capa
A YEAR
IN THE COUNTRY
CATHODE
RAY AND CELLULOID HINTERLANDS
Stephen
Prince
contracapa
The
rural dreamscapes, reimagined mythical folklore and shadowed undergrowth of
film and television
A Year
In The Country: Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands undertakes in-depth
studies of films, television programmes and documentaries and wanders amongst
depictions of rural areas where normality, reality and conventions fall away
and the landscape becomes deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times
dreamlike stories, taking in modern-day reinterpretations of traditional myth
and folklore and work that has become semi-obscured from view through being
unifficialyly available or otherwise having become partly hidden away.
It
explores film and documentary hinterlands including, amongst others, the
embracing of the ‘old ways’ in The Wicker Man; John Boorman’s creation of an
otherworldly Arthurian dreamscape in Excalibur; the alternate retelling of folk
legend in Robin and Marian; the unreally vivid seeming snapshots of folk
rituals in Oss Oss Wee Oss; the slipstream explorations of The Creeping Garden
and stories from the ‘haunted borderlands’ in Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart.
The book
also investigates the hauntological spectral and ‘wyrd’ undergrowth of
television, including, alongside other programmes, the unearthing of mystical
buried powers in Raven; the utopian meeting of starships, pedlars and morris
dancers in Stargazy on Zummerdown; teatime Cold War intrigues amongst bucolic
isolation in Codename Icarus; Frankenstein-like meddling away from the mainland
in The Nightmare Man; the magical activation of stone circles’ ancient defence
mechanisms in The Mind Beyond episode ‘Stones’; and the ‘Albion in the
overgrowth’ recalibrating of mainstream television in McKenzie Crook’s Worzel
Gummidge.
A YEAR
IN THE COUNTRY
CATHODE
RAY AND CELLULOID HINTERLANDS
The
Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of
Film and Television
Published
by: A Year In The Country, 2022
All
rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without permission from the publishers.
www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk
ISBN:
978-1-9160952-5-0
Copyright
© Stephen Prince, 2022
Edited
by Suzy Prince
Cover
image and typesetting by A Year In The Country / Stephen Prince
Other
books by Stephen Prince:
A Year
In The Country: The Marks Upon The Land
A Year
In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields
A Year
In The Country: Straying From The Pathways
The
Corner Mother
The
Shildam Hall Tapes
Albums
by Stephen Prince:
The Corn
Mother: Night Wraiths
The
Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse
Albums
by Stephen Prince (working as A Year In The Country):
Airwaves:
Songs From The Sentinels
No More
Unto Dance
Undercurrents
Contents:
Introduction
– 9
Notes on
the Text – 20
Preface:
A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly
Folk and the Creation of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape – 21
1. The
Wicker Man: Casting Aside Convention on Summerisle – 28
2. Paul
Wright’s Arcadia: Views from a Not Always Arcadian Idyll – 48
3.
Excalibur: John Boorman’s Creation of an Otherwordly Arthurian Dream – 55
4. Play
for Today and Rainy Day Women: Village Mob Rule and the Spectres of Archivel
Television – 73
5.
Bagpuss: Portal Views Into a Magical Never-Never Land – 82
6. Takashi
Doscher’s Still: Explorations of Southern Gothic, Wyrd Americana and Eternal
Cycles – 90
7. Gone
to Earth, The Wild Heart and Talking Pictures TV: Stories from the Haunted
Borderlands, Conflicts Between the Old Ways and the New and Preserving the Fading
Shadows of Film and Television History – 103
8.
Strange Invaders, Robert Fuest’s Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush, Oklahoma Crude
and Twilight Time: A Time Warp Small Town Invasion, Passion Amongst a Downbeat
Landscape, Untamed Frontiers and a Media Sunset - 121
9. The
Mind Beyond and ‘Stones’: Activating Ancient Pretenatural Defence Mechanisms
and a Sidestep into the Pioneering Work of Irene Shubik, Verity Lambert and
Delia Derbyshire – 134
10. Oss
Oss Wee Oss: Joining the Dance Far Away from the City – 150
11. The
Straight Story: Road Movie Quests and a Gently Lynchian View of Journeying
Through a Near Mythical Landscape – 162
12.
Shadows: The Layering of Time, Folklore and Myth – 173
13.
Codename Icarus: Teatime Cold War Intrigues Hidden Amongst the Bucolia – 191
14. The
Creeping Garden: The Slipstream Explorations of a Science/Science Fiction
Fantasia – 207
15. E4’s
‘Wicker Man’ Ident: An Edge of the Field View of a World Unto Itself – 214
16.
