Playmates

A.M. Burrage was the author of numerous stories of the supernatural but, with the exception of a couple of well known tales that have often appeared in ghost story collections - 'Smee', 'The Waxwork', 'One Who Saw' and 'Playmates' - and having been chamioned by such ghost story luminaries as M.R. James and Richard Dalby he has remained outside the awareness of many readers.  Happily this seems to be changing with the British Library's recent Burrage collection, 'The Little Blue Flames', placing him in a series of releases that stands him shoulder to shoulder with the likes of James, Algernon Blackwood and Edgar Allan Poe.  

Benign but aloof historian Stephen Everton unexpectedly adopts, Monica, the daughter of a distant, and dissolute, artist aquaintance.  Everton's whim is to allow the child to essentially raise and educate herself by providing for her needs whilst allowing her free access to his extensive library.  Within this loveless environment Monica slowly matures exactly as one would expect until that is a relocation of the household to the countryside elicits a change in the girl as she discovers new playmates.

'Playmates' was first published in Burrage's 1927 collection 'Some Ghost Stories' and is a gentle and rather lovely story that only hints at a darker world beyond. It's primary concerns are far more earthly and it tells a story of the importance of love and companionship and it's long been my favourite ghostly tale.

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Doctor Who: The Scorched Earth

Taken from the 1975 Doctor Who annual and read by Geoffrey Beevers (The Master in 'The Keeper of Traken') this is a lovely little daft Third Doctor and Sarah-Jane Smith tale.  Here Doctor Who (as they call him here) and Sarah-Jane are held captive by farmers whose crops have died due to "fire from the sky".  Given only until nightfall to help make the ground fertile again the doctor does so in the most unscientific way possible.  

It's a story very much from another time and for another audience but you have to kinda love the charm of these old stories written to entertain a sugared out kid three quaters of their way through a selection box on Christmas Day evening while the parents sleep off their dinner.  

It's fun but rubbish, or perhaps that should be, it's rubbish but fun or possibly both, just take it with a pinch of salt.

Voices in the Valley

'Barrowbeck, in the north of England, has a reputation for strangeness. It is a place that brings out the sin in people. But despite the dark isolation, people have lived there for centuries until the river got the better of them.'

Andrew Michael Hurley ('The Loney', 'Devil's Day', 'Starve Acre') presents 10 Aickman-esque tales revolving around the Northern English village of Barrowbeck.  Made for the BBC the stories are read by Maxine Peake, Reece Shearsmith, Alexandra Hannant, David Schofield, Siobhan Finneran, Paul Hilton, Toby Jones, Tamsin Greig, David Hounslow and Jessica Raine and tell the story of the town and it's troublesome river in stories that touch on science fiction and folk horror and tell of fertility and fairs, divorce and drownings, hibernation and hauntings in perfectly formed - and performed - little vignettes.

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The Image

Here we have a no budget black and white short film from 1967 that would have possibly been of no interest to anyone beyond being an early curio in the filmography of director Michael Armstrong (future director of The Haunted House of Horror and screenwriter of House of the Long Shadows) but for the casting of a 20yr old David Bowie, still two years away from 'Space Oddity', in his first film role.

The film purports to be "a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity" and I have no intention to gainsay it and what we get is a silent, staring Bowie enigmatically tormenting the artist (Michael Byrne) of the painting from which the elegantly beautiful young man seems to have emerged.

The music by Noel Janus (father of actress Samantha Womack (née Janus)) is wonderfully strange but the general sound work is brutally clumsy and far too loud in the mix whilst Bowie who often displayed more enthusiasm than ability in is acting is decidedly, and perhaps deliberately, wooden here.  But, it's a fascinatingly hallucinatory and violent slice of 60s arthouse cinema that must have made for a successful ardour dampener in it's original screening at the Jacey Cinema in Piccadilly Circus sandwiched, much to Bowie's delight, between two porn films.*

* (My thanks to Collin Brennan for this article which provided that info)

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The Music on the Hill

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of H.G. Wells, M.R. James, John Wyndham and in this instance Saki, read by Jonathan Pryce.

