The October Country

I do hope that I'm not just coming back here to do a string of obituaries...

Ray Bradbury died this week.


Before the internet, I was worried about this prospect.  He wasn't a fashionable author in the 1980s; TV news had limited time, I didn't read/couldn't afford newspapers and few of my friends were aware of his existence.  I became scared.  Supposing he died and I never knew about it?  The prospect seemed horrifying.

Which is why it's ironic that I heard of his death through Twitter, hours after it happened, ironic because Bradbury was hugely skeptical of the internet's significance; it took him until about two years ago to agree to e-books of his material.  I'm glad he did, because I want to take a copy of Dandelion Wine everywhere with me in life and also The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Ghost Transmissions is really about the stories that shape us, nowadays.  Bradbury did this for me, but I don't think I can comment better than the swathe of impossibly talented writers who have been talking about him for the past two days; Neil Gaiman talked about how the story Homecoming made him feel as though there were other people like him in the world and that made me happy, because I remember feeling exactly the same way when I first read it.

His stories were fast and emotional and strange; one was never sure what was real and what wasn't.  The tattoo that moves at night, the children who get taught to play the game 'invasion' by the funny voice from the shadows, the wonderful green kite which is actually a wonderful father with green wings...yes, he worked with fantasy.  But not exclusively; remember the old man calling Mexico City to listen to the sound of a streetcar as he dies, or the garbage man who quits when they put a radio in his cab, the better to organise the collection of bodies?

For me, there are two works that stand out.


The Whole Town Was Sleeping is the title given to a piece that forms part of a longer work, Dandelion Wine, but it operates so well as a stand-alone that it's often published as such.  It's a simple, wonderful story, which encapsulates an experience common to almost all of us; the walk home at the end of a night out, as you realise that you have the furthest to go, that you'll have to walk the last ten minutes alone...I won't spoil this one; though it's been copied over and over again, the original remains undiminished.  Read it.

How could I end without my favourite?  As a child, sleeping with the window open, I was awoken by the sound of the trains under the bridge, late at night.  When I stayed back at home for a summer at the age of 19, I heard that sound again and it seemed even more haunting now that I knew I'd be on one of those trains again soon, going away, far away.  It seemed like a great and personal revelation and I wanted to write about it, but I never could.

Ray did.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of those trains in the night and much more; on one level, it's about fear and monsters and wishes that, once granted, drive the lucky recipient into a particularly horrific insanity.  But it's about adolescence and desire and envy, all those things that I felt when I first read it.  And more besides; it's about the envy that age brings, the desire to be forever young, the fear of the dark that waits for us all.  But more again!  It's a book about winning freedom from both the desire of adolescence and the fears of aging.  It's about telling death to go fuck itself and running free down the streets at night, about the moment when you know that the monsters are afraid of you.

Quite apart from anything else, this is where my work dress code comes from

Yeah, I was sad when I heard about Ray.  So were about a million other people.  But he told us to take sadness, cry like mad about it, then laugh like a maniac for the joy of still living.  And not to give a damn about what anyone else thinks.


A minute's noise then, for Mr Ray Bradbury.

Night Thoughts

I've been experiencing a crisis of GhostFaith recently.

Not that many of you will be especially interested in my personal issues; quite rightly, you want to read pop-cultural ramblings, sarcastic asides, and me getting all sentimental about secret agents from forty years ago.  But you might have to bear with me on this one, just for a little while anyway.

Thing is, I keep seeing things that distract me.  There was a line on the BBC site about Occupy camps 'being shut down last year' and, whilst I know the whole story well, I suddenly found myself thinking, who the bloody hell has the right to shut down protest like that?  Who has the right to shut ME down, should I decide to protest against a system that increasingly seems horribly wrong from a purely moral point of view? 

I took part in a protest last week, as some of you may be aware; this isn't the place to discuss that, save to say that I was angry about the actions of a political/religious group and went to point this out to them.  Everyone else there was much more vocal than me, I just stood at the back and made the numbers up, but I increasingly feel as though I've been neglecting this part of me for a very long time.  The protests last year, especially the N30 strike, made me realise a few things about myself, about lazy thinking, about the power I have, the responsibility.  You know, like Spider-Man and that.

So, as my dear old friend Molesworth once said, a grate thort occur to me.  Is this a valid use of my time?

It was a difficult one.  Old TV shows and random acts of situationist culture-jacking are pretty much all I've ever talked about.  OK, I can explain the impact on me personally, I can dissect the Freudian bits of The Owl Service and I can imply that Are You Being Served? has a Lovecraftian subtext (it totally does, but that's one that got away).  I can talk about how Number 6 was a role model to a battered and confused teenager twenty years away, but what point does this serve, really?  Not to go all dramatic on you, but it occurs to me that I'm now older than my grandfather was when he died, what have I done with this time? 

I thought about turning all the lights off, locking the door, and walking away, leaving the key under the mat and the chairs on the tables.  But then I didn't.

Why?  Well, first of all, a couple of conversations out in the real world.  Thanks for being magnificent people, people. 

Secondly: it's a fucking blog, loser.  No-one cares anyway.  Just have fun with it.

Thirdly: Harpo.

Born Adolph Marx in New York, I believe.  Him and his brothers were quite famous, as it goes.  The FBI reported on him.  Went to Stalinist Russia for no readily apparent reason.  Never got into grief with Hoover, never got called before THAT committee, even though he was on record as being a unionist and a 'Red sympathiser', (which sounds like a really amazing electronica act to me).  I loved his brother Julius for his fast talking style and the way that his character never, ever lost, no matter how down and out he seemed in his movies.  I found his brother Leo funny and possessed of immaculate comic timing, though that accent really grates eventually.  But it was Harpo that really did it for me.

