“Listen, for I may tell you only once”
Evocative words from Tarry Dan; for one thing, his impenetrable accent strains the ears to catch his slow, labourious rumble of a voice, over the crackle of the poor-quality recording that has found its way to me; for another, that haunting magic of 1970s television, where the viewer must pay full attention to the screen, for there’s no catchup, no recordings, no conception of recordings; what is spoken will live on in the imagination, and only there, for Tarry Dan may only tell you once.
And so all your mind is focused on his words, a great indrawn breath.
This is a compact but powerful little chiller, and I really underestimated it. Grattan is a nasty kid – he carries a knife, and his friends are scared of him, just as the other kids are scared of all four of them. Even the headmaster assumes that Grattan has come round his house to beat him up, barely veiling his cynicism that the difficult child might have a real interest in history, and barely noticing – or not knowing how to reach – his sleepless distress. The head (Colin Jeavons) is a bad teacher – although not an unfamiliar one, the way that having power over children yet simultaneosly being powerless to raise their aspirations or provide them with the wider funding and social certainty which will help them flourish, makes one exasperated and cruel. To stay in the 70s, I was immediately reminded of the casual sadism that Pink Floyd sings about on The Wall.
A play of few performers, all of them great, but especially Grattan (Colin Mayes). When you are a child, you gain a fear of other children – and that fear never leaves you, even when you are older, when you pass Grattan and his mates in the street. His gang reminded me of the discomforting grit of King of the Castle; it immediately takes you back to being that child, and not so much the fear as the humiliation of it. Mayes’ genius as a performer is to get you wholly on this character’s side, and in a very short time too – his desperation and desire to escape, as fate slowly closes in around him. And Grattan isn’t as stupid as his teachers assume: he’s not going to pass any exams, but he understands his friends, the life he’s in, with terrible acuteness.
Then there’s Tarry Dan (Paul Curran), another manifestation of the Poacher/Tramp trope in 70s teatime folk horror – which I’ll be writing about soon. Again, such a quietly malevolent performance, and something like a spell in his voice – ancient sounds as if the land itself was speaking.
Like others of the trope, Tarry Dan is insider-yet-outsider – a fixture in the village as old as anybody can remember, but still not one of them. In this play, the impenetrable accent (another trope) is less about ruralness contrasted with the urban, but with history – an older accent, somehow. He is the keeper of the Landweird, both the memory who holds and speaks it, as well as the gate through which it comes.
I quite agree with Kim Newman’s observation: this is the working class Penda’s Fen, about a boy on the cusp of adulthood who is drawn, inorexably towards his encounter with the Landweird
But even though middle class social mores are a trap for Stephen, he still ends the play on an open hillside, filled with new options and ideas of way to be, a challenge to be dissonant and cherish an ancient flame – that he must put into practice. The sort of challenge to take on the world which a middle class background sets you up nicely for.
None of that for Grattan, stuck in a crap comprehensive with teachers who don’t care and friends who don’t even like you. The Landweird is calling; what if there was something about your birth, it says, something that makes you wrong, makes you destined to carry the burdens of history and you will never, ever escape it.
I watch a lot of this sort of thing; I can feel that this is one I’ll be recommending a lot.
- First broadcast 1 May 1978, 23:25, BBC1
- Watch online here, or an unofficial physical copy here
Some thoughts on the imagery, for practical use
the axe. the skull. the dog. The dog is, of course, a common companion to a tramp, but I wonder if here it signifies loyalty (or a reminder of its betrayal), as well as literally *being dogged* by a mood or turn of events.
The old church, an incredibly common teatime-folk-horror location. These films evoke at once, both our imagined pagan past, but also Englishness – and what can be more English than The Little Village Church. So yes, one of many. Its role here, abandoned, is perhaps to suggest how the village has been abandoned in its turn – no longer connected to its history, one another, or to the comforts of imagined rural life. Grattan is on his own, and no parent, teacher, or God is coming to help him.
Creepy singing children! Again, King of the Castle, Gwaed Ar Y Ser, and the general ring-a-roses pastoralism of the decade.
Children left to run amock unsupervised, cf public information films, and the duality of it being both a nicer time – children weren’t on their phones! they were more confident! they built whole little worlds together! – but also the danger and abandonment it represented (nobody cares to look after these children either; the stranger danger of Tarry Dan which, I guess, nobody in the era spotted the way we do now; of breaking into tide caves and abandoned buildings)
That stained glass window dream is quite something, and honestly, the sudden incursion of a man speaking to camera is the first Twin Peaks dream, where Bob speaks.
The stained glass itself has a haunted generation vibe, a slight childishness, a slight pastoralism, and the slight suggestion of a textbook illustration created by a three colour printing process, where the three colors are olive-green, orange-brown and a dull yellow. idk. The haunted generation is a know-it-if-you-see-it thing, and so all I can state is a sense of childhood familiarity with seeing it, perhaps in an old edition of the Oxford Book of Poetry.
The sea. The sea is pretty incedental here. I am confident that sea folk horror should be more of a thing than it is. As it stands, the sea says to me what it says to me, which is isolation and exposure and what it’s like to grow up in a small, crap, seaside town.
I was interested to look up the music, and I think it’s this Jeremy Barlow, the expert in old English folk songs and nursery rhymes. Very interesting! We talk a lot about Radiophonic Workshop et al as being unexpectedly avant-garde/popular modernism influencing the public sphere at this time; and this feels like a similar impulse, from another direction. A lot of people who were sincerely/unironically/academically into the very pagan-adjacent worlds they wrote about. Of course, anybody can write a bit of playground doggerel, but there’s something specific, if you ask me, about getting your on-staff expert in the nursery rhyme to do it.
Astercote Herald 