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.