Influenca: Contamination Grey of the Old UK

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.