Ignite Festival of Theatre 2014

The Ignite Festival in Exeter is an explosion of theatre and performance which takes place across the centre of the city. Exeter’s main theatre has long since been pushed to the borderlands, stranded on the slopes of the university campus. The festival makes a virtue of using of a wide range of venues in the city proper (most, indeed, within the old Roman walls), from smaller theatres (the Bike Shed and The Cygnet) to basements and backrooms in pubs (The Hour Glass, The Rusty Bike and the City Gate). All are within easy reach of each other. The timings included within the programme encourage you to pack in as much as you can, dashing from one place to another.

The festival began on Monday with Coffee With Vera, which was served in the kitchen above the synagogue. Ruth Mitchell took on the persona of Vera, a composite of the women she’d talked to at the Plymouth synagogue, often at the coffee mornings they organised to raise funds. A jacket and hat, kept on a dresser’s dummy, were put on along with the Vera character, affecting an instant transformation from Ruth, who also explored her own history. She had discovered her Jewish roots, which had been unknown to her when she started out as an actress. She talked about her first major role having left acting school, playing a part in the 1987 film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Miriam Margolyes, taking in her name and her proudly prominent schnozz, had asked her if she were Jewish. She shyly responded that she was not. From then on, Margolyes cheerfully referred to her as Ruth Who Should Be Jewish. Both as Ruth and Vera, she unpacked an old suitcase and laid mementoes out on the table, building up an array which told the stories of her ancestors and of the Jews in Plymouth and Devon as a whole. The personal and the historical, as ever, intertwined, each aspect illuminating the other. It was a funny and touching performance, the cramped setting and the coffee meeting context lending it a real sense of intimacy. You really felt you were being addressed personally, and felt the sense of belonging which such small, isolated communities must offer. The cakes, some from recipes in a cook book written by Mandy Patinkin’s mother, were excellent, too. Afterwards, we were invited to look around the synagogue. Built in 1763, it is one of the hidden treasures of Exeter, only the unobtrusive road sign of the back alley it where it is tucked away hinting at its presence – Synagogue Place. We were given a wonderfully warm welcome and privileged to be shown the Torah Scrolls in the Ark, with their beautiful velvet wrappings and Georgian silverwork.

Rooted in the word - the tree of learning

A group of student actors from the University of St Mark and St John in Plymouth, The Actor’s Wheel, put on a bold version of Shakespeare’s magical play The Tempest at the Cygnet Theatre. It was staged with immense energy and imagination. The island set, with its tree growing from a strata of books, its promontories for commanding speeches and caves to crawl out from, was simple yet effective, and bathed in a suitably aquamarine light. The actors were coiled in sleep around the rocky outcrops as we filed in. They woke up as the play commenced, or as their cues came in, and retreated to their recumbent places when they withdrew. With smears of mud on their faces (Caliban’s whole face being covered with dirt), the impression was given that these were creatures which were extensions of the island itself, or (in the case of the shipwrecked sailors) intruders who were drawn into its enchanted topography. There was one isolated boulder towards the front of the stage space. When the lights dimmed down and the ambient music faded up, the boulder moved, stretched and stood up, and Prospero began his speech. Or rather her speech. This was a Tempest with a female Prospero, or Prospera, a commanding and convincing reinterpretation of the character. This was particularly so as regarded her relationship with Miranda, who became her daughter in this version. Other innovative touches included a triple Caliban, three people roped together, sharing the moaning dialogue of the pitiful beast, constantly circling, crawling and leaping atop one another; and a six-aspected Ariel, speech hocketed between the spaced out actors as if the spirit were flickering from place to place with inhuman instantaneity. The comic actors playing the drunken sailors intoxicated with dreams of regal power were very funny, and worked off each other well. This was a production which took a familiar work and really tried to produce something original from it. I was reminded of Derek Jarman’s film version, which was similarly respected the spirit of the play whilst setting out to make of it something rich and strange. The Actor’s Wheel affected a similar sea-change. This was their first performance as a company, and promises much for the future.

Dashing off to the Bike Shed, I then saw Threnody For the Sky Children, written and performed by Jack Dean. The title made it sound like a long lost prog rock concept album (not necessarily a bad thing), and the opening seemed to affirm this impression. A beak-masked figure advanced through dazzling light with bird-like movements, for all the world like Peter Gabriel in his Genesis pomp. But this initial guise was swiftly discarded, the lights dimmed to a less blinding radiance, and the mask cast aside with a shrug. A professed love of hip-hop soon put paid to any lingering prog notions. Dean apologised for his initial indulgence, bringing this dramatic entrance to a bathetic conclusion. He (or rather his character) turned to wistful personal reminiscence from the headspace of his parents’ attic – the storeroom of his childhood past, both literally (this is where he finds his action man) and metaphorically in terms of memories nesting beneath its shadowed eaves.

