Lake Monster books of the 70s. (+1 from the 80s)

1975                                                                 1976

 

1973                                                            1982

The Tomorrow People paperbacks (1973 to 1977)

1973

1974

1975

 

1976

1977

 

I only own the first one which is interesting because its written ahead of the TV episode and therefor slightly different.  It's also got some interesting illustrations in it, like all good books of that era did, which I may scan for your future amusement.

 

Steve

Shadows - Series One (1975) pt 2

Today, via DVD, I returned to the1975 TV series; Shadows, to view the remainder of the season one episodes.

• Ep 4 The Waiting Room by Jon Watkins (24/9/1975)
• Ep 5 An optical Illusion by Thom Clarke (1/10/1975)
• Ep 6 Dutch Schlitz's Shoes by Trevor Preston (8/10/1975
• Ep 7 The Other Window by Jacquetta Hawkes, J. B. Priestley (15/10/1975)

And what a mixed bag it was.  Interestingly while I didn't have any recall of ever having watched any of the first three episodes on the set, I'm fairly certain, with my memory now jogged, that I saw at least two of the above episodes on original transmission.

The Waiting Room is the first one that feels familiar and not just because of the plot, although it is a bit of a classic set up for a ghost story. The haunted waiting room of the old railway station at night, the anniversary of a disaster, history playing its self out again and trying to pull the modern back into the past.  Its all good stuff and done very well.  Its also got Jenny Agutter in it who delivers her performance with such conviction that she almost seems to elevate the whole thing above its simple premise

Watching again it reminded me now of the second Sapphire and Steel story shown in 1979 and also the film; The Ghost Train originally released 1941 but viewed by me on some rainy Saturday afternoon also in the late 70's on TV

An optical Illusion is also a fairly straightforward ghost story set up but with some quite "light" acting and a very slow plot build which fails to add any suspense and makes it all feel like a bit of a fail after the previous story.  Maybe with 7 days between them on original broadcast, the comparison wouldn't have been a problem but its hard to escape on a  DVD box set.  It does feature Richard Willis who is one of those familiar and reliable TV faces from back in the day who I always liked.

Dutch Schlitz's Shoes is something of an oddity being a sort of spin off of Ace of  Wands starring as it does Russell Hunter as the villainous Mr Stabs.  Less ghost story and more supernatural farce.  I had already watched this last year as a bonus feature on the Ace of Wands DVD and a second viewing so soon wasn't the easiest to sit through although you have to love Hunter chewing up the scenery almost as wonderfully as he did in the 1977 Doctor Who story The Robots of Death.

The Other Window was perhaps the most disappointing with the only real pleasure to be had from the fact that I remembered the weird lens around which the plot barely hangs and unearthed some hitherto lost memory of having sat through it before in 1975.  The idea is actually quite a good one but the script is full of awful theorising and lecturing of beliefs that doesn't seem remotely realistic of any character.  Given that one half of the writing partnership was J. B. Priestley, who's enigmatic works inspired P J Hammond to create Sapphire and Steel, I dared to hope for better.

Out of the seven episodes there are two absolute keepers and a few others that are entertaining
enough that I could imagine sitting through them again. Volume 2 awaits but not for a while I think.

As a concept for kids TV, the anthology supernatural series seems to be a thing of the past which is a shame really and not because the kids wouldn't be interested nowadays but because I doubt any of the TV stations would have the balls to go for it.


Steve

Shadows - Series One (1975) pt 1

It was 1975 in my living room this Sunday gone, at least for an hour and half, as I sat and watched the first three episodes of Thames Television's spooky anthology kids show; Shadows. I say "spooky" by way of description rather than an admission.  However, even though, I'm a little too old to be disturbed by the content of the episodes now days, I can see how they would have been effective on a younger version of me.

• Ep 1 The Future Ghost by Roger Marshall (3/9/1975) 
• Ep 2 After School by Ewart Alexander (10/9/1975) 
• Ep 3 The Witch Bottle by Stewart Farrar 917/9/1975)

The series has a bit of a cult rep, which may well be deserved, although sometimes it can just take the right theme tune and opening credits to lay the foundations upon which less noteworthy content is  raised higher than deserved.  Perhaps not in this case though.

The Future Ghost was perhaps the least likely to spook (lets keep using that word) anyone as although it was sort of a ghost story, it was more about giving the concept a bit of a spin than putting its audience on edge.  Not a bad way to open the series, if only to have put any dutiful parents at ease about letting their children watch this show.  The Future Ghost made me think of a stripped down version of The Amazing Mr Blunden which is ghosts in a family friendly way.

If After School reminded me of anything its shades of Kes in its initial set up, although Gareth Thomas doesn't quite pull off sadistic football coach in quite the same way Brian Glover did.  After that he disappears leaving the two welsh school kids alone to be gently poltergeist'ed  into discovering where the earthly remains can be found and exhumed.

Now The Witch Bottle is for me the most interesting one and the first bit of old TV that I've watched with adult eyes and found myself considering - just for a moment - if it was entirely suitable for a children's teatime show.  The plot is a tried and tested formula and concerns the curse of a wronged long dead witch but its strength comes in the fact that its written very straight and is incredibly well acted by the two female leads.  At less than half an hour an episode all the stories are denied the opportunity to build the tension too highly but there are enough elements here: witchcraft, possession, curses, and cruelty to keep little Peter and Jane in nightmares for a week.  Its certainly the episode I'll be going back to for another viewing.

