A Year In The Country

Leap in the Dark, as I wrote in A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions (2023), is a paranormal-orientated British television anthology series broadcast on the BBC for four series in 1973, 1975, 1977 and 1980. There were 24 episodes in total, with the first series being documentaries, while series two and three mixed documentary footage with dramatisations of real-life cases of paranormal events. Series four featured original dramas themed around the paranormal, and included episodes written by, amongst others, renowned writers Fay Weldon and Russell Hoban, alongside Alan Garner and David Rudkin, the latter two of whose work has since come to be associated with “wyrd” rural and folk or otherly pastoral culture.

Jack Be Nimble is the first episode in series four of Leap in the Dark and is one of only two screenwriting credits for Peter Redgrove, who wrote thirty-plus poetry books, alongside writing and/or co-writing with his second wife, Penelope Shuttle, numerous novels, non-fiction books and plays.

As with much of the fourth series of Leap in the Dark, it’s in part markedly non-conventional and even borderline experimental and in this sense, it seems at a very far remove from the contemporary, generally fairly conventional landscape of television drama.

It centres around a teenage schoolgirl called Jackie, who is from what appears to be a comfortable, affluent middle-class family and who is probably around 16-18.

Jackie has psychokinetic and clairvoyant abilities which, after she foresees the death of one of her peers, lead to her being branded a witch by her female schoolmates, one of whom, after Jackie displays her psychokinetic abilities, which she uses the titular English nursery and skipping rhyme Jack Be Nimble to help focus and activate, violently attacks her in order to “destroy” what she calls her witch’s power. This, alongside her seeming at times to be able to predict answers in her classes etc, brings her to the attention of the school’s headmistress, who subsequently visits her mother and father at their home to tell them that Jackie will have to leave the school due to her being a disruptive “bad” influence.

Up until this point, it is, in large part, mostly quite conventionally presented, but it quickly and rapidly diverges into much odder territory and the subsequent set overtly paranormal and even occult inflected sequences seem to reflect, as does Leap in Dark as a whole, albeit in a latter-day echoes of manner in the case of series four and Jack Be Nimble, the embracing of the paranormal, supernatural, extra sensory perception (ESP) etc by a wide cross section of British and American society, subculture, mainstream media etc during the “occult revival” of the 1960s and 1970s.¹

While the headmistress was discussing Jackie with her parents, Jackie is shown removing all the furniture from one of the upstairs rooms and painting all of it, including the floor, completely white, which seems to enable it to become a safe place “tabula rasa” for her to explore and consider her powers. After the headmistress leaves, Jackie’s mother and grandmother embrace the reality of her powers quickly and openly and when they are discussing Jackie’s problems with her, her grandmother reveals that she also had ESP-like etc abilities when she was younger, which her first husband had been repulsed by and for which he had whipped her and crushed her hand under his foot, which led to her hand becoming permanently crippled.

Jackie, her parents and her grandmother then go up to the room that Jackie has painted white, and her mother and grandmother attempt to help her discover what she should do with her abilities, although her father remains dismissive and recalcitrant about them. In this sequence, the room is lit only by candlelight, which combines with its total whiteness to lend it an immediate visual surreality, and this is heightened by Jackie’s ESP visions that she has while she and her family are in the room, which are fever-dream-esque and variously transgressive of gender norms of the time and/or at times markedly laden with occult-like rituals and imagery.

The episode is lent an extra layer of oddness as Jackie is played by Lisa Vanderpump, who would go on to gain a prominent public profile when, between 2010 and 2019, she was a main cast member on the highly popular American reality television series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2010-). This is part of The Real Housewives franchise and focuses on the personal and professional lives of women who live in or near the city of Beverly Hills, in the American state of California, an area that is known within American and wider popular culture for its affluence and being home to a high proportion of celebrities from the world of entertainment. In turn, the Beverly Hills part of the franchise is known for its prominently extravagant glamour, high-stakes drama and celebrity cast, and, again in turn, Lisa Vanderpump has a markedly glamorous, opulent public image, style and lifestyle which often has a stylised, curated fairytale-like aspect.² She subsequently parlayed her Housewives fame into multiple reality television shows that focus on her, and in which, as in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she has often been viewed and portrayed as a matriarchal “Queen Bee”, and her appearance in these shows also helped to solidify her glamorous persona in the public consciousness.

On first glance and consideration, it may well seem like a vast and improbable jump from a very early 1980s borderline experimental downbeatly portrayed scripted British television drama that focused on ESP and other paranormal powers to the glitz and glamour of American reality television in the 2010s. However, if viewed obliquely, then, surprisingly, a link becomes apparent.

In Jack Be Nimble, Jackie’s abilities could be considered a form of magic, while in contemporary times much of the world is held in thrall to the “spell” of glamour that is cast by some sections of reality television and its travel mates such as social media fame, the latter of which Lisa Vanderpump also has a considerable amount of as she has over three million followers on her Instagram account and is considered to be one of the top Instagram influencers in the United States.³ Jackie’s “magic” and Lisa Vanderpump’s “glamorous” public profile and the spell it has cast over sections of the public could be considered to be linked by the roots of the word glamour:

“The real magic of glamour is not in beauty or style or Hollywood sway. The real magic of glamour – at least as far as the word’s history goes – is in grammar… The word glamour comes to English from Scots, the English language as spoken in Scotland. In the early 1700s, the Scottish altered the English word grammar to create glamer or glamour [which] meant ‘a magic spell’… In classical antiquity the Greek and Latin ancestors of the English word grammar were used in reference not only to the study of language but also to the study of literature. In the medieval period, Latin grammatica and its outcomes in other languages were extended to include learning in general. Since almost all learning was couched in [Latin, which was] not spoken or understood by the unschooled populace of Europe, it was commonly believed that mystifying subjects such as magic and astrology were included in grammatica. And scholars were consequently sometimes regarded with awe and more than a little suspicion [or even thought of as practising ‘the dark arts’]… It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the word glamour started to separate from its magical connotations – though those connotations weren’t, and still aren’t, entirely gone. Glamour in its modern senses – ‘an exciting and often illusory and romantic attractiveness’ and ‘alluring or fascinating attraction’ – still has a bit of magic to it, though not usually of the suspicious variety.” (Quoted from “The History of Glamour”, merriam-webster.com, original date of publication and author unknown, accessed 22nd February 2024.)

Viewed via the roots of the word glamour, Lisa Vanderpump’s transition from acting as a channel for Peter Redgrove’s “borderline experimental” exploration of the “magic” of ESP etc to a matriarch of Beverly Hills reality television and social media opulence could be considered an example of how the concept of the “spell” has shifted from the supernatural to the aesthetic.

Both versions of the “witch” or “glamour-caster” can be seen as relying on rituals that help to activate and direct their powers. In Jack Be Nimble, Jackie uses language (the above-mentioned nursery rhyme) to focus her magic, while in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the “spell” of glamour is cast through the grammar of luxury – the visual language of opulence, a stylised and curated fairytale aesthetic etc – which are “channelled” through the portals of reality television and social media.

Both roles and forms of spell require that their caster has a form of “otherness” that can invoke both awe and suspicion, and this can be seen as interlinking with the above-quoted historic suspicion of magic and associated witchery, which Jack Be Nimble, in part, can be seen as an exploration of, alongside an interconnected exploration of fear of the feminine “other” but this isn’t undertaken from the stance of a clearly delineated gender divide.

As in part discussed above, while Jackie’s mother and grandmother overtly support her as she undergoes her quest and ritual in the white painted room, her father is openly dismissive of her powers, and, as referred to above, her grandmother’s first husband violently punished her for hers. However, equally, it is Jackie’s female schoolmates who stigmatise and even, as also previously mentioned, physically attack her due to fear and suspicion of her powers.

The sequence when her schoolmate attacks Jackie by striking and cutting her forehead with a milk bottle, introduces and layers an aspect of real-world folkloric superstition to the story as she justifies herself by distressedly and hysterically saying, “I cut her above her breath. That’s what you do to witches, it destroys their power. I had to cut her above her breath.”

