the hauntological society

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With commentary by the poet Laurie Lee, and camerawork by renowned wildlife cinematographer Patrick Carey, director Ralph Keene set a precedent at BTF for a long line of films in the field of natural history.

A favourite of Edgar Anstey's, Journey into Spring is the winner of six international film awards, and was nominated for an Oscar.

Director: Ralph Keene. Production Company: British Transport Films. Producer: Ian Ferguson. Photography: Patrick Carey. Commentary: Laurie Lee. Music: Edward Williams. 35mm, Technicolor, 29 mins, UK, 1957.

The cycle of the seasons in the land around Selborne in Hampshire, home town of Gilbert White (1720-1793), country parson and naturalist. Two centuries on, the parish is still very much as he knew it, complete with the same flora and fauna.

In March, the living year begins. Coots, moorhens and dabchicks begin their breeding cycle, looking for mates and building nests. Frogs spawn in the rivers, and pussy-willows and catkins bloom. Grey wagtails, harvest mice, ants and hedgehogs take up residence for the year.

April is characterised by an abundance of nests: the skylark's, the coot's, the hedge-sparrow's, the long-tailed tit's, the rook's and the dabchick's. The latter's nest looks like driftwood, designed to fool predators. In the ponds, tadpoles hatch, and grey wagtails make their nest in the walled bank of the shallow stream.

May is when everything comes alive. Green grass and leaves change the dominant colour, and birds look after their now-hatched young. Bank voles search for green shoots and leaves. Oak trees blossom, as do blackthorns, hawthorns, crabapples, plums and white wild cherry. Slow-worms seek the sun. In a hedge-sparrow's nest, a cuckoo chick hatches and dominates its adopted 'siblings'. Sticklebacks flit through the stream, and moles burrow underground. Swallows arrive from Africa, and sand martens from Spain. Bees keep the cycle of nature turning. House martins fearlessly build nests under the eaves of cottages.

These sights have been common currency in Selborne for two centuries, but are also characteristic of the entire English countryside, for those who care to look for it.

This film is included in the BFI British Transport Films DVD compilation 'Off the Beaten Track'.

“Yesterday, today, tomorrow - they don't mean anything. I feel they're here at the same time: waiting. How long have you felt this? I don't know. Since yesterday? I don't know. I don't know what 'yesterday' was. And that's what's frightening you? Not just that, said Alison. All of me's confused the same way. I keep wanting to laugh and cry. Sounds dead metaphysical to me, said Gwyn”

This is a magical book, and the finest of Garner's young adult novels. Now, a lot of people associate magic with ethereal forces, great quests and spells and all that, and indeed spells can be found in several of Garner's other books. The Owl Service reveals a different kind of magic, the kind that arises from the interaction of people with patterns, of desires that unwittingly mesh with the larger forces around us, harsh magic that people employ without knowing it. The book is multi-layered, with themes that sneak up on the reader, requiring a second or third read, and many fans who read the book as children report returning to it as adults. This book won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award, and has remained in print since its original publication.

The Owl Service interprets a story from the Welsh Mabinogion, namely, portions of the story of "Math Son of Mathonwy." In this story Math's niece, Arianhrod, is tricked into giving birth when her claim to virginity is tested. She rejects her children, and one is raised by her brother, Math's heir Gwydion. (In a matrilineal system the maternal uncle is the male relative who takes responsibility for the child.) Resentful, Arianhrod curses her son Lleu. Her first curse is that he will not be named until she names him. The second is that he will not bear arms until she arms him. Finally, she declares that the child shall not have a human wife, and so Math and Gwydion fashion a woman of flowers to be Lleu's wife, and name her Bloduwedd (flower face).

Yet this third curse is not so easily thwarted because the couple must now make a marriage, and Bloduwedd becomes enamored of neighbor Gronw Pebr, who counsels her to find out how Lleu can be killed. Although some have interpreted Gronw's liaison with Bloduwedd as an act of pure, selfish passion, most writers also note that she had no choice of partners, and her feelings for Lleu are never really described in "Math," although her feelings for Gronw are quite clear.

Like many Celtic demigods, Lleu must abide by the curses of his mother, similar to the geas, or taboo, laid on Irish heroes, and can only be killed in unusual circumstances that usually arise only when the character breaks the geas. Gronw tries to kill Lleu, yet before he dies, Lleu manages to turn into an eagle and fly away, to be found eventually by Gwydion, who talks him down from a tree where he huddles with his flesh rotting away. Gwydion saves Lleu and takes revenge on Bloduwedd by turning her into an owl.

The Owl Service, set in the 1960s, tells the story of three children, this generation's actors in the ancient drama. Gwyn, the Welsh son of the housekeeper Nancy, along with his father Huw Halfbeacon, form two of the three doomed lovers from the previous generation. Allison is the young English owner of the Welsh estate where Nancy and Huw work. She is visiting with her mother, stepfather and stepbrother Roger. Allison and Roger find a mysterious set of dishes in the attic, and Allison begins compulsively tracing paper owls from the pattern, which then disappear, as do the patterns on the dishes.

The children investigate the intricate patterns of mystery, drawn on by clues of the last generation's trio, acquiring aspects of the original trio and yet remaining entirely themselves. The story is not so much a commentary on the original, or a retelling, as it is a carefully staged exploration of how the myth works in all times. It just is, and the characters can no more avoid participation in the greater mystery than they can avoid having personal issues.

The teenagers recreate their roles in a way that determines the fortunes of the valley. Bloduwedd can either be flowers or owl; Lleu can be either the lord of the valley and her partner, or he the betrayed lover and she the vindictive mother. The dramas of the previous generation are woven through the fates and impulses of the three adolescents.

For me, Garner's brilliance is in conveying the curious worldview of the Welsh stories. He captures the interaction between ordinary reality and the Celtic otherworld in a way that raises questions about how the reader experiences physical and temporal reality. He identifies the way that individuals and groups recreate and participate in the dramas of demigods that push the reader to see these patterns in themselves and others, without any notion that such participation might justify wrong actions. Occasionally, Garner even manages to capture the old stories‚ sense of following one's nature in a way that transcends dualistic notions of good and evil. No one does it better, or in a more subtle fashion.

Writers often remark about the Celtic people's relationship with the land, yet few, when convenying this sense, move beyond the warm fuzzies city folk feel on a country drive. Garner is able to portray this kinship in the relationship of the people in the valley, the interaction between ancient sites and contemporary people, and the brooding sense of dread that manifests through the interaction of the young people. He also conveys the interaction of people across generations as Huw manifests Gwydion across time, sometimes answering from the present, and other times slipping into another age.

The Owl Service is one of those books I found transformative as a young person. It also set me on the path to the original tales of the Mabinogi, and provided new insights on their worldview. I admire Garner's courage in moving beyond the good and evil morality tales that simplify issues for children. He wrote a great story, portraying the complications of life at the transformation from childhood. It is rich in symbolism that does not distract from the plot, and unsentimental about characters‚ motivations, limitations and hidden strengths.

"The moon shone. And Gwyn began to play with time, splitting a second into minutes, and then into hours - or taking an hour and compressing it to an instant. No hurry..."

This book is a must read for children with dreamy natures who demand both mystery and the truth about people's interaction with the larger forces at play in our world.

Kimberly Bates.

Further information here, here&here.

"The Owl Service is a peculiar work. Singular. Mesmerizing. It stands out as a one off" - Gillian Hills.

Granada Television for ITV. Original run: 21 December 1969 – 8 February 1970. 8 x 30 min episodes, colour. Theme music: "Tôn Alarch" (traditional) by Jean Bell.

Director: Peter Plummer. Producer: Peter Plummer. Script: Alan Garner. Production Designer: Peter Caldwell. Art Department: Alan Kennedy. Sound Department: Harry Brookes, Phil Smith & Peter Walker. Camera and Electrical Department: David Wood & Ray Goode.

Cast: Michael Holden (Gwyn), Gillian Hills (Alison), Francis Wallis (Roger), Edwin Richfield (Clive), Dorothy Edwards (Nancy), Raymond Llewellyn (Huw)

Teenager Alison finds a dusty dinner service in the loft of her Welsh holiday home. Seemingly possessed, she traces their flower pattern and from the tracings makes paper owls. This unleashes ancient forces feeding on the jealousy and attraction between Alison, her new stepbrother Roger and local boy Gwyn...

The Welsh legend of Blodeuwedd is a tale of betrayal retold in the 11th Century book of The Mabinogion. Blodeuedd, a woman made of flowers, was unfaithful to Lleu Llaw Gyffes with Gronw Bebyr. Gronw then killed Lleu with a spear so that Lleu became an eagle - Lleu's magician Gwydion turned the unfaithful woman into Blodeuwedd, the owl, as punishment.

Now three modern-day teenagers are revisited by Gwydion's curse. Upper-class Alison, her haughty public school stepbrother Roger and working-class Welsh boy Gwyn are similarly locked into a triangle of love and hate that threatens to destroy them. Gwyn later learns of the father he's never known and discovers that his mother was once possessed by the same old plates Alison uncovered in the attic.

Very much a product of the 1960s, the serial used a contemporary source novel (Garner's book was two years old when adapted for television) that dwelled upon class struggles and adolescent permissiveness, albeit within a supernatural fantasy framework. Then-fashionable jump cuts and psychedelic imagery were used for the all-film production. This was the first fully-scripted drama to be made entirely in colour by Granada Television, although it was shown in black and white on its original runs and not seen in colour until its 1978 repeat. This ruined the visual joke of Alison, Gwyn and Roger always wearing respectively red, black and green outfits - the colours of electrical wiring at the time - hinting at the power the three could unleash.

Alistair McGown.

Further information here, here&here.

The Owl Service is available on Network DVD "The definitive adaptation of Alan Garner's award-winning novel, combining mystery, adventure, history and the legend surrounding a complex set of human relationships"

"I never thought The Owl Service was for children only. It felt as if it fit a larger audience. That's what made it special. Because it also belongs somewhere where the memory of one's own adolescence lies. It is super-real to the extent that it becomes unreal. Wagnerian. And too, like an old film it unreels itself repeatedly, then begins again. Any criticism that the series was unsuitably adult for children is untrue. Never underestimate the child; it is pure, it observes, makes up its own mind. But then is taught to see things otherwise" - Gillian Hills.

"The Owl Service was much admired but because I could never bear to watch myself I have seen it only now. Father's very proper English family frowned at having an actress in the family yet they watched the first episode to see what I was like and followed the whole series. That was a huge compliment. The Owl Service was a magnificent gift that allowed me to haul back a slice of my lost youth. It had fallen by the wayside at fourteen when I was 'discovered' by Roger Vadim. No more contact with kids my age meant there was a chink in my learning compass. So my memory is not of anecdotes, stories. I was totally engrossed with the feel of Alison. In effect, Alison allowed me to become while she too was unfolding" - Gillian Hills.

The TV version of The Owl Service was seeded in 1960 when Peter Plummer, then a researcher for Granada Television, was sent to interview author Alan Garner about his recently published novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. The two men hit it off and formed a friendship and working relationship that saw them collaborating on news stories for various news and magazine programmes being made by the independent television company Granada.