He never speaks.  Never on film, not once.  The whole thing is done with expressions and body language.  He runs through the movies like the wrath of some demented god, grinning like a madman, trashing the set and stealing things.  He's a archetype, an ancient trickster incarnate, with a pair of scissors (for cutting the ends off rich mens' cigars).  When the HQ is under military bombardment in Duck Soup, he runs out into the line of fire...and sticks a "Help Wanted" sign on the front gate.  Salvador Dali (still famous) and Alec Woolcott (no longer famous, sadly) both adored him.  Dali wrote him a script, Horseback Salad, tragically never made.  Well, perhaps not tragically.

Throughout the movies he made (the good ones, anyway) he is the enemy of pointless officialdom.  He traps a cruel policeman in a cage, infuriates endless immigration officers, glues documents to the backside of an ambassador and steals the Presidential motorbike.  He's chaos, basically. 

Woody Allen once said that these films kept him going.  That, in his darkest moments, these movies brought him back to reality.  Which is odd, because the clip he used to illustrate this is the 'war' sequence from Duck Soup, where a huge ensemble cast go into an elaborate, frighteningly joyous and decidedly cynical song and dance routine about the joy of starting wars ("every mother's son will grab a gun and run away to war").  It's an wonderfully dark and mature moment of intense silliness. 

And that got me thinking again about stopping.  If people can be silly and say so much at the same time, surely I can carry on talking bollocks on the internet for thirty odd readers? 

Like all my recent Transmissions, Harpo helped me; I was depressed, 14, and hating things as usual when I watched Horse Feathers for the first time.  It's set in a university, but it's treated like a school, and the brothers' simple exercise of holding administration up to the light and shaking it a bit (or 'satire' as those of you who like one word at a time call it) made me feel a lot better about the world and a lot less fearful of idiots in offices who had files with my name on the front. 

But back to my starting point, and one link; it's a symbolic one.  There's this bit where Harpo saunters happily down the street.  This guy dressed half in rags stops him: "Can you help me out?  I'd like to get a cup of coffee."

It was the height of the Depression.  The same scene was in movies everywhere and everywhere in real life too.

Harpo nods, smiling.

Produces a hot cup of coffee from his pocket and hands it over.

It's just a joke, but it still means something, somehow.  Do the impossible.  Change things. 

Come into the cold room. There's something that needs to be done.

Let's talk about crushes.

I've had loads and I won't bore you with the details; crushes of every shape, size and attribute.  Gad yes, I'm a terror in my imagination.  But there's one that I never, ever got over and never ever will.

The woman who could make wearing a fetish outfit seem like a statement of power.  Genius.  Kick your arse any time you crossed her and do it charmingly.  There's a huge swathe of internet devoted to her, just like all my other transmissions.  But let's do this properly, eh?

Who the hell else did you expect?


Emma Peel.  Shouldn't have worked.  Her name is an objectification; the production team thought that the new character in The Avengers should have 'man appeal' - see?  Fortunate for them, they cast Diana Rigg and wrote her as if her gender wasn't even obvious.  It was, mind.  It was REALLY obvious.

She's only ever slightly impressed

I could write for pages here, but it would make everyone become uncomfortable.  She's an amazing character, played by an amazing actor, wearing fascinating 60s outfits.  She beats the living daylights out of diabolical masterminds (NB, not Diabolical Masterspies, that would just be wrong) and solves crimes with her best friend as a way of unwinding after a long day at work.  It really helps that her best friend is the legendary John Steed, played by the even more legendary Patrick Macnee.  Basically, they drink fine wine, eat complex pastries, drive fast cars and save the world repeatedly.  And they think it's a good life to have.  They radiate happiness, enjoyment, vitality.  They are larger than life and it never gets them down; everything is a little bit of a joke to them.

That's what they think of you.

Why a Ghost Transmission for a show that's so feted already?

There's a real danger of this blog turning into a sob story.  I've written a lot about growing up weird, me and half the bloody western hemisphere it seems.  These Transmissions were the ones that helped me (and lots of others) through that, as I'm sure you've noted.  Steed and Mrs Peel were there, you can believe it; dressed like maniacs, never getting flustered, winning the fights and the arguments, being visibly twenty times more intelligent than everyone else in the room.  Yeah, they were establishment, but the irony was that they were so establishment that they seemed to become intensely surreal and outsider-y. They were so hip they were unheimlich, to coin a Freudianism.  They were the 60s/Edwardian fusion equivalent of Lux and Ivy (just as a hint at forthcoming attractions).

I wanted that life; I wanted a best friend to solve mysteries with.  I wanted the cars, the clothes, the flat where people would turn up at random around 3:00 AM with either a bottle of champagne or a knife in their back and a cryptic note clutched in their hand.  I knew that I had to create something like this for myself. To my intense delight, over the last few years, I've created something vaguely like this lifestyle, or at least a functioning everyday analogue of the rum and uncanny.  Frankly, I couldn't be happier with it.  Though hopefully, no-one's going to come round impaled on anything sharp.

What I look like in my head, yesterday.

They remade the show twice.  Once as The New Avengers, which is pleasingly kitsch; the most interesting elements of which feature a much darker, more reflective tone, as Steed (now minus Emma) muses on the adventures he's had and all the blood on his hands.  Well, it was the 70s; IRA attacks, economic downturn and the slightly tacky version of the Cold War had changed our perspectives.  It became silly, like someone's odd dream of the series, like a fantasy based on a fantasy. 

Then, of course, they remade it as a film, with Uma Thurman and the world winced.  She wasn't very good.  She seemed like she was on the verge of tears all the way through.  She wasn't in control. She wasn't, essentially, Emma.  TERRIBLE CONFESSION: I actually quite like the film, though I'd much prefer it if it was just a peculiar spy story, not an ersatz Avengers.

