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Holy shit: Scarfolk TV is coming
01.11.2016
01:24 pm
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Nearly two years ago, we brought our readers news from a strange colony in northwestern England called Scarfolk, where it’s 1972 every day and the slogan of the local “Public Information Bureau” is, at once reassuringly and not even slightly reassuringly, “WE WATCH YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP.” (That message invariably is accompanied by a huge Orwellian eyeball.) In Scarfolk rabies is such a public danger that it’s probably best to kill your child (after all, you never know) and the first Sunday of the month is reserved for “clown exhumation.”

Richard Littler has been delighting us for several years with his painstakingly executed, devilishly creepy PSAs and informational posters in which the ostensible tone of public concern is consistently drowned out by the overtly terrifying text. (“Whatever you do, DON’T,” pictured below, is fairly typical.)
 

 
It’s a bit like what would happen if Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s Look Around You became infested by termites. It’s also a lot like the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which has since spawned a book. In 2014 Littler came out with a book called Discovering Scarfolk with a suitably Penguin-esque cover design, but it’s only available in England, I am pretty sure (you might get lucky here, however).

Over the weekend a video with the innocuous title of “Teaser A” popped up on Scarfolk’s YouTube channel. Consisting of scarcely more than a black blob on a blue field announcing the existence of “Scarfolk TV,” the video has certainly whetted my appetite for any television fare that the stalwart (and imaginary) citizens of Scarfolk would be forced to contend with. Littler has stated that Scarfolk was principally inspired by viscerally disturbing public information films from the 1970s as well as curiosities like Children of the Stones, so I’m delighted to see his Scarfolk project move into the arena of video in a more sustained way.

The teaser blandly (hilariously) asserts that the programming will resemble such outwardly harmless but stupefyingly dated fare as “The Benny Hill Show, George & Mildred, Bless This House, Morecambe & Wise, Love Thy Neighbor,” with the distinctively Scarfolkian addition of “Dismember Thy Neighbor.” Of course, we also have a good idea of what Scarfolk TV will resemble from Scarfolk’s own YouTube channel.

I simply cannot wait to hear more about this…..
 

 
via {feuilleton}
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Welcome to Scarfolk, the most twisted English village of the 1970s

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.11.2016
01:24 pm
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Welcome to Scarfolk, the most twisted English village of the 1970s
04.25.2014
12:07 pm
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Scarfolk
 
Have you been to Scarfolk? If you haven’t visited, you really should. You’ll learn about the dangers that babies pose to public safety, the fortifying properties of totalitarian salads, and the basic principles of scarecrow biology, among many other useful things. It’s a place in which the two most important facets are pagan rituals and totalitarian thought control. Rabies is a very serious problem. Best of all, the entire philosophy of the place is communicated via dog-eared paperbacks, stilted pamphlets, bizarre public-information posters, and thuddingly unsubtle PSAs. 

Scarfolk
 
Scarfolk is a multi-pronged attack on British culture, it seems, but it will surely resonate anywhere public officials use the deadening power of blandness to terrorize their citizens into conformity. Scarfolk might be the most satisfying bit of sustained satire I’ve encountered since, well, The Onion. It’s so incredibly well thought out and executed that it’s very difficult to do it justice in a blog post of this type. It’s got a little Monty Python in it, some League of Gentlemen, too, and it partakes of the same general wellspring of psuedo “vintage” weirdness as Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s Look Around You. What makes it register so deliciously is that, since the primary medium is a trove of “found” filmed and printed detritus, it all works by the power of implication.


 
Scarfolk is a village in northwestern England that has some become stuck in the 1970s (just like poor Phil Connors in Punxsutawney) until it has become a deathly chilling simulacrum of itself. It and all of its attention-getting materials are the brainchild of a designer named Richard Littler, whose introduction to Scarfolk reads as follows:
 

Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. “Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay.” For more information please reread.

 

 
Scarfolk is approximately what you would get if you put Fernwood 2Night, The Stepford Wives, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and say, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise into a blender. What makes the project so remarkably effective is Littler’s deep command of the peculiar tone of public life in the 1970s, as reflected in the lovingly re-created and vaguely official gibberish and deadpan layout of news reports, well-meant public safety videos, and so forth. At a glance you could mistake one for the real thing (often the printed covers have little stickers on them, just as you would find on the real-life equivalent today). Its primary form of existence is a blog masquerading as the mouthpiece of the “Scarfolk Council” that has dozens of immaculately produced Penguin paperbacks, posters, pamphlets, et al., all with the weathered look of something you might find at a yard sale or a Salvation Army. (I collect Penguin paperbacks myself, so I’m particularly fond of his dead-on renditions of those.) 
 

 
The source of all this macabre hilarity stems from some vivid memories of how scary the 1970s actually were. As Littler explained to The Independent:

I was always scared as a kid, always frightened of what I was faced with. ... You’d walk into WH Smith [a popular newsstand-type retail chain in the UK] and see horror books with people’s faces melting. Kids’ TV included things like Children of the Stones, a very odd series you just wouldn’t get today. I remember a public information film made by some train organisation in which a children’s sports day was held on train tracks and, one by one, they were killed. It was insane. ... I’m just taking it to the next logical step. ... What if people learned that it was a good idea to have your legs removed, or wash your children’s brains? I’m pushing reality into absurd horror but, because life was already absurd and terrifying, it only takes a nudge.


 
A book version of Scarfolk is due in October 2014 but I think it’ll be available in the UK only, at least at the outset. There’s so much sheer awesomeness at Scarfolk that the best approach is probably just to direct you to the blog and leave it at that. By all means, visit it and wade around in its glories until your brain cracks in two. But here are two representative video clips just in case of a rabies outbreak or something.
 

 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.25.2014
12:07 pm
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