Audio Drama: "The Sink", "Body Horror", "Power Out", "Steelheads"

These are all BBC audio dramas that I listened to on lunchtime walks while working from home. Some are better than others.

Body Horror (2020)

This was written by Lucy Catherine, who also wrote Harland, which disappointed me. I liked this a bit more. It is set in the near future when the march of progress means it is now possible to perform full body transplants. The main character is a middle aged woman who is less than comfortable in her unfit overweight body. She wins the lotto and has her head grafted onto the body of a young woman who died in a tragic accident. She also has some kind of remould to de-age her face. So all is good. Except she starts feeling ghostly impressions of her new body's former owner. And she begins to hear suggestions that the body transplant clinic might have its own dark secrets.

I thought maybe this unfolded in a somewhat predictable manner, but for all that it was well made and packed a few punches as it rolled along. Try it for yourself and see what you think: Body Horror

Power Out (2020)

And this one is about a kid hacker who gets involved in a radical group who decide to bring down the UK national grid as a protest against environmental destruction or something. The characterisation is pretty good but I thought the kid hacker was portrayed too positively; the programme did not really engage with how many people would die or see themselves fall into destitution if the UK power grid was brought down. But you can listen to it yourself here.

Steelheads (2021)

This one starts off with an up and coming star tennis player who has an inoperable brain tumour. She agrees to be placed in suspended animation in the hope that the passage of time will mean that future science be able to cure her. But when she awakes, the world has gone to complete shit despite it being only a couple of years into the future.

It is by the same people who created The Cipher but is much better than that, with the plotting carrying things along in an enjoyably relentless manner while Jessica Barden is impressive as the lead. But when they finally reveal what has happened to the world I didn't really buy it. I found myself thinking that a problem with mystery dramas is that too often the writers make them up as they go along, coming unstuck when they have to pull an explanatory rabbit out of the hat.

Listen to it yourself here.

The Sink: A Sleep Aid (2020)

I have saved the best till last, and it is an odd one. Written by Natasha Hodgson and with creepy narration by Alice Lowe, it presents itself as being a kind of programme to help people sleep, combined with some kind of semi-scientific study of people's dreams. So it starts off with Alice Lowe talking about how worried she is about how the listener hasn't been sleeping too well lately and how we should sit back and let her help us, but then it switches into what seems to be re-enactments of people's dreams. At first these are bizarre but comic, with the kind of surreal logic found in real dreams. A writer finds himself being berated by an interviewer after he has written a book so big that it won't fit in his house. A couple go for a picnic in the woods in an attempt to save their troubled relationship but then encounter a man who has got stuck while taking part in a fun run in a "Sonic the Hog" costume; their efforts to help him trigger the destruction of their relationship. And so on. But the mood begins to shift, with things becoming noticeably more ominous when one guy asks another, "Did a bird man ever come to your school?" After that it becomes impossible to miss all the references to birds peppering the various dreams.

What it's all actually about remains a bit arcane but the journey is a fascinating one. And I find myself thinking that I should give it a re-listen while lying in bed falling asleep, letting it seep into my dreams. Maybe you should do that too, but be careful of the Bird Man.

Did anyone else ever have the bird man come to their primary school? WITH THE PHOTOS OF OWLS AND HUMMINGBIRDS? AND WE BOUGHT THEM. SO MANY.

— Natasha Hodgson (@NatashaHodgson) July 3, 2012

One great thing I discovered subsequently is that back in 2012 Natasha Hodgson tweeted about how the Bird Man did actually come to her primary school. So clearly this drama was a long time hatching, making her an obsessive hero for our sleep deprived times.

Listen to it yourself here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08vxrgx. Sweet dreams.

Film: "A Field in England" (2013)

This is the latest film from that Ben Wheatley guy, who made Kill List, which I have yet to see.

This one is set during the English Civil War (actually during the Second Civil War, history fans, as there is a reference at one point to the Engagers; see dull historical note below), which made it essential viewing for me as that is one of my most beloved periods of history. It focuses on four guys pegging it from a battle (battle not shown for budgetary reasons). Three of them are soldiers and the other is something else - some kind of scholarly servant of someone who has had things taken from him. Quite what he is doing in the battle in the first place is not adequately explained, like much of what happens in the rest of the film.