The abrupt shift in tone and performance style, from the stylised and fantastic to the naturalistic and confessional, was indicative of the fragmentary nature of Threnody. We were presented with a kaleidoscopic progression of tangentially connected scenes between which we had to weave the associative thread. The tenor swung from the personal to the mythic, with allusions to the animalistic shape-shifting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Icarus’ dreams of flight and hubristic fall to earth predominant. Ovid’s collection also includes the tale of Narcissus, who ends up turning into a flower – Peter Gabriel era Genesis again! Dean told his poetic tale of yearning, loss and violent transformation across differing levels of scale and via constantly changing modes of performance, morphing through his own parade of personae. There were projected animations and a Pollock’s toy theatre, behind whose cardboard proscenium a plastic figure’s balletic Icarus-flight ended in a rain of tiny feathers. A lecturer with a pronounced tendency towards bursts of radio-static sibilance stood in front of screen slides delivering post-modern, post-structuralist, post-WTF screeds on the psycho-mythological meanings of pop-cultural icons. He began his own bird transformation during his second lecture. The soft Hispanic ‘chs’ and ‘shs’ turned into spasmic sounds which presaged the breakdown of language and analytical thought. A hawklike warning cry built up like the animalistic hissing sound made by the bride of Frankenstein at the end James Whales’ 1933 film. It reminded me of Robert Altman’s 1970 film Brewster McCloud, which is also similar to Threnody in that it concerns a young man’s Icarus dreams of flight. The narrative of the film is punctuated by the commentaries of a lecturer (played by Rene Auberjonois) who grows more birdlike and less human every time we see him, feathers sprouting through holes in his jumper.

A model town like a miniature film set was used to enact a localised drama within a national crisis, the country having been overrun by the ‘transformed’ – people changed into hungry, mindlessly destructive beasts. It was like a Michael Bentine’s Potty Time monster movie. Unfortunately, I wasn’t best-placed to see it; you really needed to be in the front two rows to get a good view. Urgent reports were delivered in the form of breathless breaking news bulletins, charting the progressive descent of the country into chaos and social breakdown in the face of the spreading wave of metamorphoses. These bulletins were pegged out on the descending slope of a clothesline, along with relics of the attic dreamer’s youth. The personal blended with the political and the universal in a steady record of decline.

More SF futures were imagined in the form of a Britain absorbed into a greater USA, with only West Yorkshire stubbornly seceding, now classified as a demilitarised zone. We had a fireside chat with our new president, the fire one of those comforting log blazes found on Youtube. He was Big Brother with a gleaming smile and first-name terms, ‘I’m your pal’ manner. Finally, the childhood action man, who had once engaged in daring dogfights in the enemy skies of the imagination, drifted gracefully off, feather-winged arms silhouetted against last sunset backlighting. Threnody for the Sky Children was a poetic and ambitious piece of writing and performance, elegiac, angry, touching and often funny (the latter not a quality oft-associated with prog epics). Dean compacted a huge amount into its concise 45 minutes. Intense and daring, it danced on the edge of pretentiousness, but remained always sufficiently nimble and self-aware to avoid losing its step and tumbling over.

Franz and Felicia

Küsse (German for kisses) was a two person play from Red Room Productions drawing on the epistolary love affair between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer. It was a relationship which lasted five years, only occasionally disrupted by awkward meetings. For Franz, the distance between his home in Prague and Felice’s in Berlin provided a convenient protective barrier. It was easy to make up excuses about missed or cancelled trains. Felice was a blank wall upon which he could write, articulating his ideas about his self, his creative urges, the nature of love and the ills of society and the world at large. His correspondence at times resembles suicide notes more than love letters, with detailed analyses of his crippling mental anxieties and physical shortcomings. He seemed to do his utmost to hold her at arms length, giving her plentiful reasons to reject him. The title Küsse, as the program note informs us, refers to Kafka’s remark that ‘written kisses never reach their destination’. This statement is given more nuanced meaning by the context in which it was made. Kafka wrote that ‘letter writing is an intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one’s own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written’. The written kisses ‘are drunk en route by these ghosts’. Küsse makes those ghosts manifest.

The unbalanced nature of the dialogue is symbolically magnified by the absence of Felice’s letters. We only hear her voice through Kafka’s writing, given form through his distinctive language. Küsse attempted in part to redress that balance. The small windowless space of the Black Box in The Phoenix, named with oppressive honesty, was filled with a provisionally constructed wooden frame, walled on three sides with a skin of semi-transparent waxed paper. It was a windowless room within a windowless room. As we filed in, an immaculately dressed and made-up woman sat stock still in a chair by the back wall. This was Felice as the idealised china-doll woman Franz created in his mind. As the play began, Felice began to move, stretching sensuously across the chair, which was used throughout as an essential prop. Kafka, meanwhile, fidgeted nervously in the narrow aisle left beyond the wooden frame of the room. His first entrance was surrealist slapstick. His leg kicked a rift through the paper wall. It then froze for a few moments, as if trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened (pay no attention to that leg sticking out of the wall!) Kafka would self-deprecatingly recall in one of his early letters that during their first meeting he had trod on her foot as they pushed their way through a revolving door.

Kafka made tearing entrances into Felice’s room at regular intervals throughout the play, bursting in upon her with nervy intensity. These irruptions were ever-more disruptive and always awkward and blundering. He stuttered out statements about himself and his dedication to his writing, quoted from his letters. Blankly informing her that his literary calling took precedence over her and all else, he told her (as he wrote) ‘my life consists, and basically always has consisted, of attempts at writing, mostly unsuccessful’. Such declarations were a means of maintaining distance. This was a dance of avoidance, two unsuited partners essaying entirely different steps. Felice drew on the walls, a pictorial language of love, connection and the desire for domestic contentment and stability. If Franz viewed her as a blank wall upon which he could pin his letters, then she gets her chance here to make her own mark. But her symbolic language goes unremarked. For Franz, this postal romance was an opportunity to formulate his own ideas and to elucidate his worldview. The letters are sketches and notes for the stories. He used her as a sounding board to construct a sense of self and of artistic purpose. Her replies served to assure him that she was listening, or reading. The dolls house furniture which she laid out was swept away by Franz’s packing case. Even when he did eventually turn up, he never intended to stay.

