New Series

We're back at work for a new series.  I seem to have been recast over the summer and the set is looking a bit different, but it's all testing well with preview audiences so far.  There might be different opening credits but I'm only partially non-diegetic so I can't really tell without breaking the fourth wall a little too much for this early in the season.

Like some hellish rollercoaster of devilfun, I'm attempting to run Ghost Transmissions as a straight dive right down from here to Halloween, unless I get distracted by sequins or someone waving a laser pointer near me.  Since we're starting this Bradbury-esque meta-ramble in September, let's take a look at the world outside my window.   Well, there's a skip, my car, a woman talking to a cat, my cat looking angrily on at this, and the woman in question turning round to notice me staring at her.  It's like Springwatch or something, this.  Except in Autumn.  We should try and think of a name for that.

When I was merely a small Ghost, I had a primary school teacher who set me a wonderfully evocative task; write an essay called "September", about, well, you get it.  I've never forgotten the way she told us to look at the mist over the school gates, the frost on the yard for the first time and the subtly changing tones in the sun's light.  I've also never forgotten the fifteen minute rant she had about why CND were betraying our country and how nuclear arms were crucial to world peace.  The year was 1983.  We lived in Sheffield.  Threads, people, THREADS.

OH GOD NO THREADS OH GOD WORST THING.  Also, the old town hall was way better.

So I thought about Autumn properly, in formal calendar terms for the first time.  But I'd been aware of the seasons before, just in my own ordering system.  Streetlights on = darktime.  Rain and car lights go blurry = darkestcoldtime.  Vomiting with excitement = Christmas.  Immensely relaxing taking down of decorations and cleaning house = un-named peaceful silent zone after Christmas that I still long for sometimes (check out the Aut kid sighing with relief as the tinsel comes down).

Never had a Halloween, because EVERYDAY IS HALLOWEEN, CREATURES.  I didn't get called on for much at school, but I was always on demand for ghost stories.  I knew loads and I still do.  What used to disturb me was that the other kids would demand I tell them specific stories that I'd told them before...except I hadn't.  They were completely new to me.  Self generating memetic supernatural invasion incident!  Definitely.  Where was I?

This time of year was when decent Saturday morning kids' TV started again, but you can read all about that in a hundred other places.  As soon as there were more than ten sites talking about Tiswas, it lost the mystique somehow.  I'm not interested in interviews and nostalgia in this form; I don't want to know behind the scenes production details.  It's the fevered, half-remembered dreamland of TV that I want.  The Ghost Transmissions, in fact.

So, we're now moving into darktime, to talk like a pretentious 9 year old GhostTransmitter.  That edge of cold creeping in and the sense that there's a world moving and changing outside the curtains.  Scene shifting behind the magic curtain.  You know it's really darktime when you have to shut the turn the lights on before it's time for John Craven's Newsround.  (Brief distracted moment of hauntological ecstasy over the Radiophonic Workshop theme tune).  The dark feels safe, as I said earlier this year.  Safest I felt when I was a kid.

 - And then, years later, being in sixth form college, seeing the sunset against the woods outside the window on a late lecture, the sudden rush that I was alone and didn't know where I was going anymore - nothing as intense, or as sad, or as beautiful as that feeling, the two or three times since that I've felt it - 

All those people leaving home.  We migrate in Autumn for some daft reason.  Leaving home, going towards the cold, not caring.  The excitement of being eighteen and living in one room on the edge of Rusholme and Moss Side, the cold wind and bright sunshine.  In Manchester!  That must have been the last fucking sunshine I saw for three years.  All the new students are turning up in Sheffield now.  They have special flats with heating and everything.  I'd tell them they were missing out but they really aren't.  May no-one else ever have to walk to the electricity token machine at 11:30PM.  Now that was an odd and memorable Autumn.  As far as I know.

I'd like to conclude by quoting that legendary old misogynistic right wing shite Philip Larkin (I went through five different adjectival descriptions of him then till I found one that was neither gender specific nor disablist).  In Toads Revisited he talks about the comfort in embracing the dull nature of work and the passing of seasons when "the lights come on at four at the end of another year."

It's cheerful as ever, as he goes on to describing this as the journey "down Cemetery Road" - thanks a bunch Larkin, I used to work in an office on Cemetery Road and never once walked down it without feeling your damp stary presence at my back.  Well sod this.  The lights go on at four because there's a whole world of dark and mad and Halloween capers and fireworks going off in the night.  If the price you pay is getting older, it's worth it.  Me, I'm putting my skull mask on, fitting my glasses over the top and singing the bleedin' undead Internationale (a spectre is haunting Europe.  Do you see?)

This is the very best time of year and I intend to make everyone love it all the more.  Halloween all year round, creatures!  Remember, fancy dress is for life.  The rest is just pyjamas.

The Penny Farthing and the Tiger

I've been going out on a bike a lot recently ("a lot" means statistically in comparison to the rest of my life so far from birth and is therefore completely accurate and impossible to argue with).  Whilst I bleed out of my eyes on the hills of Sheffield, a great thought occurs to me, partially due to oxygen starvation.  Were I a better human, I would see revelatory images of a better world, Trotsky's last testament represented in glorious transcendental detail.  But it's me, so I saw scenes from a shit 1970s horror film that used to turn up on BBC 1 on a Friday night.