The four guys tramp across some fields looking for a pub one of them reckons is in the vicinity, but then a series of transitions occurs. One of the four is not what he seems. A fifth character appears, one with his own sinister agenda. There is a wonderfully horrible scene in which he takes the scholar into a tent and does something to him, something that makes him scream while the others stand outside looking horrified. Then the stranger brings out the scholar who seems physically unharmed, yet somehow transformed.


The film is notable for its strange logical leaps and discontinuities. The characters are doing one thing - and then they are doing something else. Some events occur that do not seem to make any sense at all (like the rope they are all pulling on at one point, what was that all about?) And there are a series of odd tableaux in which they seem to be posing like characters in a painting for the camera (of which some feature in the clip above). In these regards it reminds me more of a continental European arthouse film of the 1970s more than anything else being made around now.

What it does have is a great visual look. It is filmed in black and white, which suits the odd and surreal nature of the film (though lurid colour probably would have done the same). The baggy 17th century costumes are wonderfully realised and did have me thinking that it would be great if people started dressing like that again. And there is a fantastic representation of the effects of imbibing magic mushrooms (it is that kind of film).

The sound is also intriguing. There is some old English folk music, sung by the character themselves. The overall soundtrack mixes in folky motifs with orchestral and electronic sounds to create a generally disconcerting aural environment, mirroring the fear and confusion of the characters. The soundtrack is mostly by Benjamin Power, but a pre-existing piece by Blanck Mass called 'Chernobyll' also makes an appearance.

Overall, this is an intriguing if perplexing film. I think it is one best appreciated by people who enjoy the feel and atmosphere of films rather than their simple plots.



Dull Historical Note

The First English Civil War is the famous one in which the armies of the King and Parliament laid into each other at such battles as Edgehill, Marson Moor and Naseby. Parliament allied with the Scots and eventually overwhelmed the King. He surrendered to the Scots and they handed him over to Parliamentary forces.

The Second Civil War was an attempt by the King's party to reverse the results of the first. English Royalists staged a number of uprisings. The imprisoned King also reached a secret alliance (known as the Engagement) with some of the Scots. This Scottish faction, known as the Engagers, sent an army into England. However the Parliamentary armies were able to crush the Engagers and the English Royalists, after which the King was put on trial and executed.

None of this historical information is needed to enjoy the film; I have merely posted it to show how clever I am.

An inuit panda production

PJ Harvey "Let England Shake" (2011)

I went off P.J. Harvey after seeing her play a gig at Glastonbury with a load of session muso gobshites from central casting and then listening to the Uh Huh Her album and thinking it had nothing going for it. People told me the White Chalk album was worth getting but it was over for me. Then the Let England Shake album came out and people said that was good too, but I wasn't having it - you can't go back, I said.

But now I have cracked. And this record is brilliant. You probably already know this so I will not say too much about it. The lyrics are about War and The State Of Britain Today and that kind of thing, though they are bit too poetic and allusive to have a very specific message even if this is always described as a political album. The music has an appealing looseness, with some guitary stuff and also a fair amount of Ms Harvey playing the autoharp.

The whole album is endlessly fascinating, but the big track here is 'The Last Living Rose', a song that begins with the lines 'Goddamn Europeans / Take me back to beautiful England' before running through all the ways England has gone to shit, combined with a subtle variant of the classic P.J. Harvey guitar sound. It is the kind of song to which I can endlessly re-listen.

One of the more bizarre things I found on the internet through This Is My Jam was a recording of P.J. Harvey on the Andrew Marr programme playing 'The Last Living Rose' to David Cameron. I encourage you to seek it out, and to also seek out Let England Shake if you have not done so already.


image source (Guardian)

And did I mention This Is My Jam? If you do not know what it is, click here. And here is me on This Is My Jam

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Terrifying images of the past

Oh, you beautiful child

Mainly, but not entirely, bands from the past - featuring the kind of people who were expelled from Swedish showbands for their poor dress sense.

