Look Around You

When people talk about the golden age of British television comedy you can be fairly sure they're about to rehash tired old cliches about everything from 'Hancock's Half Hour' and 'Steptoe and Son' to 'Fawlty Towers' or 'Only Fools and Horses' but personally these shows and their ilk left me cold.  I was entirely the wrong generation and of a very different inclination to find any of them at all funny.  For me comedy first properly grabbed my attention with 'The Young Ones' but my golden age includes shows such as 'The Day Today', 'Brass Eye', 'Jam', 'Spaced', 'Black Books' and the hauntological fever dream that was 'Look Around You'

Created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz 'Look Around You' was, in it's first series, a note perfect and fabulously daft pastiche of the types of daytime educational shows that you half watched when the TV was wheeled into the class in school or which you stared at uncomprehendingly over a snotty tissue when home ill. The second series featured longer episodes in the pop-science style of 'Tomorrow's World' that introduced the country to amongst other things The Petticoat 5 "the computer made by women for women", synthesizers and rap music.

As fun as the second series is, it's that first series of 10 minute shorts (plus the double length pilot you can watch below) that's the gem.  The pair perfectly captured the cheap and cheerless nature of these shows and each episode is filled with incomprehensible experiements, lingering shots of beakers, wires and oscillators, absurdly named equipment, grimy 1980s landscapes, bearded scientists and pencils, pointing.  It's an obvious labour of love that no matter how often I watch it never fails to evoke disquietingly flu-like feelings of nostalgia.

"Please ensure you have your copy book at hand as you'll be asked to take down notes from the screen at various points throughout the programme."

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The Earth Wire and Other Stories

Joel Lane
Influx Press

Joel Lane (1963–2013) was one of the UK's foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction.
His debut collection, The Earth Wire was first published in 1994 by Egerton Press and is reissued in paperback by Influx Press for the first time in over twenty-five years.
Love and death. Sex and despair. The Earth Wire is a thrilling, disturbing examination of the means and the cost of survival.

Unfortunately I never got to read Lane's stories when he was alive but I know he was held in high regard by a number of folks I know and admire so when I heard that some of his work was being reprinted by Influx Press I grabbed two of the collections that intrigued me the most.  

This first collection was originally published in 1994 a time most assuredly reflected in the pessimism at the heart of many of the stories.  These are stories formed out of the stifling confines of - at that point - 15 years of Tory government. When to be poor or to be different was to be less and when for many people - myself included - to be anything other was to be as impossible as it was unthinkable.  Lane's characters exist in the dark and claustrophobic confines of a post Thatcher Britain that has fallen even further into dismal fascistic hell than it thankfully did. Confronting Lane's characters isn't the mask of gurning buffoonary we are currently subjected to but the shaven headed, booted thuggery we came to know in the 70s and 80s returned.  

These stories though aren't solely social and political fiction this is weird fiction of the highest order.  Taking his cues from the likes of Robert Aickman and M. John Harrison Lane's characters exist in worlds of confusion, delusion, transformation and hallucination.  His stories are succinct and beautifully strange often dropping us into a broken reality tantalisingly familiar yet deliriously other.

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Who is David Tibet?

Today I'd like to share with you this lovely little film made in the run up to the opening of musician, poet, publisher and painter David Tibet's first US art exhibition at the California State University, Fullerton, Begovich Gallery titled 'Invocation of Almost'.

The film, made by Reypak Creative and commissioned by the university to, I assume introduce Tibet to a wider audience likely unfamiliar with him and his work in all it's many forms, features contributions from Tibet himself along with exhibition curators Jacqueline Bunge and Shaun Richards along with various fans of Tibet's work and provides a tantalising glimpse of what looked to have been a fantastic and lovingly assembled exhibition of his work.

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The Last Days of New Paris

China Mieville
Picador

It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

I've read and tried to read a few of Mieville's books over the years and have struggled and failed with most but made it through 'Kraken' which was interesting but I must admit I found it really slow going.  I spotted this one a little while ago and it kind of jumped out at me on the shelf so I thought as it's essentially a novella - and I really do love a novella - I'd give it a go.