And look!  I got through all that and never once mentioned A Touch Of Brimstone.  If you understand that reference, there's no help for you. 

Rebels and Devils 2: the Hour of the Geek (first bit)

...and if anyone gets that reference, they earn a shiny handshake from me.

What this means, beasts, is that I'm allowing myself a break from my usual ironic cool (ha!) and taking the opportunity to wallow in raw fanboyness.  Yeah, it's the first bit of my Doctor Who ramblings, so y' can all stop reading there.

REASONS TO LOVE WHO

1) The Parting of the Ways: Captain Jack Harkness.  Kisses Rose goodbye fairly passionate like.  Turns and kisses the Doctor goodbye too, in the same way.  No-one comments. 

There were, and indeed, still are idiots who go on about the new version of the show having a (and I'm quoting here) "gay agenda" which makes me think of a particularly interesting boardroom meeting. This scene is basically a massive fuckyou to all those people.  Like the Stonewall adverts say, deal with it.

2) Same episode: guns, technobabble and fighting can't save the world.  No, the world gets saved by three ordinary people on a council estate who suddenly realise that they can do anything they fucking well want to and no-one can tell them that it's not possible.  And when someone you love is in trouble, you'll change the whole universe to save them.

3) The Age of Steel: in which Mickey, the insecure loser, finally takes charge of his life, assumes the role of defender of emotions (it makes sense when you watch it) and sacrifices everything he cared about in order to do something HUGE with his life.  And then turns up six weeks later with a massive grin in order to save the day, having broken every single law of physics in the process.

4) The Girl In The Fireplace: "What do monsters have nightmares about?" - "Me."

The idea that there's someone who isn't a god or a divine force to be prayed to, someone who pays attention and stops the monsters right there in their tracks?  Well, that's just an idea.  But we created it.  As a species, as a sub-culture, as people who like the idea.  Someone you could be a bit like.  Someone you could emulate.  And every time you do, if you do it well enough, the world gets a bit more like the fantasy one in your head.  

5) City of Death: "Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably"

Because when bad people are confused, they're so much more fun.

6) The End of the World: the only things illegal at the end of the world are weapons, teleportation and religion.  I think there might be a message there.  The teleportation bit is a plot point, mind, but the fake villains are called the Adherents of the Repeated Meme. Dawkinstastic.

7) Bad Wolf: "You have no weapons, no army, no plan." - "Yeah.  And doesn't that just scare you to death?"

Improvise.  It's what I do all the time.  The faster you get at making it up as you go along, the more likely the world is to go along with your mad stories.

8) The Doctor Dances: "That's what you humans do.  You go out there into the stars and you meet all these new people and you...dance."

Or, in other words, the future is going to be fun, if we do it right.

9) Love and Monsters: lots of people hate this one.  They're missing the point; it's about outsiders, the lost ones who get preyed on by the monsters.  It's about a man coming to terms with something terrible that happened to him as a child.  And then it's about hope:

"...they tell you that it's all grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better."

I can't really say much more on the subject than that.

Rebels and Devils Part 1: Be Seeing You

When I was a mere stripling amongst Ghosts, my mother would sit and read to me.  Her choices were slightly unusual; there was a lot of Heinlein, happily, before he went all fascist on us.  Some Andre Norton.  Diana Wynne Jones, the only author to have told me that I couldn't blame my madness on her, thank you very much.

 I love DWJ.  We only spoke once, by email, a memory that I will treasure forever.  However, I digress. 

Mother also used to read me Enid Blyton, 'cause, y'know, I was about five and there's only so many scientific discussions on ballistic theory a five year old can deal with.  In the front of the books, there was a little map of Toytown and it made my mother smile; she said it reminded her of 'The Village' and left it at that, to my puzzlement.

Years went by, and I suddenly found that you could buy VHS tapes of old TV shows; one jumped out at me and the cover made such an impression that I asked for it as a birthday present without even ever having seen a minute of the series.  It was, of course, The Prisoner.

This is the best scene in anything, ever.  Prove me wrong.

Millions of words have been spent dissecting The Prisoner and I'm not sure that I can add anything to what has already been said.  For those unfamiliar still: unknown man resigns unknown job and suddenly awakens in a toyland style village by the sea.  No-one has a name.  You can live happily, you might even be allowed to leave, if you want.  The only thing the authorities there want is...well, a simple thing.  You have to prove that you like them.  You have to tell them something.  No matter if it's the biggest, most personal secret of your life, you have to tell them, have to prove you love the Village.  If you don't...well, it's a nice place to live.  And you might live for years.

So it starts.  Ah, Patrick McGoohan!  He created the show, the character, wrote and directed several episodes and was clearly having a great time, in a demented, stressed out, psychedelic way.  McGoohan was massive in those days.  He kept turning down the part of James Bond because he found the violence and the womanising misogyny morally repugnant.  The audience went mad for the show because it refused to give answers straight away.  We all know that TV gives us answers eventually, right?

If you're wondering what's happening in this picture, a killer balloon has rendered a great British actor unconscious.

The events at the end of the show, both on and off camera have been exhaustively chronicled, and you don't need me to break it all down for you or go over old ground.  Suffice to say that no easy answers were ever forthcoming, that realism was no-longer required and that the last thirty minutes of the series are the most deranged thing ever to go out at prime time on ITV.  McGoohan effectively killed his career in that final episode; certainly, he killed the myth of the ultra-cool secret agent so well that I'm not sure how they carried on making Bond films afterwards.  Even the end credits seem to be trying to tell us something, something that remains both ambiguous and haunted with levels of meaning to this day.

