The Stone Tape

Despite being a single studio drama first broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 and reshown only once a few months later, Nigel Kneale's seminal TV ghost story still seems to have managed to mark, scar or otherwise influence just about everyone who saw it back then. Amongst my generation of horror writers, most either acknowledge a debt or at least are aware of its effect on the field.

The Stone Tape was first made available on DVD about a decade ago. It was one of a series of BFI releases of classic television drama.  To say that it had been possibly the most wished-for and anticipated release of its kind would be no exaggeration. There had been rare festival showings of the British Film Institute's archive copy, but otherwise The Stone Tape had been inaccessible for almost 30 years. More than a memory, almost a legend. Murky tenth-generation bootlegs circulated on VHS and versions of the script could be found out there on the internet, but these only sharpened the sense of absence. They did little to mitigate it.

Now the drama has been re-released in handsome form by niche distributor 101 Films, in a version that includes the illuminating commentary/conversation track with Kneale and Kim Newman.

To a restored country mansion called Taskerlands comes a team of research technologists led by the controlling and bombastic Peter Brock (Michael Bryant). The team includes nervy and damaged computer programmer Jill (Jane Asher), and they're here to brainstorm their way to a new form of information storage and transmission that anticipates the digital revolution - flash memory, in particular - in uncanny detail.

Brock believes that he may have glimpsed his personal and professional grail in the form of Taskerlands' resident ghost, a recurrent haunting that has driven the builders away with their work uncompleted. No believer in the supernatural, Brock seeks a scientific explanation. Matter, he suggests, may be able to absorb an emotional charge that can be triggered to replay the moment of its imprinting directly into the medium of the human mind; that, in essence, is the reality behind the ghost and the nature of the 'stone tape'.

This is pure Kneale, the application of the rational to the irrational, not to demystify it but to take it to an entirely new level. In turning their equipment onto the phenomenon, the scientists not only fail to tame it... they reveal it to have depths and dimensions that are way beyond their hope of control.

The big, serious, one-off TV studio drama is now a lost form, seen only in occasional 'event' pieces like George Clooney's Fail Safe or the BBC's live Quatermass Experiment makeover. Such dramas resemble the film form in a superficial way - scenes, shots, cuts - but are essentially theatrical. The acting dictated the rhythm of a scene. The shot-to-shot cuts were planned by the director but actually made by a vision mixer in the gallery, following the performances in real time. Postproduction editing was kept to a minimum and mainly involved the stringing-together of completed scenes into a continuity. More complex edits were often required for outdoor sequences where multiple-camera technique had been unfeasible, and these tended to be less successful.

(There were various reasons for this - when I first started out in TV, union practices and the technically cumbersome nature of two-inch tape ensured that it was top-grade video engineers who did the actual cutting. The amount of expensive machinery that had to be tied up meant that all video editing was done against the clock, and in a hurry. What you can now do on your phone once involved analogue copying back and forth between three massive playback-and-record machines, each one the size of a small car).

As far as The Stone Tape is concerned this means that Peter Sasdy's fluent, ambitious direction pushes the medium right to its limits and often exposes them. This unsteady crane shot, that patently fake stumble... and everybody shouts a lot, the way they do in the theatre. And the visual effects are... well, the effects are purely token in a disco-light kind of way.

But nonetheless, The Stone Tape justifies its reputation as a landmark achievement in TV drama, in the genre, and in Kneale's career.

Trust me. Your life is incomplete if you haven't seen it yet.

Bedlam News

I just heard that the US edition of The Bedlam Detective is going into its second printing. Glad news for any author, and thanks to all who've picked it up. Even greater thanks to those who didn't put it down again, and went on to pay for it.

The UK trade paperback edition will be launched by Ebury Press on May 23rd, with fireworks over the Thames and an all-night star-studded gala in the grounds of the former Bethlehem Hospital. Though I may be lying about that last part.

In the meantime, there's this.

