Off The Island

In a change to our normal domestic flight path, we now take a 2,391.16 mile diversion to Hong Kong, and celebrate the arresting visual imagery and sheer bonkers brio of their television and film. 'Sexy Killer' is a 1976 take on the old 'comely lady takes brutal revenge on nasty criminals' sub-genre perhaps best typified by the fantastic Pam Grier. The credit sequence is just about the best thing in the film, but there is an awful lot more on offer: sex, violence, drugs, groovy music, larger than life performances - and some eye watering outfits.      

Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance

Abbot's Bromley is a small village in Staffordshire which has held an annual Horn Dance since 1226. Twelve dancers, including six Deermen (from the Bentley family up until 1914, from the related Fowell family up to the present day) are accompanied by a hobby horse, a bow man, a Maid Marian (a bloke in drag) a Fool, a boy with a triangle and a man with an accordion. The ensemble perform their rites at various stops on a prescribed route. After a twenty mile round trip, they go to the pub.

The antlers used in the dance were carbon dated in the seventies, and found to be from circa 1065 ad. They are Reindeer antlers, which must have been imported from Scandinavia (even in 1065, Reindeers had been extinct in Britain for about 8,000 years). As ever with these ancient rituals there is an ongoing debate about just how ancient it is, with some experts suggesting that the dance may have originated much later in the 16th century, making it a mere 500 years old. Either way, it's the oldest traditional dance we have in this country.

Since 1660, it has been celebrated on Wakes Monday, which is today, so you'd better get your skates on if you want to see it.

Nuances

Showcasing the delicate art of subtle yet convincing screen acting.

001 Richard Kiel

Victim

In his long career as a state sanctioned killer, James Bond has taken an inordinate amount of lives (he’s also been indirectly responsible for loads more deaths, but let’s park that for now). To be fair, most of his targets were trying to kill him or, at least, were in the employ of the agents of evil, so he sometimes has a point but, even so, that’s a hell of a lot to carry around. This new series will look at some of Bond’s victims, more specifically the ones that, if he had a conscience, might occasionally shake their gory locks at him in unpleasant dreams: the ones who suffered, the ones who screamed, the ones who died in cruel and unusual circumstances.

Take this bloke, for instance. He’s a pilot and a common or garden villain only distinguished by a great moustache. Halfway through the flight, he leaves the cabin, pulls a gun, shoots out the control panel and then bails out leaving James without a parachute in a plane that’s about to crash. Little things like that don’t bother 007, of course, who simply jumps out, catches the pilot up, then knocks him about and nicks his parachute from him before kicking him away into the ether.

What’s disturbing about this incident is that the doomed pilot gives out two screams as he floats off: the first full of indignation at being kicked in the face and forcibly parted from his life saving device, and a second anguished, horribly strangled cry as he realises that he is now as dead as a doornail, but will have to hang around hopelessly and helplessly waiting to hit terminal velocity and begin his long drop to the ground. 

What do you do with that time? What does that realisation of impending annihilation do to the human mind? Baddie or not, it’s an awful way to go. I hope you’re proud of yourself, Bond.

Outer Space Now Belongs To 007...

‘Moonraker’ is a Bond film of contrasts – it’s fast moving, packed full of stuff, and the outer space battle is really pretty cool. On the other hand, it takes the smug, smirky elements of the franchise to their logical extreme, and, at times, becomes totally ridiculous.

The story is pretty standard: a mad Frenchman operating from a space station wants to poison the Earth and everyone on it and then re-populate it with a hand-picked master race. Only James Bond and his glamorous CIA partner / shag can stop him. So, after a lot of messing about and about a dozen near death experiences, they stop him.

The 52 year old Roger Moore plays Bond, and seems so lethargic and weary it seems astonishing that he would appear in another three films, finally retiring when he was pushing sixty. Moore’s Bond was never really very physical, of course, certainly not the brawler that Connery was, or the blunt instrument of Fleming, but watching him go through the motions of having a really, really slow fight with Jaws on top of a fake cable car is almost excruciating, and has all the menace and dynamism of a mime festival at an old people’s home.

