Kate Bush was only sixteen when she signed to EMI Records in 1975, on the recommended of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Over the following eighteen months, Kate prepped, wrote and recorded her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, which went to number one in the UK, and her debut album The Kick Inside, which hit No. 3 in the UK charts.
Following on from her chart success, Kate Bush presented The Tour of LIfe, her first and
only
ever tour, consisting of twenty-eight shows across Britain during April and May of 1979. The BBC’s quirky news and features series, Nationwide (previously responsible for a fascinating insight into David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust… tour), made this 30-minute behind-the-scenes special of the tour and Kate’s preparation for it.
Bonus documentary on Kate Bush plus original live TV performance of ‘Wuthering Heights’, after the jump…
You may think some of your favorite celebrities live the high life in the hills of Hollywood, the townhouses of New York or the chateaux of Switzerland, but you’d be wrong. For most them live in a quiet suburban street in Surbiton, England.
Yes, this is where you’ll find the likes of Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, David Bowie, Dirk Bogarde, The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Savile and many others. Well, that’s what writers and performers, John Sessions and Phil Cornwall would have us believe with their cult comedy series Stella Street.
Pitched as a “suburban soap”, Stella Street combined what we all think we know about the stars with soap opera conventions, to produce such memorable characters as ultra-violent gangster Joe Pesci, effete snob Dirk Bogarde and mind-numbing [soccer] bore Jimmy Hill.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see Al Pacino and Roger Moore playing Monopoly in Michael Caine’s front room to celebrate Zulu’s 33rd anniversary, or what would happen if a lobotomised Joe Pesci and drunk Jimmy Hill tried to cook a turkey “the way Delia Smith likes it”, Stella Street was the place to find out.
Stella Street was screened on the BBC between 1998 and 2001, with a special in 2004, and was directed by Comic Strip Presents… mastermind, Peter Richardson. If you’ve never been, I’d suggest a visit, for you’re bound to see someone you know. Oh, and Mick and Keith run the local convenience store.
Part 2 of ‘Stella Street’ plus bonus episodes, after the jump…
It terrified the audience on its first transmission in 1968—not surprising as its author, M. R. James, was the master of ghost stories, who re-invented the genre with his tales of the supernatural. Whistle and I’ll Come to You starred Michael Hordern, and was produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, the former star, along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, of Beyond the Fringe. Miller had already made his mark directing The Drinking Party, The Death of Socrates and Alice in Wonderland for the BBC before making this classic chiller, one described as:
A masterpiece of economical horror that remains every bit as chilling as the day it was first broadcast.
Parts 2 and 3 of ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ after the jump…
As we jingle along in our festive pop tunes, here’s Neil Innes singing “Dear Father Christmas” live on BBC Breakfast Time from 1984. The jaunty little tune was a single release from Innes’ fourth solo album, Off the Record, co-produced by Rod Argent.
For TV trivia fans, Innes is introduced by the legendary British TV host, Frank Bough, whose career would be cut short after a sex and drugs scandal. Nice.
The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart is a BBC documentary from 1997, on the late, great Don Van Vliet. Its presented by the also late and lamented DJ, John Peel, who was once tour driver for Captain Beefheart, and contains contributions from Frank Zappa, John French, Ry Cooder, and Matt Groening.
The rest of the Captain Beefheart documentary after the jump…
Only someone with Ken Russell’s outrageous genius would have the balls to make a film like Dance of the Seven Veils. Sub-titled A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the life of Richard Strauss 1864-1949, the film depicted the German composer of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as a Nazi. As Michael Brooke describes it over at the BFI’s Screen on Line:
Russell’s composer biopics were usually labours of love. This was the opposite: he regarded Strauss’s music as “bombastic, sham and hollow”, and despised the composer for claiming to be apolitical while cosying up to the Nazi regime. The film depicts Strauss in a variety of grotesquely caricatured situations: attacked by nuns after adopting Nietzsche’s philosophy, he fights duels with jealous husbands, literally batters his critics into submission with his music and glorifies the women in his life and fantasies.
