Something is happening. A small girl with a face made of marzipan and a thick straight fringe interrupts her piano practice by playing some note perfect Rachmaninov with a stare that could pierce reinforced concrete. Her mother rushes into the room just in time for the cherub to instantly resume clunking through The Ash Grove. Everything is normal but the sweet little dear's expressionless face looks knowingly into the middle distance as she nods. Outside the cloud cover seems eternal. Even when the sun shines it feels like its filtered through mist. The soundtrack beyond the dialogue and all the foley work and fx library stock, is a thickly layered synthesiser wash, sweeping from one huge melancholy chord to the next. It never quite fits in. It never just sits under the action like a normal orchestral score does. You always notice it. It pulses with alien energy and the kind of crushing sadness that everyone is familiar with from facing an unpleasant inevitability. Overhead the clouds move so slowly it's barely noticeable. Something is always happening and it's almost never good.
As a child I was fascinated by the apparently endless supply of intriguing and often unsettling young audience tv that came from Britain. Production values were so low by today's standards that they are due for an ironic revival after everyone gets sick of the found footage boogaloo. But this only added to the atmosphere. There was a place in the white noise that found a foothold in the broadcast channels and invaded fullscale around the May and August holidays that was forever cold, grey and worrying. Even the advent of colour in the mid 70s (my family were and are early adopters of tech) did nothing to warm this chill. Here the troubles of the daily round weren't fighting over whose turn it was to take the bins out but how to stop the bins from communicating invasion schedules to the lawnmower. No one cared about the rained-on look as their imaginations were too busy coping with the ideas. And whoever wrote these six part torments for children knew about imagination and all its many uses.
British TV is not like this anymore. Some of the comedy is easily on par with the classic stuff but the weird fascinating sci-fi that could give you massive symphonic nightmares just before dawn has gone. Dr Who offers occasional glimpses of it (its spinoff, Torchwood offers more) and the occasional triumph like Life on Mars (which significantly harks back to the 70s I longingly evoked above) comes out but it's not the norm. There is still good writing and the performances of UK casts seems to be of a superhumanly high standard. But the things over your shoulder, the elemental spirits or radiant boys from distant star systems, have all blown away.
Maybe they should have. Things should change. But the feeling never has too. My favourite John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness is one that even his fans find a little too goofy but for me it's J.C.'s love letter to that vintage Brit sci-fi/horror. He even wrote it under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass after the scientist hero of one of the UK Tv's golden era mindblowers, Nigel Kneale. And it plays out like a Kneale story with a cavalry charge of ideas storming into the viewer's imagination at a gallop. And, despite its Californian setting it seems as grey and icy as a Yorkshire moor.
I've forgotten the plots and most of the titles of these but the atmosphere remains, forever a mix of homely tidiness and offscreen disorder all seen through the gluey haze of old video. The icy synthesiser score shimmered on. To this day if I find myself outside on a cold and overcast day I look around and almost expect to see something, just a detail, out of sorts, a speck of chaos in the order, on the road or the footpath, something wrong.
Beyond all of this rainy day press there is a silent clarity where, like the urgent crushing universe a reach away from the stratosphere, there is only silence and non-being, neither god nor intergalactic alien, just the silence of nothing.
This is what I feel in every frame of The Monsoons where there is more white than line.
This is Liza Goddard. She got the Skippy gig when her family moved o'er from the UK in the sixties. She moved back after Skippy and had a respectable acting career in Blighty. By that time this is what she thought of Skippy. I hope she now lives a happy life as a nanna growing cumquats and roses in a cottage garden in ..... Surrey. But I wasn't talking about her. She's a real person. Clancy is better than that; she's an imaginary one.
Skippy was finished already on a loop when I first saw it. See also Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space and my favourite, The Bucaneers. But Skippy was ours, looked and sounded like us.