And this got me thinking, as my calf muscles began to liquify.  The role of cycling in the media!  I've spent all day talking about socialism and cycling, which made me terribly happy.  Now for my light desert of - well, bikes in odd places on TV and that.  Um.

Everyone used to have bikes on telly.  Children's Film Foundation kids were always setting off at the start of the holidays on their bikes and finding smugglers or Electric Eskimos (it's a thing, a real thing, I swear).

I have a degree.  It's not a good one, mind.

There's a beautiful bit in the sublime HTV series Children of the Stones (and if you still haven't watched it, why not) when two kids are talking and one offers to show the other around the village.  They can do this because there's a spare bike in the shed.  Just lying around.  A spare bike in the shed because everyone needs a bike when you're a kid.  My brain is clearly not a place for the fainthearted or easily confused, but this sequence makes me inexplicably happy in a way I can't articulate.  I mean, I don't have a spare bike in the shed and my shed is also padlocked up and there's an old George Foreman grill blocking the door anyway.  But just imagine a world where there were just spare bikes lying around.  Actually, this world is Amsterdam and by "lying around" I mean "so easy to nick that it stops being an issue."

Anyway, why is today's title "The Penny Farthing and the Tiger"?  Well, the particular set of images that occupied my visual processing cortex (no really, I stop seeing the real world, it's fairly dangerous for a cyclist) originate in a sympathetic and well thought out exploration of mental health issues.  It's a film called Tales that witness madness.

For the benefit of my fellow neurodiverse, my previous statement was a joke.

Tales that witness madness is a portmanteau horror film, four stories with a linking theme.  The tiger has fuck all to do with the penny farthing, but I like tigers and it turns up unexpectedly in a sequence that I've always enjoyed, primarily due to my vague distrust and resentment towards SOME (I stress SOME) mental health professionals.  Can I spoiler you up?  There's this psychologist who's a dick.  He gets eaten by an imaginary tiger that becomes real.  The end.  That's the framing story.  There's another one about a spooky sex lump of wood.  There's little else I can add to that particular matter.   It's a lump of wood.  It's spooky.  It starts to look sexy.  That's what happens, I promise you.

We're concerned, however, with the segment about the evil ghost and his time travelling penny farthing that possesses people.

I really can't improve on this.  I think that's David Warner.

Just read that last sentence again for a minute.  Bask in its glory.  And then watch as I try to spin this out; there's very little merit in me retelling this one.  The above sentence covers the entire plot.  See, I was about to try and explain it in more detail, but all that happened was that I just said the same words in a different order.  There's this old penny farthing.  Some guy rides it for a laugh.  He gets possessed and travels in time, because of an evil ghost.  I don't know what else to tell you.

Alright, alright, penny farthings.  The Prisoner, right?  My favourite TV show ever apart from all my other favourite TV shows ever?  The penny farthing was the iconic flag and mascot of the enigmatic Village.  The great McGoohan freely explained the penny farthing (about the only thing that he ever did).  He said that it was an ironic symbol of technological progress running out of control.  I love McGoohan dearly but I'm convinced that he's just making shit up as he goes along now, so I'm going to move on.

OK.  Um...there was a kid's book called The Furious Flycycle.  It was advertised in the back of all the old Puffin books that I had.  I never saw a copy.  Never read it.  Can't help you.  Next.

Oh, here's a good one.  The Time Machine.  HG Wells.  The time machine?  It's a bike.  I can't take credit for spotting this, but anyway, it's got a saddle and handlebars and it's really fucking easy to fall off.  It takes you from your everyday street to somewhere green where you can have adventures.  My bike does that too, though the adventures aren't quite as cannibally.  Also, no-one swore at the Time Traveller when he was having trouble on the hills.

Wells was a keen cyclist (so I say in that way you do when you're halfway sure of something but can't be bothered going to look it up) and there is a powerful trend towards the bike as a symbol of working class freedom and movement, especially in the early 20th century, which would tie in with his politics nicely.  Shame he then says that working class people turn into man-eating trolls without help from their social betters, but hey, it's HG Wells and he made my childhood feel happy so he gets away with it.

What else crossed my disintegrating head as I climbed the hills?  This.

We tell kids from an early age to be careful on the roads, and quite right too.  Yet, I can't help thinking that what they actually get told is to beware on the roads, which is quite a different thing.  The roads are lethal.  That's where cars live.  Cars won't stop for you.  Cars are coming to get you.  They might drive right into your school and slap you around a bit.  There's this underlying sense that the car is always in the right because it's big and expensive; pedestrians and cyclists are irritations, distractions, obstructions.   We incubate a sense of fear and submission before motor transport.

Well, that's how I heard it anyway.  I've spent the day surrounded by fearless motherfuckers who don't take any car crap from anyone, so it's possible I may have been listening to the world too hard again.  I blame the cycling proficiency test.

I'm getting a tabard like that, but mine will say "Expropriate the banks"