Nine years later, Garner had written a fantasy novel inspired by his love of Celtic myths and legends, The Owl Service, first published in 1967 and the recipient of both the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal in Literature. In the summer of 1968, Granada successfully bid for the screen rights to the novel which they intended to be their first production shot entirely on film, all on location and all in colour. When Garner himself agreed to produce the scripts it seemed sensible to assign Peter Plummer to the producer and director seats.

With Garner working on what was originally planned as a six part adaptation, Plummer set off for Wales in search of the real locations mentioned in the book. the production hit a hitch when the owners of Bryn Hall, which plays a key role in the story, refused to let the production film there and they had to use Poulton Hall in Liverpool instead, fortuitously owned by a friend of Garner's.

With that hurdle overcome, the cast was the next concern for the production. The three leading characters needed to be young and the first to catch Plummer's eye was Gillian Hills who he had seen in the recent Play of the Month episode Maigret at Bay and who was still the subject of much public interest having taken part in the first full frontal nude scene in British cinema, in Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966). "Peter Plummer asked to meet me," Gillian recalled in 2008. "There was a fog of people around a large table. I did a reading and was offered the part on the spot".

Michael Holden was cast as Gwyn, coming straight from drama school in London, as did Francis Wallis who was cast as the last of the young leads, Roger. Raymond Llewellyn, who was cast as Huw Halfbacon, the half mad gardener. Interestingly the production opted not to cast anyone as Margaret, Alison's mother, who is referred to in the book but never really appears.

On 10 April 1969, cast and crew convened at Granada Television Centre in Manchester for a first read through and costume fitting and the following day they were driven to see Poulton Hall for the first time. Full rehearsals began on 17 April before filming actually began on Monday 21st.

Unusually, Garner was present through much of the filming, Plummer happy to have the author on hand to advise and rewrite where necessary. Gillian Hills remembers that: "Throughout the filming Alan was discretion itself. Generally I would realize he had been around after the fact. At the very beginning before we began shooting he asked us to gather in a particular bedroom of the house and talked about the plates, the shape of the room. The claustrophobia. He was enthusiastic, he sort of shone from inside and had intense blue eyes. He willed us to become his characters. We were meant to live our parts. I don't remember Alan asking me to make any changes. He knew what he wanted and Peter Plummer was the enabler. Peter was patient, persuasive and warm. The crew, impeccable".

Indeed it has been noted that the shoot for The Owl Service was a generally happy and good humoured one. In the article The Legend Unravelled, published in issue 10 of Time Screen magazine (Winter 1987/1988), Stephen McKay quotes chargehand electrician James Green as saying to Peter Plummer "I never thought I would say this, but I've really come to look forward to Monday mornings".

In the book I've Seen a Ghost, Peter Plummer told of supposedly creepy goings-on during the production though whether this was true or just canny hyperbole to promote the series is unclear. Certainly Hills remembers no supernatural manifestations during her time in Wales:

"I have not read Peter's book I've Seen a Ghost. I was unaware of it...and maybe I should not read it. My grand father, the superlative Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian, was ruled by his exceeding 'superstitiousness,' so the family was too. Artists are sensitive to this in varying degrees. I am glad I focused on Alison. But if something unusual happened I would keep it to myself. I prefer to believe I am contemplating the cosiness of a blanket than a levitating counterpane".

If the other side was indeed trying to make itself felt during production, the cast and crew managed to get through to the end of the shoot unscathed and on Friday 20 June 1969, they packed their bags with the majority of the story - now extended to eight episodes - in the can. The serial began broadcasting on ITV on 21 December 19690 to generally good audiences, though union disagreements about the switch-over from black and white to colour meant that ITV was forced to transmit Granada's first colour production in black and white.

Despite the fact that the target audience seemed to love the show, there were questions raised about whether it really was suitable for teenagers and children, particularly it's very noticeable representation of sexual jealousy and tension between the lead characters.

When the show was nominated as the British entry for the Prix Jeunesse in 1970, Peter Plummer said that the jury found it "deeply disturbing' and questioned whether it was not indeed reprehensible to offer such material to young people" (Time Screen). Gillian Hills: "It is the adult with its crooked mind that is the trouble: as with the criticism coming from the jury. It is a good sign for a piece of work to be labelled 'deeply disturbing'. This means here is something unusual. Remember Saatchi's show 'Sensation". Now Chris Offili is an established artist, as with many of the others from that show".

The Owl Service survived the storm in a tea cup and was shown again on Channel Four in the late 80s to even greater acclaim. It slowly accrued a loyal cult following that was eventually rewarded with a DVD release in 2008.

KEVIN LYONS

"The Owl Service played a part in changing the course of my life. The graphics designer for The Owl Service came while we were filming and I told him how curious I was about his work: when I was a recording artist in Paris I'd go round to see my friends at the music magazine Salut Les Copains - I adored the way the magazine was being put together. The designer invited me to visit the TV centre where they produced the visuals, soon I began at St Martins, but work was always taking me away, then Sir John Cass, Saturdays - but I was filming a lot. Throughout my childhood I was always drawing. My grandmother was a painter but we never met. When I began acting I gave up drawing. Three years after The Owl Service I would plunge into illustrating" - Gillian Hills.

Further information here, here&here.

"At the end of the nineteenth century its thousand acres were at their zenith, but only a few years later bramble and ivy were already drawing a green veil over this “Sleeping Beauty”. After decades of neglect, the devastating hurricane of 1990 should have consigned the Lost Gardens of Heligan to a footnote in history. Instead, events conspired to bring us here and the romance of their decay took a hold on our imaginations. Our discovery of a tiny room, buried under fallen masonry in the corner of one of the walled gardens, was to unlock the secret of their demise. A motto etched into the limestone walls in barely legible pencil still reads 'Don’t come here to sleep or slumber' with the names of those who worked there signed under the date – August 1914"

"We were fired by a magnificent obsession to bring these once glorious gardens back to life in every sense and to tell, for the first time, not tales of lords and ladies but of those “ordinary” people who had made these gardens great, before departing for the Great War. We have now established a large working team with its own vision for our third decade. The award-winning garden restoration is already internationally acclaimed; but our lease now extends into well over 300 acres of the Wider Estate, leaving the project far from complete. We intend Heligan to remain a living and working example of the best of past practice, offering public access into the heart of what we do" - "Our contemporary focus is to work with nature, accepting and respecting it and protecting and enhancing the variety of habitats with which our project is endowed"

The Lost Gardens of Heligan, near Mevagissey in Cornwall, are one of the most popular botanical gardens in the UK. The style of the gardens is typical of the nineteenth century Gardenesque style, with areas of different character and in different design styles.

The gardens were created by members of the Cornish Tremayne family, over a period from the mid-18th century up to the beginning of the 20th century, and still form part of the family's Heligan estate. The gardens were neglected after the First World War, and only restored in the 1990s, a restoration that was the subject of several popular television programmes and books.

The gardens now boast a fabulous collection of aged and colossal rhododendrons and camellias, a series of lakes fed by a ram pump over a hundred years old, highly productive flower and vegetable gardens, an Italian garden, and a stunning wild area filled with primaeval-looking sub-tropical tree ferns called "The Jungle". The gardens also have Europe's only remaining pineapple pit, warmed by rotting manure, and two figures made from rocks and plants known as the Mud Maid and the Giant's Head.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan completely surround Heligan House and its private gardens. They lie some 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the north-east of, and about 250 feet (76 m) above, the fishing village of Mevagissey. The gardens are 6 miles (9.7 km) by road from the town and railway station of St Austell, and are principally in the civil parish of St Ewe, although elements of the eastern gardens are in Mevagissey parish.

The northern part of the gardens, which includes the main ornamental and vegetable gardens, are slightly higher than the house, and slope gently down to it. The areas of the gardens to the west, south and east of the house slope steeply down into a series of valleys that ultimately drain into the sea at Mevagissey. These areas are much wilder, and include The Jungle and The Lost Valley.

The Heligan estate was originally bought by the Tremaynes in the sixteenth century, and earlier members of the family were responsible for Heligan House and the (still private) gardens that immediately surround it. However the more extensive gardens that are now open to the public were largely the result of the efforts of four successive squires of Heligan. These were:

Rev. Henry Hawkins Tremayne.
John Hearle Tremayne, son of Henry Hawkins Tremayne.
John Tremayne, son of John Hearle Tremayne.
John Claude Lewis Tremayne, son of John Tremayne and better known as "Jack".

Two estate plans, dating from 1777 and sometime before 1810, show the changes wrought to the Heligan estate during Henry Hawkins' ownership. The first plan shows a predominantly parkland estate, with the site of today's Northern Gardens occupied by a field. The second plan shows the development of shelter belts of trees surrounding the gardens, and the main shape of the Northern Gardens, the Mellon Yard and the Flower Garden are all readily discernable.

Henry Hawkins' descendants each made significant contributions to the development of the gardens, including the ornamental plantings along the estate's Long Drive, the Jungle, the hybridizing of rhododendrons and their planting around Flora's Green, and the creation of the Italian Garden.

Birdsong, recorded in and around the gardens of Heligan:

The restoration, which was the subject of a six part Channel 4 television series in 1996, proved to be an outstanding success, not only revitalising the gardens but also the local economy around Heligan by providing employment. The gardens are now leased by a company owned by their restorers, who continue to cultivate them and operate them as a visitor attraction.

Further information here, here&here.

This post represents the one-hundred & first for The Hauntological Society. Or there·a·bouts. It seems like more.

This being the case, I thought I'd take the opportunity to expand a little on how THS works. Then, I'm going to do some thinking out loud, regarding Hauntology's love/hate relationship with the reoccurring theme of ghosts.

THS is about the business of gathering together information on that which can be considered Hauntological. That which can be considered Hauntological, and therefore suitable for inclusion, is arrived at via a some-what idiosyncratic check list. This ultimately becomes a value judgement, for which I make no apology.

"our aim is to curate the sum of hauntology's parts, from the available information, so as to give you a better understanding, over time. if you think we have referenced you without credit/or link, please let us know"

The majority of posts feature text from existing articles and, wherever possible, images created by THS, or from our own archive (magazines, photographs, promotional stills, books, etc). The idea behind using existing articles, is to recontextualise, through inclusion, within the context of Hauntology. This is a very important aspect of THS blog. Occasionally additional text is added, say, by way of an introduction. As time goes by, or not, as the case may be, more and more material is added to the THS archive. As well as recontextualised sources, THS regularly features exclusive posts, with information supplied by their respected subjects. The audio selections, used on many of the posts, are legally obtained and offered for your consideration under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 1976.

It's no surprise that it feels like there should be more than 101 posts, thus far, as there in fact have been. However, over time, post have been re-examined, redefined and moved over to our sister site R/J/L-H. It is also worth noting that existing posts on THS are regularly revisited, revamped and updated, so check back on your favourite posts from time to time, to see what's new.

If you have any questions, ideas for submissions, etc, please use the link on the right, towards the bottom of the page.