Later, his association with Hitler leads to a graphically-depicted willingness to turn a blind eye to Nazi excesses, responding to SS thugs carving a Star of David in an elderly Jewish man’s chest by urging his orchestra to play louder, drowning out the screams. Unexpectedly, Strauss is credited as co-writer, which was Russell’s way of indicating that every word he uttered on screen was sourced directly from real-life statements.
Though Russell used genuine statements from Strauss, the film is in no way a factual representation, as Joseph Gomez explained in his 1976 biography of Russell:
What we have is Russell’s vision of the man - a vision which uses many of Strauss’s own words as found in his letters and the man’s music to shape a “metaphorically true” portrait of the composer. There is no attempt to explain anything about Strauss’s behavior; he is reduced to a one-dimensional comic strip figure - as the subtitle of the film suggests. The subject matter, the role and responsibilities of the artist, is deadly serious, but the treatment is devastatingly comic.
The content and violence of Russell’s film caused outrage after its first and only transmission on the BBC in 1970. Questions were raised in the House of Parliament, where 6 M.P.s tabled a motion denouncing the Corporation for transmitting the program. Britain’s self-appointed arbiter of the country’s morals, Mrs Mary Whitehouse attempted to sue the General Post Office for transmitting the film “over its wires”. But the damage was done by the Strauss family, which placed an outright ban on the film, which is still in place today and will continue until 2019, when the copyright on Strauss’ music expires.
Aided and abetted by the BBC, It was guerilla film-making at its best, as Russell explained to his biographer, John Baxter, Dance of the Seven Veils was:
a good example of the sort of film that could never be made outside the BBC, because the lawyers would be on to it in two seconds. I would have had to submit a script to the Strauss family and his publishers Boosey and Hawkes would have come into it, and it would never have happened. The great thing about the BBC is that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Before anyone can complain, the film is out. But the price you pay with a really controversial film is that it’s usually only shown once.
It was also Russell cocking-a-snook “at the whole dramatized documentary idea”, as he explained to Baxter, which had “degenerated into a series of third-rate cliches”.
The film finished Russell’s long and successful career at the BBC, but this was of little importance, as Russell continued on from the Oscar-winning success of his 1969 movie Women in Love to become the greatest British film director of the 1970s.
Dance of the Seven Veils stars former dancer, Christopher Gable as Strauss, Kenneth Colley as Hitler and the marvelous Vladek Sheybal as Goebbels. Watch it now before the Strauss Family lawyers have it removed.
The rest of Ken Russell’s Dance of the Seven Veils, after the jump…
“You are blaming the victims of violence for the violence.” - Jody McIntyre
BBC interview wheelchair user and cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre after he was dragged from his wheelchair by police on two seperate occasions at the anti-tuition fees protest on the 9th December 2010 in London.
John Lennon 24 Hours is a “rarely seen” BBC documentary following John and Yoko over five days in early December 1969. It’s an intimate and interesting film with some very fine moments - a few you may have seen before, but even so it’s well worth watching.
There’s a spooky moment for Lennon-philes at around 1 minute 20 seconds in part 3 (below), when Lennon reads out a letter from a concerned fan who wrote:
Dear Mr Lennon, From information I received whilst using ouija board I believe there will be an attempt to assassinate you. The spirit who gave me this information was Brian Epstein.
This is a fine interview with Allen Ginsberg taken from the BBC series Face to Face, in which Ginsberg opens up about his family, loves, identity, drugs and even sings.
The series, Face to Face originally started in 1959, and was hosted by John Freeman, whose skill and forthright questioning cut through the usual mindless chatter of such interview shows. Freeman, a former editor of the New Statesman was often considered brusque and rude, but his style of questioning fitted the form of the program, which was more akin to an interview between psychiatrist and patient. The original series included, now legendary, interviews with Martin Luther King, Tony Hancock, Professor Carl Jung, Evelyn Waugh and Gilbert Harding.
In 1989, the BBC revived the series, this time with the excellent Jeremy Isaacs as questioner, who interviewed Allen Ginsberg for this program, first broadcast on 9th January 1995.
