is there a name or a phrase for or anything much written about that distinctly British CREEPY VIBE prevalent in TV shows and movies of the '60s/'70s? (e.g. The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, Baker-era

it does puzzle me that they think people will sign up before they can see what they're signing up for.

i can only find britbox US links, nothing in the UK. as you said it was reissued a couple of years ago, i think mine was £5 from fopp. (just don't ask me where it is)

pendas fen isn’t available there afaict. odd about robin redbreast, it comes up when i search but… i’m not sure if it’s *actually* via the BFI catalogue or just a general “available to buy” thing.

anyway still amazes me how patchily available a lot of these things are.

and yes, got The Stone Tape on dvd - it’s v strong in terms of the themes, though for some reason it didn’t quite do it for me overall. maybe a rewatch is due.

that last bit a belated response to ward fowler!

The Stone Tape is verrry hammy in places, more so than the usual amount of charming ham you get with most of these pieces. But the good bits make it incredibly special, imo.

I was looking at a blog that focuses on this kind of thing but with a broader remit - http://www.wyrdbritain.co.uk/ - and found two shows I'd never heard of before: Leap in the Dark (BBC) and Shades of Darkness (ITV), the former featuring Russell Hoban and Alan Garner as writers, the latter dramatising classic tales and probably more straightforwardly supernatural than the stuff in this thread. Perhaps forgotten for good reason, certainly I'm not particularly keen to give them a go, but maybe of interest to others here.

Hoban and Garner??? OK, am intrigued.

Here's a more helpful link: http://www.wyrdbritain.co.uk/search/label/Leap%20in%20the%20Dark

the Hoban and Garner episodes are on youtube

Artemis 81, um, not for me. Far far too deeply embedded in its niche, too ponderous and obscure and too much unsaid for my liking - of course what is left unsaid can be a major aspect of this genre and what can seem to one person vague or empty can to another seem loaded with implicit or potential meaning. I did lol when i was wondering what, if anything, it all meant, and Harlax said "a story is a sequence of fictitious events! how can it mean?" - and then Gwen proceeded on a long expository speech explaining precisely what it meant - well, one aspect of it anyway.

The strange city probably the best bit, though unfortunately too dark in the youtube version. Reminiscent of Lanark I think, though it's a long time since I read that. Note that if you do watch the youtube version, there's a somewhat important scene missing at 1:54, which can be found on another full version on youtube in even worse quality.)

I watched the first half of Artemis 81 at original broadcast but it annoyed the fuck out of my dad, o got sent to bed and I've never watched the second half

I mean he was probably otm but this is my memory

quatermass xperiment on tptv tonight

i liked artemis 81 but it is ponderous af. the simultaneous suicides is a good sinister opening, and the alternate city also good. there are many laboured bits and im not sure it really makes any sense but the whole thing seems so wild as a thing to get from mind to screen im delighted it exists.

Yes, any air of mystery it has for me is nothing to do with the content and all to do with "how did this ever get made?", and though I didn't particularly enjoy it I don't mean that at all disparagingly.

When I get back from hols I'll start on the other Nigel Kneales on youtube, and see about getting hold of Robin Redbreast, and Penda's Fen for a second viewing.

I enjoyed it at the time, my mate was over (I guess his family wasn't going to watch it), my mum (fairs fair it's her house) and maybe my sister..

I don't remember much of it, there was a foreign town which was supposedly hell or purgatory or some such, although it looked like Prague or some such..

I've not seen it since, and I don't remember seeing it available on video or dvd etc. Unless it's just you lot have good memories!

Oh there it is, upthread on YouTube!

I watched Penda's Fen for the first time last night. It's weird how certain obsessions can revolve around a text you've not read or a film you've not seen and this is right up there for that - a kind of ur-text for landscape mysticism or whatever you might want to call it. What a beautifully strange film. This is undoubtedly recency bias but I've convinced myself the landscape shots in Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir are homages to Penda's Fen. Something in the hovering stillness, the interaction with the voiceovers.

One person I've not seen mentioned here is Derek Jarman. Something about the way he shot landscape and blended ideas of disobedience, oppression and that sense of the ungovernable chimes with Penda (and Hogg, who worked for Jarman in the 80s). I first saw his A Journey to Avebury in a gallery and couldn't take my eyes of it. It's stayed with me and I can't really say why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yalyDdSGn-I

Just in case anyone was still thinking of attending the Nigel Kneale fest on Saturday, it's apparently sold out now.

