Before he found world wide fame with 'Black Mirror', Charlie Brooker had long been a mainstay of British comedy through his Guardian newspaper columns (later collected in several books) and various TV review shows such as 'Screenwipe' (and the subsequent 'News', 'Games', 'Weekly' and 'Antiviral' wipes) as well as writing for shows like 'Brass Eye' and creating the 'Big Brother' zombie series, 'Dead Set'.
Shown in 2011 and following the Screenwipe format of commentary, clips and skits, 'How TV Ruined Your Life', over 6 episodes on: Fear, The Life Cycle, Aspiration, Love, Progress, Knowledge Brooker explores the ways in which TV programmes twist our expectations and warp reality to serve their own ends.
It isn't as savagely satirical as some of Brooker's work, could probably have done with pruning an episode or two and, 14 years on, feels slightly quaint in an age of micro targeted social media disinformation but it's still a funny, informative and occasionally depressing look at how we got where we are.
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In 1952, the year before he terrified the nation with the first Quatermass TV serial, Nigel Kneale wrote 'You Must Listen' for BBC Radio a play exploring themes that he would return to again and again throughout the years, namely the intersecton between the supernatural and the scientific. The original broadcast is lost but luckily Kneale retained the script and it was remade for BBC Radio 4 in 2023.
In 'You Must Listen' the installation of a phone line at the new offices of solicitor, Mr. Paley (Reece Shearsmith), is beset by problems when the voice a woman, nicknamed Passion Fruit (Caroline Catz), keeps being heard on the line. As the problem continues and as Passion Fruit's monologue takes on a darker hue maintenance engineer Frank Wilson (Toby Jones) is called in to fix the problem.
It's beautifully made and, like the best of the Kneale's work addresses timeless themes beyond the literal ghosts in the machine and it's wonderful to see this lost chapter in the work of one of the pillars of, what we humbly call, Wyrd Britain brought back to life.
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Searching for the philosophers’ stone in the pursuit of transmutation and immortality; harnessing the properties of the natural world to cast magic spells; seeking visionary experiences to connect with the spiritual world; conjuring demons to enact our desires; using the tarot and astrology to divine the future – the quest to understand the mysteries of the universe and to tap into its powers has fuelled manifold occult philosophies from the early esoteric traditions of the ancient Egyptians to the practices of modern occultists.
The latest in a line of fascinating books from T&H this books is a deep dive into the visual language of the occult as represented in art and mysticism. Here we take a whistlestop tour through time from Ancient Egypt to modern video games and across nine aspects of the various incarnations of occult lore with chapters on Astrology, Alchemy, Kabbalah, Natural Magic, Astral magic, Ritual Magic, Occultism, Tarot and New Age & Occulture.
For folks like me who look terrible in a robe or a black polo neck, who cannot rock a mystical medallion and who could, at best, be considered a tourist in this sort of stuff with no interest in the practicalities of a magical life but with a love of it as a narrative or artisitic tool this makes for excellent eye candy and an engrossing read that'll sit happilly on my shelves proving itself a handy resource for a long time to come
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First published as "The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost" in the March 1902 issue of The Strand Magazine, H.G. Wells' humorous ghostly tale of the folly of hubris has long been one of his most anthologised and well-known short stories.
Relayed to his circle of friends by firelight following a day of golf, Clayton tells of his encounter with a ghost the previous night and of its piteous nature and plight.
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Made by Brad Smith between 2006 and 2010 this is an interpretation of Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' made for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.
For the Floyd purists I suspect this might be a difficult listen but for those of you with an affection for electronic music, game music or just the slightly barmy then this'll make your day because it's all those things.
You can find out more along with all sorts of technical details that my luddite brain wouldn't understand at rainwarrior.ca
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The ITV (LWT) series 'Tales of Unease' ran for one series in 1970 taking it's stories from the books of the same name edited by John Burke. Only seven episodes were made, the first two of which - 'Ride, Ride' & 'Calculated Nightmare' - we've featured here before, this, the fifth episode, continues the series' remit of tales that unsettle but don't necessarily horrify.
Yellow beach buggy owning hipster couple 'Teddy' (Jeremy Clyde - 'Schalcken the Painter') and 'Penny' (Tessa Wyatt - 'Robin's Nest') visit a dilapidated house with vague plans to buy and renovate it but encounter the sitting tenant, 'Mrs Laristo' (Eve Pearce) who warns them not to stay.
Following it's sitcom like beginning there's a well-paced build up of tension as the pompous pair run roughshod over the increasingly panicked tenant and parade around the house planning their remodelling. Is there something evil in the house or is Mrs Laristo simply trying to scare them away from her home or, is it something, else?
For the most part it's a quick and effective little creeeper but unfortunately the pay-off, whilst unexpected, is rather silly and much of the hard work of the previous 30 minutes comes crashing down.
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Pulled from the pages of 2000AD this collection of horror shorts is, in the spirit of anthologies everywhere, a bit of a mixed bag.
