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.