Every now and again, on a semi-regular basis, a prevalent misunderstanding that Hauntology is all about ghosts prevails. My Father has even asked "what’s this sudden interest in ghosts?". In the general scheme of things, this misunderstanding is of no great importance. But, the problem here is, I find myself responding to these kinds of comments/questions by immediately stating that Hauntology has nothing to do with ghosts. Then, in the next breath, correcting myself by saying "well, it's not as simple as that". I’m not sure we’ll get to the bottom of this, but lets give it some consideration…

I recently submitted a definition for Hauntology to Collins Dictionary; Social movement concerning the idea/s of the past and the future, haunting, bleeding into, the present. Often filtered through themes such as Childhood and the Phenomenology of Landscape. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting to hear back.

Derrida clearly takes inspiration from this concept of haunting, amongst other things, when arriving at the term Hauntology "The spectral rumour now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the "sublime" and the spirit of "nostalgia" cross all borders" (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International).

Yes, I know, not the quote you were expecting, but this particular part of the text moves things on a little further, though aptly appears before the other oft used quote.

Derrida also makes reference to the ghost of Hamlet’s father: “Let us go in together, and still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let's go together" (Hamlet Act 1, scene 5). These lines are spoken by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, upon encountering the ghost of his father.

Now, we’re dealing with ideas here. Ideas that are hitching a ride on metaphors, so as to get to where they need to go. I have, In point of fact, very little interest in ghosts, from a supernatural perspective. I’ll go further; I’ve looked into it, and outside of Metaphysics, ghosts do not exist. And yet, obvious metaphors aside, ghosts, in a supernatural sense, have somehow made their way into Hauntology.

It is testament to Hauntology's 'it just is' value system, that we can talk of Hamlet’s Father’s ghost and include M. R. James in the Hauntological universe, yet state, when asked, that Hauntology has nothing to do with ghosts.

James’ supernatural ghosts are not metaphors, as such, but they do exist to teach us that we should mind our own business, and don’t poke our nose in, where we know we shouldn’t. Well, I suggest you ignore this warning and keep poking your nose in where it is most certainly wanted, so as to see us through another one hundred and one posts.

Further information here, here&here.

Impossible Project polaroids by Claire Lockley-Hobson, Ben Spear&R/J/L-H.

"This website has been around for 9 years. In that time my random wanderings around London have often been described as psychogeography and that little known penchant for walking around derelict buildings with a camera has been branded urban exploration (aka urbex). This site doesn't fit into any category or belong to any forum. There are no rules"

From the decaying houses on the North Circular, to the faded glory of the Tidal Basin Tavern in Prince Regent Dock, via Battersea Power Station and the Hoxton cinema, this is an extraordinary record of often wonderful London landmarks that are now prey to neglect, vandalism and the developer's demolition crew.

Paul Talling has been recording ramshackle London for several years, and here he looks at the cream of the down-at-heel, blending photographs with accounts of how particular buildings and sights fell into disrepair and what is likely to happen to them.

"I love walking in London,’ said Mrs. Dalloway, ‘Really, it’s better than walking in the country" - Virginia Woolf.

The Victorian Concrete House in East Dulwich, for example - a once magnificent example of an early concrete-built house but now a shell. Palmers in Camden Town, formerly the most famous pet shop in London, where Ken Livingstone bought his newts. Strand Tube Station, which featured in films as diverse as Battle of Britain, Superman IV and An American Werewolf in Paris. To mention only a few of the myriad houses, pubs, cinemas, bomb shelters, cemeteries and shops meticulously recorded and celebrated here. If you've ever peeped curiously through a gap in a boarded-up window or wondered why the building you pass every day is looking distinctly the worse for wear, this is very definitely the site for you.

Further information here, here&here.

"Paul Talling's mesmerising website.... John Betjeman would have been proud of him" - Whats On in London.

"Genius" - Danny Baker, BBC London.

"Although it has quainter pleasures, much of the appeal of Paul Talling's excellent Derelict London site, is in how it seems to trace the skeleton of a dead city while it is still in apparently rude health.In a city so devoted to making fast money, and busily fighting a one-way class war under the rubric of "regeneration", sweeping undesirables and their buildings away to the outskirts, it is almost comforting that relics and ruins still cling on to its landscape, throwing workaday time into a spin. As much as it is an inadvertent vision of how London might look after a catastrophe, Derelict London is valuable as a document of the one going on right in front of us" - The New Statesman.

Thanks to Paul Talling for his help with this post.

Wherever you live in London, you’re never far from water. I used to live off Angler’s Lane in Kentish Town, beside a fisherman’s pub that is now a Nando’s, and once helped to dig out an underground tributary in Soho, where I found myself surrounded by clay pipes and animal bones washed down from the butcheries on the riverbanks. The rivers are all around us, but remain frustratingly elusive. Imagine a cutaway diagram of London from the ground up; its terraces, shops, offices, public buildings, stations and substations, extending from the few remaining single-story bungalows to the top of the Shard.

Now mirror that image downwards to form a reversal, a ghost-map, a city inverted. What do we find below? Basements, tunnels, railways, ducts, security bases, crypts, wells, tubes of all kinds. And connecting them, a hidden roadmap created by the rivers of London.

It has become a pub game; how many of London’s lost rivers can you name? Some of us know that London is bookended by the Brent and the Lea. More know a little about the Fleet and its tributaries, but it wasn’t until I moved to King’s Cross that I realised I could see one from my kitchen.

Blocking the channels with detritus and culverting them was not enough to stem the flow of rushing stormwater; every time it rains, the Regent Canal towpath opposite my window floods, water bubbling up through the cracks in the paving. Cyclists skid, children splash and adults detour around the small lake that forms, but nobody thinks about why it’s there. In the basement of the converted warehouse in which I live, there’s a filled-in Victorian well. Further along the street, another eruption of floodwater, rising through drains and split macadam. In King’s Place, new home of the Guardian newspaper, there’s another well, extraordinarily deep. It was filled in when the old pub on this site, the Waterside Inn, was pulled down. I watched the workmen puzzling out how to demolish it. So the water pushes South, to Sadler’s Wells, to Clerkenwell, to Bridewell, and finally to the river Thames itself.

Map the wells, connect the lines and you start to redefine London’s topography. Overlay the result onto the most current map of the metropolis, and you understand the present. This is no mere exercise in geography, for the rivers tell you something more.

I was drawn to ghost stories because I came to understand why they worked. The streets of ancient London followed the lines of hedgerows, which of necessity followed the rivers, because fields have to be watered. The lowlands were poor areas largely because they were close to the water-table and always damp. Water and fog brought respiratory illness, and early deaths created superstitions; that’s why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End than the city’s prosperous hilly North. The sooty, partly derelict London of my early childhood was a city of ghosts.

The underground rivers became sewers, and canals were often riverways remade by man, but when we think of canals we conjure Venice, not Berlin or St Petersburg or London. Especially not London. In 1849 Charles Kingsley described the environment of Bermondsey residents "the water of the common sewer which stagnates, full of dead fish, cats and dogs, under their windows". And yet J Stewart’s depiction of the notorious Jacob’s Island, painted just nine years earlier, makes that cholera-riddled waterway a place of almost Mediterranean charm. This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of the lost rivers.

Despite the fact that mere proximity to them eventually became enough to kill you, their mystical significance was once so strong that the Romans floated gods upon their waters. Now, with walking maps to guide us, the journey of the hidden rivers becomes clearer.

Christopher Fowler, King’s Cross, 2011.

Foreword to London's Lost Rivers: A Walker's Guide by Tom Bolton, with photographs by SF Said (Strange Attractor Press, 2011).

Further infomration here, here&here.

"Welcome to the London Sound Survey, a growing collection of Creative Commons-licensed sound recordings of places, events and wildlife in the capital. Historical references too are gathered to find out how London's sounds have changed"

Ian Rawes, of TLSS, has been kind enough to share his thoughts on a few aspects of the project, namely: Hobbyism & Stamp Collecting vs. Theory.

Hobbyism:

The London Sound Survey is a hobby project and an example of the kind of electronic self-publishing which characterised the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It was very easy then to build a static website and, without ready-made templates to fall back on, site layouts alone told you a lot about the capabilities and personalities of their makers.

It was like the growth of printed fanzines in Britain in the late 1970s, made possible by access to printing equipment in community centres and cheaper commercial offset litho prices. I'm happy not to have to display adverts or the emblem of some grant-giving body. First, there seems to be no consistent relationship between a site's quality and whether or not it receives external funding. Second, hobbyism is about independence.

It's an escape from being told what to do at work, where recognition for your own effort and initiative can easily be claimed by someone higher in the food chain. Many people who have jobs rather than careers understand that achieving some measure of self-actualisation can only be done on the side.

Stamp Collecting vs. Theory:

There are no intellectually coherent general theories of sound other than that of acoustics, which is a branch of physics.

Specialisms with considerable explanatory clout are then built on that: musicology, phonological aspects of linguistics, the studies of hearing by neurologists and psychologists, and investigations of animal communication.

Some people don't accept this, of course, and are lured by the mirage of a big idea which always eludes them, leaving a lot of very bad and opaque prose in their wake. What I get up to is influenced by having taken statistics courses at night school.

Making and collecting recordings is a bit like stamp collecting, but with the optimistic belief that if enough material is gathered, then it turns into an array of data from which patterns will emerge. But there is no sign of that yet, other than a hunch that as urban society becomes wealthier and better organised, so the variety of sound in public spaces dwindles.

Best wishes, Ian Rawes. The London Sound Survey.

< A set of 18th-century playing cards illustrating street-sellers' cries in London. This was a perenially popular theme and sellers' cries found their way into poetry, music and even the old Thames Television theme tune 'Fanfare for Thames', which reworked the violet seller's call of 'Who will buy my sweet violets?' The last violet seller in London was around in the early 1970s.

Further information here, here&here.

Created by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray.

HTV. Original run: 10 January 1977 – 21 February 1977. Directed by Peter Graham Scott. Producer: Peter Graham Scott. Executive producer: Patrick Dromgoole. Composer: Sidney Sager. Location: Avebury, Wiltshire, United Kingdom.

Regular cast: Iain Cuthbertson (Raphael Hendrick), Gareth Thomas (Professor Adam Brake), Peter Demin (Matthew Brake), Veronica Strong (Margaret Smythe), Katharine Levy (Sandra Smythe), Freddie Jones (Dai).

Scientist Adam Brake and his son Matthew come to the quiet village of Milbury to study the 4000 year-old stone circle that surrounds it. But the stones seem to hold some kind of ancient power, one that the mysterious Mr Hendrick hopes to tap into and that holds all of the villagers in its thrall.

Children of the Stones borrows plot strands and styles popular in 1960s and '70s British horror cinema, mixing them into a satisfying serial that appeared fresh and new to children. The sinister air of a relentlessly happy, sunny English village echoes the film Village of the Damned (d. Wolf Rilla, 1960), while Professor Brake's scientific detachment in the face of seemingly supernatural Pagan or alien forces recalls Nigel Kneale's works Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1958) and The Stone Tape (BBC, 1972).