Watching this now, makes me wonder what has happened to poetry? Where are our revolutionary poets? Where are our poets who speak out, demonstrate, make the front page, and tell it like it is? And why are our bookstores cluttered with the greeting card verse of 100 Great Love Poems, 101 Even Greater Love Poems, and Honest to God, These Are the Greatest Fucking Love Poems, You’ll Ever Fucking Read. O, for a Ginsebrg now.
Siouxsie segment from BBC documentary on the ‘Queens Of British Pop’. Odd to see Ms. Sioux being described as ‘pop’. Whatever the case, it’s a tasty bit of video and Siouxsie looks absolutely lovely. My heroine.
Alan Clarke‘s TV drama Elephant didn’t fuck about. Thirty-nine minutes of screen time, three lines of dialogue, eighteen killings. No structure. No narrative. No plot. Just one bloody assassination after-the-other. And yet, it was one of the most powerful and disturbing films made by the BBC during the 1980s - and there has been nothing like it since.
Inspired by writer Bernard MacLaverty’s oft-quoted line that described the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland as like “having an elephant in your living room,” that everyone ignored, Clarke’s film presented the relentless killing that was part everyday life in the 6 Counties at that time.
Clarke was no stranger to controversy - his 1977 TV drama Scum, on the brutality of the Borstal system, had been banned, while Made in Britain, starring Tim Roth, caused an outcry over its complex depiction of a racist skinhead abandoned by the education system. Elephant was conceived by Danny Boyle, later the director of Trainspotting and written by MacLaverty, but it was Clarke’s skill as a film-maker that made Elephant so effective - long walking shots on Steadicam of anonymous killers in deserted urban landscapes; the quick, almost off-hand nature of the violence; and the lingering images of the victims. As one of Clarke’s regular collaborators, the writer David Leland said:
I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, “Stop, Alan, you can’t keep doing this.” And the cumulative effect is that you say, “It’s got to stop. The killing has got to stop.” Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction.
There is something about mash-ups that reminds me of the classic British children’s TV series Crackerjack, which ruled the winter airwaves from 1955-1984.
Crackerjack was broadcast live every Friday, from BBC TV Centre in London, and was a frenetic mix of sketches, games, quizzes and mini dramas (rather like pantomime), with each show opening with the lines, “It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. And it’s Crackerjack!” Christ knows what drugs inspired the genesis of this series, but its effect on viewers, its studio full of hyper-active kids, and the state of British TV since has been immense.
One of the highlights of Crackerjack was its mini-drama or featurette, where chart songs were re-interpreted by the show’s stars Peter Glaze, Ed Stewart, Jan Hunt, Leslie Crowther, The Krankies, Don Maclean and co. What usually happened was the tune of one hit had its lyrics changed to fit in with the drama’s narrative, one regular choice for this was Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
Mighty Mike’s mash-up of Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ made me think of Crackerjack, as the mix of preposterous rock vocal with, what comedian Iain Lee once described as “a nursery song for hippies,” would have sat easily within Crackerjack‘s format. Mighty Mike has been making these kinds of mash-ups for a wee while, and his site has a varied selection including Michael Jackson and Queen, Free and Madonna, Alanis Morisette and B.O.B.. Now, if only the BBC would bring back Crackerjack...but then again, perhaps not.
Bonus Mighty Mike mash-up and clip of ‘Crackerjack’ after the jump…
After Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended in 1974, the BBC wanted to find other avenues for their team of talented comedy writers and performers. One of the first ideas, was a proposal for a Michael Palin series. Palin was keen to try something different, but was unwilling to take-on any planned project without his writing partner and fellow Python, Terry Jones. With an offer to make a pilot, the pair came up with Tomkinson’s Schooldays, a hilarious spoof on Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Partially inspired by Palin’s own experiences at public school, the show starred Ian Ogilvy as the School Bully, Gwen Watford as Mummy, Jones as the Headmaster, the Bear and Mr Moodie, and Palin as Tomkinson and in a selection of other roles. The pilot proved a major hit, and led to a series of Ripping Yarns - each a brilliant single story episode, with an all-star supporting cast (including Denholm Elliott, Joan Sanderson, Roy Kinnear, Judy Loe), covering such derring-do tales as bank robbers (The Testing of Eric Olthwaite), POWs (Escape from Stalag Luft 112b), Agatha Christie-type whodunnit (Murder at Moorstones Manor), stiff upper lip heroes (Across the Andes by Frog), and misadventure on the high seas (The Curse of the Claw).