But this is a personal exploration.  What did the Prisoner mean to me?  By which I mean the character, not the show as such.

Intense gaze.  I tried for ages to get this right.

I was fifteen years old.  I hated my school.  I hated the inexplicable regulations, both those passed down from above and the equally arbitrary ones enforced by my peers.  I hated the fashion, the buildings, the lessons which were dull and working to some random educational agenda lost to history.  I hated that some staff and pupils used sexuality and ethnicity as a weapon against each other.  I hated that the kids who should have been cool were filled with a vicious inverted snobbery that killed all joy in music and art stone dead.  I needed a way out.

I needed escape.  So, ironically enough, I started dressing like the Prisoner. Started imitating his intense, sardonic manner, his purposeful stride, his occasional manic grin.  His declaimed, largely random statements. In short, I wrote myself into the storyline, as a fellow detainee, unable to break the boundaries of a malicious and invisible bureaucracy.

Triangle/square/binary opposition.  It makes sense when you - well, no it doesn't actually.

Except I did.  Somehow, I managed what the Prisoner doesn't seem to; I escaped.  Left the Village.  Made my point.  But, and here's the rub; the worst thing about the Village is that you carry it with you. You build the bars in your head and by the time you escape the physical imprisonment, you've constructed a beautifully elaborate trap inside your own mind, a much more perfected cage than anything that a dodgy late 80s comprehensive school could devise.

It's taken me years to deconstruct that prison.


Queen: Do you think they'll ever release us? 
Prisoner: Let me know. I shan't be around.



There's a little monument to McGoohan in the pavement outside Sheffield Town Hall.  I don't ever walk past it without a smile of acknowledgement.  Ironic that I learned something about my rights by studying the behaviour of my fellow Prisoners.

Rebel, rebel

It's probably obvious that many of you would see me as a massive geek; I understand far too much about outmoded TV production and obsess unhealthily over the imaginations of middle-aged scriptwriters c.1975.  However, there are limits, albeit ones that I enjoy exploring. 

I was looking for a Ghost Transmissions reference the other day and ended up redirected to a sci-fi message board; had a quick browse, like you do (becomes aware that this is sounding awfully like the sort of thing people say when they want to explain why they were coming out of a sex shop).  Constant Readers, please beware should you venture this way, for Lo! They have fora for politics and current affairs.  And the politics of such places veer dramatically from the radically progressive to the frankly terrifying, with very little moderation or common ground.  There's people on there who use the words "Ayn Rand" without the associated phrases "psychotic misanthropy" or "bullshit".

Anyway, the bit that caught my attention was a spectacular moment when someone (discussing, I think, the NHS) used the phrase "do-gooder", which I thought had vanished with the 1980s.  A translation for our American Ghosts: "bleeding heart" should cover it. 

My entire fashion sense; Toulouse Lautrec not shown.

Yeah, someone used that phrase.  On a Doctor Who forum.  You know.  All about heroics and non-conformity and protecting people.  It's an especially annoying comment, because from about 1990 until 1996, the show only existed as a series of novels, which contained some of the most subversive political ideas that ever sneaked into the halfway popular imagination. 

For anyone familiar with the contemporary TV version, this might come as quite a shock.  I'm not talking a little mild liberalism here.  Openly queer, non-monogamous characters abounded and the politics were extreme.  Russell T Davis wrote his magnificent Damaged Goods for the range, a savage story about class conflict and outsider status so moving that at least one publisher begged him to lose the science-fiction and publish it 'straight', which misses the point on SO many levels. Ben Aaronovitch wrote The Also People, positing a completely fluid society, culturally, politically, sexually; absolute polymorphism in all senses, made to sound like a utopia that could actually work if only we had the technology.  Paul Cornell's Human Nature was later adapted for television, without the savage humour or the optimistic anti-war slant of the original. 

My point being, these worlds that Ghost Transmissions is trying to explore are not especially conservative or middle of the road (notice that I never talk about Star Trek.  Sorry folks).  They are radical universes.  How many times do we have to see the rebels vs. Evil Empire That Never Ended before we get the point?  Frankly, the audience is a victimised and increasingly angry one; we don't want to see more than one Starship Troopers (and even that universe is a surprisingly subversive one).  We want the heroes who are born to lose. 

I was 13 and this was a defining moment.  Reject the binary opposition!  Also, fashion icon 2.

To that end, I'd like to take a few moments to study the rebels, the outsiders and the born losers who populate the Ghost universes.  I'll level with you: there's an agenda here.

I can't help but keep noticing that what might once have been science fiction excesses are creeping into day-to-day life.  Age specific ultrasound weaponry used only to exist in Michael Moorcock.  The BBC news looks like The Day Today and there are plans to scan license plates on garage forecourts, to take DNA samples from teenagers caught truanting.  Sometimes it feels like the only thing that can save us is the incompetence of underpaid private security contractors, and yet -

There's a power in fiction.  A strength which can sometimes empower and sometimes transform our very nature.  Re-write the fictions of our own worlds.  It's the power of these fictions that I want to explore now.  Which Ghost Transmissions changed the world?  Which ones could?

I defy anyone, regardless of gender, not to want to be a bit like Emma Peel.

The power of the story.  That's what we're going to go looking for. 

Still coming with me?

Intermission

There now follows a brief Ghost Intermission.


It's not hard, not hard to reach.  We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach...

Don't know why, but those words have always come back in strange times.  


I don't care about history/that's not where I wanna be

Brilliant.

...and yet there's also:


No time to think about what to tell them/no time to think about what she's done and she was


So there.

Intermission ends in five...