First published in 1911 in 'The Chronicles of Clovis', 'The Music on the Hill' tells the story of Sylvia who, having finally coaxed her new husband Mortimer away from town to his country home, falls foul of the God Pan after she spurns his existence and interferes with his shrines.

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Someone at the Top of the Stairs

'Thriller' ran for six series on ITV between 1973 and 1976.  The title of the series is pretty self-explanatory but amongst it's 43 episodes there was one with a supernatural aspect, 'Someone at the Top of the Stairs'.

When Chrissie Morton (Donna Mills) and Gillian Pemberton (Judy Crane) rent a room in an old, dilapidated boarding house filled with initially kindly but increasingly odd residents - including a prepubescent peeping tom (Alan Roberto), an underwear stealing Colonel (Peter Cellier) and a mysterious man in the attic (David de Keyser) - the pair find themselves drawn into a devilish web.

Writer Brian Clemens - who has a Wyrd Britain pedigree like no other having written movies ('Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde', 'Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter' 'And Soon the Darkness') and TV shows ('Danger Man', 'The Avengers', 'The Professionals') for the likes of Hammer, ITC and very many others - digs deep into the gothic bag of tricks to confront us with a smorgasbord of occult hi-jinks and it works, it works well, all the way to the big reveal where it unfortunately falls a little flat.  Until that point the show develops at a perfect pace and I cant shake the feeling that had this been a movie script the extra half hour would have allowed them to make good on the suspense, fill in some of the plot holes, allow Donna's character to develop completely and to have developed that ending into the one it should have been but it is what it is and what it is is a fun, minor, occult oddity but it could, and maybe should, have been marvellous.

 

Short Story: The Tomb of Pan

"Seeing," they said, "that old-time Pan is dead, let us now make a tomb for him and a monument, that the dreadful worship of long ago may be remembered and avoided by all."

So said the people of the enlightened lands. And they built a white and mighty tomb of marble. Slowly it rose under the hands of the builders and longer every evening after sunset it gleamed with rays of the departed sun.

And many mourned for Pan while the builders built; many reviled him. Some called the builders to cease and to weep for Pan and others called them to leave no memorial at all of so infamous a god. But the builders built on steadily.

And one day all was finished, and the tomb stood there like a steep sea-cliff. And Pan was carved thereon with humbled head and the feet of angels pressed upon his neck. And when the tomb was finished the sun had already set, but the afterglow was rosy on the huge bulk of Pan.

And presently all the enlightened people came, and saw the tomb and remembered Pan who was dead, and all deplored him and his wicked age. But a few wept apart because of the death of Pan.

But at evening as he stole out of the forest, and slipped like a shadow softly along the hills, Pan saw the tomb and laughed.

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Lord Dunsany 
from 'Fifty-One Tales', 1915

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The Chrysalids (radio play)

'The Chrysalids' was the third of the 'John Wyndham' novels published in the 1950s after 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'The Kraken Wakes'. It's the story of a group of telepathic children living in a post-nuclear Canada in a fundamentalist Christian society that practices an extreme doctrine of genetic purity following the 'Tribulation', a nuclear war that has left much of the world devastated and the remnants subjected to the vicissitudes of the fallout. Eventually forced to flee their home the telepathic teens are introduced to a wider world potentially every bit as extreme as the one they are running from.

This version was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 1981 by Barbara Clegg - later to become the first woman to write a 'Doctor Who' serial, 'Enlightenment' - and stars, amongst others, Stephen Garlick ('The Dark Crystal'), Spencer Banks ('Timeslip' & 'Penda's Fen') and Michael Spice ('The Brain of Morbius' & 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang').  It's an obvious labour of love that has been assembled with a real care for the source material.  There is an argument to be had over the use of adults voicing the children's parts but that's a quibble with what is otherwise an excellent adaptation. 