There is a lot of witch history and folklore casually exchanged between the characters, including mention of Matthew Hopkins, The Witchfinder General, as made famous to all by the 1968 horror film with Vincent Price.  And so. on the strength of Farrar's script, I decided to look him up only to discover that here was a writer that would have made my old English teacher proud with his golden rule of; "Write about what you know".  That's Farrar right there, standing behind the attractive naked lady.

Because, as you may have guessed by now, Farrar was the real deal.

Wikipedia introduces him thusly;

Frank Stewart Farrar (28 June 1916 – 7 February 2000), who always went by the name of Stewart Farrar, was an English screenwriter, novelist and prominent figure in the Neo-pagan religion of Wicca, which he devoted much of his later life to propagating with the aid of his seventh wife, Janet Farrar.

 

and;

 

After being initiated into Alexandrian Wicca by Maxine Sanders in 1970, he subsequently published one of the earliest books to describe this newly burgeoning religion, What Witches Do (1971). Within only a few months of being initiated, he had risen to the position of High Priest and founded his own coven in south London,

All of which is quite fantastic and goes a long way to explaining why The Witch Bottle speaks with a greater truth than the previous two episodes.  Although dramatic it is never sensational and now, armed with this new knowledge, I realise it was probably meant to be educational as well.  I suppose some might consider the most spooky thing of all.

 

 

Steve

Rollerball - Lobby Cards (1975)

 

 

Steve

"6" Seventies Super T-shirts - Rollerball (1975)

What an iconic image of 70's Sci-fi.  What a powerful and iconic film that's still has so much to say all of these decades later.  I knew of Rollerball because I read Action(1) and knew that Death Game 1999(2) was a crib on the movie.  I got very excited a few years later when I discovered a handful of images in Sci-Fi Now and was most probably treated to my first viewing on a late night TV channel - It didn't disappoint.

 
There's only a handful of films that have travelled the years with me from TV to Video to DVD and Rollerball is one of them.  You get older, you view it through different eyes and it tilts and shifts and gives you something new each time.  As a youngster its the game and the violence and as an adult its the media and the politics and the power.  Well worth a look if you never have or a revisit if its been too long since you last did. All the truths are still valid and the corruptions still relevant.

But when all is said and done, very little says 70's Sci-fi to me quite so loudly as that font on that orange T-Shirt.

 

 

(1) (2)

 

And who remembers The Goodies parody of Rollerball as featured in the 1976 episode "2001 and a Bit" in which the MCC cricket team take on the Rolleregg side. No?  Oh well, it stayed with me.

 

 

  

Steve

 

(Pages 56,58 & 59)

The Day of the Triffids - Comic adaption (1975)

Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (1)  was a black & white, sci-fi anthology comic magazine published by Magazine Management, who were Marvel Comics' parent company at that time. It featured original and reprint comic strip stories, literary adaptations of SF novels, and interviews with authors such as Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert and Larry Niven.

The premiere issue featured part one of a two part adaption of John Wyndham's seminal "catastrophe" novel; The Day of the Triffids, by writer Gerry Conway and artists Ross Andru and Ernie Chua.  Interestingly it's thought the adaption had originally been intended for Worlds Unknown #7 and #8 (2) but had been bumped for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, a more contemporaneous film which it was calculated might help lift the flagging sales figures of the latter publication. - It didn't!

The second part of the adaption followed in #2 of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction with art on this occasion by Rico Rival.  Though full of some wonderful material, the magazine lasted only 6 regular issues and one Giant Size special before dying the death of diminishing sales.

All of which is marginally interesting but only really relevant long after the fact because I read The Day of the Triffids as a back-up strip in the Marvel UK published; Planet of the Apes Weekly some time around about July 1975, issues 40 and 41 (3)  I will write more about The Planet of the Apes and Planet of the Apes Weekly and some of the other back up strips it carried but that's for a another day. This day if for Triffids and my first major encounter with them.

I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the Triffids strip and studying the potent artwork. If I say it haunted me that might suggest it troubled me but that's not actually the case.  Its hard to describe the feelings really especially after all this time. Transfixed? Enthralled? Possessed?  Yes-no-maybe.  It spoke to me but it didn't corrupt me.  I was complicit in it you see because it was my secret to witness these monstrous and murderous creatures and the end of civilisation.  I knew it was just story but what power it held.  No one else looked at my comics, not my parents or my siblings.  They were just comics after all.  Silly childish stories about superheroes and monsters and those funny looking monkeys off the TV.  And in their ignorance my weekly visits to these dark grown-up worlds were safe, week after week.  Something of my own to savour and explore...  or so I thought

There was a moment, some months after the strip had finished when my mum said something about the willow tree in the garden being like a Triffid.

     "A what?"

     "A Triffid."

How did she know that word?  And then I realised, although it made no sense, that she must have been reading my comics when I wasn't around.

     "..a sort of big killer tree with a sting?"

     "Yes a giant plant that can walk."

      "Have you been reading my comics?" I asked her outright and upon her denial, raced upstairs to retrieve exhibit: A. from the pile in the cupboard

I seem to recall that she was equally impressed with me for knowing what a Triffid was and upon revealing just how I knew, she was also impressed with the fact that this "children's" comic contained adaptions of grown-ups novels - either missing the point or ignorant to the fact that  Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel La Planète des Singes, progenitor of the entire Apes franchise, was writ large upon the cover!

So how did she know about Triffids then if she hadn't been looking.  There's a film of it, she said.  It's a very good film.  And the book is good as well.

I was blown away and on a mission to find both.

We connected in an interesting new way that day.  A bond tangential to mother and son, one of a shared interest in stories of sci-fi and horror and strange goings on. And there was me thinking she made tea in time for Doctor Who for my benefit!

Steve.

(1)(2)

 

(3)