My current novel, Domesday Afternoon, is very influenced by the kind of TV I watched as a child. This site is invaluable for my research, but also tantalising.
It takes me back. Try clicking on any of the links in this text, and, if they work, you'll be offered fragments of another time, a strange dimension of the seventies and early eighties that was cosy and yet full of doom, and that was my childhood.
Ah those were the days! The BBC Xmas Ghost Stories (especially the weirdly Aickmanesque THE ICE HOUSE), THE OWL SERVICE, LEAP IN THE DARK, WEST COUNTRY TALES, SKY, any of David Rudkin’s stuff (like ARTEMIS 81, PENDA’S FEN, ACROSS THE WATER, WHITE LADY), Nigel Kneale’s BEASTS… The series I would most like to see again is THE INTRUDER, an eerie children’s drama series set in the Lake District starring a sinister Milton Johns with an eyepatch. I’m even more keen to read your novel now. The Mausoleum Club forum here -http://www.the-mausoleum-club.org.uk/xmb/index.phpis a good place to discuss old British telly. Their large membership is a great collective resource of memory and knowledge.
Hello Robin.Well, you obviously trump me on the obscurity stakes there, because, apart from The Owl Service, I don’t think I saw any of the programmes you mention. I suppose I should say in my defence that our household didn’t have a television until I was, actually, I’m not sure, maybe eight. Perhaps that’s why I do remember the fragments I saw with especial vividness, for instance, when we would go to my grandparents’ house at the weekend and be able to watch television as a kind of treat. The Nightmare Man, above, is an example of a series I saw only fragments of – and those fragments scared me to death. Very little, if anything, has scared me in quite the same way since those times. It makes me quite nostalgic. Thanks for the link, by the way. It may prove useful, if I dare go there and ask questions about those particular programmes that no one else I’ve met has ever seen. I’m almost afraid now to find someone who has seen them. Even as a child I had strange obsessions. I was obsessed for a while with a children’s ‘magazine’ programme, specifically for children with handicaps of one kind or another, called ‘Boom’. I’m using my memories of that in Domesday Afternoon. I haven’t been able to find a single thing about it on the Internet, though. I’m afraid, as I’ve said before, that this novel may take a very long time to come out. However, if my luck with publishers doesn’t start improving, I may possibly ‘serialise’ it with one of those online publishers like Lulu.
Well you’ve trumped me now because I’ve never heard of BOOM, but it would be well worth a question at the Mausoleum Club. I understand your mixed feelings about finding out more though. There’s a kind of pleasure in feeling a programme belongs to you personally. I was particularly fond of the late-night episodes of Gerry Anderson’s UFO which were distinctly darker and weirder than the early evening episodes. I half-suspected I was the only one watching them, and then when VCRs arrived I started busily hunting down extremely blurry video copies of those episodes. Of course now the whole series is available in pristine quality on DVD. I’m glad that so much old TV is accessible now (and I’ve built up a large video collection over the years) but we’ve paid a bit of a price. In the old days you had to make the most of every broadcast because you may never see it again. And then it entered the realm of memory where it could get mutated into something even stranger than it originally was…
Memory does strange things to events and so forth. Sorry to be repetitive, but this is another theme of Domesday Afternoon – how memory creates fictions. To some extent I want the fictions of my memory to remain intact. However, I may well try asking about BOOM at the Mausoleum Club. I also realised after I wrote last that I must have been a young adult when I watched BOOM, not a child, but I suppose I was in child mode, which is not unusual with me. This may sound strange, but as an unemployed young adult I was also a big fan of Byker Grove for a while.Here’s one that I remember that just seemed to disappear – Kinvig.
Yes I remember KINVIG (written by the great Nigel QUATERMASS Kneale), though I only have one episode. I wasn’t crazy about it at the time because the comedy was a bit low-key but now it seems a rather perceptive dig at the more credulous flying saucer believers. (Actually I probably still believed in flying saucers myself back in 1981…)You might find the list of videos on this website interesting:http://www.ghoststoryforchristmas.co.uk/index3.asp