“THE SINISTER INVERSE”: ROB YOUNG’S ‘THE MAGIC BOX’

“Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant”
-‘Penda’s Fenn’

Subtitled 'Viewing Britain Through The Rectangular Window’, Rob Young’s latest book is self-described as “a riveting journey into the psyche of Britain through its golden age of television and film.” (Though I’ll concentrate on TV here, for reasons which will hopefully become obvious.)

It’s not intended as a compendium, cheerily mentioning only in passing things you might expect to see covered more closely. Though as comprehensiveness is not lacking I soon found myself using it as one, jotting down a list of things I’d not seen which I now wanted to.

But it does veer towards compendium, throws its net widely, and so more thinly than you might want. It can at times feel maddeningly uneven. The treatment of some examples is somewhat perfunctory, little more than plot summaries. But just when you’re rewiring your reading head to accommodate this, Young goes and says something striking. (As just one example, how had I ever missed the Arthurian references in ’Kill List’?)

And if it feels uneven but at unpredictable points compelling, then that makes it remarkably similar to much of the material it covers. Overall, this doesn’t read at all like a career writer working through a shopping-list of marketable subjects, it doesn’t even read like someone with an affinity for their subject. The book goes into occasional anecdotes of Young’s own screen-fixated youth. But even without them you’d guess he’d been fed on this diet from an early age, and now has it in his marrow.

Young never names his subject, finding the commonly used ‘folk horror’ too narrow, and worries little over coming up with a robust definition. About which he’s probably right. Much of the dramas covered here are made up of things nearly said and sights nearly shown. The twisty, animate, billowing sheets of ’Whistle And I’ll Come To You’ seem a synecdoche of the whole thing, an apparition you’re not quite sure what you saw even as you’re seeing it, darkly ineffable.

Young speculates whether the protagonist has gone insane and is hallucinating this, akin to ’The Innocents’. But this may be a rare case of him missing the point. The order of events that got us here seems moot. The apparition is so sense-defying, not conventionally horrific yet so oblivious to our consensus reality, to see such a thing… it would doubtless drive you mad whether you were before or not.

Given which, trying to delineate all this may seem contrary to the spirit of the enterprise. It would be like trying to map the contours of that ever-shifting sheet. Grasp at ghosts, and they’ll just slip away. But then while words are inadequate, they remain all we’ve got. Let’s at least try to lay down some fuzzy chalk lines. True, it’s not as narrow as a genre, (which ‘folk horror’ may well be), and is better seen as a milieu.

We can say it’s more than just the stuff we liked when we were kids. I obsessed over, for example the space age shenanigans in ’Blake’s Seven’, but they would have no place here. I might sketch the boundaries a little more tightly than Young. To me there has to be at least a hint of the eerie.

So the children’s information film spookily narrated by the “spirit of dark and lonely water” does belong, with Donald Plesence’s voice-over, simultaneously lugubrious and sinister. Whereas for example ’Brideshead Revisited’ doesn’t, even if Young has illuminating things to say about it. (Or alternately am I trying to read a different book to the one Young has written? Reader, you must decide that one!

But this doesn’t restrict us to the literally supernatural, any more than it does the literally literal. It doesn’t have to feature wicked nudie Diabolists or New Agers dousing for ley lines. (In fact in the second case I’d prefer that it didn’t.) Watkin’s ’Culloden’, for example, has no hauntings. But its friction between historic warfare and modern reporting methods, allowing us to see the brutality of the past in current-day up close, includes it. And if any explanation were added, that these were a time travelling film crew or some such, it would only take the effect away. In fact “hint of the eerie” might well be a tautology. Too eerie and the eerie will negate itself.

Given which, its perhaps appropriate that one of the book’s central questions is only nearly said. Is this a milieu which, once coined, could be ongoing? Or was it the product of, and therefore something confined to, a specific era?

Busying himself with case studies, Young is quieter on the macro forces which led to this. But, to simplify somewhat widely… The post-war rise of America as the dominant super-power usurped Britain’s self-appointed role.The economic axis shifted from Old to New World. So we compensated with what we had - history. Which we claimed nourished culture, almost as an automatic process, maturing it like vintage wine. We might not have rockets and skyscrapers but we had Shakespeare and Stonehenge, or so we reasoned. Culture and nature, history and heritage became synonyms, and from them we drew our sense of specialness.

So, more and more, Britain fell back on exploiting itself. But not just the coal and iron it was already at work on. It started to strip-mine a projected image of its own past, when people either talked proper or knew their place. As Laurie Penny has pointed out: “With nowhere left to colonise, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff, and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.”

We did this at least initially to make ourselves feel more secure. But we also found that culture become monetisable, an export product to those who currently lacked it. Young tells us British TV’s export market in 2019 “amounted to £1.34 billion.” As Adorno said, culture is an industry. (How much this consolidates the trend and how much it changes it, made Englishness into an export good is a good question, but one for another time.)

And TV itself was a fine example of this. It was surely more cost-effective to buy in American shows than make our own, and they often proved popular with audiences. Instead they were strictly rationed, taking the same rare but treasured place in schedules that sweets did in my childhood diet. While heritage TV was the fibre and roughage, the “good-for-you” for forced mastication.

And what was more natural in that environment than to invert it? That past we identified with, that past we thought was ours enough to give us the right to sell it, was it even truly ours? Did we really grasp it? Wasn’t it actually foreign to us, ever-elusive but at the same time inescapable, forever seeping through into the present?

The past turned out to not be an heirloom like we thought, but a cursed object we now can’t return to the shop. Young calls it “the sinister inverse of a British Transport Films documentary-style portrait of the countryside.” By being associated with old cyclic notions of time, the past could be shown as still-present, unendable.