Brake can plausibly hold forth on topics such as psychic ability, the power of ley lines, the energy of the stones, black holes, supernovas, psychokinesis and atomic clocks to happily fulfil an educational remit. This factual basis helps to create a horror fantasy grounded in some scientific, rational reality, making events seem even more frightening.

"Anger of fire, fire of speech. Breath of knowledge, render us free from harm. Return to us the innocence that once we knew. Complete us the Circle! Make us at one with nature and the elements... It is time!"

Director Peter Graham Scott remarked on seeing the script of Episode One, "And this is for children?" Not only is it genuinely frightening, thanks in no small part to Sidney Sager's unsettling pseudo-Neolithic vocal score, but the script is unpatronisingly complex. The ending - which sees Hendrick seemingly absorbed by an alien force focused on the ring of stones and events then jumping back to the beginning of the serial on an alternate 'time plane' - was perhaps slightly too complex for younger viewers.

A product of ITV's regional structure of the 1970s, both storyline and location filming are centred in the West Country. The stone circle that rings the village of Avebury in Wiltshire provides the basis of the script and doubles up as Milbury for filming. Production company HTV also dabbled in Arthurian and Pagan myth with Sky (ITV, 1975) and Robin of Sherwood (ITV, 1984-86). Writers Burnham and Ray next wrote Raven (ITV, 1977), a fantasy serial based on the legends of King Arthur.

Alistair McGown.

Further information here, here&here.

Video Content here&here.

Happy Days: The Children of the Stones. Writer and comedian Stewart Lee explores the ground breaking television series Children of the Stones and examines its special place in the memories of those children who watched it on its initial transmission in a state of excitement and terror. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 11:30am, Thu, 4 Oct 2012.

Dr. Scott: You don't want to hurt anyone. Samara: But I do, and I'm sorry. It won't stop. Everyone will suffer.

16-year-old Katie Embry and 17-year-old Becca Kotler are bored at home and watching TV.

Eventually, they discuss a supposedly cursed videotape while alone at home at the former's house. According to legend, those who watch the tape die seven days later. Katie reveals that seven days ago, she went to a cabin at Shelter Mountain Inn with her boyfriend, where she viewed the video tape. The girls laugh it off, but after a series of strange occurrences in the next few minutes, involving a television in the house turning itself on, Katie dies mysteriously and horrifically while Becca watches, leading to Becca's institutionalization in a mental hospital.

Katie's cousin, Aidan, is visibly affected by the death. After Katie's funeral, Ruth Embry asks her sister Rachel, who is Aidan's mother and a journalist, to investigate Katie's death, which leads her to the cabin where Katie watched the tape. Rachel finds and watches the tape; the phone rings, and she hears a child's voice say "seven days", upsetting Rachel. The next day, Rachel calls Noah, her ex-boyfriend, to show him the video and asks for his assistance based upon his media-related skills. He asks her to make a copy for further investigation, which she does, but later takes it home herself.

After viewing the tape, Rachel begins experiencing nightmares, nose bleeds, and surreal situations (for instance, when she pauses a section of the tape in which a fly runs across the screen, she is able to pluck the fly from the monitor). Increasingly anxious about getting to the origin of the tape, Rachel investigates images of a woman seen in the tape. Using a video lab, she discovers images in the tape's overscan area, which through further research she discovers to be a lighthouse located on Moesko Island. It also turns out that the tape's overscan does not include time code, which hints that the tape was not made using electronic equipment. The woman turns out to be Anna Morgan, who lived on the island in Washington, many years prior with her husband Richard. Rachel discovers that, after bringing home an adopted daughter, tragedy befell the Morgan ranch – the horses raised on the ranch went mad and killed themselves, which in turn supposedly had caused Anna (who loved her horses) to become depressed and commit suicide. After waking from a particularly jarring nightmare, Rachel is horrified to discover Aidan watching the tape. Panicked, she calls Noah, revealing that Noah is Aidan's father.

Rachel goes to the Morgan house and finds Richard, who refuses to talk about the video or his daughter and sends Rachel away. A local doctor tells Rachel that Anna could not carry a baby to term and adopted a child named Samara. Dr. Grasnik recounts that Anna soon complained about gruesome visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institution. While Rachel is investigating on Moesko Island, Noah is investigating the institution, where he finds Anna's file and discovers that there was a video of Samara, but the video is missing. Back at the ranch, Rachel sneaks back to the Morgan house where she discovers a box containing the missing video and a live centipede that was shown in Samara's tape. Rachel watches it, and is confronted by Richard who claims that she and her son will die, and that there is nothing they can do about it. He then electrocutes himself in the bathtub, sending Rachel running out of the room screaming.

Noah arrives and, with Rachel, goes to the barn to discover an attic where Samara was kept by her father. Behind the wallpaper they discover an image of a tree seen on the tape, which grows near the Shelter Mountain Inn.

At the inn, they discover a well underneath the floor, in which Rachel finds Samara's skeletal corpse, experiencing a vision of how her mother pushed her into it. Rachel notifies the authorities and, feeling sorry for Samara, gives her a proper burial. Rachel informs Aidan that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. However, Aidan is horrified, telling his mother she had freed her body, and that Samara "never sleeps" and that she was not supposed to help Samara. While he says this, his nose begins to bleed. In his apartment, Noah's TV turns on, revealing an image in which a decaying Samara crawls from the well and out of the TV into the room. Horrified, Noah trips backward and tries to crawl away from Samara. Samara faces him, exposes her true face and stares directly at him, killing him with fear, which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment and seeing his face distorted like Katie's was.

Upon returning to her apartment, Rachel destroys and burns the original tape. Wondering why she had not died like the others, she remembers that she made a copy of the tape. Rachel realizes the only way to escape and save Aidan is to have him copy the tape and show it to someone else, continuing the cycle. Rachel helps Aidan copy the tape, who asks her what is going to happen to the person they give the tape to. She does not respond as a shot of the well is shown in the tape. Then the screen goes to static and ends with a few pictures from the tape.

Directed by Gore Verbinski.

Written by Kôji Suzuki, Ehren Kruger & Scott Frank.

Music by Hans Zimmer. Cinematography by Bojan Bazelli. Editing by Craig Wood. Distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. Release date(s): October 18, 2002.

Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Daveigh Chase, Jane Alexander, Shannon Cochran, Amber Tamblyn, Rachael Bella, Lindsay Frost & Brian Cox.

The Ring is based on the 1998 J-Horror film リング or Ringu. Which itself is based on Kôji Suzuki's 1991 novel of the same name.

Note: During the cursed video, about 25 seconds in, a young boy's muffled singing can faintly be heard. This audio track is taken from The Innocents (1961).

Further information here, here&here. Video content here, here&here.

"We lay my love and I beneath the weeping willow. But now alone I lie and weep beside the tree. Singing "Oh willow waly" by the tree that weeps with me. Singing "Oh willow waly" till my lover return to me. We lay my love and I beneath the weeping willow. A broken heart have I. Oh willow I die, oh willow I die"

An overly imaginative young woman takes a job as a governess, caring for two precocious children in a vast and shadowy mansion...

Long established as one of the greatest of all ghost stories, Henry James' 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw has been filmed many times, but by universal consent the definitive version is this 1961 film by Jack Clayton, his second feature after the groundbreaking Room at the Top (1958).

Deborah Kerr gives a virtuoso performance as Miss Giddens, the emotionally repressed vicar's daughter who takes up a job as governess at a vast country mansion but finds herself comprehensively outmanoeuvred by her precocious charges Miles and Flora. Confiding in the housekeeper Mrs Grose (Megs Jenkins), she discovers certain things about her predecessor that she hadn't been told at the time of her appointment, notably the circumstances in which she met her mysterious death. It therefore comes as little surprise that Miss Giddens starts seeing things out of the corner of her eye - or does she?

As with all great ghost stories, we are never sure, which gives her ultimate resolution to confront "the evil" head-on an element of genuine tragedy. (Thankfully, Clayton and his writers - who include Truman Capote and John Mortimer - preserve James's famously unresolved ending). Who are the innocents? The sly, giggling, unnervingly knowing children (Miles in particular has an unmistakably sexual hold over Miss Giddens, in scenes that are arguably more disturbing now than they were in 1961) or their naïve, suggestible governess and the doggedly loyal Mrs Grose? Or is everything filtered through Miss Giddens' hyperactive imagination and we cannot therefore trust the evidence of our own eyes?

Throughout the film, Clayton demonstrates an encyclopaedic understanding of the nature of supernaturally-charged fear. The Innocents is too elegant and subtle to be labelled a mere horror film, but too genuinely marrow-chilling to fit any other pigeonhole, with cinematographer Freddie Francis giving a masterclass in the use of black-and-white CinemaScope to convey the full panoply of night-time scares and lurking (his use of candlelight is particularly effective).

But many of the most disturbing visual coups take place in broad daylight - an evil-looking cherub disgorging a fat black beetle, the hazy male figure on the top of the tower, above all the black-clad image of the former governess Miss Jessell standing in the reeds by the lake. Despite its origins on the page, The Innocents is one of the most cinematically literate of all British horror films, and still packs a powerful punch four decades on.

Michael Brooke.

"What shall I sing to my lord from my window? What shall I sing for my lord will not stay? What shall I sing for my lord will not listen? Where shall I go when my lord is away? Whom shall I love when the moon is arisen? Gone is my lord and the grave is his prison. What shall I say when my lord comes a calling? What shall I say when he knocks on my door? What shall I say when his feet enter softly? Leaving the marks of his grave on my floor. Enter my lord. Come from your prison. Come from your grave, for the moon is a risen. Welcome, my lord"

35mm, black and white, CinemaScope, 99 mins, 1961. Director Jack Clayton. Production Company Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. Producer: Jack Clayton. Photography: Freddie Francis. Music: Georges Auric. Screenplay: William Archibald & Truman Capote. Additional dialogue: John Mortimer. Based on William Archibald's play of the same name, itself based on Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw.

Cast: Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens); Peter Wyngarde (Peter Quint); Megs Jenkins (Mrs Grose); Michael Redgrave (The Uncle); Martin Stephens (Miles); Pamela Franklin (Flora).

Further information here, here&here.

Thomas Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness on 28 April 1922. The same year saw the formation of the BBC, with which he would be closely linked throughout his early career.

In 1928 Kneale moved with his parents back to their native Isle of Man, where he spent the rest of his formative years.

After briefly considering a legal career, in 1946 he moved to London to study acting at RADA. But after winning the prestigious Somerset Maugham prize for 'Tomato Cain', his 1949 collection of macabre stories, he turned to writing full-time. Kneale's first original script was 'The Long Stairs' (1/3/1950), a radio play based on a true-life mining disaster on the Isle of Man. The following year he joined the emerging BBC Television service, initially working as an all-purpose staff writer.