Jumping between two points in time it tells the story of a Jack Parsons initiated occult event in Paris in the early days of the Nazi occupation that results in the manifestation of various surrealist artworks and of the effects of that event and the arrival of these 'Manifs' and the Nazi's own demons on the city some 10 years later.

It's nicely written and whilst all the moving parts are in place the story never really gets up a head (made of) steam but at it's heart this is a pure pulp romp very much in the spirit of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and lets be honest here Jack Parsons, a pioneering rocket scientist and an Aleister Crowley devotee occultist, is a fantastic Indiana Jones substitute but this is a Mieville pulp romp with higher aspirations formed from the always intriguing intellectual premise of art as a weapon because, as it says on Woody Guthrie's guitar, "This machine kills fascists".

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The Restless Ghost

Based on the story of the same name by Leon Garfield, a staple of many a ghostly anthology, 'The Restless Ghost' is the story of two young lads, Bostock (Stephen Rooney) & Harris (Jonathan Jackson), who decide to play a trick on the old sexton (Wilfrid Brambell) who stops them scrumping apples by dressing up as the ghostly drummer boy (Matthew Peters) who reputedly haunts the graveyard.

Unlike a number of the other 'Spooky' episodes that launched the long running Dramarama series this one isn't actually all that spooky with it's studio sets and it's very old fashioned storyline but it holds together well and has some solid performances from the cast (even the kids) which is rounded out by Colin Jeavons, an actor with strong wyrd credentials having appeared in the likes of Doomwatch, Doctor Who, Kinvig and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but who will probably be most widely remembered alongside Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes as Inspector Lestrade in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

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Mischief Acts

Zoe Gilbert
Bloomsbury Circus

Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator.
A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time – at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake.
But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive – or exact his revenge.

Zoe Gilbert is the author of 'Folk' a book I've had in my hands a bunch of times but never actually got around to buying and reading.  This, her second novel, however was waving at me from the new release pile in the shop and insisted on being taken home and read.

The book takes the form of a series of vignettes all relating to the ever shrinking wood that's home to Herne the Hunter and various associated spirits.  Her stories tell of Herne's genesis, his capricious nature and his waning influence through the ages on those who interact with the wood.  Some tales work better than others, some are more developed, some feel more instinctive and some a little clumsy.

In the end though what we have is a love letter to the woods and to the myths, the legends and the histories that reside within them in much the same way as Robert Holdstock's sublime 'Mythago Wood' cycle did.  It tells the story of our relationship with our history and with the natural world and finds us very much wanting before injecting just a hint of optimism into it's green and growing wooden heart.

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Virgin Witch

Starring Anne and Vicki Michelle 'Virgin Witch' is the story of two sisters who have run away from home to become models but instead find themselves embroiled in a coven of witches run by Patricia Haines and Neil Hallet. 

One of the final films produced by the venerable Tigon British Film Productions - home of 'Witchfinder General' and 'The Blood on Satan's Claw' - it really is a load of sexploitation tosh and if there's an award for the director most successful at getting their actresses out of their clothes then Ray Austin must have been in the running in 1972 with the first 8 shots of the movie all being of topless women - although Pete Walker would perhaps have given him a run for the title with 'The Flesh and Blood Show' which opens with Luan Peters answering the door and running around her flat completely naked for several minutes. 

The story, such as it is, is entirely secondary to the nudity as Austin shoehorns in as much nubile flesh as possible.  His direction is turgid and neither of the Michelle sisters have either the chops or presence to front the movie but I suspect their acting skills weren't top of the director's mind when they were hired and both have subsequently disowned the film.  Anne would, a year later, go on to appear as a member of 'The Living Dead' biker gang in the wonderful 'Psychomania' while her sister would appear in the gloriously trashy 'Spectre' and find fame in the dire 'Allo, 'Allo!' which she really should disown.  The movie, after a slow start, does eventually pick up the pace and makes an attempt at forging an ending that while intending to evoke the hallucinatory, bacchanalian, orgiastic excess of a 1970s idea of a witches sabbath instead just looks utterly daft and the whole thing just fizzles out. 

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