The final tale in my Monsters audiobook trilogy. With When the Bell Rings Out and Monster’s Inn still being downloaded regularly, I felt it was only right to make the third story available.
Blue was written by Loretta Thessane is read by Karl Purder. A science fiction horror tale about a centuries old shape-changing alien living among us and occasionally hiring himself out as a duplicate for people who want to avoid something or literally be in two places at once. On top of this already bizarre premise, Blue becomes aware of a alien killer in the local community whose activities are drawing attention to his carefully concealed life.
It’s an imaginative and excellently performed short story, and I hope you enjoy it. Listen or download below.
The Nightmare Man was one of the first titles I wanted to cover with this podcast series, however finding the guests to talk about it proved harder than I expected. It seems this BBC SF/Horror serial is even more obscure than I thought and quite a few of the people I thought had seen it and would like to talk about it, revealed themselves unaware of it. Happily Ian Taylor, who I had met through amateur dramatics, was a big fan. So much so that he had created a horror discussion group on Facebook named after it. John Isles had not seen it but was keen too, so I lent him my DVD copy, and we were away.
The Nightmare Man is a very entertaining horror B-movie in four parts, adapted from a yarn by David Wilshire. It feels like a slightly more adult Doctor Who adventure, except the timelord has not turned up and its left to the local police, with a little military assistance, to save the day. Inverdee, a Scottish island preparing for winter, is shaken by a violent murder. A woman resident appears to have torn apart by something with super human strength. We know hoarse-breathing killer with blood red vision is out there, but exactly what is he is the central mystery. An alien, a drug-crazed madman, or something stranger?
Atmospheric, filled with likable characters and well paced over four half-hour episodes, The Nightmare Man should be better known but perhaps coming out before home video really took off meant that it could only live in memories of the few million who watched it on BBC1 in the summer of 1981. Hopefully this podcast should direct a few more people to seek out the DVD. It would certainly be a good choice for BritBox.
Cast James Warwick – Michael Gaffikin Celia Imrie – Fiona Patterson Maurice Roëves – Inspector Inskip Jonathan Newth – Colonel Howard Tom Watson – Dr. Goudry James Cosmo – Sergeant Carch Pat Gorman – The Killer
Written by Robert Holmes from the novel Child of Vodyanoi by David Wilshire Produced by Ron Craddock Directed by Douglas Camfield
You can listen to the podcast on most major podcast sites and apps. If you do, any ratings or reviews are much appreciated. You can also listen or download it from this page. Thanks for your interest.
A definite change of tone for this episode and possibly the most serious drama I’ll be covering in the series. Not to mention being a BAFTA award winning production. Threads is Mick Jackson and Barry Hines’ coal-black spectre at the feast of television. A dramatic portrayal of the effect of nuclear war on Britain, including the then new theory of a nuclear winter. What makes Threads such a shocking watch is not the graphic radiation injuries, the shootings or the wrecked towns and cities, it is the complete loss of hope, kindness and any kind of compassionate humanity. As far as this film is concerned, not only will the immediate survivors be quickly reduced to merely surviving, but their descendants will be barely be better than stunted savages.
Before that grim, almost surreal last act, the film is an expertly written and produced drama documentary, full of well-observed Northern characters and believable detail, as Sheffield City Council prepares for a possible attack, whilst the populace get on with their lives, feeling helpless and detached from the news of conventional war in the Middle East.
To discuss Threads I was glad to invite Rik Hoskin, writer across many platforms from award-winning comics to novels by way of games and audios, and Andrew S. Roe-Crines, lecturer in political science at Liverpool University. The latter has already contributed to my Tripods episode.
Cast: Karen Meagher – Ruth Beckett Henry Moxon – Mr Beckett June Broughton – Mrs Beckett Reece Dinsdale – Jimmy Kemp David Brierly – Mr Kemp Rita May – Mrs Kemp Harry Beety – Mr Sutton Ashley Barker – Bob Phil Rose – Medical Officer Michael O’Hagan – Chief Supt. Hirst Steve Halliwell – Information Officer Brian Grellis – Accommodation Officer Peter Faulkner – Transport Officer Anthony Collin – Food Officer
Producer and Director – Mick Jackson Writer – Barry Hines
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Listen Notes and many more platforms. You can also download it from this very page.
Very British Futures – Threads
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Star Cops is a series which has grown on me over the years. When it was first shown on BBC2 back in 1987, I watched it but left with the impression it was distinctly average. In trying to get away from one set of SF clichés, it had ended up embracing a whole bag of detective tropes instead. Years later I bought the VHS videos at a charity store and viewing it again it seemed a lot stronger and cleverer than my 21 year old self had given it credit for.