Soon dissatisfied with the overly theatrical style demanded for most of his assignments, Kneale found an ideal collaborator in the ambitious wunderkind producer Rudolph Cartier, beginning a partnership that would continue throughout the 1950s. Their breakthrough success, produced quickly to fill an unexpected gap in the schedules, was The Quatermass Experiment (BBC 1953), the first of four densely layered, vividly imagined tales about the eponymous rocket scientist that remain among Kneale's best-known work. A groundbreaking serial combining intellectual science fiction and visceral horror in a (more or less) contemporary setting, it proved enormously influential. It also gave the first real indication of Kneale's great acuity in depicting alienated and lonely people, displaced in place or time. Such characters recur in works as different as The Creature (BBC 30/1/1955), in which the Yeti turns out to be a telepathic, separately evolved form of humanity awaiting its time to inherit the earth; The Stone Tape (BBC 25/12/1972), in which the abandoned heroine dies after being psychically drawn to an ancient past; and even in Kneale's final script, 'Ancient History' (ITV, Kavanagh QC, 17/1/1997), in which the apparently smiling face of a concentration survivor proves to be the frozen rictus of a lonely and terrified woman who was murdered and brought back to life over and over again in the name of Nazi science.

The peaks of Cartier and Kneale's partnership include a brooding Wuthering Heights (BBC 6/12/1953) and their extraordinarily ambitious Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC 12/12/1954), from George Orwell's celebrated dystopian, anti-totalitarian novel. The controversial broadcast, with its powerful rendition of Winston Smith's torture in Room 101, was an even greater success than Quatermass, which was by then being turned into the low-budget feature The Quatermass Xperiment (d. Val Guest, 1955) by Hammer Studios. It was a box office hit, though Kneale disliked the changes writer-director Guest made to the serial. As a result, when Hammer optioned the rights to the sequel, Quatermass II (BBC 22/10-26/11/1955), Kneale himself provided the screenplay, which neatly streamlined the original's topical mixture of anxiety over 'New Town' developments and nuclear testing into a story about a secret alien invasion of Earth.

Quatermass and the Pit (BBC 1958-59), the most ambitious and probably the finest of Kneale's science fiction serials, was a fitting end to his work with Cartier. This time the alien invasion has occurred some five million years in the past, allowing Kneale to explore, with dazzling imaginative force, his favourite territory - the intersection of science, superstition and human frailty.

Increasingly dissatisfied with his BBC contract, Kneale left to pursue a career writing screenplays for the cinema, starting with Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), both intelligently 'opened out' adaptations of John Osborne's plays. He then worked on the more conventional if well upholstered costume epic H.M.S. Defiant (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1962), starring Alec Guinness and Dirk Bogarde and First Men in the Moon (d. Nathan Juran, 1964), a lightweight but enjoyable adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel that served mainly as a showcase for Ray Harryhausen's marvellous optical effects. Kneale returned to Hammer for The Witches (d. Cyril Frankel, 1966), a straightforward horror story about a contemporary coven of devil worshippers, and the belated Quatermass and the Pit (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1967), easily the best film adaptation of his television work thanks to his own script and a decent budget. During this time the BBC produced Kneale's 'The Road' (First Night, BBC 29/9/1963), an ingenious story about 18th century villagers haunted by a future nuclear holocaust; sadly no recording of it is known to survive.

Kneale returned to the BBC with 'The Year of the Sex Olympics' (Theatre 625, BBC, 29/7/1968), a prophetic and trenchant satire on the increasing power of mass media that anticipated such television phenomena as Big Brother (Channel 4, 2000- ) and Celebrity Love Island (ITV, 2005- ). Although this was Kneale's first television work in colour, only a black and white copy survives. The Stone Tape, a brilliantly executed scientific ghost story, ranks amongst his very finest achievements, but was almost his final work for the BBC. After the last-minute cancellation of a new Quatermass serial and The Big, Big Giggle, about a teenage suicide cult, Kneale left the Corporation for good. Under the auspices of production executive Ted Childs, he would pen all his remaining television scripts for ITV.

Kneale's work for ITV shows an increasing shift towards a more character-based and less conceptual approach, as evidenced by the somewhat variable six-part anthology Beasts (ITV, 1976), best known for the chilling 'During Barty's Party' (23/10/1976), and 'Ladies Night', (Unnatural Causes, ITV 6/12/1986), a satire on misogyny. Its director, Herbert Wise, later worked with Kneale on the excellent period ghost story The Woman in Black (ITV 24/12/1989), taken from Susan Hill's novel. Childs finally produced the long-delayed Quatermass serial at Euston Films, not only as a four-part serial but also in a movie version (retitled The Quatermass Conclusion); Kneale also used the story as the basis for 'Quatermass', his only novel. Although lavishly produced, Quatermass (ITV, 1979) met with a somewhat muted response, perhaps because its gloomy tale of a future society in disarray was perceived as being unduly misanthropic, an accusation also levelled at Kinvig (ITV, 1981), Kneale's only sitcom, and seemingly his greatest departure.

After a disappointing Hollywood sojourn that only generated Halloween III: Season of the Witch (US, 1983), from which he had his name removed, Kneale returned to work with Ted Childs on a variety of assignments including a feature-length episode of the Napoleonic Wars swashbuckler Sharpe (ITV, 1993-97; 2006) and a four-part adaptation of Kingsley Amis's difficult late novel Stanley and the Women (ITV, 1991) that was largely successful in toning down the original's pronounced anti-feminism.

In 2005 the broadcast of a new adaptation of The Quatermass Experiment (BBC 6/4/2005) performed as a rare experiment in live TV drama served as an effective reminder of Kneale's fertility of invention and his seminal role in the development of British television.

Sergio Angelini.

Television credits: ARROW TO THE HEART-BBC 20/7/1952-additional dialogue-MYSTERY STORY-BBC 17/8/1952-adaptation-THE CATHEDRAL-BBC 26/10/1952-adaptation-THE LAKE-BBC 29/3/1953-adaptation (uncredited)-THE AFFAIR AT ASSINO-BBC 1/1/1953-adaptation-THE COMMONPLACE HEART-BBC 13/1/1953-adaptation-WEDNESDAY THEATRE: Curtain Down-BBC 21/1/1953-script-NUMBER THREE-BBC 1/2/1953-adaptation-THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT-BBC 18/7-22/8/1953 (6 pts)-script-GOLDEN RAIN-BBC 2/8/1953-adaptation-WUTHERING HEIGHTS-BBC 6/12/1953-adaptation-NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR-BBC 12/12/1954-adapted for television by-THE CREATURE-BBC 30/1/1955-script-THE MOMENT OF TRUTH-BBC 10/3/1955-adaptation-QUATERMASS II-BBC 22/4-26/6/1955 (6 pts)-script-SUNDAY-NIGHT THEATRE: ARROW TO THE HEART-BBC 1956-additional dialogue-MRS WICKENS IN THE FALL-BBC 8/8/1957-script-QUATERMASS AND THE PIT-BBC 22/12-26/1/1959 (6 pts)-screenplay-PANORAMA-BBC 26/1/1959-on-screen participant-WUTHERING HEIGHTS-BBC 11/5/1962-screenplay-FIRST NIGHT: The Road-BBC 29/9/1963-script-STUDIO 64: The Crunch-ITV 19/1/1964-script-LATE NIGHT LINE-UP-BBC2 27/11/1965-on-screen participant-THEATRE 625: The World of George Orwell: 1984-BBC2 28/11/1965-script-THEATRE 625: The Year of the Sex Olympics-BBC2 29/7/1968-script-THE WEDNESDAY PLAY: Bam! Pow! Zap!-BBC1 5/3/1969-script-THE WEDNESDAY PLAY: The Wine of India-BBC 15/4/1970-script-OUT OF THE UNKNOWN: The Chopper-BBC2 16/6/1971-script-THE STONE TAPE-BBC2 25/12/1972-script-BEDTIME STORIES: Jack and the Beanstalk-BBC2 24/3/1974-script-AGAINST THE CROWD: Murrain-ITV 27/7/1975-script-BEASTS-ITV 16/10-20/11/1976 (6 edns)-script-THE BOOK PROGRAMME: Tales of Horror-BBC2 16/12/1976-interviewee-LATE NIGHT STORY: The Photograph-BBC2 24/12/1978-script-QUATERMASS-ITV 24/10-14/11/1979 (4 pts)-screenplay-KINVIG-ITV 4/9-16/10/1981 (7 eps)-script-UNNATURAL CAUSES: Ladies' Night-ITV 6/12/1986-script-THE ITV PLAY: Gentry-BBC 31/7/1988-script-THE WOMAN IN BLACK-BBC 24/12/1989-screenplay-STANLEY AND THE WOMEN-BBC 28/11-19/12/1991 (4 pts)-script-THE LATE SHOW: Rudolph Cartier: Television Pioneer-BBC2 1/7/1994-interviewee-SHARPE: Sharpe's Gold-ITV 12/4/1995-adaptation-KAVANAGH Q.C.: Ancient History-ITV 17/3/1997-script-SF:UK: When Aliens Attack-Channel 4 1/4/2001-on-screen participant-SF:UK: Big Brother Goes Hardcore-Channel 4 1/4/2001-on-screen participant-TIMESHIFT: Watching You-BBC Four 22/5/2003-on-screen participant-THE KNEALE TAPES-BBC Four 15/10/2003-interviewee-TIMESHIFT: Fantasy 60s-BBC Four 26/6/2004-interviewee-THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT-BBC Four 2/4/2005-original script-TIMESHIFT: Live on the Night-BBC Four 2/4/2005-interviewee.

Film credits: THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT/THE CREEPING UNKNOWN/SHOCK!!-1955-original television play-QUATERMASS 2/ENEMY FROM SPACE-1957-screenplay/original story-THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN/THE SNOW CREATURE/THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN OF THE HIMALAYAS-1957-screenplay/story-LOOK BACK IN ANGER-1959-screenplay-THE ENTERTAINER-1960-screenplay-H.M.S. DEFIANT/DAMN THE DEFIANT/THE MUTINEERS-1962-screenplay-FIRST MEN IN THE MOON UK/US, 1964-screenplay-THE WITCHES/THE DEVIL'S OWN-1966-screenplay-QUATERMASS AND THE PIT/FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH-1967-screenplay/original story-THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION-1978-script-HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH-1982-script.

Radio credits: STORIES BY NORTHERN AUTHORS: Tomato Cain-1946-writer/reader-THE LONG STAIRS-1/3/1950-script-THE QUATERMASS MEMOIRS-1996-script.

Bibliography: TOMATO CAIN AND OTHER STORIES-1949-writer-QUATERMASS-1979-writer.

Further information here, here&here. Video content here, here&here.

"Magnetic recording is the backbone of the electronics revolution. Learn how this analog technology lets you store and erase data!"

The Compact Cassette, also called audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. It was designed originally for dictation, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the Compact Disc. Compact Cassettes consist of two miniature spools, between which a magnetically coated plastic tape is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell. Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural analog audio tracks are available on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second pair when moving in the other direction.