Nothing is ever forgotten

Richard Carpenter died this week.  So did Davy Jones.  So did Philip Madoc and so did millions of other people. Those millions don't get an online obituary and I'm terribly wary of going down the Diana route. People die.  People in my life have died and I've had to face that, just like everyone does.  Why write about it?  Why choose to write about three random strangers on a piss-taking pop culture blog?

Well...I don't have a good answer for you, except to say that these three very different men all had an shaping influence, in some small way, on the way I think, on the way I write, on the way I see the world.  So, indulge me on this one whilst I say au revoir to a little fragment of my past.

I could write about them one by one, like a formal obituary.  So I'd tell you that you know who Davy Jones was, that Philip Madoc was a British character actor and the Richard Carpenter was a writer.  There.  I'd go through them, one by one, itemising their lives.  You can get that anywhere, can't you? Perhaps this will be a bit like that.  I didn't know any of them.  So this will be self-indulgent. 

It will also be getting a bit on the self-pitying side here, sorry folks; I was one of those clever-clever lonely boys in glasses.  Still am, quite often.  See!  The pity!  Anguish!  They showed The Monkees on BBC1 in the holidays, when I should have been out and about, playing with other kids.  Didn't.  Other kids freaked me out, I freaked them out.  It rarely ended well.  If you've never been chased home by a crowd throwing stones at you, you've never lived, say I. 

So, in the house, too hot, summer sun climbing the walls, parents out to work or someplace, I watched.  I slipped right into that world, that silly, dayglo, cartoon reality where you lived with your very best friends and had adventures driving round in bedsteads or dressed as the Foreign Legion.  Where you got to be creative and daft and the only people who laughed at you were an audience that wasn't really there anyway.  Where music mattered, not in spite of it being processed pop, but because of it (though, it didn't hurt that it was the best processed pop in history). 

They had that bit sometimes, where they would pretend to be silent movie characters; the villain with the twirling moustache caught my eye.  My mum often told me that villains got the best lines; the villains where I lived were all depressing and stupid and wore clothes like their dads.  The villains in my heads, the Diabolical Masterspies, they were clever and stylish and you didn't really mind them.  You wanted to spend some time in their company.  Philip Madoc was one of the best of these.  Not a name to make household status, but what a villain he could be.  A demonic brain surgeon, enraptured by the sight of Tom Baker's skull shape; a treacherous quisling, trading the wedding rings of the dead for hope and cutting deals with unspeakable fascist evil from another world, wearing a trench coat like the apocalypse was styled by Saville Row.  Oh, I thought, if I can't find a gang of demented art-friends, I shall have to become a villain and really have some fun.

And then there were Kip's worlds.

They called him Kip, see.  Richard Carpenter.  Dependable, straightforward, reliable author of family TV drama and educational programming.  So much a part of TV in the 70s and 80s that he seemed to be part of the very structure of the thing; he wrote the scripts that sank in, that became the pattern of your dreaming, never patronising, never writing down, never trying to make things obvious.  The Ghosts of Motley Hall had a premise expressed in a five word title; the joy of the show came, paradoxically, from the sadness.  The eponymous ghosts feel like memories of thwarted lives; they are uncertain if they even really exist, from the Elizabethan actor and friend of Shakespeare (dying of cold inflicted by his moronic employer's demands), to the unrequited love between Georgian dandy and mystery woman in white.  You had to think, to really think in order to be a part of this.

I could go on all night about the worlds that man built for us, but Robin of Sherwood is by far the greatest.  It was a fantasy and somehow, despite the presence of a distinctly 1980s mise en scene, the old stories seemed powerful again.  People wept at this in a way I don't think they will weep for, say, Merlin; Kip wouldn't put real world issues into his context, or transplant 21st century characters into the world of Sherwood.  He insisted on telling huge stories, the stories about love and fear and death and hope, the story of the greenwood that is always with us somewhere. 

Way back in time, I wrote about the Schools' show, The Boy From Space.  I mentioned that they re-showed this in the early 80s, with a new framing sequence to explain the change in styles.  The adult actors who played the lead roles as children drive to the observatory where the story took place and we are treated to a bitter-sweet moment that was probably lost on almost all the audience.


"How long since we've been here?  ...funny coming back after all these years.  Feels so different.  Now I'm here, I can remember it all.  This is a story about something that happened when we were children."

                             




                      


And so,  we come to an enchanted place, as AA Milne would have it. 

No, not the end, but perhaps a change and not a moment too soon, my dear.  I still want to talk about pop culture and TV oddities, but I think that my Ghost Transmissions are perhaps wider than I thought.  So many ghosts, so little time.  Therefore, I am...reformatting, piece by piece.  Let's see what we can find in here.  

I'd love it if you came with me, though.



Many thanks to Garry for the joke about bullies dressing like their dads.  Too fuckin' true.

Me and Stewart Lee

I hate nostalgia.

Right, a number of you are now descending on my ghostmansion, waving pitchforks and chanting in an eldritch tongue iah-ngahn falt-rannra, which roughly translates as "You lying bastard" for those who do not speak Eldritch.

Eldritch

But allow me to retort, before I am forced to resort (to the shotgun and hounds).  I love the past in the same way I love the future; they are both pleasant places to take a short holiday in.  The seaside, but with trans-temporal issues.  Some people choose to live there, however, and it's rarely a healthy thing.  Things rust by the seaside.

Some of those dwellers in the sandy coves of time (I feel contractually obliged to make a comment about Daily Telegraph readers about now) are prone to ranting that popular culture is losing its edge.  The ghastly watchphrase of the late 2000s was dumbing down.

To my intense irritation, I may have found an example of just that; evidence that maybe some TV was a little more sophisticated back in the day.