Raven: Unearthing Hidden Buried Power and Battles to Safeguard the Future – 219
17. –
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: Seeking Answers in the Forbidden Zone – 231
18.
Radio On and Fords on Water: Escape and Exploring the State of the Nation in
British Road Movies – 257
19.
Whistle Down the Wind: Adventures in a Time Capsule Landscape – 273
20. Hell
Drivers and The Bargee: Searching for Freedom and Autonomy in an Overlooked
Corner of the Landscape and During the End of an Era – 284
21.
Stargazy on Zummerdown: Starships, Pedlars and Morris Dancers Meet in Utopia -
289
22.
Robin and Marian: The Return and Reimagining of a Living Legend – 313
23. The
Nightmare Man: Frankenstein-Like Meddling Away from the Mainland – 319
24.
Worzel Gummidge: MacKenzie Crook’s ‘Albion in the Overgrowth’ Recalibrating of
Mainstream Family Television – 326
Appendix:
The ‘Good Housekeeping’ Wiping Television Archives – 339
Introduction
The word
‘hinterland’ in this book’s title refers to the term’s meaning and use to
describe an area that lies beyond what is visible or known, and this in turn
connects with the three main interwoven strands and characteristics of film and
television which are referred to in the book’s subtitle and that are the
central themes of the book:
1. Rural
dreamscapes: the depiction of rural areas where normality, reality and
conventions fall away and/or are able to be sidestepped, and of the landscape
as being deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times dreamlike or
otherworldly stories.
2.
Reimagined mythical folklore: the differing ways that traditional myth and
folklore have been explored, reimagined and reinterpreted.
3. The
shadowed undergrowth of film and television: work which is semi-obscured from
view through one or more of a number of factors such as no complete versions
being known to still exist, having had only a very limited cinema release, no
longer being available to officially easily view at home due to DVDs etc. going
out of print and becoming rare and/or high in price and/or never having been
officially released digitally, work that since its initial broadcast decades
ago has only been available via unofficially distributed degraded quality
versions and so on.
The book
is released as part of the A Year In The Country project which has a broad
reach, but at its core is an exploration of what could be called ‘otherly
pastoral’ or ‘wyrd’ culture, that incorporates the undercurrents and further
reaches of rural and folk-orientated music and culture, and where these meet
and intertwine with what has come to be known as hauntology, which is a loosely
interconnected area of culture that is part characterized by its creation of
parallel worlds which contain reimagined spectral echoes of the past and a
yearning for lost progressive futures.1
A Year
In The Country began in 2014, and as part of the project since then there have
been more than 30 book and music releases alongside over 1,100 posts on the
website which (among other things) consist of artwork and written pieces
inspired by, and relating to, that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological
intertwining.
Along
the way the project has explored and connected multilayered and often hidden
pathways and signposts that have sometimes become buried inn the cultural
undergrowth over time: from explorations of the eerie landscape to tales of
hidden histories via the shape of the future’s past that can be found in
Brutalist architecture, alongside acid and underground folk, ‘edgelands’,
electronic music innovators, older British public information films, rural
progressive or utopian settlements and associated temporary autonomous zones
and photographic countercultural festival archives, early canonic and modern
folk horror film and television work, the unsettled times and atmospheres of
the Cold War, folkloric film and photography, the faded modernity and future
ruins of road travel, imaginary film soundtracks, the ‘ghosts’ and forgotten
far-reaching projects of the former Soviet Union, contemporary
hauntological-esque music releases and hazily misremembered televisual tales
and transmissions and an accompanying strand of later 1960s through to early
1980s young adult-orientated British television series which had surprisingly
complex and/or dark themes.
On the A
Year In The Country website and in the books published as part of the project
the resulting work has included writing on the likes of, amongst many others:
the films and television programmes The Owl Service (1969-1970), The Changes
(1975), Children of the Stones (1977), Nigel Kneale’s work such as The Stone
Tape (1973) and Quatermass (1979), Bagpuss (1974), The Moon and the
Sledgehammer (1971), The Wicker Man (1973) and Kill List (2011); music by the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Howlround, Vashti Bunyan, Anne Briggs, Jane Weaver
and Kate Bush and released by the labels Folklore Tapes, Trunk Records and
Ghost Box Records; and the photography books Memory of a Free Festival (2017),
Homer Sykes’ Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs (1977), Sarah
Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual
Year (2011) and Rebecca Litchfield’s Soviet Ghosts (2014).
