haunty ha-ha, haunty peculiar

 

Sometime ago, Vic Reeves posted this on Twitter - if I remember right, it's artwork for a tour poster that was never used.  

Immediately I flashed on Martin Parr's Boring Postcards book.

And then I thought of the graphic that Julian House cooked up for my big Wire piece on Hauntology. 

And then the album art of second-wave hauntologists Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan 

And this got me thinking about the proximity of hauntology and comedy - more precisely, a certain strain of British comedy... 

Now, on account of some of the write-ups the H-zone gets - the droves of dissertations even now being written on this area - it's easy to come away with a sense of H-ology as this rather sombre and gloomy thing. Especially if you go with the Fisher-ian take with its focus on Burial / The Caretaker* and things adjacent like Disintegration Loops and The Sinking of the Titanic and all that.  Lost futures, decaying memory, cultural entropy et cetera. 

But, as anyone who really knows the area knows - and who has a wider sense of what it is - hauntology is actually riddled and addled with whimsy and macabre humour. When you listen to and look at the graphic presentation of what I consider to be the canonic core - Ghost Box, Mordant Music / eMMplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal -  comedy runs through the whole thing. 

And I'm not just talking the album art and the song titles and the samples - rather often the music itself has an antic air. 

(Same goes for the sources too actually: whatever else it is, The Wicker Man is also a comedy). 

(Think also of the "sinister camp" flavor of The Prisoner.... Kafkaesque yet absurdly English.... deliciously over-thesped)

(Or the Dr. Phibes movies)

So partly it's to do with the source material... and partly the proximity to pastiche and parody in a lot of the work...  and then there's the element of retro-satire in something like Scarfolk, or the early records by The Advisory Circle. 

I made this point in the sleevenote for the Ghost Box tenth-birthday compilation In A Moment:

One of the things some people don’t seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they’re thrown off by the name - is that this isn’t meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness.   It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It’s umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here.  Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty.  A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That’s a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research. 

So anyway, all this got me thinking about it from the other side - what about actual comedy on the telly that has haunty undercurrents? Britcoms that are fellow travelers with Ghost Box et al. 

 

Way back when, there was Victor Lewis-Smith’s Buygones for Club X on Channel 4 - these were standalone mini-programmes (later a newspaper column) focused on obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ... An early example of retro-futurism. 

 

Then there was Vic Reeves' Big Night Out. 

Now I must admit, when I saw the first episodes I disliked it intensely (see the negative review at the end). But about six shows in, I realised my grave error - the moldy-old all-too-English stagnant odour that I initially found suffocating was actually the source of its musty genius (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer indeed). I don't know if it is quite hauntology but it nourished itself on similar decaying culture-matter.

Then, by the early 2000s, we have Look Around You, series 1 and series 2 -  quasi-pedagogic retro-TV that could not be more congruent with the Hauntology Project.  There's even an episode about ghosts!

"in today's modern world"

What else? 

Blue Jam, in moments (there was an album on Warp wrapping blackest-ever-black humorous sketches in creepy ambient IDM)

More recently, some of the episodes of Inside No. 9 are straight out of the H-zone. There's one, "Mr King", that is very much ripping off The Wicker Man. 

The Mighty Boosh had retro-fantasia aspects that connects to that side of hauntology that imagines musical counterfactuals and alternative history trajectories for pop.  

I also think of Detectorists as on the outskirts of hauntology…  not quite bucolic horror but a sense of the past inside the present...  

Whoever did these fake Penguin / Pelican / Puffin paperback covers for the show is picking up on the same thing I am... 

Not having lived in the UK for the last 30 years or so,  I have missed much. So I decided to ask a few people who might have a better sense.

Neil Quigley of KilkennyElectroacoustic Research Laboratory grew up in Ireland but has been exposed to much of this stuff. He told me that Reeves & Mortimer were actually a formative influence on what he does, especially their later stuff (which I had never heard of) like The Weekenders and Catterick, describing them as "tonal companions to Scarfolk and more like art school projects than the prime time TV stuff they did" 

Neil also pointed me towards Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - another one I'd never heard of.

He also mentioned Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom as a non-Brit counterpart

And This Morning with Richard Not Judy  (again, never heard of it)

I also quizzed Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation / Mulgrave Audio

He pointed to a series called Mammoth and said "there was enough in there to make me wonder if he was a Ghost Box fan". 

Any more for any more?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's my Vic Reeves pan - I think it hones in on an essence that is proto-hauntology and in that sense the review provides a hauntology critique long before any one in the 2000s mounted their critiques of it - the need for some force of newness to blast open the windows, let the stuffy air out

Meat paste did, in fact, figure in a later episode of VR'BNO

* Not that The Caretaker is devoid of humour - even when confronting the most terrifying prolapse of consciousness, there's flashes of dark wit. But also the pre-Caretaker identity of James Kirby - V/VM was all about puerile laffs and icono-vandalistic glee. The butchering of middle-of-the-road entertainment as perpetrated via the CD-R series Offal reminds me of the kind of malarkey we got up to as kids - defacing Ladybird books and other innocent childhood books, adding obscene addenda to the pictures, inserting foul utterances and actions in the text. Or at a slightly cleverer level, parodying things like Stars Wars or the Famous Five.