I'm tempted to get one of these paintings for over the mantle, just to see if I can goad people into complimenting it

Children of the Stones ran for seven weeks in the late 1970s.  It's well written, aimed at kids and families and utterly compelling.  You can find out the plot on a hundred sites I expect; suffice to say, it's a 'strangers in the village' scenario, with overtones of conformity, ancient forces, mind control and the ultimately illusory nature of reality.  Like I said, kids' TV.  

But Children of the Stones is so much more.  It would be misleading to say that they don't make them like this anymore; they never made them like this, except, perhaps, The Owl Service.  Sample dialogue, between the science-aristo villain Hendrick and his butler:

Butler: There is much to be said, I think for a celibate lifestyle.
Hendrick: And yet I have my children (indicating the village), the best of both worlds.

I really can't see anything like this going at half four nowadays.  Not only does it rely on understanding the subtleties of the above relationship, we have to deal with heavy real-science (astronomy and the nature of the ammonia molecule are important to the plot) and the power of archetypes.  Like so many other texts, it deals with the conflict of good and evil; however, here, evil is equated with repressed sexuality and rejection of creativity, whilst good is explicitly presented as social disobedience, rejection of tradition and embracing outsider status.  And when we see the results of evil, there's no hedging around the issue; death comes for likeable characters, struck down, their blood visible, their pain and fear obvious.  Worse than death for others who we've come to care about, their individuality burned away into a permanent brainless smile.

Since the age of five I have had a slight phobia about the countryside.  Draw your own conclusions.

I haven't got any pencils

In about 1983, Channel 4 was actually good.  Yeah.  It seems unlikely, given that nowadays, it's really just John Snow and...well, just John Snow really.  But back in the day, it was like the Leadmill.  Oh god, I just lost all of you.

Right, the Leadmill is a club in Sheffield, and as at the present day, it's either horrendous RnB student nights or all the 30 something teachers trying to dance at the end of term.  But, back then, the Leadmill was this beautiful alternative space where you would get The Ramones (end of career) playing one night and some random ska the next and Jarvis Cocker putting a Christmas pantomime on the day after.  It was something strange and wild and unpredictable.  Likewise, Channel 4.  In those days, they had no Big Brother or Come Dine With Me.  Back then, it was whatever they could get to fill the schedules.  If you had your own production company, well, they had a slot for you.  If that involved screaming bits of string or the living dead, so much the better.

There was this series called They Came From Somewhere Else and it was about as 80s as one can get.  Big red glasses.  People with exaggerated accents.  Greenham Common jokes (ask your mum, she might have been there).  I 'watched' it with the brightness turned down on the B&W portable, so I could only listen.  Why?

Easy.  I was scared.  Because people's heads explode. Quite a lot.  So yeah, there's jokes about the police being fascists (man) and the aforementioned big red glasses and that quintessentially 80s phenomena, ending a sentence in the word 'prat' and expecting a 6th form audience to soil themselves laughing.  But heads explode.  In quick and comic succession.  It's a parody of 50s B-movies and is funny if you're a Film Studies teacher (ahem).  But...

Headburster.  Cronenberg meets Ben Elton, effectively.

There's always a 'but' in Ghost Transmissions, isn't there?  Somewhere in the 'adapted from the fringe play' fun, there's a production team who want to remake The Prisoner (and I love that show in all its forms, even the ITV one from two years ago).  And along with all the jokes about eating batteries and old ladies becoming communist werewolves (we have a big problem with communist wolves where I live, let me tell you) there's a serious idea; what if we weren't real?  What if all our deeply held beliefs and viewpoints were just working to a script?  What if Truman wasn't alone in his Show, eh? 

Comrade Wolf.  Many of my best friends are Comrade Wolves.  Hey there, you. 

Me, I don't believe any part of my life is real.  It's all illusion anyway, as someone once sang.  But this show ends with darkness and enforced community and conformity and the suggestion that if you really want to mess with a society, you steal the dreams of its children first. 

And a hint of coming rebellion, as the silliest and most comic character is reborn as something both comical and threatening.  A lesson there for all of us; beware the funny ones.  Like Groucho, like Harpo, like Stuart Lee or Peter Cook, they'll talk your regime to death before you've noticed.



It's all on YouTube.  Go there.

You must not blame her if she goes hunting

Warning: contains no jokes at all.  Well, a wry moment or two.  Boring serious one this time.  Come back next edition for one of the 'early funny ones'.



In the 1960s, a youngish genius called Alan Garner read a chapter of the Welsh epic Mabinogion and idly wondered what would happen if that same mythical story were to be repeated in the modern era.  As he mused, an owl's wing brushed his face and one of the finest pieces of British literature was born; I'm speaking, of course, of The Owl Service.  A book so beautiful that it hurts; a story about unrequited love and that peculiarly teenage moment when you know that your heart will never stop breaking.  Oh, and a vengeful supernatural force quite unlike anything else you've ever read about.  A book ostensibly for children, which finished on one of the most ambiguous notes possible, leaving its audience to wonder long afterwards. 

Granada television bought the rights around 1968.  Clearly, this was going to fuck up on an astonishing scale.  I mean, Granada?  The Coronation Street people?  Oh yeah, lots of social realism, low budget kitchen sink and all that.  But not The Owl Service, surely.

My goddess.  They made something alright.  Something unique. 

Casting an eye over modern day opinion, many seem puzzled or bored by the results; I condemn those reviewers without ever meeting them or formulating a coherent response because The Owl Service is as wonderful and strange on screen as it was on paper.  Or ebook.  (Fuck you, Jonathan Franzen.  Because, that's why.)

