About half my memories of the 1990s are of watching TV shows. The X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond, Fortean TV, Friends, Frasier, American Gothic, Dark Skies, Babylon 5, Star Trek (TNG, DS9 - and had Voyager started by then?), The Adam & Joe Show, The Friday Night Armistice, Ellen, Caroline in the City - a veritable smorgasbord of good and bad telly. I found a single episode of Caroline in the City on an old VHS a while back, and I have no good explanation for having watched it. Inarguably, I watched way too much telly back then. When your Latin teacher is teasing you for watching too much telly, then there's something wrong. Luckily, when I went to uni I had no telly, so I broke myself of the habit. These days I don't watch it for myself. I watch quiz shows with the folks and a few sitcoms with my brother. Oh, and Castle - I rather like that: Nathan Fillion, dontcherknow!
Anyway, when you have a lot of time on your hands, you end up doing stuff to relieve the tedium. So over the last few months I have scrupulously catalogued every old video I could find, and all the DVDs in the house. We have a startling total of over a thousand films. Nostalgia has thus been brought to life. I've got several old episodes of Fortean TV on tape, and they are as entertaining now as they were fifteen years ago. I found I had most of Dark Skies, and then it got released on DVD, which allowed me to fill in the few gaps. Just the other day they released Space: Above and Beyond on DVD in the UK. For those of you who missed this classic hokum back in the day, here is the set-up. In the near sci-fi future A rag-tag group of recruits have all decided to join the USMC for a variety of reasons, including one bloke who got bumped from a colony ship at the last second - when suddenly it's war! Villainous aliens have attacked a human colony - worse, it's the colony that said bloke's girl is on. Then the aliens come after Earth.
The best of the Terran forces get severely beaten up, but the aliens are repelled at the last moment. Our new recruits then spend about twenty episodes flying around with some '90s CGI, feeling angsty (like nBSG) but retaining some semblance of military discipline (unlike nBSG), and fleshing out the universe. A couple of X-Files writers were behind the concept, which is stuffed to the brim with pure frothy patriotic nonsense. Remember President Bill Paxton's speech in Independence Day? Like that but with more soldiers. Add in a villainous human corporation that has some big, sinister secret, a bunch of AIs gone rogue, and a load of humans grown in vats for reasons that never really make sense, and there's your universe: cheesy, silly, overblown, awesome. Because the writers were from The X-Files, they reuse actors you know, so you get to think, "Hey, I know that face!" There's the small town sheriff from Home, the reincarnated love of Mulder's past lives from The Field Where I Died, &c, &c.
One of the nice bonuses about getting this series on DVD is that it's one of those spaceship-set shows with quite a bit of darkness in it, so it will be a nice bit of background for my continuing terrain-making for Space Hunt! I did get a bit bummed-out today, so I haven't done so much as I wanted to on the generator. I have done some work on that and on a few other things, including conceptualise what will be a very attractive wall-mounted fan. I was a bit narked because of the nexus of several things. I asked for a book at the library, which has arrived. "Er, that annoyed you, Pete? You're nuts!" Wait, you! The new Fortean Times came out today. "But you love that magazine!" Hush a moment! It was annoying because my car has been in the garage since Monday, and the weather here is making people suspect that ark-building would be a reasonable thing to do. So if I were to walk the two miles to town to get the book and magazine, not only would I be drenched by the time I got back, but I'd have an expensive wad of papier maché, too.
Our rabbit, Spot, has been doing his best to distract me. He has been demanding that I pick him up or play with him even more than he usually does. I've started to suspect that he's realised he has a dog's name. He likes to chase one's hand or foot in circles, and ends up chasing his own tail. When one leaves the room he runs after one, and when you enter it he runs up to one, wanting to play. If one picks him up he insists on licking one's face. He hasn't started barking or wagging his tail yet, but those things are both physically impossible for him. Still, I won't rule either out! Right, until our benign postman delivers unto me the beautiful things I am waiting for, I think it's time to get back to making terrain. I have watched everything suitable except for The Chronicles of Riddick and Total Recall, so I guess it's time to pull them out of the wall of films and start carving up those materials to make the plasma generator. Au revoir, folks!