The
albums released by A Year In The Country have included a number of themed
compilations that, via work created specifically for them, explored
interconnected areas of culture, history and memory, including (again amongst
others): abandoned villages, the flashpoints of history and conflict in the
landscape, derelict Cold War infrastructure, ancient trees and their passage
through time, the faded dreams of the space race, deserted industry and echoes
of tales from woodland folklore. Alongside work by myself, they have featured
contributions by, alongside other contributors: Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith,
The Séance, Widow’s Weeds, The Heartwood Institute, Depatterning, Howlround,
Field Lines Cartographer, Dom Cooper, Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, Time
Attendant, The Rowan Amber Mill, Listening Center and Vic Mars.
I have
written about some of the roots and inspiration for A Year In The Country in
previous books released as part of the project and on its website, but in order
to provide a background for this book, and also as some reading it will not
have read the earlier work, I discuss and at times revisit some of the
inspirations and pathways that lead to A Year In The Country below.
In part
the roots of A Year In The Country probably stretch back to decades before it
began, when at a young age for a while I lived in a small rural village and
spent much of my time living a bucolic existence bike riding, climbing hills,
damming rivers and so forth. But at the same time, this was to a background of
becoming aware of the threats, worries and paranoia of the Cold War and also
discovering exploratory, dystopic and catastrophic science fiction in books and
television that while thoroughly intriguing me may also in part have been a
little too old for me to fully understand and/or that had at times decidedly
unsettling themes and atmospheres. These included intriguing glimpses of the
dystopic young adult orientated television drama series Noah’s Castle (1979),
which I did not see in full at the time but saw just enough of for its
depiction of societal collapse and hyperinflation lo linger in an intriguingly
unexplained and half-known way in my imagination. Around a similar time, I also
saw and read the aforementioned final 1979 series and the accompanying
novelization of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and their stories of the extraterrestrial
harvesting of the world’s youth amongst ancient rural stone circles, John
Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic Day of the Triffids (1951) and its terrifying-at-times
1981 television adaptation and also Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), in
which a village is invaded by a preternatural hive mind group of children. The
latter of these I never knew the ending to until many years later, as the copy
I read had the last page or so missing and so I did not know if the village was
saved or not.
I state
in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018):
“This
mixture of a pastoral playground, a world on the edge and fantastic fictions
proved to be a heady mix for the dreamscapes of a young mind, all of which
would be some of the initial seedlings [that] would lead one day to the
creation and ongoing themes of A Year In The Country.”
If I
look back to before my time living in that village, my interest in rural areas
begin depicted in fictional work as containing a sense of being ‘otherly’ or
‘wyrd’, alongside an accompanying and intertwined interest in hidden half-known
stories, may also have some of its roots in a time when one of my teachers
would only read the first few chapters of a book to the class I was in, hoping
that it would encourage her pupils to read more, wanting to know how the
stories ended.
One of
these books, which I did not subsequentlty finish reading myself, has stayed
lodged in my imagination ever since, although I still do not know the name of
it and I am not sure if I want to as I seem to prefer it existing in a
half-known state in my mind. All I can remember is it being set rurally and a
few hazily recalled characters and plot points, which included a benign
witch-like older woman with knowledge of the ‘old ways’ and it featuring some
form of ancient stone with possibly less benign mystical qualities which she
guides two children, or possibly teenagers, to neutralize in a both magical and
prosaic seeming manner.
The way
that this story remained part known, open-ended and a thing of mystery,
alongside only seeing glimpses of Noah’s Castle and not knowing the ending of
The Midwich Cuckoos are part of what semi-consciously inspired the “shadowed
undergrowth” theme of this book.
In more
recent times, several years before I started A Year In The Country, I listened
to a friend’s copy of the compilation album Gather in the Mushrooms: The
British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974, which was released in 2004 and curated
by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne. The reimagining and pushing back of the
boundaries of folk music on the album seemed to open up something in my mind,
and this was a notable influence on the creation and themes of A Year In The
Country.
Around
the same time and in the period that followed hearing that album I listened to
The Advisory Circle track ‘And The Cuckoo Comes’ from the Mind How Go album
that was originally released in 2005 by the aforementioned Ghost Box Records: a
label that explores a hauntological-esque parallel world, and I also watched
the videos which accompanied the album by Broadcast and The Focus Group:
Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009), which featured collaborative
work between Broadcast and Julian House, the latter of whom is one of Ghost Box
Records’ founders. This track and the videos have a woozy, hazy dreamlike and
at times unsettling rural atmosphere, and in the case of the videos also
implies that the rural areas they take place in contain hidden, unexplained and
layered stories.