Watched By Our Selves yesterday, which sort of fits here. It's an Andrew Kotting film from 2015, tracing one of his and Iain Sinclair's obsessions: John Clare's escape from the asylum in Epping Forest and his subsequent four-day odyssey back to Helpston to find the love of his life, Mary Joyce (who'd been dead three years, incidentally). It's black and white, features a silent moon-faced Toby Jones as Clare on his hopeless walk, and also Jones' dad - who played Clare in a TV play in the early 70s - reading some of Clare's accounts of the walk. It does start to feel its 80 minutes by the end but it has something about it. It's on Amazon Prime if that's your thing.

Did anyone go to the Kneale thing in the end? Any good?

By Our Selves sounds good, will steal

I think I should give that a go too.

rewatched penda's fen ahead of listening to the Uncanny Hour podcast thing that robin ince does (or maybe did, i an over a year behind). still don't know what to think (and it was £6 rather than 5 from fopp but was a blu ray)

Did anyone go to the Kneale thing in the end? Any good?

I did and it was good. Well organised etc. I think for a lot of the attendees, myself included, it was the first affair of this kind they'd been to since lockdown so the overall vibe was friendly, positive, upbeat. A celebration of Kneale rather than a rigorous critical interrogation, although most of the speakers had good things to say and there some genuinely funny moments. I learned some things I didn't know before (a lost tv one-off called Chopper with Patrick Troughton and an evil motorbike; Kneale working on a TV adaptation of Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop!) The lost radio play reading wasn't the absolute worst of its kind I'd seen, but it went on too long and was undermiked (the main technical flaw of the day).

I knew all the films/ tv progs on the bill, although it was nice to see them on a big screen. Larger projection did really reveal the limitations of BBC budgets. The special effects in the Stone Tape are just really shoddy, even for the time.

I was utterly ambushed by unexpected emotion when they introduced Jane Asher with a clip from the first Quatermass movie - I'd totally forgotten that she was the little girl who gets her dolly broken by the space man-monster, very nearly 70 years ago. It's all about time, innit.

I watched By Our Selves. I only really enjoyed the documentary bits, most everything else seemed a tad sterile to me. I knew nothing about John Clare so I would have enjoyed a straight documentary more. I'm curious about the director's other film This Filthy Earth.

Cool little BBC feature on Quartermass:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220427-quatermass-the-terrifying-sci-fi-that-changed-tv-forever

oh, i have a question.

what if anything does this have to do with ^ that quatermass? is there a wider meaning of the name?

https://dockstader.bandcamp.com/album/tod-dockstader-quatermass

Kneale got Quatermass from the phone book - one of the researchers at that centenary thing said they'd even tracked down the particular phone book in question, with a Mrs Quatermass listed.

Don't know how Dockstader came by that name tho

Going to do The Edge of Darkness here, even though it doesn't fit for a number of reasons – it doesn't have the CREEPY VIBE and it's from 1985. tho I think it's closer to the type than it looks on first inspection. Apologies, I couldn't be bothered to work round SPOILERS, so all spoilers I guess. You should watch this though. It's incredible.

BOB. PECK.
The line from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy about Jim Prideaux being made 'by the same firm that did Stonehenge' applies perfectly to Bob Peck. He seems bigger even than Joe Don Baker, which if you've seen Charley Varrick sounds like a hell of a statement. Wikipedia tells me he's actually an inch shorter at 6'1". still, Bob Peck looks he doesn't need to move for anyone and this makes his placidity potent and his portrayal of grief feel subterranean, a huge, implacable motive force. He's very still. This is all very important for his symbolic role, I think. The direction and editing show his mild eyes noticing everything. Other people spar off him, weighing him up with uncertain glances, unclear about his meaning and purpose.

The Sources of Information
This is very noticeable watching it now. It's in a middle place between computer databases and everything still being on a hard copy somewhere. Phone calls still needed. Having to go to places to collect information. It made me wonder how modern writers manage to move their characters about at all. What is the motivation to move someone from one place to another when an awful lot of essential information can be garnered online. It becomes more esoteric. Less about necessity.

