A good few years back I started
to remember a particular programme that I’d watched as a child in the eighties. The most distinct memory I had of the show
was that it had a very weird, unnerving atmosphere that didn’t feel remotely
like something children should be watching.
Straining my memory for specific details, I remembered that it was set
in Wales, involved a girl who was obsessively making paper owls, and it’s
action somehow hinged around an event in the past involving a youth on
motorcycle on a hillside, and another youth throwing a spear. I remembered harp music, and oddly anachronistic
episode recaps delivered in a stiff British accent over sepia stills. When I was younger, another television show –
Sapphire and Steel – had scared me a
lot. But with Sapphire and Steel, the scares were more direct, and more or less
enjoyable in the manner of a good scary film.
The show I was trying to remember, on the other hand, had a kind of
cloying, psychological closeness and tension about it, and an intimation of
things unspoken and under the surface, that made it unsettling rather than jump
out of your seat scary.
With
only those details and no name, I went on a quest to try and find the
show. I asked a bunch of people of my
age but nobody seemed to remember it. I tried
the internet, but either because google wasn’t as clever back then as it is
today, or because I wasn’t as clever at using it, I couldn’t find what I was
looking for. The Great Library of Babel
that made every half-remembered cultural artefact instantly retrievable had
failed me, and I started to wonder if the damn thing was real at all, or just
some feverish misplacing of a dream onto the television screen. Paper owls, madness, an old story from the
past possessing the present – it seemed just too weird to be a legitimate kids
show. The search proved to be very rewarding
in an unexpected way, however. At my
local specialist dvd rental store, I picked up a show called Children of the Stones hoping that it
might have been what I was looking for.
It was something else entirely – a show that instantly obsessed me, and
became one of my all-time favourites virtually overnight. I had found other people’s shamanic childhood
initiation, but not my own.
The
situation remained thus for few years after that, until the hauntological scene
kicked off awhile back, and suddenly weird neo-pagan transmissions like Children of the Stones re-emerged into
the collective ether with a vengeance.
It was a little like a speeded-up Information Age equivalent to John Aubrey
and William Stukeley rediscovering Britain’s long suppressed but never quite
vanquished pagan heritage in the ruins of Avebury and Stonehenge – a stirring
of ancestral memory on somewhat less grandiose time scales. I figured if I was ever going to find that
show, it would be now, and sure enough, I discovered a likely candidate in The Owl Service and finally hit
pay-dirt. The harp, the owls, the motorcycle,
the spear – they were all there, like the retrieval of a dream which had all
but fled to wherever it is dreams go.
The Owl Service was a 1969 adaptation of
a novel by Alan Garner. Garner had
started out writing children’s fiction which was relatively conventional in
form, albeit displaying a rich and genuine affinity with mythology and
folklore. With 1967’s The Owl Service and 1973’s Redshift, Garner moved in a more
experimental direction. These are
remarkable books, and to say that they don’t talk down to their young adult
audience is somewhat of an understatement – Garner’s writing is sparse and
allusive almost to the point of being obtuse, and their story-lines tend
towards an overall air of bleakness, ambiguity, and open-endedness. Even reading them as an adult, I found they
required a considerable degree of concentration – I suspect a great many adults
today wouldn’t have the patience for a book as rugged and open-ended as The Owl Service. The television adaptation – which Garner
himself wrote – is a very close, almost perfectly realized translation of the
novel, and shares its experimental, modernist spirit. The show utilized bold, elliptical jump-cuts,
and one of its stars, Gillian Hills, had participated in an iconic monument of
the experimental and permissive 60s – Antonioni’s Blowup, where her uninhibited tom-foolery with Jane Birkin was
regarded by the uptight as the moral nadir of the whole film.
Twin Peaks, Children of the Stones, and The
Owl Service – three shows that I discovered at different stages of my life –
all share the same basic sense of the strange impinging itself upon the
everyday. This characteristic is
embodied in both their storylines and in their status as popular mainstream
entertainments into which a surreal or subversive sensibility has been
smuggled. Children of the Stones and The
Owl Service already possess the incongruity of their complexity and sophistication,
qualities which we don’t expect in the medium of children’s television. All three, however, share a distinct of sense
of the modern world remaining subject to weird, primordial forces which are
buried in its past and hidden under its familiar surfaces. To encounter these weird ideas in the cosy
context of television has a subversive, revelatory quality, like something that
is slipped past the censor, or whispered in your ear. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to
The Owl Service, which you watch in
its entirety (in fifteen minute segments) on youtube:
No comments:
Post a Comment