This refers to and draws from a historic superstitious practice, which was more prevalent in Scotland, where suspected witches were cut on the forehead, above the “breath” of the mouth and nose, to nullify their powers to injure or harm and draw the devil out from them. As a practice and belief, it became more widespread in the 16th and 17th centuries after the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1563, which made witchcraft and consorting with witches a capital crime. Even though the Act was repealed in 1736, belief in “cutting above the breath” as a form of defence against witches appears to have lingered for a considerable time afterwards; amongst other similar reported incidents in the 19th century, in 1845 a Scottish fisherman was prosecuted and jailed for assaulting an elderly woman and cutting her on the forehead with a knife to eradicate her witches power due to his belief that her “dark dealings with sorcery” had put him under a form of curse that lead to his loss of nets and catch and his fishing crew refusing to work with him while he was supposedly under the influence of her curse.⁴

Returning more directly to Jack Be Nimble, it ends with a sense that perhaps Jackie has created and carved out a space where she and her family can live comfortably with and even benefit from her abilities.

She decides during the ritual in the white painted room that she wants to give up her abilities as she says that she considers the way they enable her to see the future etc as a form of “stealing”. However, despite saying this, the episode ends with her in a calm and subtly otherworldly manner, which seems somehow both beneficent and creepy, bringing a large piece of shrubbery in from the garden and placing it before her grandmother, which, although it isn’t spoken about, seems to have some kind of sympathetic magic ritual-like significance. She then uses her abilities to cure her grandmother’s crippled hand, who, in turn, uses the same hand to remove Jackie’s bandage and dressing from her forehead to reveal that her wound has magically healed. The episode then fades out and ends on a close-up of Jackie’s eyes as she looks at her grandmother in a not easily interpretable manner that could be considered to either indicate that all will now be well in their world or perhaps that Jackie’s power will prove to be malign in some unforeseen and possibly even omnipotently destructive to all of society manner.

Jackie’s uninterpretable gaze could be seen to mirror the impenetrable smoke and mirrors “uncanny valley” of reality television and social media and, as with attitudes towards the alleged possessors of magical powers in previous centuries, it isn’t clear, and standpoints vary on, whether the “magical” digital portals through which we see its stars are beneficent and shaman-like or “malign” forces of social destruction but as a society we are in large part nonetheless “held in thrall”.

Footnotes:
1. The occult revival in the 1960s and 1970s is discussed in depth in Chapter 1 of A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions, which focuses on Leap in the Dark.

2. This “curated fairytale-like” aesthetic incorporates, amongst other things, a home with a swan-filled moat and heavily stylised ornate, dramatic decor, while her personal public style has been called “princess-look” and “hyper feminine” and often variously features softly romantically coloured ruffled, frilled, rhinestone detailed and bow bestrewn clothing, alongside which she also often wears prominent jewellery, including tiaras and oversized rings, that have led to her being described as “dripping with jewels”.

3. The details about Lisa Vanderpump in this and the two preceding paragraphs in part draw from the wikipedia.org website pages “Lisa Vanderpump”, “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and “Beverly Hills, California”.

4. This paragraph in part draws from “When women in Scotland were cut on the forehead in the belief they were witches”, Alison Campsie, scotsman.com, 5th May 2020 and “Top 10 Things You Probably Never Knew About Witches”, Richard Sugg (fact checked by Jamie Frater), listverse.com, 29th January 2021.

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This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

Tales of Unease (1970) is an anthology drama series that was broadcast by ITV for just one series of seven episodes, each of which was directed and written by a different writer. It was based on and adapted some of the stories from the first two in a trilogy of anthology horror books that were released under the “Unease” banner – Tales of Unease (1966), More Tales of Unease (1969) and New Tales of Unease (1976) – which were edited by John Burke, who also script edited the series and wrote the second episode, Calculated Nightmare.

The stories are eclectic in their nature and, via their short runtime, they serve to demonstrate the potentially versatile nature of half-hour anthology drama series and how they can concisely create and weave self-contained stories, worlds and characters.

The series has had a limited distribution and availability: to date it hasn’t been distributed digitally officially but in 2022 it was released on a now out of print DVD by Network Distributing Ltd1 which specialised in DVD and Blu-ray releases of older (generally) British film and television, much of which has never had an official home release in any other form, and so the company’s closing in 2023 has left a large gap in the cultural landscape. The series was later released on DVD in 2024 by Spirit Entertainment, who were Network Distributing’s official distributor and who, alongside Old Gold Media, have been releasing rebranded DVD and Blu-ray versions of some of the titles that Network released, generally with more or less the same packaging.

(As an aside, the first copies of Network’s release of the series included an impressively designed limited edition slipcase which was intended to look like a battered old horror anthology paperback and had a similar design as John Burke’s edited short story collections that, as previously mentioned, the series was based on, used copies of which it wouldn’t look out of place next to on the shelf of a second hand bookshop.)

As Tales of Unease’s title suggests, the stories in the series weren’t so much out-and-out horror but rather they impart a sense of unease, although it’s intro sequence might lead some viewers to think that the stories will be more overtly horror orientated than they are as it features crudely sculpted clay heads with closed eyes silhouetted against a black background which rotate as a dread filled, in part synthesiser based, soundtrack plays. A close-up reveals that one of the heads suddenly has an open eye, and as this head stops rotating, its eye stares blackly and dead eyed-like at the viewer before the head dissolves in a shimmering fog of almost rustily blood-like and of their time video effects and reveals the series’ title.

The seventh and final episode, The Old Banger, directed by Quentin Lawrence and written by Richardson Morgan, centres around a couple called John and Susan Partridge who dump their old car, which has repeatedly broken down, on the streets in an area away from their home, due to them not being prepared to pay to have it towed to the scrap yard. However, despite repeatedly trying to get rid of it, in some unexplained preter- or supernatural seeming manner, the car inexorably keeps making its way back to them.

The underlying message of the story seems to be that you should take responsibility for your possessions, and this subtext is highlighted by the way that the Partridge’s take good care of their homing pigeons and, despite John’s frustrations when they don’t return home as quickly and straightforwardly as he’d like, they put up with and continue to care for them, which is at a marked contrast with how they treat their old car.

The car seems to be preter- or supernaturally sentient in some way but it differs from the preter-/supernaturally “evil” sentient car in John Carpenter’s 1983 fantasy horror film Christine in which the titular car was “born bad” on the assembly line, rather the Partridge’s old car’s actions, which ultimately prove to be fatal for the couple, seem to have been caused and inspired by their behaviour and it wanting to seek revenge.

Their old car eventually ends up mysteriously and magically appearing inside their house, and this sequence is particularly intriguing as the episode seems to have been shot on location, and there is no apparent indicator of how a full-size car has been placed inside a house.

The car subsequently traps and kills the Partridges inside it by suffocating them with its exhaust fumes. However, despite the Partridge’s eventual fate, this episode is probably, overall, the most overtly lightly toned and comic in the series, and via its gently melancholic and subtly humorously toned accompanying soundtrack, even the final shot of them, which shows them desperately struggling to escape from the fumes inside the car, seems to be imbued with a contrastingly humorous aspect.

This antepenultimate shot is followed by an almost static exterior view of their unpresuming whitewashed semi-detached suburban house, which is in turn followed by a brief view of one of their homing pigeons still happily ambling around, both of which highlight the otherwise normality of their life and the surrounding area, where their neighbours are no doubt fully unaware of what is taking place in the Partridge’s house.

This all combines to leave the viewer with a number of intriguing questions, such as what will whoever investigates their death think of the circumstances around how they were killed? Did it become a local myth and legend that was endlessly debated over the years, or was it just marked down as a misadventure of some sort and become forgotten about?

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This post contains excerpts from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

Thanks to Andy Morten and Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills of Shindig! for including an extract from the Ghost Signals book in issue 175 of the magazine… much appreciated indeed!

“For 12 years, A Year In The Country has been a central force in the documentation and proliferation of hauntology and associated cultural ephemera through the written word, artwork and music…. it’s latest non-fiction outing… chronicles a selection of analogue TV broadcasts that remain unavailable in the streaming era” (Quoted from the extract’s introduction.)

Thanks also to Ben Graham for the review of the book that’s in the same issue

Ta and a tip of the hat to them all!

Links elsewhere:
Details on issue 175 of Shindig!
Shindig!’s site
Ben Graham’s site

Links at A Year In The Country:
The Ghost Signals book

The Great Albert is an episode of the British anthology drama series Scorpion Tales (1978), which was broadcast by ITV for just one series of six episodes that had the loosely interconnected premise of having “a sting in their tale”, and it has something of a “wyrd” pedigree and background.