Cassette culture, or the cassette underground, refers to the practices surrounding amateur production and distribution of recorded music that emerged in the late 1970s via home-made audio cassettes. It is characterized by the adoption of home-recording by independent artists, and involvement in ad-hoc self-distribution and promotion networks - primarily conducted through mail (though there were a few retail outlets, such as Rough Trade and Falling A in the UK) and fanzines. The culture was in part an offshoot of the mail art movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and participants engaged in tape trading in addition to traditional sales. The culture is related to the DIY ethic of punk, and encouraged musical eclecticism and diversity.

"In the age of the incredibly shrinking, high-capacity mp3 player and numerous online music stores, independent artists are flocking to an unthinkable medium to get their music to the masses: the cassette tape. These labels serve as curators by catering to audiences and artists alike with eye-catching visuals and high production values that can only be rivaled by the original preferred format, vinyl, but at a fraction of the cost..."

Folklore Tapes

"Folklore Tapes is an ongoing research and musical heritage project covering and soundtracking the folklore of the UK in volumes of tapes housed in bespoke books, boxes and hand stamped envelopes. Exploring mysteries, myths, strange phenomena, nature and topography of the old counties"

Further information here, here&here.

Releases, thus far: Lancashire Folklore Tapes Vol.1 - 'Pendle, 1612' Cassette Box Set and Download/Lancashire Folklore Tapes Vol.1 'Pendle, 1612' - Deluxe Edition with Bag. Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 4 - Rituals & Practices (Regular Edition)/Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 4 - Rituals & Practices (Hardback Book Sleeve). Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 3 - Inland Water (Regular Edition)/Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 3 - Inland Water (Hardback Book Sleeve). Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 2 - Graves (Regular Edition)/Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 2 - Graves (Hardback Book Sleeve). Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 1 - Two Witches (Regular Edition)/Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 1 - Two Witches (Hardback Book Sleeve).

Coming Soon... DFT005 - Ornithology (Featuring: Broadcast & The Focus Group/Mary Arches), Folklore Tapes (Physical) News Letter Issue 1 (Featuring: Folktales/Exclusive Mix/Up-Coming Editions/Tapeography/Film News...and more).

PICK 'N' MIX TAPE VOL. 1 - A-SIDE - Music for Children:

PICK 'N' MIX TAPE VOL. 1 - B-SIDE - Music for Children:

Blue Tapes

Who are you and what do you want?

We are Blue Tapes, a boutique tape label specialising in sound art and alternative process artwork. We release music from Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

Why tapes? Isn’t it all a bit self-consciously retro?

No, tapes are not a dead format. They never went away. They’ve been the format of choice for distributing home-recorded or experimental music pretty much since the inception of that technology, and even the advent of peer-to-peer, cloud-based music services, and social networking hasn’t particularly eroded this - it’s only added more strings to our bow in terms of connecting with other human heads.

Tapes are a good format. Even audio purists like Autechre are insistent that - sonically - cassette tape is their favourite playback format. Even until recently, Autechre promos were issued on cassette tape rather than CD - wanting to sidestep lazy digital pirating was only one small part of the reason for this.

Further information here, here&here.

Releases, thus far: blue three: Cherry, blue two: Leedian, blue one: Matt Collins, Future Shuttle - Étude Study, Subscription.

"Sound art, Spoken word, Strange objects. Blue Tapes is a boutique cassette label specialising in handmade packaging, alternative process artwork, and curious audio"

The Tapeworm

"The Tapeworm is a cassette-only label. No barcodes. The cassette will never die! Long live the cassette! Click here to see all The Tapeworm’s tapes. The Wormhole is a format-free byproduct of The Tapeworm. A splendid home for splendid sounds in other splendid formats. The Bookworm is The Tapeworm’s publishing venture – an irregular series of perfect paperbacks"

Further information here, here&here.

Releases, thus far: TTW#47 - Gastón Arévalo - Classical Landscapes, TTW#46 - Chris Connelly - The Collapse of Ether, TTW#45 – Andrew Poppy – Infernal Furniture, TTW#44 – The Automatics Group featuring Amy Winedeath - Ammo A Mass A Mat, TTW#43 – Infinite Livez @ Glockenbachwerkstatt, TTW#42 - Steinbrüchel - Sinus, TTW#41 - drcarlsonalbion - Edward Kelley’s Blues, TTW#40 - Old Apparatus - 15:24-15:46, TTW#39 - Philip Corner - Piano Work’d, TTW#38 - Achim Mohné - And It Could Have Been Dead…, TTW#37 - Stephan Mathieu - Flags, TTW#36 - Lary Seven - Rotation, TTW#35 - Dr. Fleischbrittel - The 7th Synphonie of the Seven Swevens, TTW#34 - Burning Tree - Stinger, TTW#32 - Othon - Silky Hands of a Rough Piano Boy, TTW#31 - Fantom Auditory Operations / Michael Esposito - The Child Witch of Pilot’s Knob, TTW#30 - Francisco López & Zan Hoffman - Concert for 300 Magnetic Tapes, TTW#29 - Peter Hope-Evans - Cast-Offerings: Visitations, Fetches, Revenants, TTW#28 - Philip Marshall - Casse-tête, TTW#27 - Deceh - Fundamental Structure, TTW#26 - Goldmann vs Fennesz - Remiksz, TTW#25 - The Tapeworm Comes Alive!, TTW#24 - Randy Gibson - Analog Apparitions, TTW#23 - Zerocrop - On Tape, TTW#22 - Zachary James Watkins - Black Spirituals, TTW#21 - Cathi Unsworth - Johnny Remember Me, TTW#20 - Chugga - Memphistophelis, TTW#19 - Daniel Menche - Raw Fall, TTW#18 - Pita - Mesmer, TTW#17 - John Butcher - Trace, TTW#16 - Fennesz - Szampler, TTW#15 - Leslie Winer - & That Dead Horse, TTW#14 - Leif Elggren - All Animals Are Saints, TTW#13 - Autodigest - A Compressed History of Every Bootleg Ever Recorded, TTW#12 - Stefan Goldmann - Haven’t I Seen You Before, TTW#11 - Tongues of Mount Meru - The Delight of Assembly, TTW#10 - E-Man, TTW#09 - Baraclough - The Lampshade is not a Past Tense, TTW#08 - Meltaot - First and Second Rites, TTW#07 - Souls on Board, TTW#06 - Derek Jarman - In Conversation, 1979-80, TTW#05 - The Van Patterson Quartet - Live at F.W., TTW#04 - Simon Fisher Turner - De Dentro Hacia Afuera, TTW#03 - Stephen O'Malley - Petite Géante, TTW#02 - Jean Baudrillard - Le Xerox et l’Infini, TTW#01 - Philip Jeck - Spool.

Read more about the return of cassettes here, here&here.

Welcome to the fourth in a series of musical snap-shots, entitled: La Musique des Sons. Unable or unwilling to expand on the whys and what-fors of a particular artist/project, etc, two for one seemed like the way to go. Less is in no way more, but maybe less is enough.

Seemingly worlds apart, but do Shackleton and T.A.G.C. have more in common than first thought; Middle Eastern influences intertwine with hypnotic rhythms, producing meditative, ritualistic music? However, as is often the case, the similarities only serve to high-light the differences.

I first became aware of Sam Shackleton's work on the Mordant Music label: Stalker, I Want to Eat You, El Din, Pt. 1, etc. Like other interesting musicians in the modern music arena, Shackleton's work has been categorised as Dubstep (see his and Appleblim's (Laurie Osborne) work on their now defunct Skull Disco label). I've never known him to dispute this, but stylistically, we're now moving further and further away from the template. For the most part (relatively) slow rhythms, built from 'ethnic' percussion pads, weave in and out of Middle Eastern melodies, punctuated by nihilistic vocal samples (a reoccurring theme): "The Branch Is Weak". That said, from here-on-in, all bets are off...

"Well, I was making tunes on the computer at pretty much any bpm. Some just noise and experimental style, others ongy-bongy style and I gave a CDr to Ian Hicks of Mordant music. He really liked a tune called Stalker and he decided to put it out on Mordant Music. Anyway, that got picked up on by Rough Trade and they decided to put it on their Best of 2004 CD. I was really amazed that someone liked it, but it gave me confidence to start my own label. Around the same time we'd started going down to FWD. To be honest, I didn't like everything that was being played there, but I really liked some of what Hatcha and Youngsta were playing, especially the more interesting percussive stuff. I suppose that I just started keeping some of my stuff within the 140-147bpm range at that point. So anyway, I thought about starting a label and I had the confidence from the Rough Trade thing and seeing that people were making interesting bass music. I mean I remember when Horror Show and Conference dropped and thought that that was the stuff I was aiming to do"

El Din, Pt. 1 - Picking O'er The Bones - Mordant Music

El Din, Pt. 2 - Picking O'er The Bones - Mordant Music

Further information here, here&here.

Before, after and during Clock DVA, Adolphus (Adi) Newton further expanded his interests/ideas with The Anti Group, or TAG, or preferably T.A.G.C.; The Anti-Group Communications. In some ways T.A.G.C. combines early Jazz inspired Clock DVA material with the later electronic inspired Clock DVA material, but with more of an emphasis on ritualistic music and sonic experimentation, inspired by, amongst other things: "The expansion of Consciousness whether via applied use of computers and audio-visual technology or via arcane systems of Magick or other Occult or esoteric sciences". As infuriatingly inconsistent/infrequent as Newton's output has been, his ability to immerse himself in the subject at hand and present his findings is legendary. Each recording comes with copious sleeve notes, often in additional booklet form, detailing Newton's extensive research. For instance, in the same way that Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle's interest in W. S. Burroughs helped introduce the authors work to a new audience, Newton did much the same for many; Aleister Crowley, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Camus&Donatien Alphonse François (Marquis de Sade), to name but a few. Most of The Anti Group's back catalogue is criminally over-looked, therefore long out of print, and some of the CD re-releases/compilations, are poorly remastered, which is unfortunate. However, seek and ye shall find...

"The original idea for the Anti Group was devised by A. Newton & S.J. Turner as early as 1978, with the intention of the formation of a multi-dimensional research & development project active in many related areas. research and development of sound/film/video/performance and the documentation of each project was the fundamental “Modeus Operandi”. Underlining this basic idea lays the deeper philosophical and theoretical; The first non theoretical action devised by TAG was the Film “The delivery”, a 16mm tryptych projection and soundtrack , and the Anti theatre performance “The Discussion” designed for five tape recorders and multi-video projection systems. These two works were first presented at the “Der Doelen” center in Rotterdam on Sat. Sep 22nd, 1985. “The delivery” has been exhibited at the “2nd Atonal festival” in “The Ballhaus Tiergarten” Berlin, Feb 18th 1985 where the soundtrack was recorded on a mobile 24 track system. This document was released as the recording “The delivery” on Atonal Records. After these initial performances TAG concentrated on Audio development. it was during this period 1985-1987 that the above recordings were realized along with the highly acclaimed Ambisonic Album “Digitaria” which is a Technological and Ethnological work based on the ideas of the Sabean cults of ancient Khem and the Dogon tribe of Mali. Having worked through these areas, it became the next logical step to move into the application of Psychophysics developing the use of frequencies and Psychoacoustics with computer aided technology"

Ghost Cultures Under Collapse - Digitaria - Side Effects

Pre-Eval - Digitaria - Side Effects

Further information here, here&here.

