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
The BBC experienced a real golden age for television horror during the late 1960s and 1970s. Almost every year seems to have produced an array of horror delights, ranging from ghost stories of all types to full blown, psychological nightmares. Though now over half of the series is missing from the archives, 1972’s horror anthology Dead of Night and its surviving three episodes represent a … Continue reading BBC Dead of Night (1972) – BFI
Celluloid Wicker Man 