It was written by John Peacock, who also wrote the And the Wall Came Tumbling Down episode of the 1984 anthology drama series Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, which, in A Year In The Country: Other Worlds (2025), I describe as containing “timeslip folk horror Cold War dread”. While it was directed by David Reid, who also produced Scorpion Tales and who would go on to be the executive producer of the enigmatic genre-melding slipstream-esque supernatural fantasy science fiction series Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982). It also has another connection with Sapphire & Steel as its title music, which, alongside more “funk” orientated aspects, features monophonic minimalist arpeggiated synthesiser tones, was composed by Cyril Ornadel, who also composed the soundtrack for Sapphire & Steel.

The intro sequence of Scorpion Tales is evocatively rooted in late 1970s aesthetics: against a black background a scorpion pendant swings across the screen which is intercut with creepily unsettling footage of battling scorpions and close ups of their claws etc; these are intercut with silhouetted flames which although they use real world footage recall the silhouetted animated flames from the iconic intro sequence to the long running anthology drama series Tales of the Unexpected (1979-1988) which began to be broadcast the year after Scorpion Tales’ and which shared some similarities with it in terms of both its anthology structure and having often sinister stories that also often had unexpected twist endings.

The Great Albert centres around the home life of a pre-teen schoolboy called Matthew, played by Max Harris, who is the son of rare book dealer Peter Ward and his wife Virginia Ward, played by Kenneth Gilbert and Lynn Farleigh, respectively. Matthew secrets aways a “photostat” copy of a rare and valuable ancient grimoire, i.e., a book of spells, that his father is selling and which his father says gives instructions on “commanding spirits”. Matthew begins to experiment with casting spells via the book’s incantations and instructions in an initially, at least, relatively harmless schoolboy curiosity-inspired manner.

The book is referred to by his father as “the Albertus Magnus” and has opening text on its title page that says “The boke of secretes of Albertus Magnus”, and Matthew later calls it The Great Albert. Although the book is said to be from the 16th century this title text etc may in part be a reference to writing related to the 13th century German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist and bishop Albertus Magnus who is considered to be one of the greatest medieval philosophers and thinkers, and about who after his death many stories arose that he was an alchemist and a magician. However, this was in part because a number of alchemical works are thought to have been falsely attributed to him by their authors to increase the prestige of their text through association, and although he wrote about his belief that stones had a form of occult power, although he did not elaborate in his writing what these powers might be, there is scant evidence that he personally performed alchemical experiments.

In an evocative night time rain drenched scene in his family’s garden Matthew attempts to stop his father leaving on a business trip as he will miss him by using the spells in the grimoire to summon Lucifer, which ends with him beseechingly shouting and almost screaming “Come on then, come on devil, obey me, where are you, stop father going away, where are you?”

Matthew’s mother has an adulterous lover, Oliver Benthall, played by Paul Freeman, who has been conspiring with her to murder Matthew’s father, as, despite the disintegrating nature of his marriage, he is refusing his wife a divorce. Oliver becomes compounded in Matthew’s mind with Lucifer as after casting the spell in the garden he sees him through the window holding a knife as his father lies dead on the floor, and this leads him to think that his father’s death was caused by him summoning Lucifer who, at least as Matthew sees it, appears to have very literally and permanently stopped his father leaving by killing him.

His mother and Oliver act with a curiously unperturbed, detached sangfroid about having killed her husband and behave as though they have done nothing of note. They are also somewhat blasé in terms of how they dispose of his body, as they bury it only a few inches below the surface of a mound of dirt in the back garden. After which, with only a fairly thin cover story for her husband’s absence, which involves him working abroad and a trial separation, Matthew’s mother has Oliver almost immediately move into the family home and when she introduces him to Matthew, the young boy whispers “Lucifer” under his breath.

Matthew’s family live in what appear to be the suburbs and have an affluent upper middle-class lifestyle, alongside which his mother has a sense of entitlement and superiority, particularly in relation to her warm-hearted domestic help employee Mrs Withers, and her and her lover’s sense of calm after committing the murder seems to suggest that her sense of entitlement has led to her thinking, consciously or not, that she is above the law. Or perhaps it could be considered that she has an unacknowledged psychopathic detachment from social norms or guilt.

That the grimoire Matthew uses is a photostat copy, which was one of several produced by Matthew’s father at the start of the story so that he could send out copies to other book dealers and auction houses, is highlighted as being important in terms of whether it retains its power. However, whether the grimoire that Matthew uses is an original or a copy ultimately doesn’t seem to matter, as it is the spell’s instructions within it and not the “vessel” they reside in that have magical power.

Except they, probably at least, don’t have any power and events seem to merely coincide with Matthew’s spells and the wishes, requests and demands he made via them. However, there is an ambiguity about this and the possible supernatural nature of events in the episode. This is markedly heightened as Matthew’s mother’s lover has a notably subtly eerie, and almost unearthly air and ongoing sense of detachment, which makes him seem almost as if he could be a corporeal embodiment of an evil spirit or being of some sort.

As referred to above, Oliver is played by Paul Freeman, who, in the episode, has a markedly charismatic screen presence, while for some viewers, knowledge of one of his best-known other acting roles may serve to subtly add to a sense of ambiguity about whether or not events in The Great Albert have a supernatural basis.

Over a long acting career Paul Freeman has often been cast as villains, including a memorable part in the pre-World War II set blockbuster action-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in which he plays René Belloq, the dastardly rival to hero archaeological adventurer Indiana Jones with who he vies to find the Biblical artifact the Ark of the Covenant which is said to make an army invincible. Belloq sides with Nazi German forces, and in an iconic scene, after they beat out Indiana Jones and seize the Ark, he acts as the presiding priest during a ritual where he and the Nazis open it. This leads to the release and summoning of wraithlike vengeful spirits and Belloq becoming a conduit for bolts of deadly bursts of energy, which lay waste to the watching German soldiers, before Belloq himself is torn apart by the supernatural power that has been unleashed.

Returning to The Great Albert, the ambiguity about the possible supernatural nature of events is further heightened as Matthew undertook a promise as part of his spell casting that if he betrays Lucifer that he will give up his soul to him for all eternity, and in the final sequence of the drama, after his mother and Oliver have been arrested for his father’s murder, Oliver turns to Matthew and says coldly “Damn you”. It’s not fully clear whether this is a more prosaic turn of phrase or a more supernatural “damning”, and the drama ends with an intriguingly subtle and understated sense that Oliver may actually be Lucifer.

Even if that’s not the case, it’s probably fair to say that Matthew, who seemingly still firmly believes that the results of his spell casting and summoning of Lucifer are real, will most probably be forever “damned” by being haunted by guilt and worries over his actions.

Although the drama is firmly aimed at an adult audience, it’s in large part told via Matthew’s character, and Max Harris plays him in the episode in a naif-like manner which very much belongs to 1970s children’s or young adult’s television drama, and this interacts with the adult themes of adultery, murder and sex in The Great Albert to create a curious push-pull interplay in it.

The adult themes in it, and the amorality of Matthew’s mother and Oliver, are given particular expression in one scene where his mother talks salaciously with Oliver on the phone, who at one point seems to make some kind of overtly sexual suggestion to her about their upcoming plan to kill her husband and their future lives together which she finds exciting and arousing, and she notably gleefully and without any hint of disapproval tells him that he is “sick”.

Interconnected with which, Matthew’s mother, as in part referred to above, is depicted as something of an obnoxious, self-centred, demanding and shrewish harpy horror in terms of her personality and behaviour, even before she helps to kill her husband, and she is very dismissive of Matthew and notably prioritises her own wants and needs at the expense of his. However, after her husband’s murder, she seems to be duplicitously transformed into a doting mother, albeit one who is still markedly smug, and there is little sense that she will be suffering Lady Macbeth-esque sleepless nights about her part in her husband’s murder.

