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
The characters of Nigel Kneale’s work rarely like an outsider. The drama of his plays is often built around small groups of people at odds with some concept of an outsider. The oppositional group will be diametrically opposed for a variety of reasons; sometimes for more pulp tendencies such as aliens in a space invasion scenario, but also more recognisable images of townspeople entering closed … Continue reading Fear of the Outsider in Quatermas II
When watching Nigel Kneale’s infinitely weird TV series, Beasts (1976), there’s a great sense of underlying currents behind what appear to be strange amalgamations of the everyday with something of the Other. Though the links between the episodes are often animalistic, ranging the ghost of a dolphin in Buddyboy to the hoards of rats in During Barty’s Party, the majority of the episodes all, at … Continue reading Hysteria and Curses in Nigel Kneale’s Baby (Beasts, 1976).
Celluloid Wicker Man 