A second season was commissioned, but only 3 episodes were made, as budget costs and a lack of nerve from the BBC unfortunately led to Ripping Yarns cancellation. This BBC documentary, directed by Maria Stewart for the Comedy Connections series, gives a fascinating and revealing insight into the making of one of British TV’s finest comedy shows.
This short interview with Ari Up, conducted by Jonathan Ross for the BBC, captured some of the singer’s vitality, exuberance, and sheer joy, especially when she told Ross “to follow the poom-poom.” R.I.P. Ari Up
On 31st October 1992, the BBC aired a drama that terrorized the nation. Recorded two weeks before transmission, Stephen Volk’s GhostWatch was broadcast as a live on-air investigation into alleged poltergeist activity in a house in Northolt, London. Presented by journalist and chat-show host, Michael Parkinson, the program had live link-ups with reporters Sarah Greene and Mike Smith, on location at the haunted house. The documentary form of the show and its use of journalists, caused the majority of the British public to believe the televised events were in fact real.
Viewers watched as a series of cleverly constructed interviews, with the family who lived at the house and their neighbors, revealed details of the poltergeist, nicknamed Pipes, so-called from its habit of knocking on the house’s plumbing. The reporters discovered Pipes was the ghost of a psychologically damaged man called Raymond Tunstall, who was believed to have been troubled by the spirit of Mother Seddons – a baby farmer turned child killer from the 19th century. As the show developed, it was revealed (in Quatermass fashion) that the broadcast was acting as a “national seance,” giving Tuntsall’s ghost horrific powers. It ended with host Parkinson possessed by the evil spirit, and reporter Greene seemingly killed.
Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, a mass panic ensued. Over 30,000 telephone calls were made to the BBC switchboard in 1 hour, with some people claiming poltergeist activity in their own homes. One man, 18-year-old Martin Denham, was so disturbed by the drama that he committed suicide 5 days after its broadcast. The central heating in his home had broken down and caused the pipes to knock, as in the show. Denham left a suicide note that said, “if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost.”
In February 1994, a report in the British Medical Journal described cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in two 10-year-old boys. It was the first recorded occasion that a TV show had caused PTSD.
After its screening, GhostWatch was banned by the BBC for a decade. Since then it has only ever been shown once on Canada’s digital channel Scream and the Belgian channel Canvas
Stephen Volk, author of the screenplay, recalled in a BBC interview the effect GhostWatch had:
What surprised me was the avalanche of ‘IT SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED’, ‘HEADS MUST ROLL’ and ‘HOW DARE THEY INSULT OUR INTELLIGENCE!’ The anger at being, as certain members of the viewing public saw it, duped and hoaxed by trusted Auntie Beeb.
I think the only [serious] review I read about it as a piece of drama was in Sight and Sound where Kim Newman, bless his cotton socks, referred to Quatermass and obviously got ‘it’.
We were doing a piece of drama with a theme and nobody discussed that. It was all ‘SHOCK, HORROR, SICK’ tabloid stuff.
I must say in all honesty that in all the meetings I had with the Drama Dept at the BBC, I never heard anyone at any time use the word ‘hoax’. We were just doing a drama in a particular style (as The Blair Witch Project has done more recently) to give a modicum of authenticity. The idea that we wanted to make fools of people is absurd and just wrong.
Subsequently Ghostwatch has become a staple subject for Media Studies projects: one University lecturer told me that somebody chooses it virtually every year!
In 2002 the British Film Institute released a DVD of GhostWatch.
Bonus clips of ‘GhostWatch’ including TV response after the jump…