It’s a feature of the series that footage is occasionally sped up (not particularly well) to enhance the action, but here they do it about a dozen times and it soon becomes pretty tiresome, a shortcut to actually putting some energy into the scenes. When you later see Bond grappling with an obviously rubber snake, or see the poor bluescreen work, or notice that his stand in in the opening parachute scenes is suddenly wearing goggles, it becomes clear that the film makers don’t really care about making a decent product anymore, and that they are just indulging themselves, safe in the knowledge that the film will make a shit load of cash regardless (‘Moonraker’ was the highest grossing film in the series to date, and remained so until the Brosnan re-launch in 1995).

The nadir of this jokey, lazy attitude comes in a scene set in Venice where Bond pushes a button and his souped up gondola converts into a hovercraft, climbing out of the canal and traversing a busy St. Mark’s Square. It’s bad enough that one witness does ye olde ‘looking at a bottle of wine and shaking his head in amazement’ routine, or that a waiter pours a beer over a patrons head but, when a pigeon does a double take – a fucking pigeon – that’s too much, especially as the visual effect is so poorly done.

That said, the outer space sequences are good if you don’t try and be a spoilsport and calculate the impossible amount of money Drax would have needed to set it all up – and they look great, so there’s an inconsistency there that rankles. The franchise would get worse, of course, and, for the most part ‘Moonraker’ is really very entertaining. But it could have been brilliant – a bit like the theme tune, which has a beautiful melody but never really sparks into life, not even in the disco version that plays over the end credits.

For the record, this was a film that I couldn’t wait to see back in 1979 but, at the time it was first released, I was at Sea Scout camp, so my Mum brought me the novelisation to be going on with. I read it three or four times and got more and more excited. When I finally got to see the film on the screen instead of in my head, I was, of course, really disappointed. And, no, even at the age of eleven, I didn't laugh at the pigeon.

FINALLY -- this film cost £35m to make. In 1979. This is the stand-in they used for seven foot tall metal toothed Jaws. Difficult to find a lookalike, yes, but come on...the real thing first, then the double --

Moonraker

Dragonfly Trumpeter

At the time, Freddie Mercury (who would have been 67 today) always struck me as the archetypal 1970’s rock superstar: arrogant, self-indulgent, out of touch, excessively hairy. I scoffed at him and his fans because I liked new working class groups like The Specials and Madness and ‘middle aged’, University educated Queen seemed like posh dinosaurs, punk dodgers, old top hat.

I was wrong, of course, and I realised this soon after Freddie died. You don't miss your water and all that. Twenty odd years on, I’m still wearing that old hat and loving it, enjoying their early albums and marvelling at their preposterous blend of pomp, speed metal and dungeons and dragons.

Released in 1974, 'Queen II' has a white side and a black side (not literally, it’s an artistic notion rather than a novelty pressing). The white side is okay, but the black side is (literally) fantastic. Written entirely by Freddie Mercury, we are caught in a landslide of multi-tracked vocals, mantelpiece guitar, piano, harpsichord and big drums, all linked together by clever production and lyrics that reflect the 28 year old Mercury’s obsession with fairytales and mythology, and set in his very own imaginary world of Rhye.

‘Ogre Battle’ is a rip-roaring tale that tells of every wizard’s idea of a great night out: a ringside seat at a big old scrap between club wielding giants. One can only hope that elf and safety rules were followed. This segues into the centrepiece of the album, the epic (in scope, not timing) ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’.

'The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke' (1855-1864) 

Based on the painting of the same name by Richard Dadd, this remarkably overblown song tells the story of the titular faery, his associated band of dilly dally-o’s, dirty laddios and quaere fellows, and the mighty axe he uses to crack Queen Mab’s walnut. Yes, I know. But it’s as brilliant and as unhinged as the artist Dadd himself, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, killed his father and continued a long career from the confines of various asylums.

