We are 10!
Thank you to everyone who has supported Wyrd Britain over the last decade.
Here's to the next 10.
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(Here're are my other attempts at that image)
We are 10!
Thank you to everyone who has supported Wyrd Britain over the last decade.
Here's to the next 10.
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(Here're are my other attempts at that image)
It is however a fairly pacey romp that never really takes a breath and is often quite pretty to look at and, provided you don't think too hard about the plot, makes for a fun, and all too rare, Lovecraft adaptation.
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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
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
Shoreline Ritual comes with the enigmatic note that it...
might be a narrative.
A cautious exchange.
A bridge between here and there.
It could be about strange occurrences along the coast,
or old dreams, loss and the sea.
It feels fragile, nebulous, adrift and elegant.
It's a spell cast into the wind, a message carried by the waves and it's mesmerising.
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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
Recently used as the theme to the cavalcade of shallow excess that is the Met Gala this promotional chapbook (heralding a new series of reissues) of Ballard's short story - originally written in 1962 - of the death of beauty amidst the inexorable advance of the masses and their crass consumerist ways was a delightful read.
The story of a husband and wife holding back the inevitable by plucking the flowers of time from their garden in a knowingly futile attempt to delay the advancing hordes. These immaculate but anachronistic lovers, with their elaborate clothes, beautiful music, and perfectly curated collections, fearful of change and trapped in the amber of an unchanging, untainted, romanticised past, are eventually swamped by the advance as time marches ever on, trampling all before it except, perhaps, love.
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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
Directed, as was 'The Land..', by Kevin Connor - who also sent McClure to both Atlantis and 'The Earth's Core' - this one is every bit as flawed and fun as it's predecessor. The story is flaccid, the dinosaur effects are risible and the cast are poor (except McClure - I won't have a word said against McClure) with Wayne being boorish and bullying and an unlikeable lead, Douglas overplaying her role, Walters and Rimmer acting as comic relief and Gillespie providing the cleavage.
Written by future 'Amtrak Wars' author Patrick Tilley it's a pretty by the numbers adaptation that was the last gasp of the Amicus studio but when I was a kid Doug McClure was my absolute favourite and to this day his three Amicus monster movies rank amongst my favourites although I'll admit this one is solidly in third place.
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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
Split across five chapters - 'Beneath the Surface', Human Habitation and Exploration', Underwter Worlds', 'Imagined Underground Worlds' and 'Subliminal Realms' - this beautiful book explores humanities obsession with what lies below. Exploring burial chambers and mines, caverns and Charon, Hells, hallucinations, hollow Earth and hermits Ellcock takes us on a fascinating visual journey of everything underneath.
My own interests lean towards the fictional so those chapters on caves, crypts, sewers, quarries and the like were of less interest than those exploring our imaginative relationships but throughout Ellcock has chosen images that present a sumptuous feast of art and photography that encapsulates the creative interplay between the real and the imagined in our eternal need to explore the unknown and the hidden, and our obsessive search beneath and beyond.
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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
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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
The play makes some slight framing differences to the orignal, having an elderly Wells tell the story as true, as well as including the story's excised ending but it's generally a faithful and well construced adaptation that offers a welcome return to a classic.
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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
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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
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
Featuring some of Hammer's greats alongside the behind the scenes folks who made them so and lots of rare footage of them all working at Bray studios it makes for an engagingly nostalgic watch.
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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
Taking it's queues from such sci-fi classics classics as 'The Fly' and 'The Quatermass Xperiment' this is a fantastic flop of a film. Haliday's gruesome make up and some entertainingly cringy dialogue aside there's little to recommend here with its cliche riven script, it's wooden cast and dreadful climax it's a bad movie but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
This BBC Radio version of Hope Mirrlees' fabulous novel was adapted by Joy Wilkinson (who, for television, has provided scripts for 'Doctor Who', 'The Watch' & 'Lockwood & Co') and is narrated by Olivia Poulet with an appearence by Mirrlees superfan Neil Gaiman whose own 'Stardust' owes an obvious debt to Mirrlees' creation. It's a bold attempt at adapting the novel but not an entirely successful one. It's too short and much has been omitted that both colours the world and drives the plot so it's missing some of the magic of the novel but it's an interesting attempt. I love the original novel so this would have needed to have been perfect to convince me but it's an enjoyable enough attempt.
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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
Between them they gave life to hordes of classic characters, future teen Halo Jones, dystopian cop Judge Dredd, alien freedom fighter Nemesis, mutant bounty hunter Strontium Dog, Celtic warrior Slaine, genetic soldier Rogue Trooper, alien teenage delinquents DR & Quinch, pop culture superhero Zenith, the list goes on.
It also provided us with the single greatest panel in comics...
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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
The story of Will Stanton, last of 'The Old Ones', is another episodic quest as the newly minted magician comes into his power by locating lost artifacts. What elevates this beyond that first book however is Cooper's commitment to developing a coherent, mythic storyworld that is interwoven with icons of folkloric Britain, something she would continue to elaborate on across the rest of the series.
This excellent adaptation was made for Radio 4 in 1997 and unfortunately was the last one they made which was a real shame as it's from the next book, 'Greenwitch', that entwines the characters from the first two books that the series truly shines but don't let that stop you listening as this is fabulous.
