Folk 2: The Old Weird Telly

Telly used to be odd. I’m talking about the nutritious, umami weirdness of old television, the programmes made by hippies who, while trying to meet a skewed Reithian brief, allowed all manner of folksy freakishness to seep in. Ancient weirdness manifested in the most benign corners, and for each sunlit upland there was a shadowy vale.

Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood was tea-time television in the early eighties and it was bedevilled with old, weird tropes. Herne the Hunter, Robin’s adopted father, was both corporeal man and the elemental embodiment of the forest. Herne appeared suffused in green light and wearing a dead animal as a hat. He often spoke without moving his lips and stood in billowing clouds of mint flavoured dry ice. During the series Robin battled not only the Sheriff of Nottingham but Crom Cruach, a pre-Christian glove puppet, and in one episode he thwarted Rula Lenska’s dastardly scheme to summon the devil – and she only bloody did it too!

Every week Robin and his merry men were tricked, bewitched, enchanted and possessed. He even managed to die and be reborn, like John Barleycorn the spirit of the field, or more likely given the time slot, Doctor Who.

Raven featured a double-denimed Phil Daniels as the cockneyist boy in all the land. The series was a catalogue of folk horror ideas and featured variously: a spirit guide, the titular bird of ill omen, a set of sacred caverns, mystical time slips, astrological symbols, an authority figure who learns the error of his ways and a boy who is the reincarnation of King Arthur. It is equidistant between the Children’s Film Foundation and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit.

Kneale’s sticky thumb-prints are all over the folk horror genre. His Murrain sees inbred local types attempt to starve an old woman out of a remote Yorkshire farming community. For once the educated intruder, a big city vet, is not the ultimate recipient of cunning justice. This is unusual, though the ending proves gratifyingly ambiguous for both that character and the viewer.

An echo of folk horror could be found in the oddest places in the seventies. The creator of The Professionals, Brian Clemens, produced a series called Thriller which was, in the main, a collection of ponderous detective stories, but even there folk horror notions pushed through like midnight mushrooms. The prosaically named A Place to Die finds a city doctor inheriting a rural practice and bringing his new American bride to live there. The locals are entranced by this “moon pale and moon golden lady”, especially when they see her limping due to a broken bone in her foot. It soon becomes clear that their affection comes at a price – they want to marry her off to Satan. Pockets of the old religion spread like a rash through seventies television and under every stone morbidities wriggled.

Made in 1970 John Bowen’s Play for Today Robin Redbreast is a dowdy, dry run for The Wicker Man, and once again sees a metropolitan outsider visit a remote community and become embroiled a game that she cannot understand and cannot win. But whereas Anthony Shaffer’s film script was as much about ritual and rules as it was about the more heated elements of druidic practice, Bowen’s Redbreast is suffused with a quieter sense of unease. The villagers, especially the learned Mr. Fisher, are as unhurried and timeless as standing stones. In fact with the grainy patina of BBC black and white they take on the quality of stone: impassive, eternal, and of the earth. A later scene even sees them dressed as folk archetypes, with Mr Fisher a Herne the Hunter in jam jar specs.

Redbreast’s protagonist is very different from the straitlaced Sergeant Howie in Wicker Man. Norah, beautifully played by Anna Cropper, drinks with her louche London friends and sneers at the locals. She is charmed and quickly bored by local stud Rob, a dullard karate fanatic, and only sleeps with him when he saves her from a flock of birds that the locals have stuffed down her chimney: the symbolism is laid on with Mr Fisher’s dibbler’s trowel.

Almost contemporaneous and altogether more colourful was The Owl Service: the story of three children, played by palpable adults, who re-enact a tragedy from the Mabi-nog-ion: the story of Blodeuwidd, a woman of flowers who betrays her husband with his friend. The children in the story take on the personas of this atavistic love triangle and it is revealed that the story may have been enacted before, and perhaps needs to be acted out through each generation. This notion of endless recurrence seems central to folk horror: the idea that stories themselves hold power and most be acted upon irresistibly.

In contrast to Redbreast, The Owl Service was filmed in vivid, pop-art colours, the children coded throughout, with Alison in red, Gwyn in black and poor Roger in a pair of tiny green shorts that do nothing for his mood. The editing is kinetic with striding jump-cuts and paint-spattered, Peirrot le Fou inspired close-ups. The sense of peculiarity and unease starts from the credit sequence, an eerie combination of images and sounds: a guttering candle, a motorbike’s throttle, Welsh harp, a pair of shadowy hands morphing into a bird, the sound of something scratching. It is the entire story distilled into a few seconds of strange, elusive animation.

These programmes seem wordy and flat today. Their pacing is slow, the effects are dated. The lack of money afforded them obvious. But they had weight and charm, even gravitas and they were trying to propose ideas, to challenge and engage.  I think they did. Here’s to the health of the old, weird telly.