Monday, September 30, 2024

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







6 comments:

Phil Knight said...

I think Buygones was modelled on "Bygones" an Anglia TV show which nostalgically reminisced about old technologies, especially agricultural ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2gXCvf-7fE

I remember this because it was one of the most boring shows on TV, along with Jackanory and Looks Familiar.

Phil Knight said...

I should add that the very regional nature of the various ITV stations is something that seems to have been lost now. Anglia TV always had a strong rural bent to it, as though it was run by a cabal of bohemian farmers. But you could see the regional bias in the programmes they made.

As general examples, Yorkshire TV made Emmerdale Farm, which was almost suffocatingly Yorkshirey (much more so than now), Granada made the extremely Lancashirey Coronation Street, Thames TV made the utterly Londony The Sweeney.

I remember when we used to go on holiday to Wales or the southwest, and the local ITV stations always felt disconcertingly alien, like you were in a parallel reality which was only slightly different. Like when MI5 used to break into peoples homes and rearrange their furniture to disconcert them.

Ed said...

The League of Gentlemen was in that same lineage of antique British creepiness, with elements of other traditions including music hall.

I haven't seen much of Inside Number 9, which comes from some of the same people, but that also seems like some comedy-haunting business.

Ed said...

This Jackanory disrespect will not stand! I used to love that show.

Phil Knight said...

I am going to guess now that you also preferred Swap Shop to Tiswas.

Amirite?

Stylo said...

This Morning With Richard Not Judy is one of my favourite shows, and for my money the best thing that either Stewart Lee or Richard Herring has ever done. Easily the best inappropriately scheduled show BBC2 ever put on around midday on a Sunday that often missed a week because the snooker was on. There's barely a day that goes by when I don't ask who's the real sick man in this so-called society. 28 years old. And then I get off the bus, uh.

(Trust me, it makes sense in context.)

And to sate we music snobs, I mention that one of the main characters was the Curious Orange. An orange that was curious about life's little mysteries. Unfortunately, a little learning proved a dangerous thing.

I recently discovered an entertaining Youtuber called Stuart Millard, who oft uses the term hauntology, specifically with regard to telly from the 80s and 90s (That's Life, Bobby Davro, that sort of thing). Here is a recent vid of his looking at Saturday Stayback, Chris Tarrant's second attempt to make an adult version of Tiswas (the first being OTT). Seems apposite for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR7s8S0X0n0&t=42s