Dialogue was sparse, surprisingly so given the voluminous nature of the correspondence on Kafka’s side. His words were used as agonized aphorisms and stilted attempts at expressing love and desire. These were ghosts brushing lightly against each other. The play was really more of a dance piece, constantly in motion. The movements were full of tension and angsty energy, occasional contact leading to reflexive repulsion. At times, Franz’s whole body shook as if he were overcome by a nervous fit. His was a jittery St Vitus dance as opposed to Felice’s slower, more measured moves. The room was steadily torn apart as the dance progressed and the couple circled closer towards each other. The barriers came down and the spindly frame was shaken until it seemed that it too would splinter apart. When it became clear that Franz was going to leave, Felice tore all the paper down, drawings and all, and wrapped herself in it on the floor, as if it were a comfort blanket. It was a cathartic outburst, leaving her completely exposed, her inner sanctum open to the world.

In its ruinous aftermath, Felice was finally able to speak. Her first utterance was actually a paraphrase of the words of Milena Jesenska, a passionate friend from Franz’s later life: ‘I knew his fear before I knew him’. Milena was a strong and self-assured woman, and an accomplished writer. She was able to share and respond to Franz’s literary ideas and enthusiasms in a way that Felice had not. Felice draws on some of her strength in order to define her own feelings and her own sense of herself. We discover a little of what lay behind that blank wall, which Franz filled up so completely with his ceaseless words. The actress playing Felice spoke with a lilting westcountry accent, which lent the impression of a straightforward soul wishing for simple clarity and direct communication from her relationship; something which she was never going to receive from a complex, restless and self-interrogating soul like Franz. It was a quietly moving end to an absorbing and emotionally involving dance duet – Franz and Felice as an expressionist Fred and Ginger, never quite coming together and matching steps to create that magic connection. The music for the dance was interesting and varied in tone. From the delicately suspended mystery of one of Satie’s Gnossiennes to a Schubert song (I think); a minimalist instrumental from Sufjan Stevens’ BQE soundtrack and his explosive hymn Vesuvio from the recent Age of Adz LP to the sad resignation of Arvo Pärt’s slowly drifting and spiralling peace piece for violin and piano Spiegel im Spiegel. A perfect choice.

Four of Swords Theatre’s Gawain and the Green Knight was first performed last Christmas in the Black Box, scrubby backyard and auditorium of The Phoenix. For Ignite, it had graduated to the altogether more imposing and majestic setting of Exeter Cathedral. With its overarching forest of columns stretching down the nave, its copious green man bosses, and its general atmosphere of absorbed and encompassed ages, it was a dream backdrop for this ancient and most arcane of English tales. Four of Swords make a habit of seeking out atmospheric and unusual locations for their productions. They staged an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde in the dilapidated shell of Poltimore House, and retreated to the shadowed recesses of Beer Quarry Caves for their recent Macbeth. They make maximum use of these unorthodox spaces, leading the audience from one spot to another, where different scenes take place.

For Gawain, we gathered in the Chapter House before being led into the main mass of the cathedral, ushered along tea-lighted aisles and invited to take our places in the Lady Chapel. Here, King Arthur’s court was gathered, dressed in black and puffed out with leather armour-padding. With distorted electric guitar riffing reverberating round the vaulted stone spaces, it appeared we might be in for a Spinal Tap interpretation of the legend. Arthur’s long blonde locks (it was he who was crunching the power chords) and the slurred Keith Richard stumbling of one of the musician knights furthered the impression of metal medievalism, the troubadours turning it up to 11 and getting heavy. The tone of the opening scene was indeed light and frivolous, with the bathetic approach of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, undermining any pretensions to high romance. The king was a sullen, overgrown child, his knights dim-witted buffoons not conspicuously blessed with bravery or chivalric fire, but evidently filled to bloating with beef and wine.

An opening amalgam of chant and rap barked out by a cloaked and face-painted wild-woman made rhythmic if incomprehensible use of the old dialect in which Gawain was written. This turned out to be Morgana. She affected disdain at our lack of comprehension, seeing it as sign of modern decline and lack of learning. She remained our commenting chorus, narrator and haranguing guide throughout. Her character stood apart from the rest, out of time and far from home; a creature of the old ways, the pagan past. She was both distanced observer and active, sorcerous agent, a merry and somewhat deranged trickster. At the end of the court scene, before ushering out into the aisles, she pointed to the stained glass figure of Mary and noted, with calculated blasphemy, that of course, she was really just another incarnation of the eternal Goddess.

Leafy thrones

The appearance of the green knight was achieved with great, portentous dramatic effect. Entering slowly from the rear of the chapel, it was a towering giant, its sackcloth head wound about by ivy. Blazing red eyes glowed fiercely within a blackened bone-mask of a face, draped around with white flowing white down like traveller’s joy or old man’s beard. This was a fearsome, Gilliamesque creation, a fusion of oversized puppet and the recognisably human. The actor within made the most of the effect it created, looking from side to side as it made its way to the stunned knights and catching members of the audience in its hellish gaze. The challenge was issued, the blow given, and the inhuman knight’s severed head picked up and held up to issue its demands. Gawain, who had answered to the challenge where others had shrunk away, was now obliged to receive a reciprocal blow in a year and a day at the mysterious green chapel. We followed him around the north aisle and into the nave on his quest to find this enchanted place. Here, we were waylaid at a court which was the mirror of Arthur’s. Two thrones were set up by the organ screen at the front of the nave, bowered with branches which echoed the stone-carved greenery on the columns to either side. Flickering shadow branches were thrown from the light of candles burning on iron stands to the side. The king and queen of this court invited Gawain to stay whilst he awaited his appointed hour.

