Well, the warm, rosy glow of the exhibition has faded over the intervening weeks and I'm back to unhappy. Work is hardly progressing. Thursday afternoon I ended up watching two BBC dramas with occult/paranormal themes: 'The Beast', 1981, and part of the 'West Country Tales' series and the remarkable 'The Stone Tape' of 1972.
'The Beast' is a tale of haunting - of sorts. The agent is not spiritual but something quite physical and quite, quite ancient. A survival. A wildman, occupying the space between the human and the bestial. A cryptid, but also, simultaneously, a creature from out of the depths of English and European folklore. A Wodewose. Perhaps even from the dark corners of our own collective sub-conscious. The story is set on a farm deep in the Cornish countryside. The first encounter with the creature occurs within the wild wood, leading one to think that perhaps the wildman was merely the genius loci of the woods, a pan-like creature; however the second encounter takes place in the domesticity of the farm itself several years later.
And on to the main feature, the confrontational and quite disturbing 'The Stone Tape' written by Nigel Kneale who also, and famously, wrote the Quatermass series and the controversial, but prophetic 'The Year of the Sex Olympics'. 'The Stone Tape' is something that has come down to us therefore from the Golden Age of British broadcasting. Like 'Quatermass and the Pit' before it 'The Stone Tape' attempts to provide a rational explanation for paranormal activity.
The setting is a nineteenth century Gothic country house. Quite an outlandish place. (The decidedly wilful Horsley Towers in Surrey) The place has stood empty for years and has been recently bought by an electronics company. The action centres on the R & D department, which is under the gimlet eye of the demanding, maddening, driven Peter, played by the admirable Michael Bryant. A rare appearance on the small screen too for which we should be grateful. He was a great actor but worked almost exclusively on the stage. And there is Jill Greeley, played by Jane Asher, she is a sensitive - 'the type that hurts easily'. But then they are both characters on the edge. Around them is an excellent ensemble of actors including Ian Cuthbertson, Michael Bates and James Cosmo.
Almost immediately things begin to go wrong. Cuthbertson's character, Roy Collinson who has been on site for months, it is soon apparent knows a lot and guesses the rest but is 'economical with the actualite'. Events follow events in rapid succession. There is a relentlessness, a constant intensity, to this drama that must have been exhausting work for the actors. The paranormal activity centres in a single room in the house - part cellar, abandoned. An ancient space. The builders working on the restoration of the house refuse to work there. Both Peter and Jill become obsessed with what it contains. Peter's attitude is purely utilitarian, all surface; he quickly assesses (correctly) that the room acts as some sort of recording device. He thinks it might be of some commercial value. And unhappily it is as much Peter's attitude, as it is the paranormal activity, that drives his team members to madness even death. With possible exception of Jill, Peter and his team fail to recognize the 'recordings' represent some sort of trauma, that they are not merely chance events but are caused by another, as yet unseen, agency.
It is perhaps unsurprising that 'The Stone Tape' shares certain themes with another of Kneale's work 'Quatermass and the Pit' of 1958/9; the abandoned property; the sensitive, slightly neurotic, female assistant; the decent into madness of individuals and groups; the intrusion of the deep past into contemporary (post-war) Britain. Both films do indeed find a logical explanation for the horrendous events, but fourteen years is a long time and the narrative of progress has collapsed; in the end 'The Stone Tape' can only offer a partial explanation. Certainly no rational explanation, because the boundary of science has been reached and beyond lies the realm of the spirit.
