Enchanting the cultural landscape

Cathi Unsworth explores the rural dreamscapes, reimagined mythical folklore and shadowed undergrowth of film and television

A Year in the Country

Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands

Stephen Prince

A Year In The Country 2022

Pb, £15.95, 347pp, ISBN 9781916095236

Writer, musician, photographer and cultural pathfinder, Stephen Prince has been mapping hauntological themes in popular culture for the best part of a decade. His umbrella project A Year In The Country encompasses books, albums and a website that catalogue his comprehensive Ordinance Survey of the Wyrd. Previously an urban flâneur, whose journeys into the Soho night were gathered in his Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity photo-journals (2013), Prince turned rural psychogeographer after relocating to his native Derbyshire in 2014. His quest really began, growing up glued to the BBC’s Bagpuss (1974) and Thames Television’s

Shadows (1975-8) – programmes that suggested to their wideeyed viewers that a portal into another realm could only be a shop door away.

These formative influences join 22 further selections, from mainstream TV to experimental arthouse cinema, examined in

Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands. Prince’s path winds back to the post-War era, with the “time capsule” rural Lancashire landscape captured in Bryan Forbes’s sublime directorial debut, 1961’s

Whistle Down The Wind, in which farmer’s daughter Hayley Mills mistakes fugitive convict Alan Bates for Jesus. Forbes used original Angry Young Men Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to render his screenplay in authentic dialect. The duo went on to pen Southern TV’s 1979-81 Worzel Gummidge, a series Mackenzie

Crook was determined to ignore as he devised his 2019 “recalibration” of Barbara Euphan Todd’s novels – the most recent work addressed here – to awaken consciousness of environmental issues in his youthful audience using oldtime scarecrow magic.

As the Haunted Generation come of age in the Eighties, things get really interesting. Themes of Cold War espionage and catastrophic government failure cast long shadows across this very different decade, channelled by perceptive directors and screenwriters into revealing parallel universes. Prince’s most potent selections come from this uneasy cusp in time, all of them made by the BBC.

From the end days of Auntie’s Play For Today strand, 1984’s Rainy Day Women portrays a WWII witchhunt. Investigating stories of spy activity in a remote English village, an unstable army

One of the author’s themes is how reams of such history have been lost

officer instead finds the Home Guard up in arms against an alleged coven of Land Girls. This cauldron of simmering resentments against “incomers” and of women taking up men’s work boils over Salem-style, real enemy agents long forgotten. Written by David Pirie and directed by Ben Bolt, it’s the bleak, spiritual flipside to Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 Ealing war effort Went The Day Well?, in which inhabitants of a similar village pull together to foil a German invasion.

Which aptly surmises the political backdrop of a convulsed Britain, at the height of the Cold War and the middle of the Miners’ Strike – and as far in time from WWII as we are from 1984 now. “Viewed today, it is almost difficult to comprehend that challenging work such as this was once part of the everyday mainstream television landscape,” says Prince.

The Cold War finds further disturbing expression in the 1981 young adult drama Codename Icarus. Physics prodigy Martin Smith is selected as the brightest pupil from his state school to benefit from a scholarship to the privately-run Icarus Foundation. He finds himself trapped, Prisoner-style, within its encampment, forced to work on world-destroying weapons by a misguided WWII survivor who had been used by the Nazis for similar purposes.

A post-catclysmic vision of a Britain returned to tribal enclaves is envisioned in 1978’s Play for the Week, Stargazy on Zummerdon, written by John Fletcher and directed by Michael Ferguson. In the 23rd century, England is Albion once more: a land of “starships and morris dancers, pedlars on horseback hawking transistors and diodes round the villages, astrologers who milk cows”. This intriguing mix of tech, agriculture and hipsterism seems teasingly similar to the world returned by

Covid-19 to cottage industries of workers supported by Zoom and Teams. In Fletcher’s imagined society, however, man has learned from past mistakes. Tensions between the tribes are diffused in the annual Stargazy festival – where participants gather on the Neolithic site of Zummerdown to trade insults, rather than blows.

Prince dug hard to uncover these three gems, all of which attempt to evaluate the legacy of WWII at a time when Neoliberalism was deconstructing the Post-War Consensus apace. Even in the days of platform streaming and YouTube, he could only unearth copies on deteriorating VHS – Stargazy was broadcast once and never had any form of official domestic home entertainment release. One of the author’s themes is how reams of such history have been lost – and his dogged pursuit is something all readers will benefit from.

Hope comes in the form of the heroic Talking Pictures Television, the family-run grassroots sensation helmed by Noel Cronin, whose work in cataloguing, retrieving and restoring lost archives of material, via TPTV and his Renown DVD imprint, represents an astonishing gift to the nation.

So the wheel of history turns. Today’s visionaries like Mackenzie Crook, and Rob Young, whose 2010 tome Electric Eden

re-enchanted the cultural landscape in a manner not dissimilar to William Morris’s impact on the Victorian psyche – are now tackling the legacy of the ThatcherReagan years; and Bagpuss has been reborn as The Repair Shop.

Prince’s fine, thoughtful and thoroughly researched book is an invaluable guide to how we got here – and where we might be headed next.

★★★★★