I write about the night a lot. Not consciously or overtly, perhaps, but the
theme is often there somewhere. It seems
like there’s something in the nature of transmission which associates with
after dark. Don’t you just love the
language of night? Dusk. After dark.
Burning the midnight oil. The
small hours.
As anyone who’s ever shared a house with me
will know, I suffer from night terrors.
These appear to be caused by dips in blood sugar, temperature
fluctuations or stress. The symptoms
always amuse me; waking dreams, hallucinations and, funniest of all, mild
amnesia. I’ve woken people up before to
ask them what my name is. My partners
are very, very understanding people.
So you might wonder why I’d grow up with
this fascination for the night-time world.
As a child, the nightmares were pretty much constant. But they were so imaginative! Sinister carnival barkers. Deranged puppets. The Smash Martians. That big floating evil egg in the
garden. Nightmares haunt humanity, but
here’s the thing; if they aren’t anchored in some real life issues, we take one
of two routes. We either outgrow them or
we learn to love them. And eventually,
you can make friends with your bad dreams.
They are, after all, just made out of us. When I stared into the face of the laughing
Circus Man, I was looking at a part of my own mind, the same part that hams it
up in the classroom to this day. The
puppets? So loud, my fear of being
drowned in noise and loss of control, that I came to overcome. I’m not really sure what the Smash Martians
were. Probably real, I shouldn’t be
surprised to learn. They eat them with their metal knives, you know. Actually, with slogans like that, is it any
fucking wonder I was terrified?
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| They've got claws. CLAWS. |
So, the night then. Fearful.
Fascinating. Streetlights flickering on, sodium yellow: on a cloudy
night in Sheffield, the whole sky would reflect that glare back, a burnt orange
dome over my world. My father’s job was
to repair and install them. Once, he
took me up on a hillside and switched on a whole streetload of lights, opening
a small metal panel in a brick wall and pressing connections inside. One year, he turned the Christmas lights on,
hidden behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, whilst the Mayor stood on a
podium and pulled a big fake cardboard switch.
Those nights. Warm and bright inside, but you could sneak
up to the window, press your face against the glass, hidden behind thick brown
drapes. Look out into the rainy night and
watch the occasional car pass by, red lights into the distance. Or perhaps on those long car journeys back
home, late on Sunday evening, through the apparently infinite Derbyshire
farmland; I’d always get excited to see the city lights again. I’ve been jumpy in urban settings, but I’ve
never had that cold agoraphobic dread that I get in the countryside. Often, the city feels safe at night. Home.
Home with all that neon out in the streets,
when I moved to the city center. Home with
all those horror films, late on Friday.
Home with crackly black and white, with the sound turned right
down. Home, waking up to the test card
around 3:00 AM. I’m very much at home at
3:00AM.
I really miss the station closedown. The last announcement (live, of course), with
its sense that the BBC center was sleepy and shutting up shop for the
night. The clock, a public information
film, the national anthem (that bit bored me, even then). Then silence and darkness and a sudden voice
warning you to switch off. What do they not want me to see, I
thought. Because I’ve always been like
this.
 |
| And is very probably a Czech animation about a piece of string |
That after midnight place feels welcoming to me. Didn’t you ever look up at an office block,
with just a single light on? Or get the
late train and pass a single lit up bedroom window? There’s such a sad beauty to it, that’s sexy
as damnation right at the same time.
Every cat I’ve ever lived with has made a swift exit around half
midnight, running wild across the terrace backs, over the night fences and the
dark ivy.
Bright and warm, dark and cold, so very
binary, so very wintry. Summer night is
a totally different prospect; I just lose the need for sleep completely
somehow. For the sake of this
Transmission, let’s stay in the Winter warm.
As I write this, it’s 1038PM and there’s a
blizzard outside. Nighty night.
I have more to say on this soon, you'll be delighted to know. In part 2: some actual TV stuff, along with spooky observations and other random nonsense.
