believe me.  "When the 'eadless 'orseman rides over the 'ill…"


So there weren't that many repeats, contrary to what every unfunny comedian claimed.  Big viewing figures normally meant a re-transmission in the summer months, usually for a sit-com or a very slow- moving police drama series.  Anything out of the ordinary rarely got a look in.  So, say there was this three hour TV movie, about a tragic organist being forced to destroy the world by a dark angel who's probably a manifestation of the repressed fears and desires of an emotionally damaged author who's trying to release a load of brainwashed victims from a huge underground complex lit by blue laser tunnels, it might not get repeated.  It's a very specific example, I know…


This then, our first attraction, is an oldie, dating nearly 30 years back in fact.  I'm rather certain about the year and even the date of its only transmission: 29th December 1981, which is about the only time that an eight year old Ghost Transmitter was allowed to stay up.  OK, I had to check the precise date, but the year was easy.  May I present, for your delectation and transfiguration (with maybe a bit of evolution chucked in) ARTEMIS 81.

Kind of like one of our family holidays, but with less stuff on fire

It was brilliant, this.  Absolutely, screamingly insane.  There's this angel, right, and he lives on another planet, where there's two suns and no time.  To paraphrase a favourite song of mine, he's got this brother who is sick in the head, he is a monster*.  Oh, and their old mum lives there too, but she's a statue. With me so far?


Well, she's a statue until the bad brother wakes her up, at which point it becomes a story about a cold hearted author researching a sudden mystery wave of suicides.  They all seem to be connected to a tormented organist who stole an ancient carving from a Danish museum.  Lo!  The bad angel is in his house with slicked back hair and a sharp suit.  There's an explosion.  A bit of a gay snog, terribly shocking for the 1981 on the BBC (though distinctly chaste looking nowadays).  A trip to some disturbing alternative reality, where everyone coughs up blood all the time.  Ingrid Pitt gets lynched inside a cathedral bell.  The good angel shows his arse and learns about human pain and that.  The author learns to love again.  Aw.  There's a big Prisoner-esque buried underground base with brainwashing and soul-destroying (implicitly).  A headless horseman (and not in the good Will Hay sense).  Hywel Bennett running children over in a Morris Traveller (it's alright, they aren't real, probably).  A sonic dog-whistle.  Stakes through the heart.  Wagner.  Talking directly to camera.  A beach.  A grey coat that suddenly becomes very important.  The end.


Those who know me in the real world will be shaking their heads gently about now.  It's a film made for ME and ME alone!  Yay!  A mad jumble of imagery, metafictional metaphysics, postmodernity, cinematic homages, Dennis Wheatley, Doctor Phibes, electronic music, opera and the Manichean Heresy.  I watched it as a child with a fixed expression of confusion, made all the worse for being sent to bed half an hour before the end.  Me mum told me what happened, bless her, but it still made no bloody sense. 


I watched it again this week, thirty years on.  This time, my expression was a fixed grin of delight; this is astonishing!  Really! 

Way too intense a scene for jokes.  Jokes next time, I promise.

I'm carefully playing to my audience by not mentioning that the good-angel-with-his-arse-out-at-one-point is played by Sting.  Believe.  Leave your prejudices, born of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, behind.  Trust me, he's better here than he was in Dune.  Oh, and the dialogue is all out of grammatical phase at key points, to show alien thought processes and initiatory experiences and all that, which some people found annoying on first viewing.  But this is a truly great piece of television.  One of my all-time favourites.  And it makes me furious.


Furious because, though it makes me sound like a moaning old idiot, they won't make this again.  They won't take that risk, same as they won't make a new Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil, or Boys From the Blackstuff or maybe even Edge of Darkness.  Oh, I adore some of the BBCs current output, please believe that.  Furthermore,  I demand that Trevor Eve shuts his stupid flapping gob when he moans about Doctor Who; where else are three generations going to get their psychedelic multi-form fictional fix, eh, Mr cutting-edge eight series of Waking the Fucking Dead?


But it still grates on me that the Corporation seem to shy away from the absolute narrative madness and cinematic poetry of Artemis 81.  And that they showed it that one, brief time before burying it in the vaults, never again to see the light of day.  The word all too often used to describe it, sad to inform you all, is pretentious.  After all, wouldn't want to try too hard to impress, would we?  Let's keep everything at a level that everyone can get first time and then forget about.  Like when Jimmy McGovern says that he can't understand or enjoy anything that's not realist and makes it sound like that's a desirable state of affairs (if you can hear a very high pitched hum, that's because Jorge Luis Borges is spinning in his grave so fast that it's created an interference pattern with HG Wells and Dickens).


Gideon Harlax, Gwen Meredith, Helith, Asrael, Magog and of course, Von Drachenfeld; I salute you, from the memory of that cold, dark winter's night thirty years ago, when my mind got well and truly opened and I learned that heaven can be found on a misty grey beach, if it's the right day and the right person.  Television to Educate, Entertain and Inform, indeed.





*That's a reference to I Monster, not the Kaiser Chiefs, you pathetic philistine.  On an unrelated note, I see my people skills are improving no end.