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.