With stories and art by the likes of Mark Millar, Alan McKenzie, Simon Spurrier, Al Ewing, Greg Staples, Shaky Kane, Dom Reardon and Henry Flint, it definitely has it's moments but I imagine the demands of producing a weekly magazine are pretty intense and occasionally the quality control slips a bit which may excuse some of the stories here which are pretty poor. Mixed in amongst them though are some, maybe not gems, but definitely some shiny pebbles.
It's not a patch on my potentialy rose-tinted memories of, the Future Shocks or Time Twisters of yore but it's nice to think that the days of the EC Comics shocker aren't completely gone and there's still an occasional home for them in the Galaxy's greatest comic.
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Originally released 22 years ago in January 2003 this was the first album I made under the Psychic Space Invasion name - a name I used for years before reverting to my given name and then more recently to The British Space Group. My old punk band had just broken up and I wanted to carry on working with the more experimental side of what we had done so armed with a PC, some bootleg software and samples and a love of generally unsettling sounds I started tinkering.
Copies of 'This Quiet World' (the name was a homage to the brilliant New Zealand movie 'The Quiet Earth') were originally only given out to a few friends who were curious about what I was doing at the time. They seemed to like it and word spread and more and more people asked for copies. I've no idea how many I made - it wasn't a huge amount - but those copies went all around the world and occasionally folks still message me about how much they liked this one.
In the spirit of it's genesis it's free to download; always has been and always will be.
It started me along a path I'm still walking to this day on which I've made a lot of cool and talented friends and without it I perhaps would never have got to the point of starting Wyrd Britain and so it makes me happy and I hope you enjoy it.
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With their genesis in a, then, abandoned Tom Baker era, Doctor Who script - 'Shada' whose filming was stopped due to a production strike although it has since been novelised and adapted for audio - Douglas Adams wrote two and a bit Dirk Gently books that have since been spun off into two TV series, as 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' for BBC America in 2016 with Samuel Barnett and Elijah Wood, but before that, between 2010 and 2012, as 'Dirk Gently' for BBC4.
The original pilot episode aired in December 2010 and is the one, of the 4 episodes made, which most closely relates to the first novel with it's tale of time travel but the others, shown in 2012, all maintain the science fiction elements that perfectly suit a detective whose investigative style is based on quantum physics and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. The now ubiquitous Mangan, who was then mostly known for his starring role in the hospital based sitcom 'Green Wing', brings the perfect amount of manic untrustworthiness and crazed genius to the role whilst Boyd is the consumate everyman foil as Dirk's "averagely incompetent assistant" / partner.
Whilst there is a slightly cheap and cheerful aspect to the show, particularly when viewed against 'Sherlock', that was airing to global acclaim around the same time, but it's charm is it's own and, had it been given the chance, feels like it could have grown into something lasting but, unfortunately the show was cancelled following it's sole series with the BBC blaming a funding freeze and a decision to consolidate it's original drama production to it's two principal channels.
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This reading of the 'Coil Manifesto' by Jhonn Balance was made to open a 4 hour special on Dutch Radio 4 on June 18th, 2001 on the legendary British post-industrial group, Coil.
There are longer versions that incorporate elements of 'Queens of the Circulating Library' but I prefer this one mostly due to the exclamation and laughter near the end that perfectly encapsulates the group's playfulness alongside how seriously they took their art.
"Coil is a hidden universal. A code. A key for which the hole does not exist. Is non-existant. In silence and secrecy. A spell. A spiral. A serpent etched around the female cycle. A whirlwind. A double helix. DNA. Electricity and elementals. Atonal noise and brutal poetry.
Coil is amorphous, luminous, and in constant change. In-built obsolescence. In-built disobedience. A vehicle for obsessions. Dream cycles in perpetual motion. We are cutthroats, infantile, immaculately conceived. Diseased. the virus is chaos. The cure is delirium.
Coil are archangels of chaos. The price we pay for existance is eternal warfare. There is a hidden coil of strength, dormant, beneath the sediment of convention. Dreams lead us under the surface, over the edge to the delirium state, unchained. past impositions with false universals. We assemble them into our order.
Coil who has the nerve to dream, create, and kill, while the whole moves and every part stands still. Our rationale is the irrational. Hallucination is the truth our graves are dug with.
Coil is compulsion, urge, and construction. Dead letters fall from our shedding skins. Kabbalah and chaos. Thanatos and Thelema. Archangels and antichrists. Open and close. Truth and deliberation. Traps and disorientation.
Coil exists between here and here. We are janus-headed, plural. Out of time, out of place, out of spite. An antidote for when people become poisonous.
Coil know how to destroy angels. how to paralyse. Imagine the world in a bottle. We take that bottle, smash it, and open your throat with it. I warn you we are murderous. We massacre the logical revolts. We know everything! We know one thing only. we know nothing.
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This is the 10th year of the blog during which we passed 2 million views, which still amazes me whenever I think about it.
So, thank you for supporting Wyrd Britain through the last 12 months, I hope you've enjoyed the things we've shared here and I hope the year ahead is filled with love, laughter, and, of course, the weird and the wonderful.
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