Stephen Prince on the wyrd and wonderful era of British television that began in 1968    

Ghost Signals is an exploration of the shadowlands of British analogue television; drama programmes that were broadcast via terrestrial analogue networks and which, in contrast with the near ubiquity of streaming in the contemporary television landscape, aren’t, at the time of writing, available to stream officially in the UK, and often never have been.

Whether they aren’t officially streamable is because of, amongst other possible reasons, rights issues, official higher quality archival copies of particular programmes no longer existing, streaming services often being more focused on contemporary productions, there isn’t considered to be enough interest in them to warrant their professional digitisation and the cost of licensing etc is difficult to know. Whatever the reason, that they, and many other older programmes, remain unavailable to officially stream has created the fertile soil for a niche “shadowland” corner of the cultural landscape.

All of the central programmes that are discussed in Ghost Signals have been unofficially distributed online by members of the public, often on public access free-to-use video and posting platforms, including both those which are corporately owned, such as YouTube and Dailymotion, and the non-profit online library Internet Archive.

This method of unofficial distribution has effectively become a form of folk, as in of and by the people, distribution, curating and archiving of older television drama, one which is not so much samizdat-like but rather seems to be quietly allowed to exist and flourish.

In turn, this effectively offers and creates an alternative grassroots form of digital broadcasting that revolves around the otherwise overlooked “ghost signals” of television from previous decades, and which, rather than being driven by large-scale commercial, corporate and institutional choices and imperatives, appears to have been brought into being by individuals’ passion for and interest in it.

Alongside which, due to the way that they are “hidden in plain sight” and not generally part of mainstream, corporate etc cultural discussion, marketing pushes etc, exploring such programmes contains an intriguing and appealing sense of unmediated exploration.

The decision to focus on programmes first broadcast between 1968 and 1995 was made for several reasons.

Ghost Signals is released as part of the A Year In The Country project, which at its core is an exploration of the wyrd and eerie landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and culture and the parallel worlds of hauntology, and the central selection of programmes in Ghost Signals interconnect with these themes, either directly or, in the case of, for example, a Cold War orientated drama such as Shades (1982), in a more “further flung pathways manner”.

1968 was in part selected because it was a year in which some notable examples of film and television that have come to be some of the foundational elements of wyrd and hauntological culture were first released or broadcast, including, amongst other examples, the iconic folk horror film Witchfinder General and Whistle and I’ll Come to You, the latter of which was the first, albeit unofficial, episode of the original strand of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas annual anthology drama series.

1968 was also the year that acid/psych folk can be seen as having started to be in full swing, which was a loosely interconnected music genre or mode that reimagined traditional folk and was characterised by explorations of mythology, nature and pastoral escapism. It was also one of the foundational elements of wyrd culture, and in turn has notable interconnections with the roots etc of A Year In The Country in particular; 1968 was the opening year of the selection of related music on the 2004 compilation album Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974, curated by author Bob Stanley, formerly of the group Saint Etienne, and the reimagining and pushing back of the boundaries of folk music on the album seemed to open up something in my mind, and was a notable influence on the creation and themes of A Year In The Country.

1995 was selected as it was something of a sandwiched pivotal point in television’s history and the decline of analogue broadcast television. It was the year after the world’s first commercial digital television service DirecTV was launched in the US, and the year before DVD was launched which, although it wasn’t the first mass-market physical media digital home video format, would become the first to gain mass global consumer adoption and market dominance and fairly quickly displaced analogue VHS video as the primary consumer physical media television format. In turn, the digital nature of these new forms of television distribution can be seen as precursors to the contemporary dominance of streamed television.

In turn and interconnected with which, the decision to focus on British programmes was made in part because, during the time Ghost Signals focuses on, British television can be seen as having been produced and existing within a very particular set of circumstances etc which meant that, at times, it contained elements of experimentation.

In The Disruption (2017), a booklet which features an extended conversation between the authors and academics Andy Beckett and Roger Luckhurst about the post-apocalyptic young adult drama series The Changes (1975) that has become a wyrd and hauntological cultural touchstone, Beckett and Luckhurst suggest that the liberalism and experimentation within British, and to a degree wider Western, society and culture which flowered during the later 1960s to later 1970s came to be present within institutions such as the BBC in terms of “permitting experiments and allowing the pushing of boundaries here and there”.

Some of the more non-conventional, exploratory, and even at times experimental British television drama discussed in Ghost Signals – such as the metatextual timeslip satire of ScreenPlay: The Black and Blue Lamp (1988) and the non-horror folk horror of Play for Today: The Lonely Man’s Lover (1974) – can be seen as benefiting from this “liberalism” etc, the after echoes of which could be viewed as continuing to fadingly reverberate after the later 1970s.

This is an edited extract from Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995 (£9.95) by Stephen Prince. The book includes writing on TV series and programmes such as A Ghost Story for Christmas (1968, 1971-1978); Tales of Unease (1970); Leap in the Dark (1973-1980); and Play for Tomorrow (1982).

Buy a copy here.

Stephen Prince has a long history stretching back over several decades of working in the fringes and outskirts of left-of-centre pop culture. He founded and began to work on the A Year In The Country project in 2014, which as part of its exploration of the “wyrd” and spectral undercurrents of culture and the landscape has included the release of eight non-fiction books, two novellas, an artwork book and 29 albums, EPs and singles, alongside the publication of over 1,600 blog, artwork etc posts on the project’s website.

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