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This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

The A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals is Book of the Week at independent and DIY electronic music zine Moonbuilding’s Weekly Substack roundup:

https://moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-102-3-april-2026

The review is written by Cathi Unsworth, the author of many fine noir novels and also Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, and it’s an intriguing wandering through the “wyrd” transmissions of teatime TV back when and other related “ghost signal” topics…

…and it shares company at Moonbuilding Weekly Issue 102 with reviews of new releases by various purveyors of spectral audio including Pulselovers and sometime Ghost Box Record-er Pye Corner Audio ft. Andy Bell (of Ride)…

Thanks to Neil Mason of Moonbuilding and Cathi Unsworth, much appreciated indeed (!)

Links elsewhere:
The Ghost Signals review at Moonbuilding Weekly
Moonbuilding’s Bandcamp
Cathi Unsworth’s website
Review of Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth book at Wyrd Britain

Links at A Year In The Country:
The Ghost Signals book

A Pattern of Roses (1983) is set in the early 1980s and centres around a 17-year-old called Tim, played by Stuart MacKenzie, whose family is affluent due to his father being the owner of a successful advertising company and who is staying with his parents at their second home in the countryside while he recuperates from glandular fever.

Tim begins to experience timeslip-esque visions of a young labourer called Tom in the early twentieth century who died tragically young and whose life has some parallels with his own; they both enjoy drawing, and drawings made by Tom that Tim sees appear to act as an opening gateway to his visions. After Tim tells the somewhat feisty and non-conventional local vicar’s daughter, Rebecca, about his visions, they start to try and piece together the story of Tom’s life and death.

Broadcast by Channel 4 it is an adaptation of K. M. Peyton’s 1972 children’s novel of the same name, and it has some notable cultural points of pedigree, including that it was directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who created and directed all but one of the first strand of the BBC’s anthology drama series A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-1978). Rebecca is played by Suzanna Hamilton, who went on to play the pleasure-loving non-conformist Julia in Michael Radford’s titular film adaptation of George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984, which was released in the year of its name. While Tom’s mentor and patron is played by Kathryn Pogson, who in the folk horror-esque dark fairytale film A Company of Wolves (1984) played a young bride who is terrorised by her husband, who turns out to be a werewolf. Alongside which, it marked the first major screen appearance for Helena Bonham Carter, who would go on to achieve prominent success in film, and who here plays a privileged young woman called Netty who becomes involved in Tom’s life.

The supernatural elements are in some ways fairly slight and tangential to its subplots, which are perhaps in fact its main plotlines and themes and that in large part revolve around the restrictions and expectations that class and privilege place on people’s lives.

Tim rejects his parents’ plans for him to go to an elite university in preparation for taking over his father’s business and after initially saying he wants to concentrate on his artwork, he goes to work in a blacksmiths, albeit, as he openly admits, he is able to do this and live as a “subsidised labourer” as he is still living rent free in his family’s second home and his parents are paying for his food etc. In contrast, Tom is naturally skilled at drawing, but his social and economic position as a labourer means that his opportunities to explore his creativity are severely curtailed.

It is in part a notable Cold War time capsule, as the church which Rebecca’s father preaches at has a collection tin for the real world organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) prominently on display, while the kitchen of where Rebecca and her parents live is practically wallpapered in CND and related posters etc, and the decorations at a Christmas party that is held at her home seem to be almost exclusively CND related. It seems to be her father and not Rebecca who is responsible for these decorations etc, which further adds to the Cold War time capsule aspects as during the 1970s and 1980s in the UK a number of Christian clerics were involved in CND, which proved controversial, particularly in the case of Catholic priest Bruce Kent who in the 1980s became the movement’s most prominent figure and public face, alongside periodically serving as CND’s General Secretary and Chair between 1979 and 1990.

That it’s Rebecca’s father and not, despite her apparently non-conformist stance, Rebecca herself who is responsible for the CND decorations etc can be seen as a reflection of how the more privileged teenage characters’, i.e. Rebecca and Tim’s, various stances of non-conformity and rebellion seem more akin to self-centred, self-absorbed and self-serving brattishness rather than any form of meaningful rebellious stance against injustice in society. Interconnected with which, in an echoing down through time manner, Tom seems to be a good-hearted innocent abroad who becomes a temporary plaything for the brattishly insolent privileged teenager Netty, which ultimately leads to his doom when she self-centredly implores him to save her dog from drowning, during which he himself drowns.

Tim relives Tom’s death via his recurring timeslip-esque visions of Tom’s life, which almost causes him to drown as he has become so absorbed in and intent on finding out what happened to Tom. However, Rebecca saves him, and in a final sequence where he appears to begin to consummate their thus far unexpressed attraction for one another, he tells her that Tom and his visions of him are gone and that while Tom had to do what was expected of him, he is able to make his own choices. While this could be considered to be a celebratory moment and declaration, due to the collective self-centred brattishness of the privileged teenagers in the story, it could potentially be viewed as being a self-congratulatory embracing of privilege and even dismissal of Tom’s life and the restrictions that were placed on it.

Returning to the Cold War aspects and their intertwining with the church and religion, at one point, a local groundsman, who gives Tim and Rebecca information about Tom’s life, says that in Tom’s time, the local vicar was a “fierce man” who, because of his hellfire and damnation style of preaching, was known as Brimstone Bellinger:

“They were the bosses round here in those days. Pettigrew owned all the land and brimstoners… owned our souls.”

It could be considered that in Tim and Rebecca’s time, the local vicar, via his promotion of CND, still preached about “hellfire and damnation”, albeit from a markedly different standpoint, where such things were derived from weapons of mass destruction rather than his predecessor’s literal “hellfire”, and that he preached about such things to try and prevent the destruction of the world and its population rather than using related symbolism etc as a way of instilling propriety and religious beliefs in people.

* * *

This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

Ghost Signals is the Book of the Week at The Idler’s website this week (starting 23rd March 2026 to be precise)…

It’s in some fine’n’fascinating former “Book of the Week” company there, including to name just a few:

David Bramwell’s Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man Scrapbook in which he “unravels the history of The Wicker Man” and the sing-along Wicker Man shows in which he’s been performing as Lord Summerisle since 2010.

Lead guitarist with Roxy Music Phil Manzanera’s memoir Revolución to Roxy… a memoir written by one of the art pop rock aliens who first landed in the middle of Top of the Pops and pop culture back in the early 1970s and who helped create the dystopian ache of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”?… where do I sign up?

Simon McKay’s Dear Fenella… 90 Years, 90 Letters…, which is his biography of iconic Carry On actress Fenalla “Do you mind if I smoke?” Fielding, which is based on 90 letters and “a feast of unseen Fenella photos”… oh dear, it’s looking like making this list might prove more than a little temptingly punishing for the old bank balance…

Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures which, as its title suggests, explores the “neither plant nor animal” world and ways of fungi, and which would make a good companion for The Creeping Garden documentary on slime moulds which I’ve written about before.

Julian Marsh’s The Big Midweek – Life Inside The Fall, his memoir of life playing with left-of-left-of-centre auteur pop maverick band The Fall.

Charlie “The Fast Show, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) etc” Higson’s novel Whatever Gets You Through the Night which has been intriguingly described as “[Delivering] the atmosphere of a classic Sixties thriller in a contemporary setting, peering into the dark underbelly of a sunny Med holiday spot”.

More iconic pop rock journeying via Gary Lachman’s memoir Touched by the Presence: From Blondie’s Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult, in which he traces his “journey from bassist and founding member of Blondie to writer on consciousness and the esoteric tradition”.

Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop visual memoir, designed by Julian House of Ghost Box Records, in which he unearths and explores pop culture, his background, the birth of his band Pulp etc via the contents of his loft (!)

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey in which he continues his psychogeographic wanderings through the landscape, history etc, which in this book involves a journey through the “Hidden worlds beneath our feet… From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves…”

The Idler is a multi-faceted project that began in 1993 which has the aim of helping people to “slow down, have fun, live well” and has released magazines, books, hosted festivals, runs online courses, ran a bookshop, cafe and event venue etc. More details at the links below.

Thanks to Michael Meekin, the deputy editor of The Idler, for including Ghost Signals in their Books of the Week, and to author Cathi Unsworth for helping to make it happen. Ta indeed!

Links elsewhere:
The Idler’s Ghost Signals Book of the Week post
The Idler’s Book of the Week archive
Cathi Unsworth’s website
Review of Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth book at Wyrd Britain

Paperback and ebook released.

Paperback and ebook available at Lulu, Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Germany and Amazon’s other worldwide sites. Ebook also available at Kobo, Apple Books etc.