Two short stories in one eBook volume. Out of Bedlam is a Sebastian Becker story that was specially written for a Random House Dead Good Books promotion. The Plot is a Victorian mystery originally published in Subterranean Magazine and reprinted in my collection Plots and Misadventures, not yet available in eBook form.

This link should take you to your region's Kindle store. Amazon Prime members can access it free.

Peter Diamond

This month, mega-niche distributor Network releases the complete first (and only) season of Virgin of the Secret Service, a 1968 Empire-spoofing obscurity remembered with fondness by at least one viewer. I was thirteen at the time, and in my autograph-collecting phase; I wrote to leading man Clinton Greyn and in return got a typed slip of paper that read, "I'm sorry but ATV say they can't afford to print fan photographs." But he'd signed it, so it went into the album anyway.

On Network's website they're marking the launch with an appreciation by Frazer Diamond of his father Peter, the series fight arranger.

Peter Diamond, who died in 2004, was a British stunt performer, arranger, and swordmaster with a staggering list of credits ranging from just about every piece of classic British TV through the Bonds, Star Wars and Highlander movies and every other big-budget blockbuster of the late 20th century.  He was responsible for the swordplay in The Princess Bride and The Mask of Zorro. He acted, too; any time you saw a bald guy being punched, shot, or thrown down the stairs, there's a fair chance it was him.

Back in 1997, when I was shooting the Oktober miniseries for ITV, I specifically asked for Peter to supervise the action. I was in awe of his reputation and saw it as a chance to work with a true legend. He was terrific, supportive to a novice director, and without any discernible ego; he’d listen to my ideas, quietly mould them into something better, and then present the results as if they were my own.

On more than one occasion, when a crew member challenged my judgement in the light of my inexperience, he’d catch my eye and quietly shake his head; he’d seen it all, and if Peter reckoned it would be OK, it would be OK.

Stick to your Conkers, Mister Bond

I was reprimanded at the age of 10 for taking Thunderball into school as my book for the 'own choice' reading period... I can date it exactly because I still have the headmaster's remarks on my school report.

Oh, well.

Years later I was amused to see several of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, Thunderball included, being issued in 'abridged and simplified' editions (with the abridgements credited to Gordon Walsh) in an attempt to encourage teenaged boys to read.

Kubrick Hair

Over on the Scouting New York blog, this post about the impossible geography of Kubrick's settings in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut triggered a memory from 1997.

I was in production at Pinewood Studios when Eyes Wide Shut was filming. My office was in the long main building but on the other side of the lot, visible from afar, was Kubrick's New York exterior set.

The set was highly secure while the work was under way, and you couldn't get anywhere near it. But once shooting was over, the guards disappeared along with the crew and no one prevented me from walking over and poking around.

It was the usual situation that you find with any outdoor studio set. From the outside all you could see was an array of flats and scaffolding. Step inside and suddenly you're The Omega Man or Will Smith in I Am Legend, or else you're The Last Woman on Earth (a movie that I thought I'd just now made up for the purposes of gender equivalence, until I looked up the title and found that Roger Corman has actually made it).

The Eyes Wide Shut set consisted of a couple of New York city blocks but here's the thing that struck me - on at least 50% of the set, every single piece of signage was reversed. Store signs, street names, even graffiti.

Without being party to any of the detail that would no doubt be mentioned in the movie's famously lengthy schedule, I assume that Kubrick took scenes on the streets dressed as normal and then the art department did a mirror-image redress, after which he shot more scenes and reversed the photographed image to get double value out of the same limited piece of backlot real estate.

I'm a fan of Kubrick though not, alas, of Eyes Wide Shut, which  I think of as Dennis Wheatley Makes a Porno.

(The title of the post was my suggested name for those digital embellishments added to cover the movie's sexy bits, to create a version that could secure distribution in the more over-excitable territories.)

Silent Witness DVD

Released March 25th. Buy my episode and get all the others thrown in absolutely free! Amazing bargain.

Find it here

And in the aftermath...