Enter if you dare - the way through

Good use was made of filmed interludes, which are a feature of Four of Swords productions. They were projected onto a curtain hung beneath the organ, the soundtrack provided by our strolling minstrels, standing discretely in the aisle next to the northern Norman tower. Acrobatic hunt scenes were shot on the ramparts of Woodbury hill fort, whilst Gawain’s seduction by the queen (the ‘other Guinnevere’) took place in cobbled courtyards and bare attic rooms of appropriate antiquity. Finally, three days and nights having passed, we were invited by Morgana, still on hand to guide us (and offer us Christmas cake!), to follow Gawain through the gateway revealed by the raised screen beneath the organ to the green chapel beyond. ‘Look after each other’, she whispered, suddenly solicitous. We parted the ivy which hung down, tangling our path, and proceeded solemnly onward.

Green pulpit - playing us out

The choir, screened off from the main body of the cathedral, and with its wooden stalls, tree stump pulpit and towering bole of an archbishop’s throne, was the perfect choice for a sacred woodland glade. All was bathed in emerald light, and when the green knight made his entrance, his eyes shone even more balefully blood redthrough the pervasive leaf-refracted haze. A wonderfully magical atmosphere was conjured, the Cathedral transformed into an otherworldly realm. The sorcery underpinning the whole allegorical quest was revealed. I won’t tell you that revelation, however, since there are further performances scheduled for Poltimore House this summer. It will be interesting to see how Four of Swords adapt their story to that environment. The gardens certainly offer plenty of scope for dramatic scene setting, as does the house itself, of course. It is surely the cathedral, however, which offered the perfect stage for their Gawain, and they made superb use of it.

The Hall at the bottom of Stepcote Hill is a new venue, still in the process of being cleared and renovated. Its slightly rough and ready state at this point in time proved entirely in keeping with the spirit of the Don Quijote show performed there over three nights by Tom Frankland and Keir Cooper in association with Ultimo Comboio. It could scarcely be called an adaptation; rather it was an exploration of the spirit of the novel, and an attempt to discover how that spirit might be made manifest in our heavily mediated and controlled world. The book plays with ideas of illusion and fakery, qualities embedded into its very form and history. As we were informed in a brief, breathless lecture, delivered in full bullfighter drag, Don Quixote was in fact a book of two parts. The bipartite nature of the book was made gleefully literal by two of the actors taking a power saw to a paperback copy clamped to a work frame. The effortful shearing off of the spine also demonstrated what a thick volume the two halves created. It was like a variation on the old strong man act of tearing the phone book in two.

The first section was published in 1605. Its success prompted another writer to produce a forged sequel. Cervantes responded to this hijacking of his creation by writing an ‘authentic’ continuation of his novel, published in 1615. Needless to say, numerous imitations ensued, the copies which trail in the wake of all popular works of art. In 1939, Jorge Luis Borges published Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a short story in the form of an imaginary literary critique of an imaginary writer’s ‘translation’ of Don Quixote. Although every line is exactly the same as the original, he considers it to be a completely new version, given a completely new context by the contemporary age in which it is rewritten. Quixote has become an ur-text which resonates down the ages.

The novel’s play with illusion was reflected from the beginning of this ‘Quijote’. The variant spelling itself suggested another version, a further generation of the original. We began with shadowplays projected onto the bricks of the wall. Knights, palaces, windmills, inns and cities on the hill drifted across like dream phantoms just on the periphery of perception. Slides of the book’s descriptive chapter headings suggested scenarios which these restless shapes might form the setting for or play their part in, if only they could settle. The shadows were created by the actors panning lights behind a tabletop landscape. An inspection of this miniature La Mancha afterwards revealed trees, buildings and cities made form scraps of cardboard, plastic tubes, blu-tac boulders and food packaging towers. Any old crap which was roughly the right shape served. And yet the shadows they produced were highly evocative, firing the imagination. We were seeing through the transformative vision of Don Quixote from the outset.

Following on from the prefatory shadow-show, our attention was redirected to another part of the hall. This required us to shuffle around on the cushions we had been handed as we came in. The evening’s diverse happenings would take place at all ends and in all corners, and sometimes in our midst. Now we saw a young woman happily absorbed in reading a book. An illuminated showbiz sign above her comfortably, familiarly shabby armchair announced her as Rosie Biggin, Tonight’s Guest Don Quijote. As the show travels around the country, new Quijotes are discovered and invited to take the starring role. Rosie read Quijote silently for a good few moments, challenging us to enjoy the passive spectacle of someone else enjoying reading. Just as this was on the verge of provoking uncomfortable shifting of bums, she put the book down and started to poke at a fan with a stick, her playful version of tilting at windmills. The power of the story had taken hold of her, and she’d begun to carry its ideas, actions and ideals out into the world.

This was one of the themes of the show (and it was more variety show than play). The translation of the battered chivalric code found in the pages of Don Quixote into deeds carried out in the world. Deeds which are invariably foolhardy, amateurishly enacted and doomed to failure, but also noble in intent, brave and full of passion, and generous of spirit. We heard a story told by a man purportedly from Barcelona who had recently been helping out in a primary school. When he left, he had wanted to present a parting gift, as is the Spanish custom. He hit upon the idea of gathering petals and throwing them outwards from the school roof onto the pupils in the playground below. Each petal, he said, represented one of the children. This act was reproduced in a small way as he threw petals torn from a bunch of flowers in the grill of a revolving fan (an essential prop this evening) which blew them out over the heads of the first few rows. A shredded stick of broccoli proved less aerodynamic, and somehow lacked the same poetic resonance.