The paperback is also available to order from other online and bricks and mortar shops; please contact them directly for more information.

Exploring the Haunted Airwaves

Before the ubiquity of streaming, British television was a landscape with room for strange experiments, folk-horror nightmares, and “wyrd” transmissions. Today, many of these programmes have vanished from official channels, leaving behind only “ghost signals“: a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet.

Ghost Signals maps this territory from 1968 – the foundational “wyrd” year of acid folk and iconic folk horror – to 1995, the dawn of the digital revolution. The book delves into a unique era where public funding met social experimentation, creating a “broad diet” of television that was often as challenging as it was chilling.

This landscape invited viewers to encounter the seasonal hauntings of A Ghost Story for Christmas, the suburban occult of Scorpion Tales: Great Albert, and the layered mythologies of The Moon Stallion. It was a time that embraced the edgeland quiet horror of Unnatural Causes: Lost Property, the prescient virtual worlds of Play for Tomorrow: Shades, and the metatextual timeslip satire of ScreenPlay: The Black and Blue Lamp. From the paranormal pathways of Leap in the Dark: Jack Be Nimble to the non-horror folk horror of Play for Today: The Lonely Man’s Lover, these broadcasts pushed the boundaries of the terrestrial signal.

Released as part of the A Year In The Country project – which explores the intersection of folk horror, hauntology, and the “eerie” landscape – Ghost Signals is a journey through the fading frequencies of a spectral past: the hidden gems that continue to resonate within our collective cultural memory, flourishing quietly in the digital attic of the internet.

Format: paperback and ebook
Author, artwork, photography and design: Stephen Prince
Publisher: A Year In The Country
Page count: 140 pages

Chapter List:

1. A Ghost Story for Christmas – Whistle and I’ll Come to You, The Stalls of Barchester and The Icehouse: A Lineage of Seasonal Hauntings

2. Tales of Unease: Conjuring Half-Hour Worlds of Unsettling Tension and Intrigue

3. Play For Today – The Lonely Man’s Lover and Stronger Than the Sun: From the Fields of Non-Horror Folk Horror to Seaside Secret State Cycle Subterfuge

4. Scorpion Tales – The Great Albert: Occult Summonings and Ambiguity in Suburbia

5. The Moon Stallion: A Teatime Layering of Legend and Mythology

6. Leap in the Dark – Jack Be Nimble: Pathways Through Paranormal Powers and Between the Roots of Magic and Glamour

7. The Bells of Astercote: Trapped Forever Guarding the Chalice

8. A Pattern of Roses: Timeslip Echoes and Cold War Controversies

9. Play for Tomorrow – Shades: Escaping from Real World Shadows Into Prescient Virtual Worlds

10. Dramarama – Spooky: The Exorcism of Amy: Stepping Into a Fever Dream Nightmare

11. Screen Two – Unfair Exchanges and The Blue Boy: A Multi-Layered Shadowed Whirlwind of Creativity, Paranoia and Fringe Science, A Phantom’s Revenge and Roads to Doom

12. Unnatural Causes – Lost Property: A Bubble Edgeland of Quiet Horror

13. ScreenPlay – The Black and Blue Lamp: Metatextual Satire and Preternatural Timeslip to Life on Mars and Back

14. The Plant: Unearthing a Leafy Suburban Invasion

Appendix: A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk, Folk Horror and Explorations of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape

“For any self-respecting hauntologist, A Year In The Country is a treasure trove of wyrd delights.” Sarah Gregory, Shindig!

“A Year In The Country is steadily building up a body of work that presents an alternative view of rural Britain and the project’s output is consistently fascinating.” Psychogeographic Review

“A Year In The Country make excellent music and excellent books about all things dark rural, folk horror, liminal England and hauntology.” Stuart Maconie, Freak Zone, BBC Radio 6

“A Year In The Country epitomises the confluence of interest and dark synergy between nature, myth, occultism and ghost traces of hauntological memory.” Rob Young, The Magic Box

The A Year In The Country project began in 2014 and was founded and is run by Stephen Prince. As part of its exploration of the “wyrd” and spectral undercurrents of culture and the landscape there have been eight non-fiction books, two novellas, an artwork book and 29 albums, EPs and singles released, alongside over 1,600 blog, artwork etc posts on its website.

The Lonely Man’s Lover (1974), directed by Brian Parker and written by Barry Collins, was broadcast as part of the BBC’s anthology drama series Play for Today (1970-1984), and centres around a young woman called Lizzie, played by Jan Francis, who lives and works on a farm close to a small village in the Northern English County of Yorkshire, where the drama was shot on location. Since Lizzie’s father died, she and her mother, Sarah, played by Anne Dyson, have lived on the farm alone, and their work and way of life appear harsh, tough and almost as though it is from an earlier time, and apart from a milking machine, there is little sign of mechanisation on the farm.

Lizzie is engaged to a young local farmer called David, played by Struan Roger, but she feels restricted by her rural farming-based way of life and the pre-set expectation that she will help keep the farm going. A writer called Daniel, played by David Bailie, has moved with his son to the area, and Lizzie becomes smitten and infatuated with him, even though she’s never met or talked to him, but for her, due to his being a writer, he represents a more cultured alternative to her way of life. Subsequently, she argues with her mother about her interest in and the worth of culture and splits up with her fiancée and then leaves her home, goes to the writer’s house and tells him that she needs somewhere to hide and starts to live with and become romantically involved with him.

The music on the soundtrack is by the real-world local(ish) band The Oldham Tinkers, who create an evocative traditional folk music soundtrack which uses distinctive local vernacular. Accompanying which, the area in which the story is set is shown as still being steeped in tradition in terms of local dialect, folk rituals, a narrow set of expectations and roles in life etc. However, it’s also on the cusp of change as the farms are said to be “on the slide”, i.e., struggling financially, which is said by locals in a disparaging and even fearful of change manner to be partly due to the newcomers and so-called “arty folk” who are moving into the area.

The writer is part and a reflection of this change, and although he’s only recently started renting his house, he has local roots as his grandfather owned the closed-down local mill. However, he doesn’t appear to have made or make any effort to maintain or nurture his connection with the area and the people who live there, alongside which he isn’t an especially likeable character and has a subtly expressed air of superior snobbishness about him, and he subtly mocks the locals and their traditions.

Further reflecting his lack of commitment to the area and perhaps his general arrogant urban outsider/tourist-like lack of respect etc for the locals, although Lizzie becomes pregnant by him, he still carries through with his plans to leave and go back to London without her. After he’s gone Lizzie goes back to live with her mother and when she dies she sells the farm and plans to leave; her ex-fiancé tries to get her to stay in the local area but she says that she needs room to grow, to which he replies there’s plenty of space where they are and points out the nearby fields but this literal “plenty of space” isn’t the kind of space that Lizzie wants for herself, rather she is still looking and wishing for a different way of life.

During the drama, there is often a background babble of gossiping and often disapproving comments by unseen locals, and the views they express are often very traditional and restrictive in terms of life choices. This coupled with Lizzie’s mother’s berating of her about her interest in culture and the way in which she seems more passionate and interested in it rather than the upkeep of the farm and also a more surreal or at least non-realist sequence shot with distorted angles where the locals and the writer’s face bear down on Lizzie gives the drama an oppressive and claustrophobic air and adds to the sense of her being hemmed in by her life.

This is further added to by a backstory which tells of how when Lizzie’s father died, she was taken out of school by her mother to help work on and keep the farm going, alongside which, in a manner that acts as a precursor and interconnection with Lizzie’s frustrations about her life and wishing to spread her wings culturally etc, she is shown when she was at school making art in a creatively nurturing environment where pupil’s paintings have been put up over much of the walls and her teacher is shown to have been supportive of her creative leanings.

Later, the teacher is shown trying to visit Lizzie on the farm, but her mother won’t let her onto it, and the teacher says to her that when she took Lizzie out of school, she felt they were battling for her soul. Interconnecting with this “battle for her soul”, Lizzie is finally prompted to leave the farm when her mother’s disapproval and berating of her interest in culture finds a physical expression when she rips down the music etc posters on Lizzie’s bedroom walls and burns the writer’s books which she has been reading.