Showing posts with label Forteana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forteana. Show all posts
Friday, 27 April 2012
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Welcome to Terror!
A few years ago a very entertaining show came out, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Those of you who missed it at the time should look it up before continuing. For unrelated reasons I was looking for stuff on the Fortean Times forum - if you've read the last entry on this blog, you don't have to be a genius to work out that I was looking for uploaded episodes of Fortean TV. The discussion turned up the comic Garth Marenghi website, and - even better! - the apparent inspiration: Shaun Hutson's website. I promise you that I have not adulterated this introductory babble one iota.
This is everything you wanted (or even didn't want) to know about my books, my work, my thoughts and my ravings. All put together by that giant among men, Graeme Sayer.
Read on and enter the darkness.
Let's go.
Yes, that really is how this guys writes. "Pete, don't you yourself tend toward an over-abundance of exposition and long rambling asides that add nothing to the story you're trying to tell?" Yes, I do. But I'm not a published author. Perhaps I ought to be! I haven't heard of anything new from Dan Brown in ages. Meanwhile, on the Fortean theme I have uncovered an episode on Youtube. Watch and let me know what you think of the Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe. In the manner of Police Squad he always introduces himself as Father, while the captions proclaim him to be the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. Who knows why. I hope you enjoy this stuff!
Introduction By Shaun Hutson
This is the one. It's official. This is the Shaun Hutson website. I know it's official because it's me, Shaun Hutson, telling you. You're on it, so stay on it. All the dirt, all the filth, all the blood and all the guts straight from the horses mouth. Stuff you couldn't read before because publishers banned it, stuff you couldn't imagine. Stuff that will make your hair curl, your jaw drop, your sides ache, your stomach churn and your bowels open.This is everything you wanted (or even didn't want) to know about my books, my work, my thoughts and my ravings. All put together by that giant among men, Graeme Sayer.
Read on and enter the darkness.
Let's go.
Yes, that really is how this guys writes. "Pete, don't you yourself tend toward an over-abundance of exposition and long rambling asides that add nothing to the story you're trying to tell?" Yes, I do. But I'm not a published author. Perhaps I ought to be! I haven't heard of anything new from Dan Brown in ages. Meanwhile, on the Fortean theme I have uncovered an episode on Youtube. Watch and let me know what you think of the Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe. In the manner of Police Squad he always introduces himself as Father, while the captions proclaim him to be the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. Who knows why. I hope you enjoy this stuff!
Saturday, 3 December 2011
Fortean TV
Those of you with an interest in the odd might have heard of Charles Fort. He was an eccentric who demonstrated the qualities both of the sceptic and the believer. He was, in a word, a proto-scientist or a philosopher to give it the name of the pre-Christian era. Inconsiderately, he only bothered to be born about a century and a half ago, so he tends to be regarded as either a visionary nut or just a plain nut. He compiled a great deal of entertaining/amusing/startlingly important information, and spawned a magazine, Fortean Times. I don't read a great many regularly spawned periodicals. The total amounts to Wargames Illustrated, Miniature Wargames, The Daily Telegraph (thanks, Dad!) and Fortean Times. Oh, and the UK's Vegetarian Society magazine, but that's contingent on membership, so I don't really think of it a lot.
In the '90s Fortean Times must have teamed up with Rapido (the production company that brought us Eurotrash), as those of us watching Channel Four were privileged to behold the start of Fortean TV. This covered much the same ground as the magazine still does, albeit in an inevitably different format. The Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe (a doyen of the paranormal scene, and apparently a CofE vicar in biker leathers) was the presenter of choice, and introduced us, in the most affable voice you can imagine, to a series of ephemera, impossibilities and so on. I sensibly recorded a lot of these at the time. Rapido does not seem to have released them, I am sorry to say. I mean to go through as many as I can.