An underwater kind of silence, humming of electric pylons, "Don't forget me" fades in static, another scene began... Transparent faces from the old school, no-one to project them onto, he drives by 1958 and someone says his name. He waved out of the film again, he turned and he flickered and he walked away, he felt a distant kind of longing, another scene began...

A New Kind of Man - Metamatic - 1979/1980.

As the original singer and main songwriter in Ultravox!, Foxx formed and 'designed' the UK's first synthesizer-rock group, working with producer Brian Eno before David Bowie mixed traditional and left-field influences together on his 1977 Low album. In fact, according to John Foxx, 'Brian got the call from Bowie when we were in the studio together'. Ultravox released a series of pioneering tracks which still sound contemporary today, including 'My Sex', 'Young Savage', 'The Man Who Dies Every Day', 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' and 'Dislocation'. Many of them were featured in the recent British movie Awaydays, based on a novel by Liverpool writer Kevin Sampson.

'The starting point for me was being at a party in the '60s and hearing The Beatles 'Tomorrow Never Knows' which had been released that day', reveals Foxx. He realised in an instant that the taped drum loop on 'Tomorrow Never Knows' was essentially a blueprint for the future. 'I sensed that that song had all the elements for everything that was going to happen for the rest of my life. It was a fantastic feeling'. Further inspired by Pink Floyd's experimental, psychedelic 'happenings' and a growing interest in surrealism, Foxx enrolled at the Royal College Of Art in the early 1970s where he founded Ultravox! ('we used to rehearse in the college dining room until they gave us the push for making too much noise') and encountered the likes of Quentin Crisp who modelled at the college and painter Francis Bacon. 'He would only recognise me when he was drunk', laughs Foxx.

Armed with an old analogue synthesizer and a four-track recording machine, Ultravox! gradually began to fuse together elements of Roxy Music, glam and Krautrock, in particular the bands Can and Neu!. After signing to Chris Blackwell's Island Records in the mid-70s, Ultravox! attracted the interest of former Roxy Music pioneer Brian Eno who worked with them on their self-titled debut. Two of the albums highpoints, 'My Sex' and 'I Want To Be A Machine' previewed the sounds and attitudes later adopted by British electronic pop (this was a full year before Kraftwerk's The Man Machine album) - inspiring the likes of Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Duran Duran.

Ultravox!'s follow-up LP Ha! Ha! Ha! was a new wave classic of manic, mad-eyed paranoia, heavy guitars and lush electronic interludes, especially on the pioneering 'The Man Who Dies Everyday' and 'Hiroshima Mon Amour'. Their final album, 1978's Systems Of Romance, was recorded in Germany with Krautrock guru Conny Plank whose previous credits included Kraftwerk and Neu!. Loaded with great songs ('Slow Motion', 'Just For A Moment', 'Dislocation', 'The Quiet Men') this dark, anthemic electro-rock album pointed the way forward in terms of sound, but also Foxx's sleek, elegant artwork for the LP was almost immediately referenced by designer Peter Saville in his sleeves for Joy Division and later New Order on Manchester's Factory Records. The album has continued to grow in stature over the years with the NME recently commenting: 'Synthesizing late-'70s English pop's two important strands - punk rock and the 'cold wave' electronics of Bowie's Low - the original Ultravox evoked an apocalyptic Eurocentric sci-fi world that veered between the hallucinatory and the monochrome... Systems Of Romance perfectly captures Foxx's doomed, visionary poetry in all its waiting-for-the-bombs-to-fall glory...

By this time Foxx was writing most of his lyrics through the perspective of a new Quiet Man alter ego: 'A long time ago I found a grey suit in an Oxfam shop in London', he explains. 'Over the next few weeks I began to think about who might have previously owned the suit and what kind of life he may have led. I got a few friends to wear the suit in various locations and rooms that I liked and took photographs and films of them, never showing their faces. I began to wear the suit and walk around London and other cities. It gave me a surprising amount of freedom. I attracted no attention at all. I found that I could go into a café or walk into a hotel without attracting a comment. If I sat in a corner long enough people would eventually cease to notice my existence altogether, so I could easily overhear conversations and observe all the small dramas that happen around us all the time. Here was a kind of invisibility and it was very exciting. The Quiet Man is still me, or rather still a part of me', he concludes.

Meanwhile in January 1980 Foxx emerged from the wreckage of Ultravox! (band member Billy Currie was on tour in Gary Numan's band at the time) with the stark, icy Metamatic, home to his most famous solo single 'Underpass' which he says was influenced by his love of dub reggae. 'The bassline on 'Underpass' is dub. Because a lot of the acts signed to Island Records were dub and reggae, I did meet Bob Marley and Lee Perry in the 70s and I was struck with how the music sounded like a living organism. Everyone in the studio sort of melted into it'.

“I deliberately don't define anything too closely, too fast, having learned years ago that's how you kill songs - they might sound OK, but they'll be inbred. You have to let other people walk them. Let them off the leash. See what they run off and mate with”

As Foxx recently recounted, his own work was mostly born out of long hours spent by himself. 'I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio every day and wobbled back at dawn imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of electro-pop. Metamatic was minimal, primitive techno-punk. Car crash music tailored by Burtons'. Metamatic's fusion of J. G. Ballard, Max Ernst and apocalyptic Japanese horror flicks made Foxx an unlikely chart contender yet he had his first taste of Top 20 success. More importantly it connected with an audience that included the likes of techno DJ Dave Clarke, John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers), the Junior Boys, Ladytron, Aphex Twin, Hollywood movie director Alex Proyas (The Crow, I, Robot) and Detroit electro artists such as Juan Atkins and Carl Craig... Read more here.

My Face - Single Sided 7" Flexi-disc - Free with Smash Hits! Magazine (1980)

Film One - B-Side of 'Underpass' 7" (1980-VS 318)

This City - From 'No-One Driving' 2 x 7" (1980-VS 338)

Further information here, here&here.

Argleton was a phantom settlement that appeared on Google Maps and Google Earth but does not actually exist. The supposed location of Argleton was just off the A59 road within the civil parish of Aughton in West Lancashire, England, which in reality is nothing more than empty fields. Data from Google are used by other online information services which consequently treated Argleton as a real settlement within the L39 postcode area. As a result, Argleton also appeared in numerous listings for things such as real estate, employment and weather, but although the people, businesses and services listed are all in fact real, they are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode district. As of 30 January 2010, Argleton was no longer in Google Maps.

< One of Roy Bayfield's photographs from the location of the non-existent Argleton. View more of his photographs here.

The anomaly was first noticed by Mike Nolan, head of web services at nearby Edge Hill University, who posted about it on his blog in September 2008. In early 2009 it was investigated further by Nolan's colleague, Roy Bayfield, who walked to the area shown on Google Maps to see if there was anything special about it. Bayfield commented about it on his own blog and described the place as being "deceptively normal" as well as extrapolating the concept of a non-existent place using the tropes of magic realism and psychogeography; the story was later picked up by the local media. By November 2009, news of the non-existent town had received global media attention, and "Argleton" became a popular hashtag on Twitter. As of 23 December 2009, a Google search for "Argleton" was generating around 249,000 hits, and the domain names argleton.com (with the message, "What the hell are they talking about? We, the good citizens of Argleton do exist. Here we are now!") and argleton-village.co.uk (a spoof website describing the history of Argleton, famous "Argletonians" and current events in the fictional village) were claimed. Other websites were selling merchandise with slogans such as "I visited Argleton and all I got was this T-shirt" and "New York, London, Paris, Argleton".

On 18 September 2010, the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Punt, PI' hosted by Steve Punt, investigated the case of Argleton...

One possible explanation for the presence of Argleton is that it was added deliberately as a copyright trap, or "paper town" as they are sometimes known, to catch any violations of copyright, though such bogus entries are typically much less obvious. It has been noted that "Argle" seems to echo the word "Google", while the name is also an anagram of "Not Large" and "Not Real G", with the letter G perhaps representing Google. Alternatively, it has been suggested that "Argleton" is merely a misspelling of "Aughton", although both names appear on the map. "Argle" is also a somewhat common metasyntactic variable, the kind of placeholder names used by computer programmers. "Argle-bargle" is a term for an argument. Professor Danny Dorling, president of the Society of Cartographers, considered it more likely that Argleton was nothing more than an "innocent mistake".

A spokesman for Google stated that, "While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors", and encouraged users to report any issues directly to their data provider. Data for Google Maps are provided by Netherlands-based Tele Atlas, who were unable to explain how such anomalies could get into their database, but said that Argleton would be removed from the map. It was finally removed sometime around mid-November or early December 2010.

Agloe, New York was invented on a 1930s map as a phantom settlement. In 1950, a general store was built there and named Agloe General Store, as that was the name seen on the map. Therefore, the phantom settlement actually became a real one.

Beatosu and Goblu are two non-existent Ohio towns that were inserted into the 1978–1979 official state of Michigan map. The names refer to the slogan of University of Michigan fans ("Go Blue!") and a reference to their archrivals from the Ohio State University (OSU).

Peter Fletcher, a Michigan alumnus and chairman of the State Highway Commission, inserted the fake towns of "Goblu" (near the real town of Bono, Ohio off State Route 2) and "Beatosu" (near Archbold, Ohio, just south of Interstate 80/Interstate 90/Ohio Turnpike at exit 25). In a 2008 interview, Fletcher explained that a fellow Michigan alumnus had been teasing him about the Mackinac Bridge colors: green and white, the colors of Michigan State University. Fletcher noted that the bridge colors were in compliance with federal highway regulations, so he had no choice in that matter; he did, however, have more control over the state highway map. Fletcher said that he thus ordered a cartographer to insert the two fictitious towns. Road Pig, a member of the Dreadnoks, from the fictional G.I. Joe series, is recorded as having been born in Goblu, Michigan.

A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as nonexistent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.

Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

Trap streets are routinely denied and rarely acknowledged by publishers. This is not always the case, however. A popular driver's atlas for the city of Athens, Greece, warns inside its front cover that potential copyright violators should beware of trap streets.

In an edition of the BBC Two programme Map Man, first broadcast 17 October 2005, a spokesman for the Geographer's A–Z Street Atlas company claimed there are "about 100" trap streets included in the London edition of the street atlas. One such street, "Bartlett Place", a genuine but misnamed pedestrian walkway, was identified in the programme, and will appear in future editions under its real name, Broadway Walk. It has been suggested that Google Earth placed Sandy Island (New Caledonia) as the geographical analog to a Trap Street, although historical evidence implies that it originated as a cartographical error and Google simply passed the error along.

In a 2001 case, the Automobile Association in the United Kingdom agreed to settle a case for £20,000,000 when it was caught copying Ordnance Survey maps. In this case, the identifying "fingerprints" were not deliberate errors but rather stylistic features such as the width of roads.

