British, odd and proud of it
For British forteans of a certain vintage, Watch with Mother was a gateway to so many horrors (and pleasures, terrors and rumpy-pumpy…)
The Bodies Beneath
The Flipside of British Film & Television
William Fowler & Vic Pratt
Strange Attractor Press 2019 Pb, 398pp, illus, bib, ind, £15.99, ISBN 9781907222726
With its origin in the ‘Flipside’, a celebration of delinquent British cinema and television held at the British Film Institute between 2006 and 2013, Fowler and Pratt’s The Bodies Beneath documents their findings into homegrown cinematic oddities. What is on offer is a detailed cultural appraisal of what they acknowledge is a personal selection of film and TV that they tender as a countercultural filmography. No mean task, and yet they manage to convey the complexity of establishing a canon as the relationships between writers, directors and studios are counterpointed with shifts in popular taste and the breakdown of cultural boundaries between high and low art.
Alongside the current interest in the psychogeography of cultural memory and the ‘repressed’, Bodies Beneath explores the bubbling id that has both undermined and co-opted our viewing culture. The authors explore convincingly the degree to which mainstream media exploited radical new perspectives laid bare in the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the decadent embrace of the 1970s. Each of the staples of the ‘typically’ repressed British psyche – sexuality, class, war and fantasy – are scrutinised in highly researched and authoritative studies of individual films and commercially problematic cultural tropes considered taboo.
Quite a trajectory!
Take for example Lloyd Bickford’s film, A40, a black, gay, dystopian allegory from 1965 (aired in 1971) or Antony Balch’s experimental study of awkward sexuality, Secrets of Sex (1970), which, as the authors point out, would leave an expectant cinema audience understandably detumescent. Such errant experimentalism provided a strange bedfellow for everyday sex-romp fodder, and yet by the end of the 1970s avant-garde big hitters such as Cosey Fanni Tutti could be found subverting the genre in the somewhat mystifying Phoelix (1979) and yet at the same time modelling for sleaze magnate David Sullivan. Crazy days!
It’s not all about sex, however, and much of the authors’ focus is upon the doom and gloom redolent of post-war Britain. As urban sprawl occupied the countryside, ecological disaster followed close behind. Curious documentary pieces such as Oss Oss Wee Oss (1953) cast its wary eye on the eerie and strange traditions that could be found in the English countryside and the anxiety and spiritual malaise urbanisation brought with it is seen in the muted and melancholy desperation of Robin Redbreast, a 1970 BBC Play for Today. No area of the human condition remained sacrosanct, we are reminded, as Peter Watkins’s War Game (1965) held the nation in post-nuclear abject terror. Well, if the bomb didn’t get you then there was always mental illness or kidnap and torture at the hand of homegrown terrorists as evidenced by Eric Marquis’ Savage Voyage (1971) and Howard Brenton’s Skinflicker (1973). With one’s dream of a happy future in tatters, perhaps there is something quite reassuring about the comic strangeness of faux Mondo documentaries such as Primitive London (1965) and the arch humour of nudist and witchcraft exposés at the hand of Daniel Farson and his Out of Step series (1957). Can things get any weirder, we ask? Yes, of course they can, and much is made of the British ability to render the most innocent of things fantastical, if not pathological – psychotic even?
Once lulled into a stupor by Watch with Mother (1953–1975), our children had to learn to cope with deranged glove puppets, monsters of implicit threat, as Hartley Hare terrorised the living room before Oliver Postgate’s Tottie was witnessed firebombing a doll’s house in 1984. Well now, if that all meant you couldn’t sleep at night, forget about a visit to Sooty’s Chemist Shop (1957) where he was found knocking up a few ‘specials’ to take out Sweep. For the adults in the room the Ray Davies’ scripted Starmaker (1974) and Charlie Drake’s Saucerer’s Apprentice (1970) proffer salutary tales of regression into toxic nostalgia and tackling depression by falling in love with a bedsheet! What was in that tea? To cap it all, if Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) isn’t enough to send you into therapy then perhaps you’d best join Alex Sanders and his hippy witches – Secret Rites (1970) – and tune in, turn on and get your kit off! And why not!
Fowler and Pratt have done a fantastic job here and Strange Attractor has produced an elegant volume worthy of any bookshelf. With plenty of illustrations and a scholarly bibliography to boot, this recalibration of British cinema and TV not only implies a parallel canon of cultural note but wittily examines the British psyche writ large in 35mm.
Chris Hill
★★★★★