After the Quixote paperback had been de-spined, the remains were handed around the audience, and we were invited to take a page and hand it on. These were our petals. In the climactic act of the evening, the remaining pages were pushed through the teeth of a shredder by Rosie Quijote. She then tossed handfuls of Quixote confetti into the airstream of the fan. Paper flakes fluttered down like soft snow or cherry blossom, settling in drifts on the floor. The spirit of Quixote had been disseminated out into the world. The physical artefacts which had contained and conveyed that spirit, the pages and words which activated it, were no longer necessary.

The show sought to discover the spirit of Cervantes’ ragged hero in the modern world, to find the new Quixotes and define the qualities which went into making them. Spanish stereotypes (the flamenco dancer, the bullfighter) were indulged, only to be ridiculed and dismissed. Don Quixote was declared a universal figure, not one limited to a particular time, place or culture. Cervantes was painted as a victim of oppressive and controlling forces, having spent five years in an Algerian prison after he was captured by pirates; This in an age when piracy was a politically sanctioned activity (just think of Raleigh and Drake). Deriving inspiration from his incarceration, he wrote his story for the unjustly downtrodden, for the thwarted dreamers and those who remain true to their noble vision even as it leads to their inevitable fall – the persecuted outsiders and misfits. He created a plausibly human character who could represent them and offer a model of resistance – absurd and foolhardy, hopeless and glorious.

A parade of modern Quixotes, ranging from the ridiculous to the tragic (and often a mixture of both) was presented to us, their faces flickering across an old black and white TV screen which had, until this moment, been filled with illuminated static. Backyard dreamers, stubborn naysayers, the defiantly different and the eccentrically creative, all inventing themselves in a ramshackle and instinctively amateur fashion which defies externally imposed rules and dictates (and thereby tends to get them in trouble). All ultimately destined to fail, but persisting anyway, even when they are fully aware of the doomed nature of their ventures (and ultimately of all human endeavour). To borrow (steal) Samuel Beckett’s phrase, they have determined to ‘live better fail better’. Terry Gilliam might have been added to this gallery, although he is probably too well known for the company’s purposes. Don Quixote is a novel close to his heart, and his fated attempts to film it have become legendary. The documentary which records his serial mishaps and misfortunes, and his determination to carry on in spite of escalating setbacks and the seeming antagonism of the gods themselves, casts him wholly in the mould of Cervantes’ hero. Perhaps he will never make a better version of the novel than this record of his epic failure to make it.

The spirit of heroic amateurism, of noble and sincere absurdity pervaded the show. Chaos and chance (with its potential correlative, disaster) were positively courted. Rosie’s Quijote walked out into the audience as she donned the first pieces of her cardboard armour, and some of the audience were handed tape further junk appurtenances and encouraged to help her complete her knightly ensemble. When she emerged from the resultant industrious scrum, which had been noisy with the sounds of tearing cardboard, and the pulling out, ripping off and adhering of tape, she was resplendent in a carapace of cardboard and appended utensils. Another audience member was chosen as her Sancho Panze, and the retired to the nearest pub (presumably the Fat Pig) to plot their adventures, their grand Quixote gestures. These were revealed to us near the end, when they made a grandly heralded return.

Various glitches occurred, including a power failure. Again, the question of illusion and fakery arose. Were these genuine, or were they calculated to give the impression of amateurism, of busking it, thus lending the resultant extemporisations the air of instinctive spontaneity. You’d have to go to more than one performance to find out. Certainly, as our attention was drawn from one end of the hall to the other, and from one escapade to the next, we never knew quite what to expect. There was a deliberate air of the jerrybuilt and cobbled together to the whole affair, of sets and props hastily concocted from raids on charity shops and rubbish dumps, held together by string, blu-tac and dreams. But for all that, it was a remarkably coherent show, thought through and written with a great amount of care. In the end, all its disparate parts came together beautifully. It was a heady assemblage, leaving the head spinning but the spirit uplifted and exhilarated. And I haven’t even mentioned banana castration, drum frenzies or the soothsaying monkey. With indoor fireworks fizzing above the tabletop La Mancha towards the end, this was an appropriately incendiary and celebratory way to the bring the Ignite Festival to a close.

The World of The Double

Richard Ayoade’s film The Double draws on a long tradition of stories which confront the protagonist with a shadow self which threatens to usurp, undermine or derail his or her life. These include Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson )filmed by Louis Malle in the 1968 Poe anthology film Spirits of the Dead), Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shadow (1847), and the novel which Ayoade freely uses as source material here, Dostoevsky’s The Double. The double in fiction is often a manifestation of a part of the self which has been repressed, or which fills out a lost or undeveloped aspect vital to the integration of the whole person. The splintering apart of warring halves of the persona can also give literal embodiment to a state of state of mental crisis, projecting a conflict raging across the internal landscape onto the external world.

John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, draws a fine distinction between the double and the doppelgänger. A double may be unrelated to the protagonist, unattached physically or spiritually, whereas ‘a doppelgänger is always intimately connected to the person in whose footsteps he walks’. It ‘may be a projection of the original person whose likeness it takes or mocks’. Given that Simon James’ double, James Simon, presents him with a mocking version of the outgoing person he cannot be, as well as growing evidence of his own invisibility and status as a non-person; and given the physical link which is revealed between them towards the end of the story, they can perhaps be thought of as subject and doppelganger than as doubles.

