Don't Get Me Started: What's Wrong With Blasphemy?

This documentary was made by comedian Stewart Lee after far-right fundamentalist Christian groups whipped up a frenzy of protests about 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' that he co-wrote and produced organising protests at theatres, against the BBC showing and against Maggie's Centres, a cancer charity providing palliative care, to which the production had made a donation.  Lee's documentary takes these protests as his starting point to present a fascinating and funny investigation into religious intolerance and its impact on the arts via interviews with folks like Alan Moore and Polly Toynbee.

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Lee & Herring's Reasonably Scary Monsters

Stewart Lee and Richard Herring forgo pizza and football in order to watch a bargain bin video called "The World's 9 Scariest Monsters with Carol Vorderman" that features contributions from pop culture monsterologists Mike Gatting, Adam Woodyatt, Chris Packham, Pat Cash, David 'Kid' Jensen and others.

Made in 1998 - around the time the duo were doing the first series of 'This Morning With Richard Not Judy' -  for BBC2s 'Monster Night' it's a fun roast of those god-awful '100 Greatest...' clip shows in a format that pre-empts Gogglebox by some 15 years and will leave you with a new understanding of the tumultuous life of Mike Gatting.

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Stewart Lee on Arthur Machen

Here's a lovely little snippet from The Verb on BBC Radio 3 on 26th May 2017 featuring the official 41st best stand up ever Stewart Lee telling poet /  presenter Ian McMillan about his love of the bard of London's byways and back streets Arthur Machen and reading an extract from 'Far Off Things' one of Machen's volumes of autobiography and discussing one of his (and mine) favourite Machen novels the much maligned 'The Green Round'.

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Children of the Stones

'Children of the Stones' is a 7 part drama for children produced by HTV in early 1977.  It tells of the arrival of astrophysicist Adam Brake (Gareth Thomas) and his young son Matthew (Peter Demin) in Milbury (actually the Wiltshire town of Avebury), a small town situated within an ancient stone circle.  Milbury is run by the powerful Rafael Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson) who in emulation of the Druid who built the circle is using it's powers to control the minds of the village's inhabitants.  As the series progresses it becomes apparent that something much greater, more terrifying and infinitely stranger is occurring.

'Children of the Stones' is a glorious piece of drama that still stands with the best British supernatural or science fiction drama.  From the off it chooses not to patronise it's audience (a rarity in TV made for children) and almost seemed to go out of it's way to be as creepy and as strange as possible - take the theme tune as evidence of this...



British comedian Stewart Lee is a fan of the series (and others of it's kind) and has produced a couple of things about it which I'm going to include here.

The first is a short piece from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe in 2007 talking about the different ways children are represented in TV shows then and now.



The second is a fabulous 30 minute documentary for BBC Radio 4 which features contributions from cast, crew and fans. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n1rbx

Before you dig into all that though you can watch the full series on the player below or buy it from here - Children of the Stones: The Complete Series [DVD]

Happy day

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.