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"