Golden Nuggets

The Bulletproof Coffin #2 & #3, by David Hine and Shaky Kane

I am struck by how self-referential this comic is, both to itself and to the world of comics more generally. The main character, Steve Neuman finds a stash of old Golden Nugget comics, but they date from after these classic titles were all cancelled. In each issue he reads one of the comics, and we see the crazy issue he does. But then in the third issue he reads an issue of Ramona, Queen of the Stone Age (which tells of a large-breasted woman in a skimpy outfit who lives back in the time of dinosaurs and primitive savages), which in turn has a reference to an issue of Ramona inside it. On finishing it, Steve meets the actual Ramona and they realise that the comic has hidden within it the secret to saving the world from some unspecified catastrophe.

Or maybe Steve has gone mad and imagined everything – is it not a problem for comics fans everywhere that they lose touch with reality? But, then, who were the weird old people dressed as wrinkly incontinent old arse versions of Golden Nugget characters who showed up at the end of #2? They told him that because he had found the costume of The Coffin Fly (another Golden Nuggets character), he had been Chosen – he was now The Coffin Fly, doomed to ride the Bulletproof Coffin across a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape.

Aside from the meta-textuality and evident fascination with comics and the forms' history, the title has this sense of creepy dislocation in the here-and-now. The protagonist seems completely alienated from his wife (who thinks, perhaps correctly, that he needs psychiatric help), his blank and uncommunicative yet monstrous sons, and the ugly hairless and sexless dog. Maybe the ugly dispassionate despair of every day life is what causes Steve to retreat into the brutal yet fascinating world of the comics, or maybe there is only one world and later episodes will throw everything together.

wrinkly image source

issue 2 cover

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Children With Monster Heads

The Bulletproof Coffin #1 (of 6), by David Hine and Shaky Kane

I bought this before registering that it was partly by Shaky Kane. Older readers may remember him as that guy who did all the weird occult themed stuff in the British anthology title Deadline. I am actually surprised to see him draw something like this that is an actual narrative comic, as back then his technique was so stylised that I would not have thought him capable of it.

What lured me into buying this was skimming it and seeing that it had a comic-within-a-comic, done in the retro style of things from the 1950s and 1960s. I am a sucker for both meta-narrative and pastiche, if it is done well. This does not disappoint. The outer story is about these guys lifting stuff from a dead guy's house before it is turned into landfill. He turns out to have been a collector of outré pop culture material – bizarrely possessing what appear to be incredibly valuable comics thought never before to have been published. One of these is the inner comic - The Unforgiving Eye, about a dealer of unflinching justice with a giant eye for a face. "There is no escape from the all seeing EYE OF KA-BALA", he asserts to some luckless crim. But in the narrative, the inner comic was created by… Shaky Kane and Paul Hine.

Further odd things happen. I know I will want to read more of this, but as it is a limited series from Image, future issues will probably appear only intermittently and never make it to Irish shores.

image source

An inuit panda production

Mice and Pterosaurs

The BBC has some interesting stories on the re-introduction of threatened animals in Britain.

Harvest mice have been provided with tennis balls in which these little fellows can make new homes.

Meanwhile, in London, the pterosaur re-introduction programme has proved a great success. Conflict between humans and pterosaurs has been avoided by the fliers’ exclusively fish and carrion diet and also by the tough regulations protecting their roof-top nests. Oddly, the initial fascination with the spectacular re-introduced animals has largely given away to indifference.

Frank Sidebottom, Chris Sievey

Frank Sidebottom has died, as has Chris Sievey, with whom he was closely associated. Frank was most popular during the so-called “Madchester” era of the early 1990s, when his fondness for high-quality ties was oft remarked on.

Chris Sievey, meanwhile, is perhaps most famous for his time in The Freshies, who almost had a pop hit with “I’m in love with the girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore checkout desk” (subsequently re-released, reputedly following threats of legal action, as “I’m in love with the girl on a certain Manchester megastore checkout desk”).

They will be missed.

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Saucy Secrets of the Furries

Wow, the BBC has run an article on Furries, after interest in the hobby was sparked by a court case* in which the defendants met on a furry website. This of course brings to mind my own exploitative writings on the furriverse. Wasn't I going to delete them? Oh well, one day.