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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
I first read Cooper's series as an adult and shorn of the wonder of a child I've long been of the opinion that this first book is definitely the weakest of the five, far too firmly entrenched in the Enid Blyton tradition of children's books whereas the others increasingly embrace a more complex Alan Garner-esque mythic storyworld and are all the better for it. This adaptation made for Radio 4 and broadcast in 1995 is the first time I've revisited it since and I enjoyed it far more in this format. An entirely sympathetic dramatisation with a strong cast it works well in this format with the tension kept at a peak as the three kids race around the village.
Unfortunately only the first two books of the sequence were dramatised (I'll return to the second soon) which is a real shame as the others - particularly books 3, 4 & 5 - really are quite wonderful and I'd have loved to hear what they would have done with them.
This adaptation was made for the BBC in 2005 and is, for the most part, beautifully read by Philip Madoc although his French accent has a distinct whiff of 'Allo 'Allo about it.
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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
Unlike the movie du Maurier's original story revolves around the family of a disabled farm labourer, recently returned from the war, and struggling to find work in Cornwall and this adaptation by Melissa Murray for Radio 4 , featuring Neil Dudgeon ('Midsomer Murders') and Nicola Walker ('The Last Train'), keeps that premise whilst making some judicious changes to the narrative, both narrowing it's focus and widening it's scope, but retaining the essential character of the original in a bleakly claustrophobic story.
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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
The film is presented as a roughly cut documentary, fronted by Marcus Brigstocke, focussed on the first gallery exhibition of Bolton's vampire paintings. Bolton - who appears in the film as an interviewee at the exhibition launch - is played by actor John O'Mahoney, and is shown as socially awkward and reticent of both the gallery show and the film eventually relenting to allowing Brigstock access to his studio located in the crypt of an old church at the centre of a suitably gothic graveyard.
Developed from his own fictionalised biography ('Drawn in Darkness') this mockumentary written and directed by Neil Gaiman - who's worked with Bolton several times on stories such as 'The Books of Magic' & 'Halequin Valentine' - is, in his words, "an investigation into where artists get their ideas from". Gaiman's status as a novice film-maker works to his advantage here and the occasional clumsiness plays to both the mockumentary form and the 'unfinished' nature of the documentary and the end result is a fun, tongue in cheek tribute to Bolton and his influences that owes a debt to H.P. Lovecraft’s 'Pickman’s Model'...........................................................................................
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
Graphic designer and musician David King met future Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud and artist Gee Vaucher at college in the 1960 and later moved into the Dial House commune with them and many of the other Crass members. Once there he designed, what became, the bands iconic logo that has adorned a milliion bus shelters and underpasses, a design that mixed a cross, the ouroboros, the Union flag, and a swastika.
Whilst this short film predominantly focuses on King and his logo it would be as remiss of me as it was of the film makers not to highlight the importance of the work of Gee Vaucher, the visual artist to the Crass music. Vaucher's designs for the group were every bit as essential to the experience as the words and the music. As profound as they were provocative and as insightful as they were incisive her artwork was the perfect visual catalyst to the musical storm. They provided a visual element that enhanced and deepened the listening experience and I cannot even begin to quantify the amount of time I have spent lost in her work...........................................................................................
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
Newly weds Michael (Jonathan Cake) and Phyllis Watson (Saira Todd) have, via his job for the English Broadcasting Company (EBC), intermittent front row seats at the beginning, middle and end of the end of human civilisation as they know it as they pursue the apocalyptic theories of the vilified scientist Dr. Alistair Bocker (Russell Dixon) with regard to the arrival and intent of the extraterrestrial visitors who have taken up residence at the bottom of the ocean.
This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Wyndham's alien invasion / monsters from the deep / ecological disaster classic was made in 1998 but sounds far, far older which is testament to the care of the creators but does give it quite a dated feel. It is though a solid performance of what I personally think to be a prescient but fairly stodgy book as Wyndham weaves a slowly unfolding story of goverment misinformation and misdirection and the general public's inability to react appropriately in the face of an obvious threat. Some narrative corners are cut, not entirely successfully, particularly in the middle when Michael 'goes on holiday', but they tell the story concisely, conclusively and enjoyably if perhaps just a touch too reverentially.
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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
The story is partly narrated by Elizabeth (Annabelle Lanyon) an only child whose family gives a home to a troubled young girl named Amy (Lucy Benjamin - Eastenders' 'Lisa Fowler') who brings with her, Amelia (also played by Benjamin), her malevolent imaginary friend who has spoiled all her previous homes.
Made for the 'Spooky' series that preceded ITV's long running 'Dramarama' series, written by Paula Milne ('Gemini Factor') it hasn't aged as well as some of the things we feature here but appearing to be filmed in a translucent, minimalist, dreamscape complete with a nightmarish fancy dress party, a shattering sting in the tail and with strong central performances from the two girls it was certainly fun to revisit and a reminder of just how much film-makers of the time loved to terrify their young viewers.The vital and materialist young doctor is disturbed in his lodgings on several escalating occasions by his enigmatic downstairs neighbour, Smith, a source of mystery to the other residents, which culminates in a terrifying midnight rescue and, perhaps worst of all, an unreturned book.
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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