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UNBURY OUR GHOSTS!

The West Yorkshire police press conference after Sutcliffe's arrest in January 1981

Marcello Carlin responds to my most recent David Peace post:

Nineteen Eighty in particular I also found a key book since it took me back to the North of England through which I travelled, from Glasgow down to Oxford for my entrance interview, on Monday 8 December 1980 (it was my mum’s birthday) – pouring with rain and oily blackness, Warrington indistinguishable from Penrith, an encroaching and then unrelenting dark which bore the residue of foretold apocalypse, all of it stained with what was going on with the Ripper and everything else. And the records of that time seemed to carry that coagulated, wine-coloured blood within them; think of UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming,” the 45 of the Specials’ “Do Nothing” whose string synth (played by Pete Waterman and not a lot of people know THAT!) tied it firmly to “Atmosphere,” even the sepulchral echo that Dave Edmunds slapped on “Runaway Boys” by the Stray Cats – this reflected the dying, two-dimensional, yet to be reborn Glasgow but also Afghanistan, and the endless darkness…

(my big record of the time was The Hapless Child, Mike Mantler's adaptation of Edward Gorey, sung by Robert Wyatt, which is the nearest equivalent to DP in music I can think of outside 1980 Leeds or Manchester...)

I woke up in Oxford – a misty and practically invisible Oxford – on the Tuesday morning (yes, I felt like McGoohan stumbling to the window and seeing Portmeirion instead of Stag Place SW1), switched on the trusty transistor radio, heard the news and everyone was in a daze; not an especially grieving one – more a bemused one, a “where the hell do we go now?” one…but I’m rambling already…

(and of course "Who is Number One?" may = "Where is this God that shall deliver us from processed, smiling self-torture?")

...Peace’s work strikes me as a howl of hope – UNBURY OUR GHOSTS! – and strangely enough The Damned Utd (set in a parallel Nineteen Seventy Four) provides the exit door; Clough goes but we know he’s going on to greater things rather than damnation (though I’d love to read DP do one on Keane and Sunderland in the fullness of time)…there is hope and DP’s cry is one that’s on the side of life, which is why I think the kneejerk comparison with Ellroy doesn’t work; Ellroy sneakily loves the destruction he wreaks and his heart is with the Pete Bondurants of this world, the reckless freebooting right-wing if they could be bothered to vote “adventurers” who never realise that they’ll always be slaves.

The voice of Weird paternalism

The Master enjoys the Clangers: Dr Who 1972

"Stuff your bird or whale song, forget about breezes in cornfields or lapping waves and waterfalls: there is no more calming sound in the world than the voice of Oliver Postgate. ... It floated above all these stories, that voice; wound its way through them. It was the kindest, wisest voice you ever heard, and now it's gone.

As have all the other sounds, which you'll now hear in your mind's ear as I mention them in turn: Ivor's pshht-a-coo engine mechanics; the Clangers' whistles; Bagpuss yawning; Gabriel the toad swallowing; professor Yaffle climbing down from his bookend to inspect some new artefact; the squealing mice. All gone now, too."

Charlie Brooker on Oliver Postgate. Brooker is of course right to highlight Postgate's voice, though I'm not sure 'calming' quite captures its peculiar affective quality. Postgate's voice was certainly possessed of an eerie serenity, yet this was always coloured by something that resembled melancholy but which never came close to worldweariness; it was authoritative without being remotely self-satisfied, paternalistic but not fatherly; quietly entrancing, gently lyrical. It held open the possibility of a wisdom that had nothing to do with deflationary commonsense. This was the voice of an adult speaking to children; an obvious point, no doubt, but where in children's TV now would you find such a mode of address? There are no children, there are no adults, there is no wonder: only adolescents in waiting, being spoken to by screamingly selfconscious adolescents in their twenties and thirties.

Postgate's dream paternalism is another example of the way in which public service could incubate the strange. The fact that Postgate and Firmin made their shows in a converted cowshed is significant less because of the homemade, handcrafted quality it lent to their animation and puppetry than because it allowed them to work independently, far away from the normalising, metropolitan pressures of demographics and focus groups. Watch Bagpuss or The Clangers now, and what you see is not the kitsch that clipshow chitchat leads you to expect, but something Weird. Even though it is liable to be described as 'quintessentially British', Bagpuss looks as if it might just as well have come from Eastern Europe. The bizarre, piping folk music and oneiric atmosphere hail from a Weird England, which although it comes from the near past, is now irretrievably foreign. All gone...