Brief memory of a Very Strange Television Show -Solved!

Last summer I wrote a description of a sceme from a television show I remembered as a child. All I remember, really, is one scene, and that it was a childrens television programme, and broadcast sometime in the late 1970s. Much as I would like to link to that post now, my laptop seems to be emulating the computers of the 1990s and is not allowing me to do anything exciting. So, I'll settle with quoting from my own post...

'A group of people are in an underground cavern, searching for something. A dark and shadowy labyrinth, rock walls and sandy floor. Someone disturbs a rock, and there glides from behind the rock, a snake, only this snake has a human skull for it's head... This was the cliffhanger at the end of an episode'.

I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that I had probably dreamt the whole thing. I could find no referemce to anything like it anywhere, in the shows I had watched and those I had only read about; Sky, King of the Castle, Children of the Stones, Shadows, The Owl Service, The Tomorrow People, The Omega Factor...
The scene seemed too nightmarish for it to be a childrens television show anyway, and I had ascribed it to some vague memory, mixed up with some nightmare... until, of course the other day, I found out what it was much to my total astonishment.
I think I was looking at Amazon at Sapphire and Steel box sets, and looking at what other people had bought. One of the DVDs that someone else had bought after buying a Sapphire and Steel box set was a programme called 'Raven' from 1977, and a description saying that it was 'little seen'. Hmm, I thought. I had never heard of it. This in itself quite excited me. Thought probably not surprising. Just when you think you've discovered the limit of 1970s childrens supernatural/science fiction dramas, along comes another one. Moving on quickly to Youtube, I discovered that someone had, helpfully, uploaded the entire series.
There it was. The end of episode 4.

My memory was remarkably accurate.
A group of people are in a cave. They are looking through a hole in the wall. We see five heads from within the hole in the wall. They call for one of their friends. Somethin rises at the bottom of the screen. We cut to a shot of the one woman, screaming. We cut to another shot. We are looking into the hole, from the outside. Something emerges from the hole. We see it for a split second before the credits kick in. A human skull, on what seems to be the body of a snake.

I, of course had to check the beginning of episode 5 to see what happens next.
We have a reprise. The human skull, on what seems to be the body of a snake emerges once more, and the body of the snake is in fact an arm, the hand of which is holding the snake... and the arm belongs to a man, who climbs through the hole. 'Well' he says 'he needed rescuing too, but its a bit late for him!'.

I am reminded of that old adage of 'never meeting your heroes'. A slight disappointment that there is not an actual skull-headed snake..? Oh well...

I have only flicked through the episodes on Youtube. Apparently the entire series is released on DVD. I've read a few reviews of it online. Despite the skull-headed snake not being a skull-headed snake, the programme looks, to be frank, absolutely incredible. It seems to concern a plan to build a nuclear power station over a series of ancient caves, freeing ancient elemental forces. It seems to base a lot of its ideas on Celtic myth and astrology. One clip I saw sees one character explaining why tunneling from one cave system to another was asking for trouble; 'the cave system forms a zodiac... capricorn and cancer are negative female signs in direct opposition; there had to be fireworks'. Another clip I saw sees a white-eyed figure of a man, translucent against a swirling chaotic void. A magical symbol is overlaid on the screen as it cuts between scenes of the man vanishing into the psychedelic void and the people attempting to call him back.

This is almost like occult programming aimed at children. One modern day reviewer has called the programme 'deeply unsettling'.

And despite the fact that there is no skull-headed snake, the end of episode 4 is still looks fairly nightmarish to me...

AND ALSO THE TREES III: On the Cliff Edge Wind, in Limbo

and After the long summer of 1996 I started at Worcester University College (all summers, despite their length remaining exactly the same must always be described as 'long', in a way that autumn and spring never are.) I lived in a shared house in the St John's area - a tidy little building that had a cellar (carpeted) a garden and three floors, noit counting the cellar. My room was large and pleasant and caught the sun all day. As I look round this sickly bedsit, I can barely imagine such luxury now.
I met the people in my house whom I all got along with, and their friends, whom I all got along with too. One of them turned out to be an acquaintance I had not seen since before Southampton, at leaat two years before. Quite a coincidence.
The trouble was, as nice as my home life was, all the people in the house had already finished their degrees, and were ex-students. As such, for that first term, I knew very few people I was actually at college with, and most of those were people who lived off campus for some reason. I remember talking to one of them, and how difficult she was finding it to socialise with the people she was on the course with.

The people I lived withg were working and mostly coupled up. A drunken and riotous first term at university this was not proving to be. A sense of dread would sometimes envelop me as I made my way to another lecture where I would know no-one and smoke cigarettes in silence at breaktime, and return home sometimes having not spoken for hours.