Accompanying
this, around a similar period I read Allan Brown’s book Inside The Wicker Man
(2000), which in part explored the also hidden and layered stories around the
now-iconic 1973 folk horror film The Wicker Mans’ production, and I also
semi-consciously became intrigued by the 1998 red vinyl edition of the film’s
soundtrack released by Trunk Records. The latter of these contained a location
map from the film, which through its hand-drawn and photocopy-like character
seemed to imply that you were looking at something only semi-known or an
unearthed secret.
The
Wicker Man became one of the recurring touchstones and reference points for A
Year In The Country, as did the sense of no complete version of it still being
known to exist and how watching it can be like being given an extended glimpse
of the ghost of the full film. Viewing it can also be not dissimilar to
watching an almost fever dream-like documentary about the way of life and
events on its isolated island location, and it creates and depicts a world unto
itself where wider societal norms and conventions have been cast aside.
Alongside which its story and world are deeply imbued with myth and folklore
that seems to draw from, refract and reimagine traditional folk culture and
ancient stories, rituals and beliefs, and to connect with hazily distant
half-known memories of them.
The
sense of reimagining mythology, folklore and folk culture and the landscape
being layered with dreamlike, semihidden stories and secrets in work such as
that referred to above, alongside a loosely interconnected landscape of other
work that explores interrelated areas, and my discovering and investigating it
combined and intertwined to become part of the inspiration for the themes,
atmospheres and explorations of A Year In The Country and subsequently the
three central themes of this book.
As
referred to previously, part of the “shadowed undergrowth”, semi-obscured or
semi-hidden aspect of those themes refers to the way in which there is a large
subsection of film and television that is lost or obscured in plain sight, at
times perhaps forever, which includes the just mentioned complete version of
The Wicker Man.
Despite
the vast range of older film and television productions that have been released
as DVDs, Blu-rays and/or digitally, there are still large gaps in what is
available to view at home, or at least view more easily, in reasonable quality
and/or officially. Sometimes this is because, in part, as mentioned previously,
official physical releases may be out of print and have become scarce or
relatively expensive to buy or were only released via now obsolete formats,
films and programmes never having been officially released in any for for home
viewing after their initial cinema release/television broadcast, them only ever
having been released on Blu-ray and/or DVD that are ‘locked’ for viewing in
particular areas of the globe, them only having been distributed unofficially
online in degraded quality form etc., or in the case of The Wicker Man it is
because the complete version or the ability to recreate it is probably not
possible due to the footage being Thought to have been disposed of, some
versions of the film becoming lost and so on.2
Also, the
gaps in what is available to view easily, officially and/or at all is partly
due to how in previous decades television programmes were not always archived;
this was for a number of reasons: sometimes they were performed and broadcast
live and not recorded or often the recordings, or at least parts of series,
were later wiped in order that tapes could be reused both because their
relatively large physical size meant that they required a large amount of
storage space which in turn resulted in archiving them being costly and also
the high cost at the time of such recordable media meant that being able to
reuse it could cut production cists. Alongside this was not always realized
that programmes would be of interest in future years, possibly in part because
in previous decades ‘repeats’ of programmes were seen as something to complaint
about.3
Accompanying
these factors a number of television and film programmes from previous decades
do still exist but are only available for official viewing at particular
locations via private viewings, as is the case with a number of British films
and programmes that are stored at the BFI National Archive.
Curiously
some of the ‘obscured from view’ television programmes that have never had
official home releases in any format since their initial broadcasts, including
some ‘wyrd’ rural culture-related ones that are discussed in this book, do
surface online, often uploaded unofficially by, presumably, the general public
to high profile open-access video streaming sites such as YouTube, but it is
not always clear what the origin of the videos are. They may be from television
broadcasts that were recorded by the public on home video cassette recorders
and later digitized, but some contain timecodes or studio countdown intro
sequences, which imply that at some point they were copied from master tapes
and/or internal production copies.
These
unofficially distributed versions are often, if not generally, poor quality and
it is quite likely that they are multi-generational copies; watching them can
be akin to viewing an impressionistic interpretation of the original
recordings, where the world as depicted in them, the stories they tell and the
atmospheres they create are murky, smeared and seen through a haze of degraded
media. Because of this they are a distinctive and curious anomaly in the
current media landscape where films etc. are often released for home viewing in
ever-higher resolution and once prepared for release utilise the
generally-precise replication processes of digital distribution. Also, at the
same time, the low quality of such unofficially distributed versions of
programmes etc. becomes almost an inherent part of their character and lends to
them a sense of being hauntological spectral versions of themselves.