If you picked up The Boat House during the 48-hour giveaway - and it cheers me that so many of you did - I hope you'll enjoy the read. Did you know that, a year or two after the book came out, it was almost a movie with Jude Law and Milla Jovovich? My agent still sends out my screenplay as a writing sample, sometimes. It's about the only use I can get out of it now, given the turnaround costs that have been run up against it.

You can read that story here.

If you feel the urge to go back to Amazon and add your review, I wouldn't discourage you. 

I'll probably liberate another free book from the backlist in a few weeks, but this time I'll be more businesslike about it and tie it in with the UK paperback launch of The Bedlam Detective.

Free Boat House, 2 Day Offer

If you prefer, you can skip the story and go straight down to the link for the free book. Otherwise...

In 1984 I travelled to Finland and took the train to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then known. I was alone, with a backpack and not much money. I'd been living by writing for four years and it wasn't going all that well. My second novel had tanked and my third was unsold. Yet here I was, digging into what little reserves we had to gather the material for a fourth.

This was Soviet-era Russia and so travel was restricted, and had to be organised through the state-owned Intourist agency. I couldn't get into Russian Karelia so I began the research in that part of the divided region that lay within Finland; the area had been split up in 1940 after the Winter War, and the border ran right through it.

All for the backstory of a book set mostly in the Lake District.

That's how I worked, back then. I was neither worldly nor experienced, so I'd go out into the world on a calculated mission to record some experiences. My method's still the same although the backpack hasn't been out of the attic for some years, and I've lost my taste for dossing on railway station platforms.

You know what brought it back? A Disney song on the radio, heard while driving home from town a couple of hours ago. Because it made me realise that The Boat House is essentially a modern-day reimagining of The Little Mermaid.

Which led to an impulse to go online and schedule a couple of free days for the book on Kindle. So for March 13th and 14th you can download it from Amazon for absolutely nothing.

And the novel? Like the one before, I couldn't sell it. Until I sold Valley of Lights, and then The Boat House went for a shedload of money along with the previous book. Film rights too, but that's another story.

While it's free, get it here.

What I'm Watching

Well, I gave Red Widow a try... despite a cool title and Radha Mitchell and production values to die for, I couldn't swallow it. It's like Miss America married into Gogol Bordello and they all set up shop in Marin Country as drug-dealing Beverly Hillbillies. Then there's a gang war and Mrs America starts packing heat and running the trade... entirely against her will but, you know, it's the only way to keep the family together. The story choices were skilful enough, but the place they led you to... nah.

Credibility in drama is a strange thing. I can buy into Grimm's world, no problem. Or Carnivale's, or Firefly's. And I reckon I could buy into Crime Boss Soccer Mom if the pieces were put together right, the way they were in Breaking Bad.

The Americans is about the only one of the new shows that I've taken to. It's a kind of Homeland/Mad Men/Mr & Mrs Smith mashup about a husband-and-wife team of Russian spies living with their two unwitting American-born kids in the Reagan-era DC suburbs. He puts on a false moustache to go out on spying missions, she puts on lingerie. Then an FBI man and his family move in across the street. Mucho tension between the oaths they took and the pull of the American way of life, a complexity that allows you to root for them in perilous situations even though, technically, they're the bad guys.

A&E's Bates Motel doesn't air until March 18 but the teasers I've seen make it look like Young Dexter. I see The Glades is getting a fourth season and Longmire's been renewed. I watch both - they're network-style story-of-the-week procedurals, classic 'TV to unwind with'. The kind where the killer is always revealed to be the person who had two unnecessary lines in the second act.

It's not strictly new any more but I also like CBS's Vegas, which is a more populist Boardwalk Empire set in 60s Nevada. Dennis Quaid is basically Longmire in Las Vegas (same scowl, cowboy hat, pickup truck, mourning for dead wife) but the real interest is with Michael Chiklis as a mobster-with-principles-and-a-vision and Sarah Jones (last seen running around with a gun with Sam Neill in Alcatraz) as a sharp-minded casino manager with a classy education and an old-school mob father.

Her from The Matrix is in it too. Strong cast.

Have Cake, Eat

See this? You wouldn't get away with it today, would you?