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The Red Room

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and others and in this instance H. G. Wells, read by Freddie Jones.

First published in The Idler magazine in 1896, 'The Red Room' is the story of an overconfident man who decides to spend the night in the haunted red room of Lorraine Castle where he fights a losing battle with the candles, the furniture and his own fear.

 

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After School

This the second episode of the first series of the 1975 ITV series of spooky stories for children, 'Shadows', was written by Ewart Alexander - who wrote an episode for each of the three series - and directed by Audrey Starrett, 'After School' is the story of two Welsh schoolboys Poodle and Seth (Rhys Powys and Lyn Jones) trapped after school in their PE teacher's (Gareth Thomas) office after school who experience a number of ghostly events all relating to the town's coal mining history.

Even though he makes only a short appearance it's fun to see Thomas - seen here a year before heading off to the village of 'Milbury' to look at some stones -  giving his original accent free reign and his portrayal of the PE teacher brought back some unwelcome memories of my own Welsh valley school teachers although they would have laughed at his football obsession as they brutalised generations of children on a poorly maintained rugby pitch. The two young lads who carry the majority of the episode are solid enough and make the best of what they have with a script that requires them to continuously over-emote. Written and aired in the long shadow cast by the Aberfan disaster Alexander's script touches on some delicate areas but the 30 minute runtime means any commentary is fleeting and whilst it has some nice touches, such as the 'mine collapse', the film never really amounts to anything more than a curio. 

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All Hallows

Written by Walter De La Mare and first published in 1926 in 'The Connoisseur and Other Stories', 'All Hallows' tells the story of a traveller's visit to a remote cathedral and his meeting with the verger who tells him of the strange goings on within building.

De La Mare's tale is a masterclass of atmosphere and suggestion.  Any and all sense of the uncanny is literally in the telling, both De La Mare's and the Verger's (and indeed in Richard E Grant's sympathetic reading), and in our and the traveller's imaginations as, potentially, nothing actually uncanny happens beyond a tour of the cathedral at dusk in the company of a companion spinning a yarn of disappearance, death and devilry.  The story ends on a positive note for the future, but we are left guessing as to the veracity of the Verger's tale of diabolic renovations but captivated by the story he's spun.

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Who Goes Here? (radio play)

In the 24th century guilty men join the Space Legion to, quite literally, forget as the offending memory is electronically erased upon induction but when new recruit Warren Peace awakens from the procedure with his entire memory is gone he absolutely needs to find out just how much of a monster he must have been?

From the novel written by Bob Shaw, dramatised for BBC Radio 4 in September 1991 and starring Douglas Hodge as Warren Peace, it's a quick and light-footed adaptation of Shaw's equally quick novel. With it's feet firmly planted in the same territory as 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' this is a fabulously daft story that takes Warren across the galaxy and back again in his quest to find out what it was exactly that he did and who exactly he is.

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Lost Property

'Unnatural Causes' was a seven episode ITV series broadcast in 1986 that featured stories of unusual deaths written by such luminaries as Nigel Kneale, Beryl Bainbridge, Lynda La Plante and in this case 'Sapphire and Steel' creator Peter J Hammond whose, 'Lost Property', is the only episode of the series with a supernatural element.

Anne Forrest (Miranda Richardson)  along with her husband John (John Duttine), is living in an old school where she has partially reverted to a fantasy innocence, playing at being a teacher, retreating from ast and her present. John, on the verge of leaving, is a tightly wound ball of frustration unable to understand why his wife is behaving as she is and into this volatile situation appears a young girl, Marian Price (Louise Hellicar), an ex pupil at the school who claims a deep affection for the previous headmistress and for her own schooldesk.

Director Alan Dossor keeps everything tight and claustrophobic meaning the tension in Anne and John's relationship fills the screen and P. J. Hammond's slow moving script gives plenty of room for the two leads to explore their characters.  The conclusion manages to be both predicable and surprising and also satisfyingly enigmatic grown out of seeds sewn earlier in the episode but leaving us with plenty of questions relating to the events and the nature of, at least one of, the characters.