Although,
as referred to above, these are not officially sanctioned releases, the copyright
holders seem to not know of or overlook them, or at least they do not appear to
rigorously seek them being removed. Perhaps they do not have the resources to
do this, or do not focus on preventing the unauthorised distribution of these
sometimes semi-forgotten programmes but rather direct their attention and
resources toards controlling the unauthorised distribution of higher profile
and more indemand content. Whatever the reason, this overlooking could be
considered to make their distribution not so much a form of forbidden
samizdat-like publication but rather a form of archival folk preserving and
distribution of culture that, while unsanctioned, acts as a substitute for
official releases.
This
book focuses in part on such unofficially distributed television programmes,
including Stargazy on Zummerdown (1978), Rainy Day Women (1984) and The Mind
Beyond episode ‘Stones’ (1976) but I am
aware that by the time it is published and read some of the programmes which
are written about may have become officially available or some may no longer be
‘unofficially’ available. Alongside which, some of the films and television
programmes discussed in the book that at the time of writing were not always as
easily available for home viewing due to one or more of the previously
mentioned factors such as DVDs going out of print and becoming rare, high in
price etc., may have been reissued in one form or another in the UK and/or
elsewhere. With this in mind, the book is a snapshot of a particular point in
cultural time and place and also of the spectral ‘lost in plain sight’
character of these films and television programmes.
In part,
the book reflects and documents a form of personal detective story during which
trying to discover, for example, what official versions have been released of
certain films and television programmes, if any, and in what forms, countries
etc.; if unofficially distributed programmes etc. are available for official
viewing in archival collections; if a programme was only broadcast once;
tracking down writing that is long out of print and/or has never been put
online which focused on a particular film or programme that had also not been
written about extensively and so on became a type of intriguing and engrossing
puzzle.
Accompanying
which, it may be the semi-hidden nature of such film and television programmes
and the work required in seeking out and connecting information about them that
is an element of what drew me to them, particularly due to it contrasting with
the wider contemporary cultural landscape where much of culture is easily
available via the click of a mouse, tap of a remote etc.
Interconnecting
with this, and to a degree also contrasting with it, the book does not overly
focus on licensing, copyright ownership issues etc. which may have resulted in
films and television programmes not being available. Rather it approaches their
release (or non-release etc.) from a standpoint that, in these days of potential
ease of cultural distribution and access via digital networks, it is interesting
and curious that there is still often a notably piecemeal and patchwork
availability of much of film and television, whether in terms of it being
officially available at all, which countries it has been released in, the
varying costs of releases, what platforms and/or formats it is available on
etc. Such aspects of film and television distribution seem to be distinctively
disparate to the contemporary digital release and distribution of music, which
is, generally much more internationally standardized and widely available
across a variety of platforms. This disparity remains notable even with an
awareness that the film and television-related copyright and licensing issues,
production costs, the creation of digital transfers etc. are potentially more
expensive and complicated than with music.
With
this in mind, to a degree, the book has something of an underlying, and until
had finished it probably largely unconscious, theme of being intrigued and
surprised that the distribution and ease of access to film, television etc.,
has not ‘settled down’ into a largely more standardized widespread
digitally-available model as has occurred with music.4
The
Wicker Man contains and reflects many of the central themes of the book
through, as discussed above, its depiction of an isolated rural world unto
itself where normality and conventions have fallen away, its refracting of
traditional myth and folklore and there being no complete version of it being
known to still exist. Also much of contemporary ‘otherly pastoral’ or ‘wyrd’
rural culture and the flowering of interest in such things, including my own,
has been inspired by and flows from the film, and because of these various
characteristics and factors the chapter which focuses on The Wicker Man ids the
first in the book.
I hope
you enjoy the ‘wanderings’ through rural dreamscapes, reimagined mythical
folklore and the shadowed undergrowth of film and television in this book, and
that it helps to inspire explorations and journeys through your own cathode ray
and celluloid hinterlands.
Stephen
Prince (19th July 2021)
1.
Hauntology, otherly pastoral and wyrd culture are discussed further in the
Preface.
2. I
discuss related themes with regards to The Wicker Man in Chapter 1.
3. The
background to such ‘wiping’ practices and related themes are discussed further
in the Appendix.
4.
Related themes are discussed further in Chapter 4.
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