The urban world of Ayoade’s film is an indeterminate zone, with no specific geographical or historical locus, or defining characteristics of any sort other than a vague latter half of the twentieth century timeframe derived from the background technology. Its expressionistic set design, cinematography and sound push it beyond the authentic replication of real place or mood and takes us into the territories of psychologically resonant architecture and interiors. The characterless city in which Simon James lives and works is shaded in drab, muted colours, with a tendency towards chiaroscuro shades of grey. There is no enlivening brightness. The daylight is smeared, as if having to penetrate through a grimy glass dome. The interiors have the sickly yellow glow of striplighting, which makes everybody look sallow and jaundiced. The sky is occluded, shuttered off in the windowless labyrinth of the office or swallowed up in the shadowed canyons between the brutally monumental slabs of the housing blocks.

Simon witnesses, with mute horror, a bird being spat out of a duct mouth to land with a wet thud on the upper shelf of an inaccessible, glass-fronted storage cupboard. It has presumably been sucked from the sky by a vent on the roof somewhere far above. There it lies, an eviscerated lump displayed like an anatomical specimen. Simon glimpses it again later in the story, untouched and slowly rotting away, roughly filed in its sealed-off stationery mausoleum. It serves as a stark symbol of the death of the soul in this deadening environment, left to wither and decay in airless confinement rather than soaring in expansive flight.

Office technology is monumental and domineering, photocopying machines great glowing hulks which judder and shake into threatening motion as if powered by small nuclear plants. Individuals are hived off into dim wooden pens like so many productive farm animals, faces wanly illuminated by the dull green radiance of computer screens, the bulky extension of the encased tube at the back adding to the air of suffocating claustrophobia. This is a place in which people are a component of an overarching machinery, subservient to the unquestionable logic of a mechanised system the output of which has become almost irrelevant.

The expressionistic tenor of the film extends to its sound design. The office is filled with subterranean rumblings and the incessant grind and chatter of overcharged and unstable technology makes it sound more like an industrial plant in which heavy machinery rolls and booms through its violent processes. The space between the housing blocks is scoured by a bleak wind, which sounds like it has blown in from some chasmic void. It makes of it a blasted no-man’s land, to be hurried across with as much haste as possible.

Is this the drear, depersonalised world which has shaped our hapless protagonist, or is it an expressionistic projection of his inherent nature, a subjectively distorted perspective. Perhaps a little of both. Simon literally projects a long, angular shadow behind him when he pauses before entering his building one night, sometime after his double has set his life on its downward trajectory. It’s almost too perfect an image, reproducing the impossibly jagged and distorted black and white shadows of the German films of the 20s which established the cinematic language of expressionism. It could have been designed for use on the poster. The subjective , self-conscious nature of this imagery is also made clear when Simon walks down his apartment block corridor with a spring in his step, filled with the sudden and surprising possibility of happiness after his meeting with Hannah. The lights fizzle and flicker above him, bathing him in brief pulses of bright, primary colour.

In such a drearily entropic, drained world, imaginative escape of some sort becomes necessary for survival. Simon zones out to the arpeggiated synth soundtrack of a ridiculous space opera. He drinks in the tough guy heroics, and the simplistic life or death choices which the silver-suited, ray gun wielding lead character makes as a matter of course, always accompanied by some macho epithet. The gulf between the life of a downtrodden nobody (or ‘creepy guy’) and the action hero he dreams of is as painfully gaping as it always is in such wish-fulfilment fantasies. It’s the kind of vapid escapism which, in the end, only serves to make the real world that little bit more unbearable.

Hannah escapes through art, drawing sketches which she then tears into scraps. She gazes at the fragments which adhere to her fingers as if they were precious mosaic bricks, before brushing them of into the rubbish chute. This furtive practice suggests that art and creativity is seen as a shameful impulse in this world, unproductive, self-indulgent and useless. Simon rakes through the rubbish bins beneath the mouths of the communal chutes and collects these paper fragments, pasting them back together again in a scrapbook he devotes to the reconstructed pictures. It’s a scenario reminiscent of one of the plot strands running through Georges Perec’s absurdist novel Life: A User’s Manual (La Vie Mode d'Emploi in the original French), first published in 1978. A hugely wealthy Englishman named Bartlebooth learns to paint to a high standard and travels the world producing landscapes at various ports. He sends his paintings back to an apartment in Paris where they are cut into challenging jigsaw puzzles by a master craftsman. He then reconstructs them, and when they are finished sends them back to the place where they were created. Here, the watercolours are washed off, leaving a blank, scarred canvas which Bartleby claims as his own. Another Perec link is made through the first of Hannah’s sketches which Simon puts back together. It’s a view of the back of a head, a figure looking at itself in the mirror. The reflection is not of a mirrored face gazing back at itself, however, but a reproduction of the back of the head which we see. This is a conceit which Rene Magritte used in his painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced). A poster of it is stuck to the wall of the room in which the protagonist of the 1974 film Un Homme Qui Dort (A Man Asleep) lives. It was a film which Georges Perec worked on with director Bernard Queysanne, adapting his own 1967 novel. Like The Double, it is about a young man falling further and further out of sync with the world around him, slipping into a shadowy state in which he becomes like an insubstantial ghost drifting through life. The narrative progression of both films charts a descent into escalating mental disintegration and despair.