I can't remember how old I was when I was dispatched with a handful of siblings and cousins to see Skippy and the Intruders. The cinema was packed. In one scene a chest was opened to reveal gold bars. A kid in the row behind mine responded with a highly audible: G-g-gold. It almost had a speech balloon around it. I didn't turn and look but laughed easily with everyone else who'd heard it. This was an under-ten aspirant adult, a wannabe, a collaborator with the adult occupying forces, the type whose doughy cynicism always sounded like the kind of indoctrinating instruction suffered by children in dictatorships (or even our own in Queensland). He was nevertheless, for all our sniggering, experiencing this movie the way it was intended.
To watch Skippy was to walk around inside it, to be resting, gumnut baby style, on a eucalypt leaf or one of the deadly rotors of the Waratah's chopper. If I was ever lodged in one of my loungeroom's 70s chic beanbags I was also there in the endless light of Skippy's paradise. And there, too, was Clancy.
I'm not going to go into the memory of a prepubescent near sex experience (those who know me personally would be in counselling for months). An instant nuclear grade sexual attraction was in effect every time she was onscreen but that's not my point. When Clancy entered the screen she walked into my imagination, strolling lightly among the Lost in Space set of red dangling bioforms that I imagined my brain to be, touching, here and there a stray hanging tongue-like protuberance from either idle curiosity or hard fascination.
On screen she might have had her foot caught the muck under the rising tide as Sonny provided her with ever longer improvised straws to use as snorkels (a real episode) or joining in some goofily choreographed fighting in the mud with a rock band dressed as the Kelly Gang (another real episode) -- actually, both of those examples are getting me all hot and bothered so I'll close up the thought with: on screen she might well have been the good looking female prop around which action took place (unlike the good looking male props like Ken James or Tony Bonner who usually came in to act directly after Sonny and Skippy had solved the mystery and needed variously adult and human assistance). ANYWAY, that's what she might have been on screen but as I watched she was in the room with me watching and being, sipping from the same family-size bottle of Coke that I was (and could never finish by myself so it would go like all the others into the fridge to flatten and be forgotten), selecting petite sized twisties from my packet and watching Skippy.
She was an odd (ie exciting ) mix of demure and cheerful and even to my still forming sexuality seemed to drive all the boys around her to hard competitive action. Skippy him/herself was meant to do this but not if you were male and around nine years old. It was her, it was Clancy doing all that. She wasn't in many scenes per episode but didn't have to be. All the action returned to her magnetic centre. Well, that's what happened when I watched it!
All the world loved Skippy. It was translated for Cuban and Conquistador alike, into Czech for the other side of the iron curtain. Carthage might have fallen for Skippy. Only Sweden resisted. The show was deemed irresponsible for depicting an animal capable of doing so much (eg. operating speed boats and literally disarming villains but, curiously, never mowing the lawn). But I loved Clancy more. As soon as I was old enough for a girlfriend it would be she. I imagined this done by Royal Decree. We would receive a white envelope at our Aitkenvale home. It bore the blobby red seal of The House of Windsor and contained a card with guilded borders which, when opened, was thus inscribed: It is our pleasure to command that Clarissa Merrick hereafter called Clancy be the sole companion of one Peter James Jetnikoff of Aitkenvale, Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The Queen. I'm filling out the language there, but that's how I saw it. I didn't call it fantasy then. Didn't have to. At nine, who does?
But the world of Skippy was as real as Mr Squiggle (I'll get to him later and explain that). We even had things in our kitchen from his home (no, not the kangaroo paw bottle opener). Waratah Cheddar was a kind of dairy flavoured pliable plastic that came in a package the same shape as a pack of Golden Crumpets (fellow entries in the greater Australian electoral roll, this is how you ruin a toaster). It was very salty, just the kind of cheese that would keep you going through days of being lost i' the bush. There it was, as close as the fridge.
But Clancy remains central to me as I write and draw this story of mine. Because if Gail ever did resemble someone it was she. Liza Goddard was too old to be Gail and too young to be her mum. Big sister subtracts too much from the concept. So it's Clancy, Clancy as an Irish Queenslander (Gail's name is Byrne) from the manager classes, but really Clancy all the same, grown up and aware of the powers of her physicality, Clancy whose backchat and frowning observations were those of a teenager who had to compete with an entire family good at both, a Clancy who would get sick of the boys running at windmills of solutions and do something more practical.