How best to describe it, without ruining it?  I can't, so we'll be very short on detail tonight.  It's about three young people, somewhere around their late teens.  Two are very definitely 'county', i.e. posh.  More than somewhat laden down with the finer things.  The third is the angry young son of the housekeeper.  Down in the garden, there's a standing stone.  In the poolroom, there's something hidden away behind the wall.  Up there in the attic, there's something that sounds just like birds, but it isn't.  Even though it is.  And that's all you're getting on the plot details.  This is a glimpse of the other worlds that lie hidden away in plain sight, in the dark places, in the woods or in the anger of a mother.

Opening credits; oppressive sense of foreboding not pictured

Idiots often boring ramble on the theme that you wouldn't get away with that today!  Largely, this refers to horrific racism, or jokes about domestic violence, and the implication is that the speaker quite definitely wishes that they could get away with it today.  On this occasion, they'd have a valid point, because there's no way anyone would commission this for family viewing. 

Why?  Easy.  It's filthy.  The key theme is one of sexual frustration, adolescence, jealousy and inexplicable heartbreak; fair play, but this is largely signposted by having Gillian Hills writhe around in her underwear.  All very aesthetically pleasing (and before you start, she's clearly about 25) but I can imagine it causing more nightmares than anything else; this isn't an easy view of sexuality.  Sure, the first episode is Hills in bed with just a shirt on, moaning quite a lot, but look what happens next; her stepbrother innocently checks in on her and she slashes at his face with her nails, quite instinctively and unexpectedly, leaving his face bloody.

There are a lot of scratched faces, a lot of fighting and staring.  And a lot of people in swimwear, looking bloody cold.  This is a realistic and troubling sexuality, all blood and sweat and crying, along with the flower petals and laughter.  Dark and light, flowers and owls. 

In narrative terms, its closest relative could be that other late 1960s Welsh fantasy, The Prisoner.  Similarly enigmatic, especially in its final moments, we are also treated to some wonderfully avant-garde moments worthy of McGoohan's masterpiece.  There's an astonishing scene of confrontation; a sunbathing Hills (yeah, swimwear again, I know, I know) argues with her fellow 'inmates' - suddenly, a weird poltergeist type effect kicks in, but not in any way you'd expect.  The camera work disintegrates, the continuity of editing is deliberately ruined, the scene becomes purposefully impossible to follow for a moment.  It's as if all that tension reached out and broke the process of filming, extended into the real world for a moment.

If you believe some of the stories from the set, that's exactly what did happen.  I'll leave those up to you to discover, as I did, long ago; hugely inexplicable coincidences, wild owls arriving when owls were needed on set, mental problems amongst some crew, euphoria amongst others.  Owls and flowers, see?  The truth has become a little obscured over the intervening years, with some trying to work the tragic 1978 murder of actor Michael Holden into the pattern.  Perhaps, if this story has a moral, it is that we must be careful of morals, of the patterns we see in things.

There's a power in this story in all it's forms (I wanted to write manifestations there), but that's what the book and series are about, the power of stories, the essential danger in misinterpretation.  The pain of being the owl that is compelled to go hunting, when all it wants is the softness of the meadowsweet flowers.

Not funny this week, like I said.  I suppose you could say that this story means quite a lot to me; I first read it at the age of 12, alone in a school library, like a billion other kids.  That's powerful magic.




Next time: the 1980s, exploding comedy heads,  big red framed glasses,  poor American accents and the word 'prat' being seen as an acceptable punchline.  Jokes and everything, promise.

She Wants To Be Flowers

I'm planning a discussion on a certain 1969 spookfest (the title should pretty much give it away).  But whilst I tap away at it, I suddenly felt all visual.  Ghost Transmissions, I said to myself, what you need is an old school start-up sequence. 

So here, rushed together, photographed, "animated" and soundtracked by yours truly, is what you would have seen at 9:00 AM weekday morning in the early 1970s, had I been in charge.  A hint of BBC schools, a touch of Ghost Box Records, a smattering of Alan Garner.  Truly, a rush job and a bit of a botch, but weren't they all?  I may do more if you like them.  Actually, I'll do more whether you like them or not, you twisted monstrosities.

Why I love Tove (A They Live In Your TV Special)

Good lord, but I was out of ideas for a time there.  Ghost Transmissions nearly ground to a halt amid a huge house move and Christmas and so on.  The new GhostMansion is within sight of a huge transmitter tower, so I'm inviting the Ashtar Command round for tea later this week.  Apparently, I've been seeing him as lights in the sky for a while now.  My god, was that  Ghost Transmissions in-joke for longstanding marks readers?

No matter.  Inspired by the seasons, I turn to something I'd nearly forgotten. 

Two things about winter.  If it's damp and dreary, well, hibernating through is the only answer.  But if it should turn a little snowy...well, I love a blizzard, me.  Indirectly, this leads me into a world where ice, snow, sunshine, summer and sleeping for several months all combine into one fuzzy-felt animated semi-paradise, albeit one with crepe-paper serpents.  Let's take a look at the time the Poles met Tove Jansson.

Unfamiliar with the name?  Tove (one of my dearest wishes is that I'd been on first name terms) was a legendary (and I use the word precisely) Finnish artist and writer.  She had a pretty prolific output, but her most famous creations were, of course, the Moomins.

Ahhhhhh, go some of you.  Little cute hippo things.  Japanese cartoons with the odd scary witch monster in.  Cute.  Kawaii. 

WRONG.

I'm a touch obsessive on this.  Before I do all the TV stuff, quick overview of the real Moomin story; the books begin as gently spooky tales of funny monsters having adventures and looking out for their friends.  They're about family and love and summer days.  With monsters, as I said, but nice ones.  Except that even in these early stories, there are hints of a bigger picture; Tove describes a cutesy spring day in the Moominvalley, before casually mentioning that 'the spirits that haunted the trees were combing their long hair.'

And of course, there was a real, full on monster in the story and one that has given small ones the screaming horrors for years.  But we'll come to HER shortly. 