Tonight's episode covers an unusual Indian fish-swallowing custom, ghost-hunters (this long precedes that night-vision stuff one sees today) and the always popular Yeti! But don't go cross-eyed with boredom yet. The first story is all about a guy who found a pork scratching that resembled the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. He found it opposite a chip shop called Gabriel's, the pub (indeed) which he had just left contained a total of three people, was known as The Chapel (despite being called The Royal Oak) and contained 400 year-old church pews. Yes, you have correctly discerned the way this story came to prominence: by way of the tabloids. Cue some mumbo-jumbo about the coming Millennium marking the end of an age. The delights of this show were always the way that it presented everything in a thoroughly deadpan manner. One has the option to say, "Well, yes! God would manifest himself in a pork scratching!" as much as one has the opportunity to raise an eyebrow like Kirk's second-in-command.
Next, ghost-hunting! Father Lionel Fanthorpe receives a letter from a man with ridiculously awful hair and a computer which was surely a decade out of date even in the mid-nineties. God save me from having to comment on the chap's glasses, shirt and sofa: an ill-attired Leo Sayer with an English accent and lamentable taste. That said, I've a poster advertising all three Star Wars films on my wall, so maybe I should stop throwing stones out of my glass house. Back to the tale: a villainous poltergeist had interposed itself repeatedly whenever the English Leo Sayer and his wife, Kaye, were in the mood. Amusingly, he recaps it even more unappealingly than I just did. "When we were about to become intimate, er, that is to say, to have nookie." Leo then tells us that he asked some mates round for a spot of ouija.
I should probably remark at this point that I neither believe nor disbelieve in Ouija Boards. I don't intend to use one, nor have I ever used one. My Mum recounts a tale, back when she was a prefect at her school, of coming across two younger children, who frightened themselves by using such a board. I might have missed her exact wording, but the sense is there: they frightened themselves. Of course, you can interpret that as a) their imaginations ran away with themselves or b) through them terrors were revealed from another astral plane. I have no feeling for ghosts. I was sitting in the kitchen of our student house with my ex, when she remarked (for she, you see, was avowedly sensitive) that she sensed a spiritual presence. I remember her noting that it was female. Maybe it was young? Anyway, I noticed nothing except her becoming tenser. I don't dismiss such things out of hand for a few reasons. First, you know green and brown? "Yeah, Pete, we're aware of colours!" Hey, calm down. I have a bit of a blind spot between the two. I had a pair of trousers I thought green, but which female friends (including the ex - spooky!) thought brown. Likewise, there's a bush in the back garden which I think pink, but which Mum assures me is purple. In a word, my eyes have been shown to be untrustworthy. So maybe there's such a thing as ghosts which I cannot see, hear or in any way sense. Inarguably, this is much the same as not believing in the things, but with a lot less sarcasm! :-D
Back to Leo: the Ouija results in Leo Sayer's twin discovering that his ghost is the spirit of an old (i.e. from 1745 - "Bonnie Prince Charlie's era") wife, that his current wife is pregnant, and that his glasses just look weird. OK, maybe not that last. He needs no ghost to tell him that. There is no apparent checking of details, and this is arguably another charm of the series. Herodotus never had the resources to check whether there really were giant ants in India. He'd just say "Well, I was down th pub, and this merchant told me that..." Does it matter if Leo had a wife in 1745? No. It's entertainment. Truth is secondary. Lest it seem that I am unfairly giving Forteana a pass I would not give to "real science", I was really amused by all this light-speed stuff in Europe of late. I would be amused if it transpired that the speed of light could be exceeded. I doubt it would have any impact on my daily life (sorry, Captain Kirk), but the scratching of heads by the globe's pre-eminent physicists would be worth a chuckle. Well, there's also an English scientist who has promised to eat his underwear if it turns out to be true. I haven't seen that sort of thing since Laurel and Hardy had to eat their hats.
So we move on from Leo. Now Father Lionel Fanthorpe gets personally involved. He enrolls in a Ghostbusting course. Shirley, a grandmother, leads the course. Dowsing rods turn up. Sadly, Proton Accelerators do not. Shirley leads everyone in a course of moaning (some sort of odd throat-singing, maybe?) to rid the house of Alice's ghost. Father Lionel gives us a polite scientific viewpoint. He remarks that although he trusts all those present who are psychic that they are giving a true account (cue smiles and nods), that he does not trust his own imagination when he feels he can see something peculiar.