Magritte's painting in Un Homme Qui Dort

Another very obvious literary influence is Franz Kafka, who might as well share a screenwriting credit as spiritual advisor. The Kafka characteristics are all present: the crushing bureaucracy; the blandly indifferent figures of petty authority who operate according to abstruse yet immutable laws; the concern with the fine detail of hierarchies and of power within relationships, and the unceasing struggle to gain recognition or a degree of self-determination; the absurd dialogue which can turn logic inside out and switch from innocuous pleasantry to undermining attack within the turning of a phrase; and the subjection of a powerless individual to the arbitrary dictates of an incomprehensible system, or merely to the chance operations of the uncaring universe at large. The presence of a little Kafka lookalike (played by Craig Roberts, the lead actor in Ayoade’s first feature, Submarine) is a nod to his pervasive spirit. Ayoade has also talked about the influence of Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962) on the mood and look of his film.

Other film references seem to adorn The Double, Ayoade’s cinephiliac side bubbling irrepressibly to the surface. Hannah has a blue glass mobile similar to the one which Juliette Binoche gazes at in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue. It’s a visual echo which draws a comparison between the two women leading lonely lives in their solitary flats. The periodic rumbling in the café, presumably indicative of subway trains passing directly underneath, is reminiscent of the shuddering passage of the heavy trains which sets furniture and glasses rattling in the bar in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and later accompanies the telekinetic shifting of the glass along the table by the damaged young girl). It’s a film which shares, for the scenes set outside of The Zone, The Double’s oppressively colour-drained palette. Simon’s use of a telescope to spy on the life on display through the windows of the apartments opposite, and at Hannah’s in particular, inevitably recalls Rear Window. But perhaps a more appropriate comparison, given the Eastern Bloc drabness of the housing, would by Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love.

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil shares similarities in its building of an exaggerated, absurd architecture of bureaucratic oppression. It’s also similar in its depiction of a society in a state of dulled, stupefied inertia, lumbered with antiquated systems and baroque. barely functioning technologies; and in its general air of pervasive grubbiness and corrosion. There is none of the brightly brittle emphasis on the artificial promise of escape through consumerism found in Brazil’s mutated post-war Britain, however. The world of The Double builds more upon an Eastern Bloc variety of austerity. There seems to be a lot of unspoken emptiness and absence, a fearful quietude which has settled over everything. Vast importance is attached to work and position, and the moral backbone which their diligent pursuit provides. But this work has no readily apparent purpose. A militaristic authority figure, the Colonel, is presented as a gleamingly spotless, airbrushed icon, imbued with an almost spiritual power of redemption. To gain his blessing means attaining a higher state. James Fox lends him a suitably aristocratic bearing, vaguely benign but detached and unapproachable.

Such influences are used lightly, however, and with conscious application. They build up layers of resonant association which add further depth to particular scenes. Ultimately, The Double creates its own world, visually self-contained, shot through with bleak absurdist humour (just as Kafka can be) and full of idiosyncratic and finely observed detail. It is, I feel compelled to conclude., a singular achievement.

70s Children's TV Fantasy - Part Three

King of the Castle (1977)

King of the Castle turns away from the ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ ethos of much 70s fantasy, with its rural backdrops, and strands its central character in the unforgiving urban environment or a poorly managed and ill-maintained high-rise block; The type of building which came to seem emblematic of the failure of post-war utopian dreams and far more in keeping with the spirit of place of Britain as it hobbled towards the declining years of the decade. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin referred to it as Kafka for kids, although they could equally have gone with Ballard for boys, as this is a drama which sets the controls for inner space. The opening episode takes place in the ‘mundane’ world and introduces us to all the characters and elements which will go towards creating and populating the world of the imagination into which the protagonist, Roland, is plunged. The mannerisms and characters of people in the real world get translated into their names, status and symbolic roles in the world of the imagination. So Fulton Mackay’s scornful, authoritarian headmaster at the cathedral choir school, with his birdlike head movements and interrogatory prodding, becomes Hawkspur, a Frankensteinian scientist whose experiments set out to recreate his own ideas of what is right and good. The bully whom Roland has to confront, identified only by the nickname Ripper spelt out in studs on the back of his jacket, becomes the functionally named Warrior, the guttural, monosyllabic guardian of the stairways between the levels of the castle of the mind.

Gormenghastly

The series draws upon many literary influences and there are allusions to various of them throughout. There is a nod to Susan Hill’s novel I’m the King of the Castle, with its depiction of childhood bullying, in the title. Roland is tormented by Ripper, the tyrant of the high-rise stairways and his cadre of cronies in the opening episode, which plays out in deceptively straightforward social realist style. Kafka is, however, the writer whose influence is most explicitly referenced. The narrative drive of the story can be seen as an inversion of that of The Castle. The protagonist of that novel, K, is attempting to gain access to the inner sanctum of the castle as opposed to Roland, who is inside looking for a way out. The pointless maze of officialdom through which Roland is forced to run in order to progress is akin to the bewildering bureaucratic processes and indeterminately menacing interrogations to which Josef K is subjected in The Trial. There is an atmosphere redolent of the absurdist theatre of Pinter and Beckett too, with its gnomic, evasively circling dialogue and sense of existential angst combined with a vaguely vaudevillian air. The white faced, top-hatted vein could certainly have stepped from the pages of a Beckett play, and the deadpan double act of the lift engineers/basement chefs, with their repetition of each other’s phrases and obfuscatory language, are very Pinteresque. There is much of the topsy-turvy logic and linguistic legerdemain of Alice in Wonderland too, with its feel of a world where madness is the norm. Roland shrinkage to a diminutive self after drinking the queen’s proferred draught (or ‘squash’) and observation of sudden shifts in scale echoes Alice’s similarly disorienting experiences at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Indeed, his fall down the lift shaft can be seen as a modern variant of Alice’s dream descent. Roland’s name is probably chosen for its allusion to Robert Browning’s visionary poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, in which that title provides the tantalising final line, as if the whole narrative is a prelude to the real adventure. If Browning leaves Roland at the gates of the tower, Bob Baker and Dave Martin plunge him straight into its dark depths.