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"We Need More Ghosts" - Alan Moore in conversation with Robin Ince

"I don't want to be bound together in one belief with a lot of people who worship a sock puppet.  That would be mental!"

Today, 18th November 2023, marks the 70th birthday of Northampton's waywardest son (but probably it's truest champion), Alan Moore.  

"We need more ghosts, I don't know what all these exorcists are thinking!"

With a several decades long career in comics now behind him Moore has recently released a collection of short stories, 'Illuminations', and is embarking on a series of novels called 'Long London'.  Here, in conversation with Robin Ince, he discusses writing, magic, the collaborative process, lost histories, AI and more.

 "If everybody else is having their livelihoods threatened by automation, why not politicians?"

I've been a fan since first picking up 2000AD as a young lad and noticing that so many of my favourites were written by the same person and his work has been central to my reading habits ever since.  So,  happy birthday Mr. Moore, we probably wouldn't be here without you and all stellar work you put into warping our minds so, here's to many birthdays to come and to all the ideas that have yet to bump into each other.

"As humans we need, I think, on a fairly regular basis to transcend those sort of boundaries. Whether it's sort of, uh, you know, by mysticism, by poetry or by reading a lot of books about giant killer crabs".

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Markheim

Originally appearing alongside - amongst others - F. Marion Crawford's '‘The Upper Berth’ in 1885 in the pages of 'The Broken Shaft: Tales of Mid-Ocean' that year's Unwin's Christmas Annual, Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Markheim' is the story of a murder and of the consequences of such as the titular character comes face to face with, in his reckoning, The Devil who confronts him with his dissolute and degenerating nature and presents him with the opportunity to continue, successfully, along his current path.

The version presented below was made for and aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1971 with Tom Watson as Markheim, Malcolm Hayes as The Stranger and Martin Heller as The Dealer.  Adapted from the original by Tom Wright (who returned to the story three years later for a TV adaptation starring Derek Jacobi and Julian Glover and who would later contribute a script to the 'The Omega Factor') it's a rather fine and sensitively performed interpretation although it does omit one telling moment near the end that hints strongly at the true nature and intent of the Stranger.

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Jack Be Nimble

Made in 1980 for the third series of BBC2's 'Leap in the Dark' and written by poet Peter Redgrove 'Jack Be Nimble' is a curious story of witchcraft and female empowerment.

Jackie - played by future 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' cast member, Lisa Vanderpump - is the latest in a line of empowered women and is coming into her abilties much to the fear of her family and friends as her growing abilities to predict such diverse things as maths, menstruation and motorbike crashes are increasingly alienating her from all those around her. Fortunately she has Grannie (sympathetically portrayed Audrey Noble) on her side who has a heartbreaking insight into what's going and can guide her to a resolution.

It is in parts a little incoherent and towards the end it trends towards amateurish pretensions, as does some of the acting, but it makes a valiant stab at highlighting the changing times for women and acknowledging the distance still to travel couched in a tale of witchcraft and magic that avoids many of the cliches of the genre and at it's end finds it's way to an open ended conclusion on the nature and use of Jackie's abilities.  

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The Unsettled Dust - The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman

Jeremy Dyson, the off camera 'League of Gentleman' member, has long been known in these pages as a devotee of author and conservationist Robert Aickman being responsible for both a short film, 'The Cicerones', and a radio play, 'Ringing the Changes', based on Aickman's stories. 

Aickman was the author of, to use his term, "strange stories", stories that often defy easy categorisation or even easy reading and here Dyson presents a light hearted and engaging exploration of the appeal of the man's literary endeavours, with help from author Ramsey Campbell, TVs Mark Gatiss, Tartarus Press' Ray Russell and others, and makes the case for the man to be given his place among the first rank of writers of the weird and the supernatural.