Next we have an unusual pastime: Indians in Hyderabad swallowing live fish stuffed with something herbal and full of saffron as a cure for all sorts of things. Those of you even more sceptical than I will be pleased that nutritionist Prof. Tom Sanders is on hand to explain that a live fish would be dissolved in 15 minutes, and that this would have no bearing on any herbs, drugs or whatever were stuffed into the fish. Well, to be honest, I'm rather predisposed to Tom's side myself. I am not a fan of seeing fish tortured to death. Now comes the ad-break, apprising us that the Yeti follows thereafter!
The ad-break ends, and the show returns: a brief version of the theme plays while a businessman with a lizard's head and a newspaper under his arm rotates beside the show's name. Fanthorpe takes s through a brief history of the Yeti, including some delightful clips of 1920/30s black and white footage of chaps in monkey suits threatening Professor Challenger & co as they escape The Lost World. Mike Dash, an expert, turns up and suggests the possible explanations for Yeti sightings: 1) a survival of Neanderthal Man, 2) an unknown prehistoric ape, 3) a mutation of one or more species and 4) hoaxes. Fanthorpe notes that much seeming proof has been exposed as false. The scene now cuts to Moscow, where Russian researches have been investigating the theory that the Yeti is a human species believed extinct.
Although new evidence is adduced, I shall have to guess that it didn't prove the Yeti's existence. If it did, then everyone seems to have missed that for the last decade and a half. Anyway, Fanthorpe then closes the episode with a recounting of what we shall see next week (Elvis, frogs, stigmata) and "The Yeti Song" (his own words and a familiar tune) with "my good friend Alf!" Then we get the Rapido frog, which baahs like a sheep, and the copyright date: 1998. Ah, what a great little show this was!
In the '90s Fortean Times must have teamed up with Rapido (the production company that brought us Eurotrash), as those of us watching Channel Four were privileged to behold the start of Fortean TV. This covered much the same ground as the magazine still does, albeit in an inevitably different format. The Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe (a doyen of the paranormal scene, and apparently a CofE vicar in biker leathers) was the presenter of choice, and introduced us, in the most affable voice you can imagine, to a series of ephemera, impossibilities and so on. I sensibly recorded a lot of these at the time. Rapido does not seem to have released them, I am sorry to say. I mean to go through as many as I can.
Tonight's episode covers an unusual Indian fish-swallowing custom, ghost-hunters (this long precedes that night-vision stuff one sees today) and the always popular Yeti! But don't go cross-eyed with boredom yet. The first story is all about a guy who found a pork scratching that resembled the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. He found it opposite a chip shop called Gabriel's, the pub (indeed) which he had just left contained a total of three people, was known as The Chapel (despite being called The Royal Oak) and contained 400 year-old church pews. Yes, you have correctly discerned the way this story came to prominence: by way of the tabloids. Cue some mumbo-jumbo about the coming Millennium marking the end of an age. The delights of this show were always the way that it presented everything in a thoroughly deadpan manner. One has the option to say, "Well, yes! God would manifest himself in a pork scratching!" as much as one has the opportunity to raise an eyebrow like Kirk's second-in-command.
Next, ghost-hunting! Father Lionel Fanthorpe receives a letter from a man with ridiculously awful hair and a computer which was surely a decade out of date even in the mid-nineties. God save me from having to comment on the chap's glasses, shirt and sofa: an ill-attired Leo Sayer with an English accent and lamentable taste. That said, I've a poster advertising all three Star Wars films on my wall, so maybe I should stop throwing stones out of my glass house. Back to the tale: a villainous poltergeist had interposed itself repeatedly whenever the English Leo Sayer and his wife, Kaye, were in the mood. Amusingly, he recaps it even more unappealingly than I just did. "When we were about to become intimate, er, that is to say, to have nookie." Leo then tells us that he asked some mates round for a spot of ouija.