And Also The Trees crept into my consciousness. Long hours spent in my room, watching autumn deepen and cool into winter. The 'Virus Meadow' album opened up to me. The opening track 'Slow Pulse Boy' a spoken word narrative set to music. A man stands at a window as 'somewhere the blast furnace explodes...' A creepy, haunted track, the tempo slow enough to create a growing sense of tension, then a kind of release, where the shouted words 'Fire burns in our jack boots' become a kind of plea, whether of triumph or despair it is difficult to tell. Then the last line; 'tomorrow the sun shines' - and the message is obvious.

The sun doesn't shine tonight.

'Gone Like The Swallows' too, another spoken word track. A near arcane litany of words toward the end of the track, like the ingredients for a post-modern spell...

'A green teapot, a pair of boots

A broken pocket, watch and chain
A born dead baby pig
Lying, pure white... bloodless
Soft and smooth as a gloved lady's hand
A spinning wheel, a bill hook
An umbrella, empty bottles, a tin bath
A hat stand and a slate grey pill box hat
Sailed past his grabbing hands

And were gone... like the swallows'

The song is sweet and nostalgic, and like a day in summer building up to a storm. (I have no idea why the font has changed itself by the way):

'Trying to cling to the summer cotton
Light threadbare patterned sleeveless
Flowered dirty carnation sunflower
Sweatstained primrose threadbare
Dirty disappearing decaying flowered
Fading cotton forgotten fucking summer dress'

I would mesmerise the words, and yet, I still had no idea that the band were existing.

Autumn moved into winter, and I began to feel cut-off from college life to the extent that I considered leaving my course. To do what I didn't know. I would set 'Virus Meadow' on the alarm on my stereo. Woken to the sounds of 'Slow Pulse Boy'. Fall asleep to vague memories of strange dreams. The songs working their way into my mind. One dream I remember was about choirs lost in the second world war, returning as ghosts in darkened chapels... 'we could tear up the floor, and find all the things we'd ever lost'.

On empty Sundays by the window, I would watch it get dark, study the post box across the street, bright red against some hedge-lined alley I never walked.

The darkness of midwinter, and lectures had finished. Only a few essays to deliver, and my body clock, helpfully, had managed to rearrange itself. Every night I would stay up until 5:00am then wake in the afternoon as it was getting dark. An awful cold had descended on the house. Icicles stretched in the black night from the lip of the roof to the garden. Some days it was so cold when I got up, we would immediately remove ourselves to the local pub to warm up. Coats became indoor wear.

A few days before Christmas Eve, there was a phonecall from the landlady.

She wanted the house back, and we had to leave by the end of January.

Song for the Liminal Season

Joe down for the day, arrived late last night from London. Walking from Andy's house down Cromwell Road. Breeze up, and the spectral white of the street light through the leaves, casting shadows. Ghost moths rushing across the silence between the cars. Shadows looking strange, Joe; 'What's going on with those shadows?'

An anxiety dream last night of the new campaign at work (I start tomorrow). I am fifteen minutes late. Other people are already taking calls. I cannot get my computer to work. My headset has tuned into another conversation. Someone else's phone call coming through the headphones.

Meet Joe at midday at Waterstones, like something from that mid-period of Brighton (2004 - 2007 approx). Wonder up to Queens Park to meet Al, who is not there. The strange streets of Hanover. An empty building all boarded up and intriguing. A Meditterenean looking church, denomination unknown. A slightly frightening statue of Christ next to a mural of an eagle. The Eagle reminds me of something Teutonic and fascistic. An old Roman echo, a cryptographers icon.
Queens Park is strangely sloped, full of trees and curving paths and a clock tower and the call of wood pigeons. Nostalgia birds whose only purpose is to make you long for a past you can't quite recall.

Half pint in a pub on the hill with Al, Claire and Joe. A street lamp in the garden (does it work?) and the drunk and giggling middle aged women next to us. The blue of the skies, and the dusty incessant wind, full of deserts and sand. Strange ghosts of the end of summer here - and where are we here? This is not summer and not spring. A liminal season, and as haunted as these halfway times -and places- are rumoured to be. Felt on the verge to day of slipping back into the past. Some memory I can't recall.
The nostalgia-birds would know.

Half pint at the Evening Star. Not been here for months. Half familiar faces and cartoons in my notebook of Al and Claire ('That's awful... I look like a man!') Claire eats crisps and reads the newspaper. The toilets at the Evening Star are the same as ever, the puddled floor looking as if it is about to crack open. Al talks about a man he once knew; 'He always complained he had bad luck with tenants because they always died'.

After Joe leaves, I have a cup of tea at Em's house, and when we leave to go to Sainsbury's I am startled by how cool it has got. I am reminded of the beginnings of autumns, of London Hill road in Worcester (the rain, Harry's Wines, the warm serenity of the Chinese takeaway on the corner.
Back in the bedsit now. A couple of hours to myself before sleep.
The halo of the lamp, a quarter loaf of bread.
The man next door turns on the tap just for a second or too.