When I was canvasing friends for what TV shows they would like to talkabout on my potential podcast, Star Cops was mentioned quite a lot. So much so that this is my first four handed episode, with regulars Kevin Hiley and Dr Rebecca Wray joined by Peter Grehen, a friend and writer who I had first met through BBV as the author of Sontaran: Silent Warrior and later asked to write an Agents of Psyence script, which sadly was never made. I was slightly worried that some guests would get marginalised but I’m pretty happy that we all had our say, whilst keeping the episode down to a reasonable length.
Important credits to know about Star Cops as you listen:
Main cast David Calder – Nathan Spring Erick Ray Evans – David Theroux Linda Newton – Pal Kenzy Trevor Cooper – Colin Devis Jonathan Adams – Alexander Krivenko Sayo Inaba – Anna Shoun
Production Team Created by Chris Boucher Written by Chris Boucher, Philip Martin, John Collee Produced by Evgeny Gridneff Directed by Christopher Baker, Graham Harper
Very British Futures is now also available on Pod Follower and Pod Bean. If you do listen to the podcast on one of the platforms which allows reviews, then please consider leaving a review for us, because it helps raise the show’s profile.
As ever you can listen and download the show from here too. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.
Somewhere in the world between the USA and Europe is a city ruled by television, where gangs roam the dirty streets, the rich live in skyscraper fortresses, life is cheap and technology is a retrofitted mix of hi-tech computer networks and 20th century junk. It’s world in need of a hero, but what its going to get is a video celebrity who’s not even real – or is he? 20 Minutes Into the Future has no right to be as great as it is. Designed to launch a new pop video show on Channel 4, it’s a pop rock video delight that captures the flavour of cyberpunk better than most Hollywood attempts.
It was definitely one of the shows I had in mind when I first thought about making a SF podcast. Joining me for the ride are Amy Elizabeth, who you might remember as Bianca Ruocco in Agents of Psyence and Steve Noble, top reviewer for the Talking Pictures TV podcast and one time comic strip writer. We had a very chatty and enjoyable discussion about Max Headroom, with as you’ll hear a lot laughs along the way. Although the pilot movie is the focus, we can’t help but talk about the whole Max Headroom phenomena, that burned brightly but briefly in 1985.
Reg
The UK pilot led into an excellent but short lived US TV series which was beyond the podcast’s brief but personally I am very fond of too. Even though it softened some of the pilot’s cynicism and made Max himself a little more obviously a good guy. One fact I didn’t manage to fit in is that US broadcast of this film featured extra Max Headroom, with clips from the Channel 4 pop show added to increase his presence in last act.
Important Max Facts for you: Edison Carter / Max Headroom – Matt Frewer Theora Jones – Amanda Pays Grossman – Nikolas Grace Bryce – Paul Spurrier Blank Reg – W Morgan Shepherd Dominique – Hilary Tindall Breugal – Hilton McRea Mahler – George Rossi
Written by Steven Roberts Based on an idea by Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton and George Stone Produced by Peter Wagg Directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton
You listen to this episode at Anchor.fm, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and most major platforms. Or listen and download it from here!
The Nineties were a busy time for SF television, just not for British voices. Whilst the success in syndication of Star Trek: The Next Generation ushered in a purple patch for US television – The X-Files, Deep Space Nine, Stargate SG1 and countless short-lived shows with a range of quality, it seemed to me that the UK lost confidence in the genre once Doctor Who was cancelled (bar the one-off 1996 TV Movie). It’s noticeable that a lot of what was produced by TV companies in this decade for peaktime audiences put the emphasis on their ‘realism’ or carried assurances that they were not ‘science fiction’ but drama. Star Cops, Bugs, Space Island One. ITV’s The Uninvited is an interesting example of that. It’s an alien invasion story dressed up as A Ruth Rendell Mystery.
I enjoyed rewatching The Uninvited recently and I equally enjoyed talking with my friends John Isles and Nicky Smalley about it a few weeks ago for the next edition of Very British Futures. Turns out like me, John kept it on VHS tape for a long time, simply because it was British SF TV at a time of relative scarcity. I don’t think I quite managed to fit in my appreciation of Leslie Grantham as one of the chief alien bad guys, all intense stares and cool demeanor. This episode might feel a little different to the preceeding ones because I was testing the water by having a more wide-ranging conversation about the Nineties and novelisations too. Here’s some more details about the show for the record.