The bombast and driving harpsichord of ‘Feller’ gives way to a ballad, ‘Nevermore’ that sounds like its being performed on a crystal grand piano at the top of a very tall tower and could have been done by The Beach Boys if they came from Narnia rather than California.

Anyway, don't take my word for it --

Listening to the black side of this album has led me to revaluate my feelings about Freddie, banishing my image of him as a strutting, moustachioed rock knob and instead revealing a far more sympathetic figure: a somewhat lonely and out of place person who retreated into a fantasy world to find somewhere his difference didn’t matter. & Freddie was different: born in Zanzibar, brought up in India, Parsi, Zoroastrian, buck toothed, gay (or bisexual, he had a long term girlfriend at this point). If the record hadn’t been so perfectly realised, or he didn’t have the rest of the group behind him, he could have been the archetypal outsider artist.

The Girl Who Was The Girl Who Was Death

Despite Number Six' almost complete lack of interest in the fairer sex, there are an awful lot of pretty girls in 'The Prisoner', one of the prettiest (and deadliest) being hit woman Sonia, as played by ITC regular Justine Lord. 

The Prisoner: The Girl Who Was Death

‘The Girl Who Was Death’ is an unusual bit of television by any standards, even the superlatively weird ones of ‘The Prisoner’. Completely adrift of any continuity, hallucinatory and disjointed, set outside the Village and mostly played for laughs, the episode is, nonetheless, bloody good telly, and one of the most genuinely entertaining of the series.

Originally written as a ‘Danger Man’ episode, ‘The Girl Who Was Death’ is a wild fantasy that parodies the idea of the super capable agent up against equally deadly foes, but also provides some excellently thought out sequences that would grace any serious espionage drama.  

It’s all very psychedelic (in the British sense of slightly frightening whimsy, rather than the American sense of losing your mind and going to a different dimension), and has a joyously ramshackle feel to it, a sort of thrown together quality no doubt caused by McGoohan’s absence for some of the filming (he was away making ‘Ice Station Zebra’, Howard Hughes’ favourite film), and the requirement to use stand ins and back projection to make up for it.

This is an episode of great ‘bits’, and Justine Lord, as the slinky white clad assassin, is a memorable and deadly addition to the ever changing cast. In the end analysis, ‘The Girl Who was Death’ isn’t exactly a ‘Prisoner’ episode, but it’s isn’t exactly anything else, and that’s what makes it so great.

More Of The Many Moods Of Jason King

Feeling The Love

Britain is not a nation of dancers, a statement borne out by forty odd years of watching young people mill about and bump into each other to music every week on pervert’s playground ‘Top Of The Pops’. Even the dancers on the programme couldn’t dance or, at least, despite having some individual skills, found themselves trotting around and doing half-hearted high kicks in whatever piss poor routine Pan’s People, Ruby Flipper or Legs & Co were scheduled to do that week. 

In 1978, however, for a few minutes at least, everything changed. The catalyst was Donna Summer, and the soundtrack was her phenomenal hit record ‘I Feel Love’. Faced with the relentless propulsive energy (literally, the sequencer sounds like an outboard motor) of this superlative track, even the British could dance. Ignore Legs & Co, by the way, they’re just getting in the way (if you’re wondering, they are sat in a plywood car because they have just ‘interpreted’ Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’). 

Look at the audience, though, the poor, lumpy proletariat who have been pushed around and out of the way all day and ran the risk of being groped by The Hairy Fuckflake or worse: they are energised, invigorated, alive. This isn’t just disco, this is a primal force and, somewhere deep in the collective consciousness, there is a memory of how to rhythmically and vigorously move to music. How much more fun is that than shifting your weight from foot to foot and hoping for the best?

Good News?

We'll be back tomorrow. Yes, I know, Richard - 'MEH' - but it keeps us off the streets. Most of the time, anyway. See you in the morning.