*of unspecified nature

"I wanna hear about this 'cock' thing"

There is a Radio 4 humour programme that uses 'Beers, Steers, and Queers' by Revolting Cocks as its theme tune. They carefully exclude any of the vocals or sampled dialogue intros. Truly these are the end times.

Japan: the world's greatest country

Have you ever found yourself thinking that it would be brilliant if cafés laid on cats for you to play with? I know I have. Apparently there are loads of these cat cafés in Japan. I am so there.

hat tip

Untidy Details

Casual reading of the Wikipedia page for George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco who was murdered by demented former city supervisor Dan White, revealed the fascinating fact that he had appointed Jim Jones of the People's Temple to the city's Housing Authority. Jim Jones is of course more famous these days as the raving lunatic who orchestrated the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, in which some 900 members of his cult were induced to poison themselves, but he seems to have spent much of the 1970s involving himself and his movement in progressive San Francisco politics. Jones seems to have been a fairly big player, someone that many liberal politicians were, for a time, anxious to have onside. One detail the Milk film omitted was the People Temple's involvement in some of Harvey Milk's election campaigns. It is perhaps easy to make too much of this - for a long time Jim Jones and the People's Temple must have seemed like just another bit of leftover 1960s counter-culture stuff, but it is still a fascinating detail.

Wikipedia page on the People's Temple in San Francisco (with lots of citations)

Fruitwa

from Fruits and Votes

THE GREAT DEBATE!

On Internet messageboard I Love Everything, the most crucial question in the history of humanity is being debated - right now. Make sure your voice is heard. Polls close January 19th.

Divine Justice

The BBC reports that a burglar broke into what he thought was an unoccupied Edinburgh flat on New Year's Eve. Unfortunately for him, Mr Torvald Alexander was at home, and he confronted the intruder. Mr Alexander was also getting ready to go out to a fancy dress party, and was dresses as THE MIGHTY THOR. This might explain why the unnamed intruder jumped out a first floor window to escape, losing his shoes in the process.

Mr Alexander denies actually being the Norse God of Thunder, and asserts that he was just wearing a costume he had made himself out of tinfoil.

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image source

Fish in a Barrell

It is easy to laugh at Conservapedia, this crazy website for strange people who are building a parallel universe by constructing an encyclopaedia that leaves out or grossly misinterprets anything from the real world that challenges their mindset. Currently giving us all roffles in Panda Mansions is the very impartial entry on Barack Obama, which includes many fascinating facts. I was particularly struck by the FIFTEEN proofs that he is a secret Muslim, proofs that include the following:

"Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for "Pakistan" rather than the common American one."

"Obama has chosen the Secret Service code name 'Renegade'. 'Renegade' conventionally describes someone who goes against normal conventions of behavior, but its first usage was to describe someone who has turned from their religion. It is a word derived from the Spanish renegado, meaning 'Christian turned Muslim.'"

Click here for more worrying facts that the liberal media conspiracy have tried to hide.

Click here for pandas

An astonishing discovery

The popularity of UB40 among the rougher elements in Dublin is a well known and long enduring feature of the city's cultural landscape. Yesterday evening, though, I discovered who is such people's second favourite recording artist. When driving around in stolen cars, they sometimes like to take a break from UB40's reggae stylings to listen to the neo-folk sounds of Tracy Chapman.

Look Good. Feel Great.

Would you like to know more?

Don't be afraid of the robot

I was reading a post on the interesting Angry Robot blog, and it linked to a truly terrifying post about the world's creepiest real life robots. I would include pictures here, but I shouldn't steal the roffle. Follow the link and see for yourself.

From there I followed a link to the world's most evil robots. They seemed initially innocuous enough, but when you get onto the second page you get the robot exo-skeleton for giant repulsive insects from Madagascar (it is not clear why giving these giant insects exo-skeletons is such a good idea), but the most terrifying is the Breast Massager Robot. It seems to have come from Japan. To massage your breasts.

Follow link, see terrifying pictures.

Help an old sailor

Conversations you never want to have on a plane #7