After a brief introduction from the nice voice-over man at the BBC, I sat down to watch, my coat still on. It didn't take long to become fully engrossed and intrigued by this Thriller? Horror? Sci-fi? show.
However programs of this quality are better watched in all of their Technicolor glory so, waiting for a momentary lull in the drama, I raced downstairs and see if the colour TV was free in the living room.
It wasn't. So I raced back upstairs to continue as was but mentally preparing for the next episode.
The following week I was ready and waiting in the living room, having claimed squatters rights on the best seat on the sofa. The trouble was that there were 6 of us in my family and my siblings were not always respectful of a genre TV show. I don't think it took too many minutes before I was racing back upstairs to watch in peaceful, all be it monochrome, solitude. At least now I knew how red the reds were though!
Steve
The subject of an interesting/odd talk/performance/event at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in October. In fact it looks so weird I may just have to go.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/headlands-fairy-folk-ufos
That does sound all kinds of wonderful. If you go, you'll have to report back and tell me all about it
DeleteWell, that turned out to be about as odd as I expected. I’m still not quite sure what it was really about.
DeleteThe event was described at the beginning as ‘an experimental lecture’ in one of the University drama studios - basically a black cube with a couple of tables set up with assorted audio-visual gear, a lectern, mic and three screens, the side two of which cycled through various chroma-key processed photos and videos of the Port Isaac area - a hint of the red-tinged POV footage from The Nightmare Man which would be shown throughout the talk.
The talk itself was read by three participants from a script while more shaky-cam footage of Cornwall was thrown onto the screen to a continuous unsettling background audio drone that sounded variously like guitar feedback re-recorded down a vacuum cleaner pipe and the distant sound of someone torturing a cathedral choir. It turns out that the Headlands Hotel, from which the talk got its name, is something of a centre for UFO research and general weirdness. It was also the hotel in which the cast and crew of The Nightmare man stayed when the surrounding area was coincidentally (or was it?) chosen to double for the Hebridean setting of the original novel. What it attempted to do was (I think) synthesise a connection between the TV series’ cold-war paranoia and unearthly goings-on, a well-documented visitation by fairies to a local girl in 1645 and the theories and literature of occultist Arthur Machan. At one point one of the participants stood up, unspooled an audio cassette of what I think was a field recording of an empty room in the now derelict hotel and dragged and stretched the tape over the exposed play head of a Walkman connected to the PA making a rather unpleasant, but presumably to them significant, hissing drone. It was that sort of evening.
I think that analogue tape seemed particularly significant to whatever experience that they were trying to recreate as the video seemed to be deliberately sourced from what looked like VHS. The newer location shots were, I think, hand spliced in with stretched and slowed-down excerpts from The Nightmare Man and tape noise, static and splice bumps were deliberately left in. The machine even seemed to break down a couple of times. Interesting but I think that I’d have to get hold of a transcript to try and work out what they were actually on about.
Thank you so much for reporting back. I don't quite know if I should feel sorry for you or not. Was it an endurance of something painfully pretentious or something wonderfully madcap or both. I've sat through equally bizarre and often find it depends on my own moods and tolerances at the time. Either way I suspect this memory will remain either way. Again thanks for the review. You are a star
DeleteGenyeva. Once again, viewed from behind the sofa.
ReplyDeleteHah! but it made us who we are today
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