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.