I should probably remark at this point that I neither believe nor disbelieve in Ouija Boards. I don't intend to use one, nor have I ever used one. My Mum recounts a tale, back when she was a prefect at her school, of coming across two younger children, who frightened themselves by using such a board. I might have missed her exact wording, but the sense is there: they frightened themselves. Of course, you can interpret that as a) their imaginations ran away with themselves or b) through them terrors were revealed from another astral plane. I have no feeling for ghosts. I was sitting in the kitchen of our student house with my ex, when she remarked (for she, you see, was avowedly sensitive) that she sensed a spiritual presence. I remember her noting that it was female. Maybe it was young? Anyway, I noticed nothing except her becoming tenser. I don't dismiss such things out of hand for a few reasons. First, you know green and brown? "Yeah, Pete, we're aware of colours!" Hey, calm down. I have a bit of a blind spot between the two. I had a pair of trousers I thought green, but which female friends (including the ex - spooky!) thought brown. Likewise, there's a bush in the back garden which I think pink, but which Mum assures me is purple. In a word, my eyes have been shown to be untrustworthy. So maybe there's such a thing as ghosts which I cannot see, hear or in any way sense. Inarguably, this is much the same as not believing in the things, but with a lot less sarcasm! :-D
Back to Leo: the Ouija results in Leo Sayer's twin discovering that his ghost is the spirit of an old (i.e. from 1745 - "Bonnie Prince Charlie's era") wife, that his current wife is pregnant, and that his glasses just look weird. OK, maybe not that last. He needs no ghost to tell him that. There is no apparent checking of details, and this is arguably another charm of the series. Herodotus never had the resources to check whether there really were giant ants in India. He'd just say "Well, I was down th pub, and this merchant told me that..." Does it matter if Leo had a wife in 1745? No. It's entertainment. Truth is secondary. Lest it seem that I am unfairly giving Forteana a pass I would not give to "real science", I was really amused by all this light-speed stuff in Europe of late. I would be amused if it transpired that the speed of light could be exceeded. I doubt it would have any impact on my daily life (sorry, Captain Kirk), but the scratching of heads by the globe's pre-eminent physicists would be worth a chuckle. Well, there's also an English scientist who has promised to eat his underwear if it turns out to be true. I haven't seen that sort of thing since Laurel and Hardy had to eat their hats.
So we move on from Leo. Now Father Lionel Fanthorpe gets personally involved. He enrolls in a Ghostbusting course. Shirley, a grandmother, leads the course. Dowsing rods turn up. Sadly, Proton Accelerators do not. Shirley leads everyone in a course of moaning (some sort of odd throat-singing, maybe?) to rid the house of Alice's ghost. Father Lionel gives us a polite scientific viewpoint. He remarks that although he trusts all those present who are psychic that they are giving a true account (cue smiles and nods), that he does not trust his own imagination when he feels he can see something peculiar.
Next we have an unusual pastime: Indians in Hyderabad swallowing live fish stuffed with something herbal and full of saffron as a cure for all sorts of things. Those of you even more sceptical than I will be pleased that nutritionist Prof. Tom Sanders is on hand to explain that a live fish would be dissolved in 15 minutes, and that this would have no bearing on any herbs, drugs or whatever were stuffed into the fish. Well, to be honest, I'm rather predisposed to Tom's side myself. I am not a fan of seeing fish tortured to death. Now comes the ad-break, apprising us that the Yeti follows thereafter!
The ad-break ends, and the show returns: a brief version of the theme plays while a businessman with a lizard's head and a newspaper under his arm rotates beside the show's name. Fanthorpe takes s through a brief history of the Yeti, including some delightful clips of 1920/30s black and white footage of chaps in monkey suits threatening Professor Challenger & co as they escape The Lost World. Mike Dash, an expert, turns up and suggests the possible explanations for Yeti sightings: 1) a survival of Neanderthal Man, 2) an unknown prehistoric ape, 3) a mutation of one or more species and 4) hoaxes. Fanthorpe notes that much seeming proof has been exposed as false. The scene now cuts to Moscow, where Russian researches have been investigating the theory that the Yeti is a human species believed extinct.
Although new evidence is adduced, I shall have to guess that it didn't prove the Yeti's existence. If it did, then everyone seems to have missed that for the last decade and a half. Anyway, Fanthorpe then closes the episode with a recounting of what we shall see next week (Elvis, frogs, stigmata) and "The Yeti Song" (his own words and a familiar tune) with "my good friend Alf!" Then we get the Rapido frog, which baahs like a sheep, and the copyright date: 1998. Ah, what a great little show this was!
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