Principle Cast Douglas Hodge – Steve Blake Leslie Grantham – Chief Supt. Philip Gates Lia Williams – Melissa Gates Sylvestra Le Touzel – Joanna Ball David Allister – James Wilson Caroline Lee-Johnson – Sarah Armstrong
Writer – Peter Broker Music – Martin Kizsko, Toby Gilks Cinematography – Doug Hallows Editor – Colin Goudie Producers – Ruth Boswell, Leslie Grantham, Laura Julian, Archie Tait Director – Norman Stone
I’ve been adding the RSS feed for the podcast to more online directories. You can find it at: Anchor, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Spreaker, Blubrry, and Digital Podcasts.
However you can still listen or download the show from the link below too.
Star Maidens is exactly the kind of show I originally set this podcast up for. Not quite a lost show, but certainly an obscure one, at a time when there was not that much SF on mainstream television that was not Doctor Who or from the Gerry Anderson stable. A British-German co-production, it’s certainly got a lot of problems in both concept and execution, but there’s some interesting ideas in there and for a relatively low-budget production, the world of Medusa is quite impressive thanks to Keith Wilson’s production design skills. (see one of his design drawings above for the Medusian city). Wilson also was the lead designer on Space 1999 and the two shows share a certain look. Although the more location bound episodes set on Earth do look cheap and ugly in that special Seventies way.
Liz is interrogated by Octavia
It’s also intriguing to think that this show was shown a year before Star Wars was released and rewrote the SF landscape for ever. Nevertheless the disco futurism look of SF, typified by Star Maidens would persist for a while yet. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century would be a key example. Despite the opportunities for kinky dominatrix and lesbian subtexts, and the fact that it has a plethora of beautiful women in its cast, it does not feel like a particularly sexy show, or at least no more than Space 1999 or UFO did.
We got so busy talking about the gender politics and the characters with my guests Dr Rebecca Wray and Kevin Hiley that we left out some basic details about the show. So here are the essentials you might like to have whilst listening.
Cast
Lisa Harrow – Liz
Christian Quadflieg – Rudi
Christiane Krüger – Octavia
Judy Geeson – Fulvia
Gareth Thomas – Shem
Pierre Brice – Adam
Derek Farr – Dr Evans
Dawn Addams – President Clara
Directors
Freddie Francis, Wolfgang Storch, James Gatward, Hans Heinrich
Writers
Eric Paice, Ian Stuart Black, John Lucarotti, Otto Strang
Producer
James Gatward
Very British Futures episode 4 – Star Maidens is available on all the major podcast platforms, or you can listen and download an MP3 copy below.
Very British Futures – Star Maidens
In the end, I’m glad I’ve finally got around to seeing this show, which for years I only remembered for the sticker colouring book which my grandparents bought for me back in 1976. Thanks for your continued listening and support.
Response to the first episode of Very British Futures was very warm, and now I am keen to push on and get several more recorded between now and September, when my workload will increase. Next out of the gate is Knights of God, the ITV 1987 family adventure series set in the then future year of 2020. Now 2020 was not a bundle of fun for most of us, but at least the country had not collapsed into ruins and being ruled by a jackbooted religious order. It’s an impressively mounted television series that recalls ITV’s ambitious children’s series from the Seventies such as Sky and Children of the Stones in its scope and grittiness.
I was glad to be joined over Skype by my old Westlake Films muckers Kevin Hiley and Dr Rebecca Wray to remember the show and discuss its themes. They were worried they wouldn’t have enough to say but as you’ll hear we filled an hour nicely.
You can listen to the podcast at Anchor or on one of these platforms: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Breaker, RadioPublic, Acast or PocketCasts. Whilst I’d encourage you to use one of those, to build up my figures, if you need a copy for your MP3 player, you can download it below.
Very British Futures – Knights of God
Thanks for your support and join me next time, as we continue the theme of life under occupation and young resistance fighters with The Tripods.
For the last few months I have had a project secretly coming together, something to look forward to as I laboured on the third year of my degree apprenticeship. I have enjoyed being a guest on other people’s podcasts but it has left me with a desire to do more. So it was only natural to start thinking about my own podcast series. Now episode one has been released on the Anchor platform and Spotify, and hopefully will gradually be made available on other sources too soon.
Very British Futures is a celebration of lesser known science fiction television series which Britain has produced over the years. I felt that there already enough excellent series and websites covering Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Red Dwarf, The Prisoner, Quatermass and Supermarionation but there was a niche for talking about some of the less well-remembered productions. So each episode, some special guests and myself will be looking back at a different show, critiquing it and putting it into context of the history of SF. There’ll certainly be humour but the emphasis will be on appreciation rather than mockery.