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Judge Dredd: Superfiend

It's been 10 years since the release of the 'Dredd' movie and with no sequel and no news on the purported Mega City One TV series we're left with just the two official screen adventures of everyone's favourite fascist, future cop, the Stallone movie which looked right but did everything else wrong and the aforementioned Karl Urban movie which got most everything right except sharing a name with that previous pile of crap and releasing in the wake of The Raid, but we do have a couple of unofficial releases that we're going to explore beginning with the the Adi Shankar cartoon series, "Judge Dredd: Superfiend'.

JD:S is a six episode series made in the hyper-frenetic 90s MTV style of animation.  I wasn't really watching cartoons then so the only visual reference I have for you would be 'Ren and Stimpy'.  The story loosely follows the established Judge Death backstory of Sydney De'Ath, the son of a homicidal dentist who grows up to become a Judge before deciding that as all crime is committed by the living then life itself must be a crime, gets himself all corpsey looking and goes on a rampage but that's pretty much the end of the similarities. Here Deadworld and Dredd's world are one and the same, Rico has only just escaped from Titan and is trying to bond with his daughter, Vienna, and the Angel Gang are selling Stookie in a Cursed Earth disco crater.  

The story just about holds up and has some fun moments and dialogue - "Dredd to control. I'm up to my ankles in entrails here, what do you want?" - but the frenetic nature and lack of any sort of depth soon wear away at you but you can entertain yourself by easter egg hunting - my favourite was the brief appearance of Fergee.

If you'd prefer to watch the six episodes separately you can do so here or you can watch them edited into a handy continuous story, without all those pesky credit sequences, in the player below.

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The Diary of Mr Poynter

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, H.G. Wells, John Wyndham and in this instance M. R. James, read by Michael Bryant.

Originally published in James' third collection of stories, 'A Thin Ghost and Others' in 1919, it tells the story of a diary, some curtains and a hairy visitor.

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The Devil's Ape

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and in this instance Barnard Stacey, read by John Woodvine.

Originally published in 1933 in The Evening Standard it's the story of three chums who upon aquiring a spell book decide it would be a wizard wheeze to use it to transfer the soul of their grumpy neighbour into a lay figure.

With it's satanic undertones this is without doubt the most enjoyably and luridly pulpy of the Spine Chillers episodes I've seen and benefits immensely from a suitably urgent and dynamic reading from Woodvine. 

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The Treasure in the Forest

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and in this instance H. G. Wells, read by Freddie Jones.

Originally published in the Pall Mall Budget on 23 August 1894, two greedy English treasure hunters kill a Chinese man in order to steal his map but too late learn the meaning of it's enigmatic symbols and the dead man's grin.

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The Yellow Cat

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and in this instance by Michael Joseph, read by John Woodvine.

Far more familiar to book lovers as the owner of the publishing house that bore his name, Michael Joseph was also the author of several collections of stories about cats.  'The Yellow Cat' first published in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine in June 1924 is the story of a stray cat, a gambler and changing fortunes. 

 

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The Mezzotint

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, H.G. Wells, John Wyndham and in this instance M. R. James, read by Michael Bryant.

James' story, taken from his first collection 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', is of an engraving of a manor house, an engraving that changes each time it's viewed.

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The Death of Grass (Radio Drama)

This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Christopher's 1956 novel 'The Death of Grass' was broadcast in 2009 in five fifteen minute episodes that tells the story of John Custance, his family and their friends as they race across country to reach his brother's remote farm hoping to find refuge from the deadly global blight that has killed all forms of grasses and plunged the world into famine and genocidal chaos.

Narrated by David Mitchell and with a cast including Darrell Brockis as John, Bruce Alexander as the terrifyingly pragmatic Pirrie and Rebecca Egan as Ann Custance, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation keeping to the same time period so the post war callousness and the 1950s sexual politics of the original have not been updated to align with modern sensibilities.  The unrelenting bleakness of Christopher's story means this is not necessarily a fun way to spend an hour but it's certainly an engaging one as this tale of selfishness and survival remains a powerful experience that still raises as many questions now as it did almost 70 years ago.