And yet, be honest... there's something about that 'sixties adventure-fantasy Dolce Vita that calls to us still. So what, if none of us actually looked or lived like that, or knew anyone who did? So what, if those who attempted to live the life for real mostly crashed and burned?

For the rest of us there was an alternate universe where Bond and Barbarella fought evil masterminds, where secret agents woke to find themselves in mysterious Villages, where a Modesty Blaise or Mrs Peel was a teenaged boy's idea of a feminist icon.

Real life in the 'sixties could still be a bit crap, to be honest, but it was a decade in which our fantasies soared. The exotic and the ironic didn't cancel each other out, but coexisted to make popular art in a way we often struggle to emulate now.

So let me draw your attention to Goldtiger, a Kickstarter project from writer Guy Adams and artist Jimmy Broxton. At first glance it's a classic European-style three-panel newspaper strip, collected and presented in the manner of those gorgeous bande desinee albums that you fantasise about collecting, if only your French was a bit better.

In actuality it's a pitch-perfect recreation of the style and tone of the era, done with love and a contemporary perspective. It's a 360 degree act of the imagination; they've even created the creators and their backstories. Check out the Kickstarter page and see if the project appeals to you as much as it does to me. There's no gambling on whether they can pull it off; what they're funding is the physical production, with the imaginative element already fully-formed.

I'm reminded of nothing less than Matthew Holness's brilliant creation Bob Shuter, aka The Reprisalizer, 70s anti-hero and suburban vigilante, about whom I wrote here.

Writer Fortune Cookies

It's Lucy Hay's fault. She asked for some twitter-length quotes for her forthcoming Writing and Selling Thriller Screenplays book so I went through my folder of old interview responses - because yes, I hoard such thoughts like unspent pennies - and picked out anything that might fit the bill. And now I'm left with this useful-looking list that serves no useful purpose.

• Audiences show up for story, not for big themes or great characters. But it's the big themes and characters that send them away happy.
• Flawed heroes. Complex villains. Mythic everyman figures in classically-structured story forms.
• Stuff happens that obliges someone to action. The action generates incident. The developing effect of those incidents is the drama.
• Link every beat with "So then they have to..." or "But they can't because..." If it's, "Then they decide to..." then your story is weak.
• Everybody wants to be edgy and relevant and issue-driven. And no one wants to see it.
• I can see a place for professionally-done exploitation in any healthy industry.
• A feature film is a one-off universal myth. TV’s a continuing parade.
• The Thirty-Nine Steps, in its combination of personal conflict and open landscape, is the closest thing we have to the Great British Western.
• Does the anti-hero even exist as a concept any more? It seems to me that yesterday's antihero is the model for all heroes now.
• Research is about continuing to write with authority after you've detected the limits of what you know.
• Never use someone else's fiction as research. It's already been diluted or corrupted to the author's purpose.
• It’s a terrifically delicate thing to manage suspense and darkness without falling into the trap of mere unpleasantness.
• Postwar British thrillers took the war story ethos (protagonist has to improvise/survive in enemy territory) and gave it a peacetime spin.
• The prose writer and the screenwriter live in two universes that move at very different speeds. The screenwriter who doesn’t get it will turn out books that read like novelisations. The novelist will write a script that can’t be shot.
• All kinds of people can make changes to your work, but you don't get to change what anyone else does.
• American TV has its flaws but a failure to understand showbusiness isn't one of them. It makes a lot of our stuff feel like school homework.
• (And this one's over-length but won't be cut down:) 
• Getting the money for a production is like getting a celebrity to show up for your party; all your timing needs to be just right, because if things ain't ready then neither will hang around.

Free eBook Reminder

As if you needed reminding...

In the years following the Great War, a skeptical conjuror and a spiritualist medium merge their interests to tour the regional lecture halls of the United Kingdom.

This eBook novella is a free download, offered to coincide with US paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective. After the promotional period you'll be able to buy it from Amazon.

Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it follows the pairing of stage magician Will Goulston and spiritualist Frederick Kelly as they tour the lecture halls of provincial Britain.

Go to the download page