It’s an oddly contrasting drama in some ways, as although it is in large part fairly realist in terms of its presentation, it has an air of being folk horror without containing any actual horror. During much of it there’s a palpable but not always easy to define sense of dread and it utilises and explores a number of tropes that have come to be connected with folk horror such as traditional folk rituals, an outsider (the writer) who is isolated in a rural community and who comes into conflict with its traditions etc and a sense that at any moment tensions will boil over and somebody, or a group of people, will turn against somebody else with possibly deadly results.

The viewer is left guessing if that will happen and if it does, who it will be: will it be the locals whose offscreen voices are repeatedly heard berating the “odd” outsider writer who turn up mob-handed, burning torches aloft to lynch him, or will it be the writer who kills Lizzie? The latter of these outcomes is lent a degree of credence, as, alongside him being an unsettling, distant and arrogant cold fish, the locals’ voices keep saying that they’ve heard his wife drowned, and it’s not clear if she was murdered or not.

Alongside which, there are quite a few mentions by the offscreen locals’ voices where they talk about the nearby rural town of Hebden and how it’s gone “arty”, and there’s a sense that the locals fear and will possibly in some way fiercely resist such things spreading like a contagion to their hometown. As a possible outcome, this seems as though it may not end well for Lizzie and the writer, as they are easy potential scapegoats due to being a prominent outpost and signifier of such changes, and the locals’ offscreen voices disparagingly call them “hippies” for living together out of wedlock.

Further adding to the sense that the drama may become more overtly folk horror-like, when the traditional folk celebration May Day comes around, and while Lizzie is living with the writer and his son, he says they have a present for her, which is a traditional folk ritual-style May Queen wooden garland that he’s been shown carving. When he puts it on her head, his son, at one of the few points when he talks, says that it’s a snake which is biting its own tail. This markedly adds to the sense of potential folk horror dread, and with knowledge of the tropes of folk horror, it’s easy to see this gift giving and the son’s description of it as possibly being the start of a murderous ritual of some sort. Accompanying which the sense that the drama may turn out to be an overt form of folk horror is heightened by knowledge that its writer Barry Collins would go on to script a 1976 BBC production called The Witches of Pendle which dramatised the notorious real world 1612 Pendle witch trials where nine women and two men were accused and tried for the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft in the Northern English town of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, ten of whom were found guilty and executed by hanging.

However, ultimately the drama turns out to be merely the story of a young woman who wants something different to the traditional rural farming way of life that has been mapped out for her, which comes as something of a relief in a way because of the increasingly layered signposting in the story and its atmosphere etc which seem to be pointing towards something far more deadly.

Interconnecting with and reflecting Lizzie’s yearning for a different way of life, her character is stylish in appearance, which, due to her modish haircut, is still the case even when she’s shown in her working farm clothes. She is markedly more stylish when she is in her “civvies” which have a late-1960s to mid-1970s Biba-esque urban fashionableness to them and which include a stylish red plastic mac that looks markedly out of place when she is taking a walk through the countryside, and the overall effect of her style choices seem to indicate that she is already bursting out of the preset pathways of her life.

Returning to her relationship with the writer, it seems as though she is perhaps more in love with the idea of what he represents, i.e., a different way of life and an escape from her own, rather than him as a person. Indeed, as alluded to earlier there’s not all that much to love about him: he is something of an arrogant and distant cold fish and has an unappealing brusqueness, alongside which there is a sense that Lizzie may well just be a passing distraction for him, essentially a form of local colour, and that his relationship with her may merely be a way in which, consciously or not, he is researching the local way of life and its older folk rituals etc for his writing.

Adding to his unlikeable characteristics, when, after Lizzie and him have been living together for a while, he asks her if she’s pregnant and she tells him she is he doesn’t even suggest supporting her in any way other than saying that although, as in part discussed above, he’s still planning to leave, he’s paid another month’s rent on the house and she can stay after he leaves if she likes. The marked ungenerous at best nature of this offer is heightened even further, as he knows she has no way of supporting herself, so it is a very hollow offer.

His response is also odd because he has a young son, so it’s not as though he is unused to rearing children, but he doesn’t even seem to consider the option of helping support his and Lizzie’s unborn child, perhaps raising it together or in some way co-parenting. All of which adds to the just-mentioned sense that Lizzie may have been merely a passing “local colour” distraction and could potentially be seen as a comment on cultural and societal tourism, particularly when undertaken by members of an urban-based cultural elite. It also perhaps even suggests that if the drama had become more overtly folk horror-like, then the locals turning up mob-handed with burning torches aloft to, if not actually lynch him, then to at least impel him to undertake his parental responsibilities would not have been a completely unreasonable response (!).

The sense that something like that may eventually occur is hinted at the start of the drama when, during a traditional folk ritual play/procession in the village streets, one of the locals tells the writer to “get back to where you belong”, i.e., the city. Reflecting the local open hostility about outsiders and newcomers and the changes they bring about, the local goes on to berate the writer about how in contemporary times there are only a few locals there to watch the procession and that the old ways and such rituals have been reduced to being merely tourist attractions performed by schoolchildren, whereas once upon a time that he and generations of the men in his family played key roles in the procession.

Contrasting with this stance and her ex-fiancé, David, as previously mentioned, saying that there is space amongst the fields etc for her to grow, towards the end of the drama, Lizzie says to David that the hills and the local people crush people. However, in turn in contrast with this, during the drama David says that the newcomers are moving to the area because the towns have crushed them and that although the resulting changes in the area have caused the also previously mentioned “slide” in farming, that after a period of turbulence things will find their balance again but this is not enough to dissuade Lizzie from seeking a new life elsewhere.

The story ends on a melancholy-tinged but hopeful note; after David makes one last attempt to try and convince Lizzie to stay, which in a kindly way she says no to, he says, “Goodbye, Lizzie”. There’s a sadness and finality to this, but also a sense of acceptance, and it seems as though he knows and accepts that things change and, although he is sad about losing Lizzie, that he himself is okay with staying and riding out the turbulence of the changes to the area that newcomers are bringing.

When David asks Lizzie if she and her child will be okay, she tells him that now her mother has passed away and the farm is to be sold that this will pay her family’s debts and she will be left with some money to tide her over, and her overall outlook about her potentially precarious situation and the risks she is taking in changing her life seems to be positive.

Ultimately, the drama doesn’t present a straightforward black and white good or bad view of either the newcomers, as represented by the writer, or the locals, the latter of whom David describes as gathering vultures at an auction where the household items from Lizzie’s farm are being sold. However, overall, David seems like something of a beacon of decency, and there’s an unspoken sense that he would be prepared to take on and support another man’s child.

As a final note, there is notable poignancy when, during the just-mentioned auction, the auctioneer is selling Lizzie’s guitar, which has been shown in her bedroom a number of times, but which, in the drama, she is not shown as actually playing. The auctioneer describes it as being in as new condition, and there is a sense that it, along with the music and culture prints on Lizzie’s bedroom walls, is perhaps more important as a signifier of a possible other way of life rather than Lizzie being intrinsically interested in them.

* * *

This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

The supernatural short drama Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), which was written and directed by Jonathan Miller and aired as an episode of the BBC documentary series Omnibus (1967-2003), inspired Lawrence Gordon Clark to create the first strand of the renowned yearly BBC supernatural anthology drama series A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-1978), which Whistle and I’ll Come to You has come to be considered a part of, and that he directed all but the final episode of. The first five of these that were officially broadcast, as with Whistle and I’ll Come to You, were based on the ghost stories of author and academic M.R. James (1862-1936), which are considered by many critics, authors and readers to be some of the genre’s finest English language examples and also to have been widely influential on modern horror.

In Whistle and I’ll Come to You, an academic, Professor Parkin, who is on an off-season holiday at a guesthouse in a coastal village where the guests are pampered in a primly formal manner, finds an old whistle amongst the bones from a grave that has been exposed by coastal erosion. The whistle has a Latin phrase on it which translates as “Who is this who is coming?” and when the Professor blows it, he appears to unleash a supernatural force or creature which begins to haunt and markedly unsettle him.

The professor initially seems like a bumblingly likeable eccentric, which is aided by Michael Hordern’s screen presence and persona, that, for some viewers, myself included, may conjure up hazy memories of gently comedic film and television from childhood. However, he is subtly but steadily revealed to be a self-satisfied academic who, at best, struggles, or more likely can’t be bothered, with even the most basic common politeness in his interactions with others.