As Young recounts, the past, the buried, the concealed and – above all – the eerie are often taken as interchangeable terms. (Significantly, ‘buried’ includes names. Both ’Quatermass And the Pit’ and ’Penda’s Fen’ include the ‘real’, historic name of places as a revelation.) At a time when, as he he also recounts, American anxieties were fixed upon the sky.

There were inevitably those who took to this from the start. But, equally inevitably, it was most taken up by the succeeding post-war generation, and so reached its peak in the Seventies.

Which is why it’s so fitting that Young’s previous book was ’Electric Eden’, on the adoption of folk music. This often took the form of a younger generation claiming the folk tradition from their parents. But it had as much to do with de-claiming it, giving it back its unfamiliarity.

Which makes for a strange rebellion, in some ways a reactionary one. Youth in revolt didn’t just not reject what Marx witheringly called “the muck of ages”, it actively rejected the possibility it could be rejected. In fact it purposefully raked through that muck of ages, hoping to come across something thrillingly dangerous that could be set loose. 

Kneale’s vision of us in ’Quatermass’ as the lemming-like Planet people was an old man’s phobia, bur perhaps contained a smidge of truth. If folk horror isn’t the whole of this milieu, it tends to be where these contradictions come to a head. (As said over ’Blood On Satan’s Claw’.) Turning into, as Young terms it, “I fought the lore and the lore won”.

Further, form and content are never truly separable. The television technology of the time was ephemeral, its images dependent on (and akin to) our fickle weather, often fuzzy and indistinct, lending themselves to the spectral. ‘Ghosting’ was a literal feature, frequently coming up on our family TV. Added to which, TV wasn’t a constant. You would see it come on in the morning, and go off again in the evening. It arrived and left, announcing itself both times, it wasn’t ubiquitous.

(Young recalls wishing he was old enough to stay up for the closedown signal. I can remember watching the daily opening ceremony of Anglia TV, a camera revolving around a statue of a fittingly regal horsebacked knight. It was tedious but somehow also enthralling, the magic ritual by which the programmes were conjured up.)

Which lends itself to the notion that there’s something mediumistic about it, a metaphor to which Young often returns. So does that make all this the product of an era, enhanced further when combined with our own semi-ephemeral memories?

Perhaps we should push this more rigorously. Perhaps all this only comes into being when framed in our memories. After all the Seventies, where most of this material comes from, is now itself the past - a foreign country we only half-recall being citizens of. I cannot imagine a sleek updated version of ’The Stone Tapes’, it needs the clunky analogue technology of its time. Similarly, the box TV with its turny dial navigating a vortex of white noise can feel like a interchange between todays’ hi-def flatscreens and the medium’s table.

But of course at time of transmission that technology wasn’t an aesthetic choice, any more than Seventies London was in ’The Sweeney’. Today it feels perfectly natural to bundle all this material up together, whereas back then it wouldn’t at all. (Historical dramas, some of them literary adaptions, alongside science fiction shows aimed at kids?) Back then it just looked like TV, because that’s what TV looked like.

Added to which, we were the TV generation. Unlike our parents we were born after the box, took its presence for granted. Their regarding it as a semi-foreign object, whose transmissions needed to be carefully curated, seemed strange and arcane. Which means its nature only strikes us now, in retrospect.

Yet there’s also contemporary examples. A relatively small number, perhaps, but they’re there. True, because they’re riffing off this milieu. ’Kill List’ for example, has a quite Seventies aesthetic. Yet it’s contemporary-set, suggesting the milieu is not spent yet. 

Besides, new technology always opens new avenues. Mass broadcast was thought by many as a standardising, homogenising force which would kill off what remained of folk culture, something like the regulating Judge in ’Blood On Satan’s Claw’. Instead like was attracted to unlike, and it exploited its own nature to marinate with that folk culture in creative ways.

But there is something which has changed. It is never times that are creative, they only ever provide a context to be creative within. Only people can be creative. But they can only act creatively when given the opportunity to do so.

At the book’s end, Young points out how almost none of these programmes would have been commissioned today. “Television has become the source millions turn to for long-form episodic narratives, the media has had to focus on story and forward drive over ambience and atmosphere… the television has become part of the digital data flow and and the never-ending conversation of social media.”

Contrary to every single piece of received wisdom we’ve been spoonfed since the late Seventies, it was the stuffy old bureaucracy of the BBC (and similar institutions) which commissioned these left-field shows. And this was precisely because they weren’t micromanaging and focus-group-testing every single thing they produced. With income guaranteed from the license fee, they could afford to experiment with what might interest people. Not so today. Much of what’s ludicrous about the current moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ is its failure to grasp that most censorship happens at the commissioning stage.

But if this milieu isn’t over, it’s gone on some decades - making it possible to ask how effective it was. That quote from ’Penda’s Fenn’ up top, that can be a tricky combination to pull off. On one side, the past can’t just seem dark and foreign. ‘Bad stuff happened back then’ is in itself barely even a banality, and by itself merely suggests a haunted house whose door needs nailing shut. We need to feel estranged from the past, but also that we belonged there.

And as time went on, there was a counter-tendency which was possibly worse. The Right seemed in such control of the present, that the future was surely theirs too, and so the past became something of a refuge. To quote Evelyn Waugh, via Young, “when the waterholes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage.”

This yearning for a time before there were, like, corporations and stuff reached a risible terminus in doctrines such as Primitivism. Yet much like racism and the Right, it’s proponents were only saying out loud which seemed outrageous, but which others were already thinking. And so the colonialist projection of the Noble Savage reasserted itself. And ’Avatar’ ain’t eerie.

Watch this space! Of course the real question is - how does any of this apply to ’Doctor Who’..?