This is from a time just before that conundrum is posed, so that phone calls and rendezvous and travel are all required. People may not be contactable when you need them. How Craven navigates the world of information is interesting. Detection doesn't happen as such – he is just *driven* (as Jedburgh says of him in the final episode) to acquire whatever he needs to get to the centre of the web. Craven finds recordings, notes, interrogates, interviews, a computer database, he uses psychic contact with his dead daughter, Emma, and talks to himself, he exists in a web of surveillance, data security and information secrecy, odd secret service functions. Colleagues consider him on the edge of sanity – one version of the 'edge of darkness' at play – and he himself wonders what territories he is walking in, especially when he loses the link with his Emma. It is becomes increasingly clear his role as a policeman is becoming entirely absorbed by an emotional quest. Quest? Yes, the motives behind the drive are sexualised, animistic, mythic, arthurian.

Sexualisation
His daughter, the absence of the mother, there's something going on here. You notice it in the car in the first episode - it's not entirely clear whether she's his daughter or his young girlfriend. It's in the notorious and powerful episode where he sniffs his dead daughter's dildo, working his way round her bedroom, trying to find, recover, feel her presence.

then there's his very peculiar interrogation technique, of one of the pair who was involved in her death, in the hospital where the mother died. He whispers tenderly and softly to the unconscious terrorist, near death, comforting and sensuously courting him, in order to get the information he needs.

So much!
It's super super dense, the writing, the direction, the acting - it all contains so much. the politics of energy and post-industrial environment, nature v humankind, a psychological portrait of grief, a nuclear era psychomachia - these themes in particular link this to something like Penda's Fen or Quatermass – all connected with Thatcherism, London, mining, masculinity. High relevant to emusk for example. But also the faces in this are alive with abrasive interaction, power plays, sizing each other up. There's an extremely memorable moment where we cut from Jedburgh (Joe Don Baker) in a combat jacket, running around in crisis mode, to him standing, cheerfully grinng, raising a stetson to a sworn enemy flying in from the States. People are not what they seem and are willing to play parts in the dance that's taking place. ie this programme doesn't take its viewers for fools, thank god.

As a by the bye – there's nothing like this era tv ('70s, '80s) for better conveying a grey London in the rain.

psycho psycho machia

so yeah about that. Jedburgh is basically Christianity; that's fairly heavily trailed. He is of course an extraordinary character – Chestertonian in his Christian exuberance to do good, a rather militant good, and to live life and kill enemy. He is clearly co-opted by state authority in the beginning, but recognises this and breaks from it into a sort of Manichean entity, driven to bring about Armageddon. Holding up the plutonium in his extended hands in the form of a cross at the conference. Craven is, as Jedburgh himself says, 'freeze-dried from some earlier epoch'. His an animistic world, variously portrayed as a tree and a stag. He represents the earth, and the Gaia theory, and survival beyond nuclear war. Pastoral v Nuclear makes it very much of that period of drama. And It's interesting to see this conversation – of nature being part of and surviving within the ambit of human's capitalistic behaviour – worked through by The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

How the show contains all this in an integrated way is something else that adds to its density, makes it potent like v good whisky.

i haven't seen the hollywood remake, though i'd like to, once i've rewatched this a couple of times.

Thanks Fizzles, a perceptive and insightful post as always! No it doesn't have the creepy vibe that this thread is all about but I think it's adjacent. The creepiness of the shows in this thread is obviously supernatural, whereas edge of darkness is trading on the very real idea of nuclear terror, which it does it subtly and creepily (the occasional shots of trains of nuclear waste rattling through the night) as well as much more explicitly (sluicing the tunnels with radioactive water, the dead body in the radiation suit at the hot cell). And not to throw the net of creepiness too wide but there's the idea of higher powers (governmental or extra governmental) always watching even when you don't know it - AZURE!

I have to say Jedburgh = Christianity passed me by on my previous viewings, if I rewatch I'll look out for it. I guess I would have characterised him as chaotic neutral.

I have no interest in seeing mel gibson's remake.

i do think there's an explicitly supernatural element, but yes, this is firmly in the nuclear space. there's a few things that cause me to locate it perhaps more closely to the vibe that might seem appropriate, but they're all fairly subliminal.