Filmed in black and white, it creates a notably eerie atmosphere often largely through suggestion, although it uses to great effect what has now become a staple in horror film and television, the distant, implacable supernatural creature that steadily hunts down its conversely panicked prey. Here, the “creature” is seen in the real world, biding its time as it watches the professor from a distance on the beach and appears to finally catch up with him in his dreams before issuing a startlingly effective jump scare-inducing truncated roar. Accompanying which the production, design etc, as a whole often seems closer to, say, an almost experimental arthouse film rather than a mainstream television drama due to its use of, amongst other things, unusual and borderline surreal high and low camera angles and a markedly restrained stillness in terms of pacing, events and atmosphere.

The story is somewhat ambiguous, and it isn’t clear if the professor is losing his mind or is he actually experiencing supernatural phenomena, and if he is, whether or not it is a form of harsh punishment for his self-absorbed intellectual arrogance, refusal to accept other and others’ viewpoints and dabbling in things better left alone, which are recurring themes in M. R. James’s ghost stories. The answers to such questions are left forever unanswered on the stark and eerie monochrome beaches of Whistle and I’ll Come to You.

As a final point, the first strand of A Ghost Story for Christmas has been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the BFI, but its official streaming availability in the UK has been, particularly for such a renowned and relatively high-profile series, intriguingly intermittent. It was made available, for a limited time, on both BBC iPlayer and BFIPlayer, but at the time of writing, none of the episodes are available to officially stream in the UK.

* * *

This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.

A somewhat regal folk art-esque straw sculpture… or is it another 1970s Doctor Who monster that’s escaped into the real world?

“This is a straw ‘sculpture’ of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred. Originally, the figure had a wooden sword in one hand and a straw scroll in the other, representing both the warrior and the scholar. It is actually one of three figures made by master thatcher Jesse Maycock for the annual University College ball, Oxford, in 1961. One figure was a seated King Alfred, while the other was William Archdeacon of Durham, the founder of the College in 1247. Jesse created King Alfred using the same techniques involved in making a thatched roof, where straw or reeds are used protect the top of a building.” (Quoted from “King Alfred”, The Museum of English Rural Life (merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/objects/king-alfred/), date and author unknown.)

A Popular Witchcraft poster design by Julian House of Ghost Box Records for, I think, a 2012 exhibition in Scotland at the Good Press Gallery, which was in the back of the Mono cafe bar and music venue, where the Monorail record shop also is…

It incorporates a number of “classic” Julian House Ghost Box design tropes; “otherly geometry”, jumpcut-like collaging and the sense of being some kind of possibly educational (meets occult) journal or magazine from the later 1960s or 1970s that you can only remember on the edges of memory…

This is a still from the 2000-2001 remake (revival?) of the supernatural detective series Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), which was created and written by Charlie Higson and starred Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer, Emilia Fox and Tom Baker.

I still find myself thinking about the series quite a bit. Perhaps in part because, at times, as suggested by the folk art creepily folk horror-esque figures above, it explored various “wyrd” and folk horror-like themes a fair while before the more recent(ish) post-2010 upsurge of interest in such things:

“The episode Man of Substance… seems to predate Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz film of 2007 by a year or few in a number of its themes, borrowings, and the story of a sleepy country idyll gone bad and is rather folk horror-like in its setting and plot… The village has a dark secret or two, and quite quickly it becomes apparent that something is not quite right in this particular chocolate box and the village is revealed as having a kind of parallel world existence… Its population have been trapped in between life and death, unable to leave the village since the days that a pestilence had caused the demise of a considerable percentage of the English population a number of centuries previously… Along the way towards the almost taking over the world shenanigans that the villagers get up to, the episode wanders into the territory of and borrows from: The Wicker Man, with petal scattering woodland nymphs dancing through the churchyard. 1970s and early 1980s British horror portmanteau films, such as The Monster Club (1981) and one of their “you’re never going to escape from the village” plots. Medievalistic fetishistic pleasures by way of Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968). A touch of Hansel and Gretel and the fattening up of the chosen calves. The… unpleasant punishments of the incarcerated via Witchfinder General (1968) or its less well-known brethren The Bloody Judge (1970). Possibly even a touch of Penda’s Fen (1974) and its sense of the mythic and mystical in the landscape and returning kings. And then back to The Wicker Man, as the fool becomes the king for the day (and eternity) during a local festival in service of the community’s ends, where a pyre is made for a sacrificial burning.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018).)

An ethereal, spectral, otherworldly image of Kate Bush from her self-directed Experiment IV music video, which could maybe be considered and odd choice for a single and video released to help promote a greatest hits album ( 1986’s The Whole Story)… although looking back at Kate Bush’s work I supposed “a bit odd as a choice for a single” could well be considered to be a fair part of her modus operandi…

Why potentially a bit odd for a greatest hits album’s promo single choice? Well, it’s a mini-concept song and video about a secret military plan to create a sound which is horrific enough to kill people. The video was shot in a disused military hospital, and by the end of it, nearly every person who has worked on the project has been killed by the sound, which has conjured and is personified by Kate Bush, who transforms from an angelic apparition into a terrifying flying monster.

According to cultural norms, that should be thoroughly mainstream chart music unfriendly  (!)… although as The Whole Story album went to Number 1 in the UK charts, and Experiment IV went to number 23, perhaps a lesson could be learnt from them, as with the success and popularity of Kate Bush’s work in general, about the public’s willingness to embrace more left-of-centre exploratory work.

(As an aside, the cover art for the Experiment IV singles almost all featured a fairly standard promo-style portrait headshot of Kate Bush that gave no hint of the unsettling nature of the song and the video… apart from one Italian radio promo single which featured somewhat curiously markedly, and in part, grotesquely, psychedelic artwork that looks closer to something you might find being used as, say, the cover art for a 1970s scifi novel or maybe a 1970s prog rock album.)

A one-minute version was created for the BBC’s popular and highly influential chart music show Top of the Pops, but they refused to play it as it was considered “too violent”

Looking back, Experiment IV could be considered to have parallels with and connections to Cold War-inspired and often apocalyptic pop music singles that were released during the early to mid-1980s, including, amongst others, Nena’s 99 “Red Balloons”, Strawberry Switchblade’s “Since Yesterday” and Frankie Goes to Hollywoods “Two Tribes”. Those, as with Experiment IV, were released to a background of heightened Cold War tensions, although the Experiment IV video seems, perhaps, in part, to more hark back to an earlier time of unsettling and paranoid science fiction, such as the earlier Quatermass series, rather than be an overt reference to and exploration of Cold War fears during the 1980s.

Curiously, two of the prominent members of the Experiment IV cast, Dawn French and Hugh Laurie, were people who were known at the time (and to a degree still are) as comedians, which, back when, and to a certain extent still does, added a curious sense of disjuncture to watching it.

And further curiously, it seems to have been remade/reimagined as a 7-minute black and white short film in 2025 by, I think, Manchester/Salford-based student filmmakers who are connected with the EX4 Collective.

That has an IMDb page with some limited details, such as it being directed by Chloe Jolly and written by Sam Hill and some photographs etc but other than that there seems to be little information about it online, although its plot looks like it’s been lent an added poignant slant as in it a “deaf scientist is forced to create a sound that can kill or face the wrath of her military captors”.

A fine slice of folk art from Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive book which collects together examples of creative work from every day life in the UK, often things which may not be considered art with a capital A by its makers or wider society… in it you’ll find amongst other things tattoos and tattoo guns,  burger van signs, illustrations painted onto the bonnets of cars and crash helmets, fairground paintings, sandcastles, cake decorations, Christmas decorations, protest banners, shop and cafe signs, decorative costume for a night out or a carnival, clairvoyant hand signs, crop circles and also things related to folk rituals etc.

The scarecrow in this photograph seems to be both “1970s kids TV-esque” friendly and sinister, and I love the way it uses the “found object” of “dad’s old shirt”…

A 3D D.I.Y. diorama of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape made and sold by HeyKidsRocknRoll.