1961’s Pathfinders in Space trilogy seemed a great place to start. It’s not the first British SF series by any means but it feels like the beginning of a new era of modern television. Its place as the precursor of Doctor Who means it is influential but at the same time it is not nearly as well known as it should be. Plus I knew from conversation that Nigel Anderson and Brian Clarke would be happy to talk about it and both were at ease in front of a microphone. We had already recorded several podcasts about missing Doctor Who episodes, for Nigel, and I also appeared in a video discussing the Daleks which Nigel had produced. Whilst being together in a room to record would have been pleasant, Skype’s audio quality was acceptable for a simple conversation.
It’s been good to go back to a little light audio production. Making a podcast is a lot simpler than an audio drama. Most of the work is editing the original Skype recording, applying some noise reduction, getting rid of mistakes or sections where the conversation went too far off-topic, then bookending it with music. My biggest problem has been learning to use a headset properly, being more use to a microphone on a stand or a dictaphone. I turned to my friend Chatri Ahpornsiri, who I’ve worked with on previous audio dramas, to provide the theme music and he generously provided four versions to choose from. You can hear more of his marvellous work at chatriart.bandcamp.com. There are several free to use platforms for hosting podcasts. I felt Anchor was the easiest to use and I was attracted by the way it automated posting my series on most of the major podcast outlets.
You can listen to the series at https://anchor.fm/gareth-preston but unfortunately you cannot download the episode easily from there. Whilst I’d prefer it if people streamed it from here or one of the other platforms for the sake of the show’s stats, I appreciate that some people would like the option to download the MP3 file for portable listening. So you can find episode one below:
Very British Futures – Pathfinders in Space
At the moment I am editing the second episode, in which Rebecca Wray, Kevin Hiley and myself talk about Knights of God. After that there are plans to make episodes about: The Tripods, Star Maidens, The Uninvited and after that I have a long list of possible candidates, and plenty of guests I am hoping to record with. Would love you to have a listen and hear back from you, what you think and what shows you would like to be covered.
Keep looking for opportunities they say. With no chance of Bolton Little Theater or indeed anyone else’s theaters opening for business anytime soon, creatives are turning to the internet to tell stories and keep connected with their audience. Quite a few local theaters and film-making groups have ventured into monologues, with their obvious advantage of combining lockdown friendly simplicity with potentially great acting and writing. After all, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads is considered a drama benchmark. Not that I am presenting BLT’s own contribution to the genre as anything like on that level, but it is a versatile format and I hope our Life Bites are going to exploit it.
I was first approached in August with the idea of making short videos for Bolton Little Theater by Carol Butler, who has joined me as producer on this series. She had noticed several of our rivals were already producing them and felt our group was getting left behind. So we proposed the idea to the committee and it was accepted, along with plans for a larger group video filmed at the theater called Stages in Waiting and a short excerpt from ‘Allo ‘Allo, the play we would have been producing in September. Sandra Leatherbarrow suggested the title of Life Bites and it felt right immediately to me. My next act was to set up a dedicated YouTube account and create an animated ident out of the theatre’s logo. A simple coming together of the front symbol and the background coloured square.
Like me, Carol is a writer and performer and had recently been compiling her stories and poems into a forthcoming anthology. She drew on one of these comic stories for the first instalment and recorded it on her smartphone in an impressive feat of learning unknown technology. All I had to do was create the title sequence. I was influenced by the old BBC Play for Today credits from the Seventies. Since these monologues are likely to be all close-ups of performers, I did my best to find photos from old BLT productions which were a good close up of an interesting face and it was actually quite hard to find suitable images in my library. However I persevered and found enough to make the right length of montage, shuffling the actors around to find the best mix. The music was from YouTube’s copyright free music library. Why invite trouble?
Carol’s Pink Fluffy Handcuffs went down really well and has easily been the most successful episode so far. It was followed by Gig 13, Dean Lane’s comic tale of a nightmare gig, not drawn from his own musical career but inspired by it. Dean is an excellent storyteller as well as songwriter. Then there was lull.
After several busy weekends, I finally had time to venture into the local parkland and find a secluded spot to record my entry Helpline. I originally wrote this for the Octagon Theater’s 2014 Best of Bolton evening for local writers, where it was performed by Hylton Collins, before he became a regular on Emmerdale as Tubby Dingle. The idea was one of those that just came into my head and doesn’t have a defined origin. I was just trying to think of a quick story that would fit on a single page. For this video I revised it a bit further, making it a little punchier and adding a contemporary joke. In the end the version I filmed was a little improvised, using the script as a guide because I had not given myself enough time to learn it word perfect. I quite enjoyed editing it, adding a blue filter, some digital distortion, creating an animated message card and filtering the dialogue to give it that monitor quality. Now its out there and I would love you take a look at one of first bits of personal filmmaking I have done in quite a while.
