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.
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