As with this diorama, HeyKidsRocknRoll’s dioramas etc often have a playful “fun” and subtly humoruous quality and it always make me smile when I have a wander over to see what they’ve got for sale in their Etsy shop… and I generally get a “quick, hide my (digital) wallet” feeling as I often want a fair few of the things they’ve got for sale…

Which at the moment includes, amongst other things, various pop’n’rock music-orientated things such as a The Fall/Michael Clarke Dance Co. “I Am Curious Orange” Toy Theatre Diorama, a “Stop Making Sense big suit” style David Byrne Jumping Jack Puppet and Kate Bush “red dress” Wuthering Heights Felt Hanging Decorations…

…plus various more wyrd and hauntology friendly items such as various “Folk Fancies” including a Welsh Mari Lwyd folk ritual hobby horse and a ghostly Straw Man finger puppet/tree topper and Delia Derbyshire, Suzanne Ciani and Quatermass and the Pit dioramas…

A photograph of people in Biddy Boy costumes from Homer Sykes’ Biddy Boys 1972 photography zine/booklet published by Café Royal Books, a company/project that specialises in publishing generally short zine-like booklets of documentary photography, often from decades gone by.

What are Biddy Boys, you may say? They are are participants in an old Irish traditional folk custom that’s celebrated on St. Brigid’s Eve (January 31st) and St Brigid’s Days (February 1st) and are part of, as I expect a lot of such things are, a ritual that blends pre-Christian and Christian traditions which is intended to give protection from illness and evil spirits, welcome spring and ensure fertility and prosperity in the coming year.

The Brídeóg (Biddy) group tend to wear straw hats, masks and at times women’s or inside-out clothing to disguise themselves, and they travel from house to house carrying a Brídeóg (or Biddy), which is a small doll or effigy that represents St. Brigid, which is usually made from straw, rushes or reeds and is dressed in white cloth.

When they visit houses, the Biddy Boys sing songs, play music and dance, and they request money, food, or sweets, and it is considered a blessing and an obligation for the household to offer a donation so that they can  receive Saint Brigid’s protection.

All of which aside, the photograph and the costumes in it make me think of a traditional folk ritual as interpreted by iconic new wave pranksters Devo (!)…

And while I’m talking about Homer Sykes, above is a photograph of a folk ritual hobby horse taken by him in Minehead in 1971.

Homer Sykes has been photographing and documenting traditional British folklore customs and annual events since the 1970s, and his 1977 book Once a Year, which collected his photographs from seven years of travelling around Britain photographing traditional British folk customs, was an early inspiration and reference point for what became A Year In The Country.

As I’ve written at A Year In The Country previously, his photographs of British folk rituals can be seen as being part of a lineage of related work, that includes more recent photography books which document British folk rituals, including amongst others Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year, Merry Brownfield’s Merry England and Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica and also Benjamin Stone’s photographs of British folkloric rituals from the late 19th and early 20th century.

One of the things I find fascinating about some of Homer Syke’s 1970s photographs of folk rituals is the way that they combine and contrast such things with being snapshots and time capsules of the day-to-day aesthetics and ways of life of the times, such as in the above photograph, where the hobby horse looks like a strange surreal out-of-time-and-place alien that is being watched fascinatedly by a lone young boy on an otherwise almost starkly empty suburban seeming street…

Does anybody remember the Folk Horror Review blog which, as its name suggest, included writing about folk horror related culture and that was online in the early 2010s, back when all things folk horror and Wicker Man-esque etc were still fairly niche, esoteric and even more than a little arcane (imagine that, seems like a very far off cultural landscape nowadays!).

As I in part wrote at the AYITC site a few years or so ago, the Folk Horror Review blog contained writing about, amongst other things, various films, TV programmes etc that have now become prominent and well explored folk horror and wyrd Albion touchstones, including amongst other things The Wicker Man, its unofficial forebear Robin Redbreast, ghostly scribe Arthur Machen, Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England, Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, various BBC Ghost Stories For Christmas, Children Of The Stones, Psychomania etc…

It seems like nowadays the blog has very much become a digital spectre as it doesn’t even seem to have been fully archived by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine that wanders the web capturing time capsule snapshots of websites and pages etc…

And while we’re talking about the early 2010s and some of the recent(ish) roots of the contemporary flowering of interest in all things wyrd Albion-esque… above is one of the early Folklore Tapes releases, which featured a spoken word dreamland conjuring meets performance art-esque piece by Paper Dollhouse and an entrancingly otherworldly, beautiful and at times ghostly and spectral set of six “songs” by sometimes A Year In The Country contributor Magpahi (aka Alison Cooper):

“Rituals and Practices… features a grimoire of sonic spells exploring symbolic customs and activities from the county of Devon… Magpahi weaves together a rich tapestry encompassing six different forms of ritual from the West Country, largely informaed by the work of late folklorist Theo Brown. Alison presents a sonic vitrine of tales and customs. Among them are the salting down of a corpse at an isloated Dartmoor inn; the plaiting of corn dollies in the field, tied from standing sheaves; the dangers of picking the white flower flowers of stitchwort (which may result in being spirit-led away by malignant pixie folk); and the work of witches and charmers in Devon, including their use of snakeskin for cures.” (Quoted from text which accompanied the vinyl reissue of Magpahi’s work for Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. IV.)

For myself Magpahi’s work for this release sits alongside Cat’s Eyes soundtrack for Peter Strickland’s 2014 film The Duke of Burgundy and some of Broadcast’s work, in particular on Mother is the Milky Way, in terms of its intertwining of the accessibility of (avant) pop music with explorations of far off fields in a netherworld of the imagination. Lovely stuff…

If memory serves correctly this was a promotional postcard that I picked up in a mainstream high street store a fair few years or more ago… I know next to nothing about the photograph but its lingered in my mind and I still find myself wondering what the story behind the plane’s fuselage ending up abandoned in what seems to be possibly a wood or forest was…

Handmade paper cut mask from (I think) the early 2010s… created by Amy Flurry and Nikki Salk, aka the Paper-Cut-Project… it has a stylish elegance and brings to mind the procession masks in The Wicker Man possibly by way of couture fashion and the 18th century French aristocracy’s Court of Versailles…

If you’re going to be an abandoned house that’s been reclaimed by nature and is featured in a book of urbex photography then don’t mess about but go the whole “Hansel and Gretel stumbled on the witch’s house in the woods” vibe (!)

(Photo from the Naturalia: Overgrown Abandoned Places book by Jonathan Jonk Jiminez, who also published the Spomenik book of huge concrete and steel war memorials that were commissioned by Yugoslavian President in the 1960 and 1970s and which had strikingly abstract, futuristic, brutalist designs.)

…and if you’re going to be a shot of an urban wyrd-friendly “tower block as signifier of evil” in a film then this shot from Freddie Francis’s 1987 film Dark Tower would be a good reference point…

Check the back of your bathroom mirror (if you’ve seen Ben Wheatley’s Kill List film, you’ll know what I mean)…

…and spot the lines of accidental similarity and symmetry with symbols from Harry Potter and The Blair Witch Project…

Has their ever been a better headdress in a film than the one Barbara Steele’s character wears in 1968’s folk horror-esque Curse of the Crimson Altar?

“The film is particularly memorable in its conjuring up of phantasmagorical occult scenes, which are made all the more striking by a film-stealing Barbara Steele as Lavina Morley, Black Witch of Greymarsh, who is dressed in striking, opulent and almost surreal folkloric garb, including a behorned headdress. She serves as mistress of the film’s woozily transgressive dreamlike ritual ceremonies, helping create almost a film within a film; one which seems quite separate to the more mainstream and fairly conventional presentation of the film as a whole.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations.)

 

I’ve had a longstanding softspot for these corn husk dollies from Margaret Facklam and Patricia Phibbs’ 1974 book Corn-Husk Crafts, which have an intriguing sort of gently spooky and unsettling “wyrd” quality, in part because of them being faceless which interconnects with the recurring trope of faceless characters in wyrd friendly scifi and fantasy TV such as in Sapphire and Steel Assignment IV…

A nice slice of “otherly geometry” design from Folklore Tapes back when…

One of Elsa Mora’s entrancing “wyrd” papercut figures… say no more…

A photo from Axel Hoedt 2015 photography book Dusk that explores the traditional, at times eerie Fastnacht (carnival) costumes of southwestern Gemany, Austria and Switzerland… makes me think of a traditional British folk ritual straw bear costume that’s tumbled into a subtly parallel world elsewhere by way of 1970s Doctor Who monsters…