 

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Crow Face, Doll Face

Carly Holmes
Honno

I first became aware of Carly Holmes via a story in another Honno book, 'The Wish Dog and Other Stories' and subsequently via her Tartarus Press collection, 'Figurehead' (recently reissued in paperback by Parthian).  My impression of her work is of a writer with a delicate and thoughtful touch for whom the strange, the uncanny or the weird is inextricably linked with, or can be found almost incidentally within, the workaday to the extent that it can be easily missed or miscontrued in potentialy devastating ways as is the case in this, her second novel, where she tells a story of madness and magic and most importantly of family with all it's associated turmoils.

When Annie's marriage breaks down and irreparably fractures the fragile unity of her family she takes flight with her two youngest children, the unnaturally beautiful Kitty (Doll Face) and her dark shadow Leila (Crow Face), two children with a seemingly unbreakable and potentially magical bond.  We watch as Annie slides ever deeper into her own broken psyche, tormented by her perceived failures, exacerbated by the lingering guilt associated with an earlier bout of postnatal depression that had blighted her relationship with her elder daughter Elsa, obsessed with what she has lost and increasingly spellbound by her two youngest and her belief in their uncanny natures.

Holmes relates the story of Annie with gentle care teasing out her story and keeping it balanced on a razor's edge with the conflicting concerns of sanity and the supernatural held in a deliciously enigmatic consonance as we are slowly allowed to discover how reliable a narrator Annie actually is and we are never entirely certain as to what parts of her story are fact and what is fantasy, what is madness and what is manipulation and what is selfish and what is selfless.

With this book, particularly coming on the heels of the 'Figurehead' paperback, Holmes has placed herself squarely among the first rank of contemporary writers of the weird.  I see a kinship in her work with many of the folks we've championed here on Wyrd Britain such as Rosalie Parker, Andrew Michael Hurley, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Alex Older.  She is a writer for whom the strange is as mundane as the mundane is strange and 'Crow Face, Doll Face' beautifully encapsulates that fascinating ambiguity with a story of dreams, delusions, fallibility and frailty that lingers in the imagination.

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The Tower

Marghanita Laski was an English journalist who was science fiction critic for The Observer in the 1960s, biographer of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling and author, most notably, of the timeslip novella, 'The Victorian Chaise Longue' and the terrifying short story, 'The Tower'.

First published in 1955 in Cynthia Asquith's 'Third Ghost Book' it's the story of Caroline, the young wife of the domineering Neville, who decides to strike out on her own for some solo siteseeing at the end of which, with evening closing in, she spots and decides to climb the 420 steps of a tower stood amidst a ruined village.

Laski's story, one of very few short stories that she produced, has long been a staple of anthologies of supernatural fiction and deservedly so.  A deceptively simple seeming tale, beautifully written and with a devastating sting at it's end that floored me when I first read it.

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The Great Albert

'Scorpion Tales' was an ITV anthology series shown in 1978 for one series of six episodes, of which one episode, the third, had a superatural theme.

'Great Albert' tells the story of Matthew Ward (Max Harris) who uses a photocopy of an ancient spell book in an attempt to summon Lucifer to help him stop his antique book dealer father, Peter (Kenneth Gilbert), and contemptuously bored mother, Virginia (Lynn Farleigh), from divorcing which, inevitably, leads to unfortunate consequences.

Written by John Peacock who had, a couple of years earlier, scripted Hammer's 'To The Devil a Daughter' and who would later write 'And the Wall Came Tumbling Down' for 'Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense', it's an entertainingly "Hammer" premise that wouldn't have been out of place in that later series but it takes a tad too long to get going and runs out of time and slightly out of steam in its final act but the cast are strong and there's a pleasingly claustrophobic aura that allows us an insight into Virginia's predicament and the toll it takes on Matthew before the story concludes with an intriguing and ambiguous flourish.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue, then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.