In another case, the Singapore Land Authority sued Virtual Map, an online publisher of maps, for infringing on their copyright. The Singapore Land Authority stated in their case that there were deliberate errors in maps they had provided to Virtual Map years earlier. Virtual Map denied this and insisted that they had done their own cartography.

Further information here, here&here.

"As a child, I devoured the information in my parents copy of Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, published by the Readers Digest in the mid-sixties. Inside its black, embossed covers, was a rich and magical world of Green Men, Stone Circles, Witches, Giants, Haunted Houses and Seasonal Customs. Single-handedly, it engendered my life-long interest in the folklore traditions of these Islands" - Simon Costin, The Museum of British Folklore.

Bibliographic information:

Title: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain.

Contributors: Reader's Digest Association, Reader's Digest Association Staff Edition illustrated.

Publisher: Reader's Digest Association, Limited, 1973.

ISBN: 0276000390, 9780276000393.

Length: 552 pages.

Eddie Jessup: Memory is energy! It doesn't disappear - it's still in there. There's a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be; and I'm telling you it's in the goddamned limbic system. Mason Parrish: You're a whacko! Eddie Jessup: What's whacko about it, Mason? I'm a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get?

Directed by Ken Russell. Produced by Howard Gottfried, Daniel Melnick & Stuart Baird. Written for the screen by Sidney Aaron, aka Paddy Chayefsky, adapted from his novel of the same name. Starring William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid, Thaao Penghlis & Drew Barrymore. Music by John Corigliano. Cinematography by Jordan S. Cronenweth. Editing by Eric Jenkins. Distributed by Warner Bros. Release date(s): December 25, 1980. Running time: 102 minutes. Country: United States. Language: English & Spanish. Budget: $15 million. Box office: $19,853,892.

Paddy Chayefsky is one of the twentieth century’s most renowned dramatists, praised for his successes as a playwright and as one of the progenitors of television drama in the early 1950s. He is however best known for his screenplays, most notably Delbert Mann’s Marty, Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital, and Sidney Lumet’s Network, all of which earned Chayefsky Academy Awards and are considered essential by many critics and scholars. Chayefsky’s contributions to print are considerably smaller. He only wrote one novel, 1978’s Altered States, a vast departure from his previous work, not only for its medium but its subject matter. Nonetheless, he would adapt it for the screen in Ken Russell’s 1980 film of the same title. Despite the notorious clashes between the two men as to what direction the film would take, it remains a standout in each’s oeuvre.

Altered States is the story of psychologist Eddie Jessup, who is loosely based on real-life psychologists Timothy Leary and John C Lilly and their explorations of human consciousness in fifties and sixties. Jessup’s work with schizophrenics spurs a renewed interested in events from his own past, particularly the quasi-religious visions he experienced as a child. Jessup is able to recreate these visions in himself via a sensory-deprivation chamber, where he takes increasingly long journeys into his subconscious while under the watchful eye of his collaborator Arthur. The visions he experiences allow the rational scientist to come to terms with the irrational incidents of his past, but after marrying Emily, a fellow scientist, and getting a professorship at Harvard, Jessup abandons his research into altered states of consciousness via the sensory-deprivation chamber.

Seven years later, Jessup is plagued by the idea that he gave up too soon and separates from his wife in order to devote his entire focus to his goal: the identification of the quasi-mystical concepts of the “true self” and genetic memories. He first journeys to Mexico to participate in the ritual ingestion of psychotropic substances with indigenous mystics who promise to show him a vision of the beginnings of humanity. Jessup experiences the start of an illuminating vision but then loses consciousness and is unable to remember what he saw.

He returns to the States with the mystics’ potion and begins experimenting in a controlled setting with Arthur’s help, but still experiences a “black out” before the crucial part of the hallucination. To enhance the experience, Jessup resumes his use of the sensory-deprivation chamber, this time in combination with the psychotropic drug. Confirming his theories, Jessup begins to hallucinate that he is a primitive human fighting for survival at the dawn of time. This mental regression has a physical side-effect as well: each time Jessup regresses mentally, his physical body begins to devolve into that of a pre-human ape man. Jessup begins to experience transformations outside of the chamber, but remains determined to experience the beginnings of life despite the dangers to himself.

Altered States is an early example of body horror cinema, and its dual focus on physical and psychic transformation borrows from Cronenberg’s early work and prefigures his Videodrome. There is a much earlier antecedent, however: that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There are many parallels between Jessup and Jekyll/Hyde, chief among them being the use of science to initiate a “regressive” transformation of both body and mind. Jessup, like Jekyll or any cinematic mad scientist, is driven by a sense of duty to knowledge. He must take the experiment to its logical conclusion because he can and, in true mad scientist fashion, Jessup believes that only he can. Altered States lacks the good versus evil dynamic of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and instead takes place in a moral vacuum. Jessup is an archetypal scientist, caring more for his quest for the unknown “truth” that he seeks than he does for his family, friends, or even himself, thus he’s willing to sacrifice all if need be. Chayefsky’s screenplay doesn’t chastise him for this lack of feeling, but instead depicts Jessup as a brave pioneer of the mind. It is a refreshing take on the mad scientist narrative, but one that makes the film’s emotional ending feel sudden and out of place. As with all body horror, Altered States is narratively structured to place a primacy on scenes of Jessup’s physical transformation. This is the unintended result of his research and thus is the main conflict of the narrative. The first time he experiences a transformation, it is unseen. His vocal chords become a laryngeal sac, a physical trait found in primates but not humans. This change is registered on x-rays of his throat and the importance of this discovery is conveyed to the audience – who are most likely unaware of the scientific importance of the change – via the characters’ shocked reactions.

The first visible transformation occurs later that night as Jessup’s arms and chest begin to undulate in an excellently realized scene wherein his entire body appears to become pliable. He stares quizzically at these transformations; though in immense pain, it is clear that Jessup is more curious than afraid. His concern grows as his brow extends to resemble that of a Neanderthal, but his body reverts to normal suddenly, leaving open the question of whether or not the mutations are real or simply hallucinations. Jessup’s next experiment results in his transformation into the pre-human he earlier imagined himself to be. Disappointingly we are denied the transformation itself, seeing only the result, but it works narratively and the sight of a hairy simian arm opening the chamber door is one of the film’s best shocks. The final transformation sequences are shown in great detail are among the best examples of corporeal dissonance in cinema.

Jessup’s final experiment takes him beyond the dawn of man to the beginnings of time itself, reducing his body to primordial sludge in the process. His final form looks a great deal like Belial from Henenlotter’s later Basket Case: a single arm attached to a mound of flesh; mouth permanently fixed in a silent scream. This terminal experiment opens up “the void” that existed prior to the big bang but Jessup is saved by Emily, who risks her life to pull him out of the vortex. The film’s climax sees Jessup unable to maintain his physical body in the aftermath of the experiment and he must struggle against a piece of “the void” which is now inside him in an attempt to retain his humanity.

"We're not dealing with genetics! We're beyond mass and matter here, beyond even energy. What we're back to is the first thought!"

The main issue of contention between Chayefsky and Russell allegedly centered on the latter’s direction to the cast to give their lines in a hurried, frenetic manner rather than the methodical, scientific style the author envisioned. Russell’s decision makes more sense for the narrative, as it allows for a characterization of Jessup as a man so driven and full of ideas that they literally spew forth in bursts. The conflict between the two artists is ultimately the reason why the film is successful. Russell’s psychedelic mysticism is counterbalanced by Chayefsky’s rational humanism, and vice versa. In a bit of synchronicity, the conflict of mysticism versus scientific rationality is the central theme of Altered States. Jessup’s life is consumed by a desire to bring the world of the supernatural into the laboratory; to quantify, measure, and contain the human soul and possess the fundamental truths and secrets it holds. Similar to the way in which Chayefsky’s rationality ultimately yielded to Russell’s psychedelia, Jessup finds peace not when he achieves his goal but when he accepts that it is impossible.

- David Carter/Not Coming To A Theatre Near You/2012.

John Corigliano - Altered States (Original Soundtrack Recording): Second Hallucination (Hinchi Mushroom Rite and Love Theme)...

Further information here, here&here. Watch the trailer here.

"It is today, this time, this decade. But for a stranded group of young people on a remote island in the South Pacific, it is the Year One. Theirs, by a sudden thrust of circumstance, is a New World. Can they create a better one?"

Created by Larry Gordon, Aaron Spelling & Rod Serling. Directed by Corey Allen, Charles S. Dubin, Harry Harvey Jr., George McCowan & Nicholas Webster. Starring: Tiffany Bolling, Zooey Hall, Jill Jaress, David Moses, Dennis Olivieri & Peter Ratray. Country of origin: United States. Language(s): English. No. of seasons: 1. No. of episodes: 17. Executive producer(s): Aaron Spelling. Producer(s): Harold Gast. Running time: 45 min. Original channel: ABC. Original run: September 22, 1969 – January 12, 1970.

The New People is a short-lived 1969 American television series on ABC that focused on a group of young college students who were returning from a trip in Southeast Asia when their plane crashed on an island in the south Pacific Ocean. The crash killed several of the college students, and all but one of the adults, who was badly injured and later died. The surviving students were the only human life remaining on the island. The island was unusual in that it had been built up as a site for a potential above-ground nuclear test which never took place, leaving all of the buildings and (improbably) supplies untouched and ready for use by the survivors.

The New People reflected the youth-oriented, counterculture of the 1960s. All people over 30 were now dead, and it was up to the young people to start a new society on the island. The pilot episode was written by Rod Serling (Serling wrote the screenplay for the episode under the pseudonym "John Phillips"). This program is an extremely rare example of a regularly scheduled network television series with 45-minute long episodes; it aired immediately after The Music Scene, another 45-minute program.

The concept of having all the adults killed off leaving only the young people to survive was not a new one, nor was this to be its last appearance. This concept was also used in William Golding's 1954 novel and subsequent film Lord of the Flies. In 2004 ABC premiered the hit Lost which also featured a group of plane crash survivors stranded on a strange island. In October 2005, NBC began broadcasting a Saturday morning series with a similar premise, Flight 29 Down. In 2007, CBS broadcast a reality show called Kid Nation in which 40 children, aged 8 to 15, are left alone in an abandoned mining town try to create a functioning society, including setting up a government system with minimal adult help and supervision.

Episodes List With Original Air Dates: Pilot (9/22/1969), Panic in the Sand (9/29/1969), The Tin God (10/6/1969), Murderer! (10/13/1969), Comes the Revolution, We Use the Girls' Shower (10/20/1969), Lifeline (10/27/1969), Marriage-Bomano Style (11/3/1969), Is This Any Way to Run an Island? (11/10/1969), The Dark Side of the Island (11/17/1969), A Bride in Basic Black - Part 1: The Courtship (11/24/1969), A Bride in Basic Black - Part 2: The Surrender (12/1/1969), The Pied Piper of Pot (12/8/1969), Speed Kills (12/15/1969), The Guns of Bomano (12/22/1969), The Prisoner of Bomano (12/29/1969), The Siege of Fern's Castle (1/5/1970) & On the Horizon (1/12/1970).

Further information here, here&here. Watch the trailer here.

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