Around eight years ago, I made my first “fake trailer”. Partly in response to Ben Wheatley’s (and Amy Jump’s) adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, which I felt somewhat missed the mark, I edited together a “what if” trailer for the book if it had been adapted for BBC television in 1975. The responses to it, along with those to a follow up trailer (looking at … Continue reading Trailer – J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Thames Television 1974)
By the time I was growing up in the 1990s, the previous decades of the Post-War years had been heavily codified. The 1950s were very much the 1950s; the 1970s were very much the 1970s, and even the 1980s – the decade I was born in the last year of – were very much the 1980s. The BBC in particular milked this realisation for all … Continue reading The Kaleidoscopic Past of the Counter-Culture Years
TL;DR – I love rubbish First Doctor stories. I was on a car journey earlier this year heading to midlands with Mark Gatiss, Jon Dear and Chris Lincé. It was painfully early and we were on our way to hunt out some of the locations used in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, The Signalman (1977). The conversation covered exactly what you’d have … Continue reading Hartnell Greys
Local Haunts was released at the end of March by Influx Press, and has been on sale for around two months at the time of writing. I’ve resisted talking more about it on here so far, largely because I wanted to see what the general reaction was rather than pre-empting it. Thankfully, after having done a number of events in which the response has been … Continue reading Local Haunts (Influx Press, 2025)
Part 15 We are the Goon Squad and we’re coming to town When David Bowie died in 2016, it felt for a moment like someone had removed a piece of my spine. The feeling was a mixture of frustration, at having only fully appreciated the musician’s work later in life, and worry, at having relied on his work to get me through my own on … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 16)
Welcome to this year’s End of Year review; my usual, long-winded run-down of my excessive viewing and reading habits. It’s been an exhausting but rewarding year of films, television and books, and the sheer length of this post should evidence that. One interesting thing to note is how much happier I feel having virtually ignored the majority of post-2010s culture. Such a decision was not … Continue reading 2024 Review
Part 14 My second memory concerning a Polaroid photo appearing in pop culture was one taken by a maniac. This maniac had hitched a ride from some naïve teenagers in the sweltering outback of Texas and was freaking them out with his variety of macabre hobbies. He’d just visited the local slaughterhouse before they picked him up. He didn’t work there. He just liked it. … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 15)
Part 13 Easy Riders, Cops and Maniacs A man is stood in a pool hall. He’s surveying the green baize landscape as he drinks. Should he bother with the game anymore? The light has a medicinal quality, emanating with an annoying buzz from a long halogen strip above the table, proudly advertising Canada Dry ginger beer. It could be a lonely portrait by Walker Evans … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 14)
Part 12 Scrying ‘Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die’, wrote Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek.’ I think of this often. The room was hazy yellow with dreary sunlight. Rays of summer drifted lazily through the air. I’d been contemplating the window through which this light came through … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 13)
Part 11 Not all memories are as sacred as Tarkovsky’s. If time can be expressed in photos taken by the public at drunken parties, then it can certainly present in work by other artists, even those driven by less transcendental aims than Tarkovsky. Considering this, the first body of work that comes to mind is that of the American photographer William Eggleston. The Tennessee photographer … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 12)
Celluloid Wicker Man 