What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  This  BBC program, titled The Lonely Shore and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. There are some nice and eerie Radiophonic style electronics on the score. And the grave upper class voiceover, mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature, has the feeling of a classic Public Information film, while textually suggesting familiarity with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man) and Spengler (pattern work, Decline of the West). There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. The beachscape setting with the jetsam of Time array of mystifying and opaque salvage is very Ballard and I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon.

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.