- the spring magically appearing where his daughter dies (Jedburgh quotes Hamlet when he sees it: 'Oh Jepthah, Judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou' which suggests biblical allusion on his part, but it can also be read as a sacred grove).
- the figuring of craven out of policeman into an avatar of nature, and his final mystical transformation into a stag (it's how he's last seen, and we only hear how he just disappears at the same time as a distant cry)
- the daughter as just on the edge of psychic projection and autonomous ghost
- christianity v nature worship allegory (if you do watch it again i'm interested in your thoughts – there are various key moments throughout, the co-opting and working with the state in the first place, but becoming a radical millenarian by an end seems to me deliberately allegorical)

i guess you could see it as a reverse of penda's fen, where nuclear and military appropriation and potential destruction of the land are a meaningful backdrop to the supernatural events. in this it's the reverse, the supernatural is a deep, unemphasised background to the nuclear and energy political thriller.

TKM should overruled Peck and turned him into a tree, as intended.

I've never seen The Edge of Darkness

Genuinely one of the greatest TV series ever, real justification-of-the-form stuff. I cannot imagine the circumstances which would lead to me watching an American remake.

There is something both supernaturally and actually-in-reality terrifying about dying of radiation poisoning (it’s invisible! but it kills you grotesquely). Proper horror

And obvs the Clapton/Kamen score is an incredible bullseye use of their limited ranges

Okay watching Mike Hodges' The Tyrant King on youtube (thanks Soref for the recommendation) and it has a distinctly creepy UK vibe - I think this would have disturbed me as a kid, especially with the Pink Floyd freakout jams.. it's not very supernatural (so far) but has sinister adults chasing children all over London

https://www.quartzcity.net/ilx/edgeofdarkness1.jpg
https://www.quartzcity.net/ilx/edgeofdarkness2.jpg

(I recently rewatched EoD and discovered a rich vein of screencaps)

Fizzles' analysis above deserves more space. I didn't pick up on Jedburgh = Christianity either, but admittedly I'm biased by the American style of Atomic Christianity/apocalyptic which would have told the story from Joe Don Baker's p.o.v. or something.

Anyway, back to pining away for the lost recordings of the original A For Andromeda

one of my friends recommended me two books called "Scarred For Life" by Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence, i've found them to be genuinely excellent considerations of all aspects of this kind of thing

Thread revival made me look up Sapphire and Steel and damn, is it as great as it sounds?

There was a vibe so many of these programs had which tripped me out when I’d catch them as a kid. For some reason my local PBS station (iirc) would air Blake’s 7 late at night and the atmosphere and style of it just felt very creepy and odd to me. I don’t know how creepy it actually is, this was something I was watching as a 9 or 10 yr old in the mid eighties.

sapphire and steel is a very slow by 2023 standards. it's also made all the weirder when you consider it went out at prime time early evening back when there were only 3 TV channels available.

and the various cases are wildly different

Sapphire and Steel is slow and of its time, yes, but it's wonderfully weird and entertaining. If you don't like the first episode, you can safely bail on the rest.

I would actually say that if you don't like the first episode, try going straight to the second season. The first season is good fun but a bit shonky, the second season is amazing imo. I can't remember quite how much you need to watch to get the 'lore' of the show, but I think you can do it this way without missing too much.

Just finished EoD. Extraordinary - thanks for highlighting it!

on reflection I think emil.y is right ... S1 of S&S is scary but has two cute kids getting lots of screen time; many would prefer the child-free horror of S2

Lots of quibbles about stuff but I would simply like to say I watched the first 2 stories at time of broadcast and the second one was the one that stuck

second one is extraordinary i think. it’s worth watching the first just to experience how deep and hard the second one goes. it’s pretty long.

I often wonder if this is why Space: 1999 failed to catch on. Lew Grade's business model involved selling UK shows to the US audience, which worked with The Saint and Danger Man because despite starring British actors and being written by British people everybody knew the brief. Meanwhile Gerry Anderson wanted to get into live action.

So his first show was UFO, which was a weird mixture of dayglow wigs and downbeat plots where the heroes always lost. And the Space: 1999, which had some awesome spaceships but every episode consisted of Martin Landau looking worried and Barry Morse looking worried and at the end of Landau would look at the camera and say "there's no hope for any of us, or for the people watching at home, because it's 1975 and there's just no hope, no hope at all".

Every single episode. They just couldn't suppress their Britishness. The Britishness leaked through. To this day I haven't seen Moonbase 3 but from what I've read it was much the same but without even aliens. Like Star Cops but ultra-70s.