Alien Nation conference

[altariel]

Last week I went up to Newcastle for Alien Nation, a two-day conference about telefantasy (i.e. British SF, fantasy, and horror television). James Chapman's Inside the TARDIS and Catherine Johnson's Telefantasy battled for citation supremacy, but surely the fairy godmother of the conference was Network DVD, purveyors of retro television series to the discerning. Gone are the days when washed out Nth generation video copies of UK Gold repeats were the only available window onto childhood memories. Network, we salute you. (Warning: clicking on the link to Network will result in serious damage to your finances.)

I'm not going to attempt a full write-up of the conference here, chiefly because Frank Collins has archived his live blog of the event here, covering papers on Nigel Kneale, Doctor Who, Doomwatch, Children of the Stones, Outcasts, The Owl Service, The Clifton House Mystery, The Professionals; and, thematically, on gender, music, what makes British telefantasy "British", the Gothic in children's television, etc. etc. Really, go and have a look through Frank's heroic set of notes, annotated liberally and joyously with great pictures and relevant footage.

Just to pick out a few highlights of the conference for me:

• The panel on 1970s and 80s dystopia: A panel made for me – YES I AM ALL ABOUT THE BUREAUCRACY. Papers looking at Doomwatch (and Wombling Free); the 1977-78 dystopian series 1990, starring Edward Woodward (which has sadly never been repeated or released); Threads and The Tripods; and Children of the Stones. All series that portray a downbeat and declining industrial power stifled by bureaucracy and lacking the energy to imagine escape routes, like a concrete Gormenghast.


• Derek Johnston's paper on music in Terry Nation's Survivors: there's hardly any music in Survivors, apart from one piece of non-diegetic music, and the rest either recorded, or performed by cast members. This was great: Johnston showed how recorded music indicated characters who wanted a return to social order, while people performing their own music welcomed the end of technological society and the new rural world. Johnston connected this up to themes in the English folk revival. A really interesting paper. I don't instinctively "read" the music of television programmes, and particularly appreciate this enhancement of my understanding of a show.


• Peter Wright's superb keynote on the 1971 BBC adaptation of Peter Dickinson's trilogy of children's novels, The Changes. Peter has done extensive research at the BBC archives in Caversham, and interviewed adaptor Anna Home (a significant figure in BBC children's television). A model of research and analysis, with thoughtful reflections on how race is handled in both book and adaptation. The highlight of the conference for me.


• The emergence of what Peter Wright dubbed the Doctor Who carbon dating system: when an obscure programme is being discussed, refer to whatever Doctor Who was being broadcast at the same time in order to orientate one's audience. In the case of The Changes (broadcast 6 January – 10 March 1975) this would be from the middle of "Robot" to the beginning of "Genesis of the Daleks". Handy.

My train back was on Thursday evening, so sadly I didn't get to see Penda's Fen (BBC Play For Today from 1974). But what a great couple of days, listening to people talk about, and getting to talk about, stuff that I love. The folk working in this field are amongst the friendliest, most welcoming, most collegiate set of academics I've ever met. Really glad I made the trip, even if I returned home with a Network shopping list long as my arm.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Pity about Penda's Fen - I remember it being rather good.

Had a look at Network DVD to see if they had anything I wanted that I didn't already have or know about. My lord, there are some really, really bad TV series out there that I had very happily forgotten about. Saracen! Whiplash.

In 1851, the great Australian gold rush.
The only law a gun, the only place the wild bush...

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, my own fault for hurrying home and not staying the extra night. Still, it was nice to have Friday at home.

Network is definitely full of, um, treasures!

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Saracen is the one I used to spend Mondays picking to pieces with my then boss, an ex-security officer (RAF). We first bonded trying to cap each other with idiocies from Dempsey and Makepeace Deadbeat and Makeweight.

*sigh* I do miss Jim.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'd never even heard of it. Has a great supporting cast, shame it was no good.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

It was sort-of based on the mercenary organisation Sandline, but they didn't seem to have had a technical advisor. The silliest episode was the one where they conducted a hostage exchange in a bull ring (sniper sight lines everywhere) and their chap was by himself and armed with a piddling little handgun.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Your memory for this stuff is amazing.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I loved The Changes - I hope the paper is published.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I hope so too.

[muninnhuginn]

Me too.

[kathyh]

I remember watching "Penda's Fen". I didn't understand it at all really but it was hypnotic viewing. I can remember "The Changes" as well. Obviously I didn't appreciate it at the time but I think I grew up in a golden age of children's television, and Anna Home had a lot to do with that.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, her name seems to crop up behind much of the most significant BBC children's drama. I absolutely agree that it was a golden age.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Anna Home was interviewed in an issue of Skonnos in the late 1990s about The Changes - she seemed keen to distance herself from her 1970s work at the time, though given that she was still in situ as head of BBC Children's then, it's understandable.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, big differences between early 70s and late 90s production values! ETA: I guess we're all a bit shy about reflecting on our early work.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

It sounds like it was a truly excellent conference.

*sigh*

I still wish I'd been able to make this, not least because I think that the way people are relating to these televisual texts has much more in common with what I'm doing than standard lit crit interrogations of text, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that people are not afraid to express love and affection for their sources. So much better than the pseudo-distance and so-called objectivity that gets paraded around elsewhere, or getting bogged down in absurd and reductive discussions of quality of source material.

The music thing makes me twitch between my shoulder blades a bit, partly because it makes me think of how I get continual messages about how I don't do music properly, and it seems to me that using music to represent character in this way is part of the same discourse, where music you make for yourself is better and the music-maker is superior to those who don't, without consideration that don't is a result of can't for many people. I will treat anyone who insists that everyone can make music to a trio as sung by me, my father and my brother, and accompanied by me on finger cymbals and see if they still claim the inherent superiority of home-made music over pre-recorded music.

I do hope Peter Wright's keynote gets published. I remember finding The Changes absolutely terrifying, from the opening credits onwards.

Happy shopping!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

One of my most vivid memories of my school days is being allowed to stay up to watch until the end of each episode of Doomwatch - and my total disbelief when they blew up Toby Wren.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Legendary TV moment! My equivalent is the end of Blake's 7.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The blowing up of Toby Wren was the 'water cooler talk' of its day. I was at college and unsurprisingly few of us had TVs, but surprisingly many of us managed to be near someone else's TV on a Monday night for Doomwatch. We were all in shock on Tuesday morning. Imagine.... The clock's counting down from ten, the plucky hero is defusing the bomb using only a pair of pliers and a tool that boy scouts use to remove stones from horses' hooves. Of course it's going to stop at 'one'. It _always_ stops at 'one'. Only this time - KABOOOOM! Unbelievable! And the TV company had managed to keep it a total secret that Robert Powell was leaving the series.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, that's 'Penda's Fen'. I remember the trailer back in 1974, and it scared the living shit out of me. But I never really knew the title.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Looks brilliantly crackers, I have to say.