It's Clancy, demure but developing, who gets what she wants, sharp minded and boxing gloved like Liza Goddard against all the bullshit she's known so far and all the bullshit that is to come. It's Clancy in the big, haunted silence of the final scene with Meg and the weirding events of the middle act. Clancy in an episode of Skippy so serious and challenging that even the kangaroo wranglers refused to step forward. She won't need those gloves. Skippy won't be there. This is the episode of Clancy: Monster Hunter, Ghost Caller, Conqueror of Chaos. Only her name's Gail.
This is the cover of the first war comic I ever bought. I would have been about nine or ten. Mum ridiculed the title but that's what made me pick it out at the newsagent. The cover and the title formed a kind of concentrate. My first war comic had to be full flavoured and lasting. This one promised magnificent violence and in machine-like hatred. Win!
I think it's particularly apt, then to begin this subseries of posts about direct influences over the look, feel and content of The Monsoons with what was a huge formative influence o'er my life for about three years, either side of eleven.
The story of Kill the Enemy, in fact, was about a soldier twisted with a personal hatred. Fuelled by vendetta and propaganda, he was ready to go out in a blaze as long as he took a few beastly boche with him. Eventually, he was brought around by his fellow soldiers because it's all bad and puts everyone's life in danger when they could fight more coldly and kill a whole host more of the deadly hun. Well, not quite, there was in fact a quite effective anti-war message to this which I grew to quite enjoy. No contradiction here, I liked the war story and liked being invited to join in and condemn war: I take one in and get to feel superior (yea, verily unto myself). Then everything rebooted for the next one.
This was a War Picture Library comic. It was British. The other British war comic to get was Commando. These were black and white, mostly without tones and varied little but noticeably in style. They had to move quickly and be very authentic with their military hardware and landscape. Something I always noticed about the stories set in the desert campaigns was that they captured the effect of glare through very sparse use of line. You could put tones galore on the North Sea,the roof of New Guinea or the beaches of Normandy but the desert was all line, thin line against white that looked blisteringly hot.
The American war comics were coloured and heroic but it was easier to get the antiwar messages from them. If you didn't notice that the circle drawn around the words THE END in the last panel of each story itself contained a phrase like MAKE WAR NO MORE then you were choosing not to look. Sgt. Rock was chief among these (it was the one with the end messages) had some intriguing stories, sometimes verging on the kind of sci fi nazi of eighties cult cinema. They'd also tack on shorter stories from different eras of warfare. One was set during a Roman campaign. Blood flowed from the title panel and poured into a centurion's cup as red wine. That really zapped me.
The UK ones never went anywhere near there. They were the solid universe replaying over and over as I reread and reread them until the pulpy beige pages disintegrated in my hands. However, as a reader the two strands, fantastical and adventuresome, I conflated them into a World War II of clean lines and phantasmagoria. War movies, by contrast were always drab by comparison, either too jolly and heroic or as everyday as the war machines I could see just by looking up at the sound of a jet engine in my town of soldiers, sailors and flyboys.
The stark line of the desert comics is the same as the one I'm using for the piercing glare of the tropics in The Monsoons. The esoterica (well, near enough) of Sgt. Rock weaves in between the hard edged line and the wandering white of the Commando blaze. I cannot stress too strongly the effect that these comics had on me. It was to the cost of any super hero fare and even horror pieces that my elder siblings left in their wardrobes under their old paisley jackets and cadet's slouch hats.
Perhaps they also fired, I doubt it not, the young imagination of Magnetic Island's most infamous or famous son, Julian Assange (will I put him in?) who, at the age of eight during the The Monsoon's timeline, would, just like me and all of us, have looked up at the sound of a jet engine to see the hardware of the state, a Mirage or a Phantom fighter, tearing at the clouds, or gaze into the waves in case he saw not stingers, nor sharks, but an Oberon Class submarine rise huge and awesome from the jade green waves of Cleveland Bay. That's what I was looking for.