Time went on; Tove wrote more Moomin stories.  The characters grew more defined, the jokes and non-sequiturs got funnier.  The art was sublime.  Then...then came one of the greatest books ever written.  No hyperbole.  Simple as that.  Moominland Midwinter.  What's so good about it?  Well, it's a life affirming, philosophical (and intensely pagan, in a sense) tract that touches on life, death, rebirth, outsider status and sexuality.  And it's about the Moomins.  Our hero, Moomintroll accidentally awakens in January.  Alone and trapped by snowdrifts, he meets the mysterious Too-Ticky and a cute squirrel.  Ah, Too-Ticky!  I may be overstating the point about sexuality in this book, but Too-Ticky is a loner, accustomed to survival, who speaks of the status of the people who only appear in winter-time:


...everything that's a little shy and a little rum.  Some kinds of night animals and people that don't fit in with the others and that nobody believes in...

Lest you be somewhat puzzled at this point, Tove's life partner (or the person whom I'd effectively describe as her wife in these somewhat happier times) was called Tuulikki Pietila.  Note the pronunciation. 

I'm not spoilering this one for you.  You need to read it.  Yeah, there's a cute squirrel.  But not for long, I'm sorry to say.  Trust me, this is intense.  There's a bit with a midnight bonfire that seems like a cross between Labyrinth and The Wicker Man.  Everything about this book is haunting and resonant. 

And so it went on; the books were increasingly beautiful and strange and full of hints and suggestions, until we reached Moominvalley in November, which is basically Waiting For Godot with trolls, as lots of formerly minor characters wait patiently for the Moomin family to return.  We never see them.  I was terribly saddened by that, as a child. 

But this is Ghost Transmissions.  The TV one.  I promised you a They Live In Your TV long before I started proclaiming my love for long lost Finnish authors.  In the early 1980s (yes, them again) a Polish TV company got the rights and a stop-motion serial was made.  It was about a million episodes long and kept referring back to its own story in a way that very little kids' TV at the time ever did.

Communist era animation was perfect for the world of Moominvalley.  It seems strange enough at the best of times; there used to be a running joke at my school:  "In a change to the advertised programme, here is a Polish animation featuring two bits of string screaming at each other for five minutes."

See, I was like this even then.

So, they made the Moomin stories and very faithfully too.  ITV duly bought them and FilmFair, a small UK animation house redid the titles and the music, finishing the job of with a new narration.  Hooray!  Then they showed it and a nation of children started to cry.

It wasn't Disney.  It wasn't cutesy enough; sure, the Moomins were cute, but some of their friends were just plain weird looking.  And there were...things.  Things in that world.  Terrible things.

I was fine with all this.  I'd read the books.  Little My was the greatest character in fiction after H.G. Wells' Time Traveller, as far as I was concerned.  The rest of my generation may have felt differently and here are three notable reasons why.  In reverse order...


3) The Hattifatteners

Sailing in their little boats...on their way to YOU

They look like little ghosts.  They never speak.  We are told early on that they cannot hear or see well, so they sense by vibration and some kind of telepathy.  They are likely to creep up on you in huge numbers if they think you are on their territory.  Oh, and they can give off huge electric shocks sometimes.  Many a child had visions of these bad boys under the bed.



2) The Lady Of The Cold

It's all gone a bit Fendahl. 

Oh, this is an odd one.  Even in the books, they just suddenly mention that there's a danger of The Lady Of The Cold showing up.  She does.  Someone dies.  The animation is worse, she's all tin foil and weird empty eyes.  Those mad radiophonic effects on the soundtrack aren't helping.  This is the Brothers Quay for nine year olds.  Those painted on eyes!  That expressionless face!  She's creeping me out even now.


Should you choose to follow this link, part of the story will be forever spoiled, but you will get to check out some quality animation.  See if you can spot where FilmFair changed the storyline so as not to leave their entire audience sobbing hysterically.  "Over the sea to their own country of snow and ice" -  my arse, FilmFair.  My arse.



So, if you were alive in the early 1980s, there's a good chance you've guessed what's coming now.  Some of you may well have left the page and I'm not joking about that; I've known at least two people who wouldn't even look at a picture of our winner.  Scariest thing on the Moomins and, let's be fair, one of the scariest things on kids' TV ever.  Beasts and small creatures, I present the one, the only...





1)  The Groke

Tove's original.  Oh god, SHE'S LOOKING AT ME

Now that you've all stopped screaming, let me explain.  Actually, no, let this clip explain for you.

Back with me?  The Groke slithered and faded in and out and snarled and hissed and haunted and froze everything.  She's there, the dark, frightening beast in the night.  The worst thing the Moomins can imagine.  She never actually does very much; she doesn't need to.  How many of you dreamed of her shifting, flickering eyes staring in at you from the garden?  How many heard that voice in the night and howled in terror?  Isn't she the worst monster of all?

Actually, no. 

I'm actually at a loss for words right now.

You could go to the books to check this, but it's on screen as well.  The Groke is a monster in her first appearance, no doubt.  She's scary as hell whenever she appears...but after that first encounter, her appearances tend to coincide with Moomintroll's depressions (seriously), anxieties and loss of self-belief.  That, or the depths of winter, when she puts out the midwinter bonfire.  It seems like an act of evil, but then we get the revelation that she's cold; she's seeking warmth that she can never find.
Somewhere between the freezing epic darkness of the Finnish winter and the shadows that haunt so many of us lies the Groke; she's depression and self-hatred and loss of family and love. 

Is it any wonder she's so terrifying?




This Ghost Transmissions is dedicated to my brand new niece, Charlie, who I will be showing round Moominvalley as soon as she's old enough to protect me.