Roland’s confrontation with the bully Ripper and the subsequent retreat from the police who intervene lead him to run into the lift which we have learnt from several previous encounters is out of order and in the process of being repaired. Roland’s pressing of the button shuts him in its confined space and sends him plummeting down to the bottom of the shaft and into a strange imaginary world. The series predominantly takes place within this world, but the occasional insertion of scenes from the real world follow the efforts to reach him and the reactions of his parents and the other characters involved to his predicament. These interludes underline the correlations between the worlds, and the parallels between inner and outer realities, with progress in each being of equal importance. The inner world reflects that of the outer, but as in a distorting mirror which recasts everything into grotesque forms of exaggerated symbolism. Just as he is confined in a literal sense within the claustrophobic space of the lift, so Roland’s imaginary world is contained within the walls of the castle tower in the basement of which he finds himself after his accident. The castle takes its form from the tower block and its architectural cues from the stone corridors and arching roofs of the cathedral school which Roland attends, as well as the dream structures from the fantasy posters which adorn his walls. Of these posters, one is by Rodney Matthews and depicts orc-like creatures running up the staircase winding around a turret; and the other is by Roger Dean, the cover of a Greenslade LP, which depicts a multi-armed, green-skinned man with a ramshackle city of precipitously stacked dwellings receding into the distance behind him. The camera lingers over this roofscape for several seconds, as if to fix it in our minds and suggest to us the building blocks which go towards constructing Roland’s interior world.

Vertiginous distance

The stairs in the castle coil around upon themselves as they rise into the vertiginous distance. They bring to mind the stairway in A Matter of Life and Death as it threads across the starry gulfs of space, its diminishing perspective creating a sense of vastness, or in this case an interior space which contains a whole world. This idea of the castle as a self-contained world unto itself is very reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, a resemblance further enhanced by the distorted gargoyle faces carved into the rock around the stairway passages and the grotesque and theatrically exaggerated nature of its inhabitants. As in Gormenghast, there are different social zones in the castle, areas which serve the needs of a large enclosed community. This reflects the mechanics of the social and administrative workings of the tower block and school, but also, by extension, of the British Isles in their isolationist, Little England fashion. The castle is both high-rise and cathedral school, reflecting both modernity and tradition, and bridging the opposite ends of the social spectrum. The royal crest of the castle, with its crenellated tower, is the same as that of Roland’s school. His ascent to the top of the tower (to be King of the Castle) is an emblematic reclamation of the badge which is torn from his blazer in a self-characteristic act by Ripper, the stairwell bully.

Gothic Vein

In the fashion of video games yet to come, Roland must work his way from the basement in which he awakes and ascend through various levels until he reaches the top and finds the way out. With each encounter on the way he will learn something which will provide him with the key, both literal and figurative, to find his way to the next stage. By implication, his escape will lead to his re-awakening to consciousness in the real world. But it will also be a form of rebirth. His ascent to self-awareness in this inner castle will help him to define his place on the outside. He is guided in his quest by the ambiguous figure of Vein, a character analogous to the testy, grudgeful caretaker Vine in the real world. As Vine seems to regard the high-rise as his domain, so Vein may have motives of his own behind his offers of aid. He resembles a funeral director who has applied his own techniques upon himself. This fits in with the general gothic cast of the inner world, an atmosphere which is given justification by the horror comics which Roland reads and the model of Frankenstein which he has in his bedroom. This was a time when the spirit of Hammer and Universal horror films lived on in plastic model kits and bubblegum cards which made them common currency in the playground amongst children who’d probably never seen the pictures from which they originated.

The structure of the series, following the initial establishing episode, follows Roland through the various levels of his ascent of the tower and the trials which he undergoes at each in order to learn, which, as Vein repeatedly informs him, is the purpose behind his progress. Each episode takes place on a different level and serves to reflect a particular aspect of the outside world which has seeped through into Roland’s subconscious to spread fear and anxiety. The first level finds him encountering the mad scientist Hawkspur and his pitiful creation Ergon, figures analogous with his headmaster at the cathedral school, Spurgeon and his nervy, subordinate lacky Hawker. Hawkspur’s laboratory centres around a sparking piece of machinery in the traditional Frankensteinian syle which is designed to remove a voice (in this case Roland’s) in order to imprint it upon his dumb, childlike creation. This expresses Roland’s anxieties about his singing and the scholarship it has granted him as a chorister, something to which he is not as committed as those who would use his talents (all the while telling him how grateful he should be for such a privilege). He teaches the monster Ergon to defy his master, and its half-absorbed, electronically distorted voice utters nothing other than the idiot phrase ‘I won’t’. It’s a fairly useless rebellion, limited in its reflexive nature, and the creature sustains cumulative injuries as it repeatedly plunges down the shaft of the tower in the course of its lumbering attempts to break free, never learning better. For Roland, this is a start, a piece of displaced defiance. A refusal to be moulded through the imposition of another’s values, to allow his voice to be appropriated for their ends.

Warrior of the stairways - jazz collage backdrop

After a confrontation with the warrior on the stairs, who repeatedly obstructs his upwards progress, the second level involves an encounter with the ‘Lady’ of the castle, who is analogous with Roland’s step-mother June. He is seduced with the temptation of luxury and an enveloping care, the promise that all his needs will be met. A drink of the Lady’s ‘squash’ reduces him to a pocket-sized figure for whom her doll’s house awaits. She offers a suffocating, imprisoning form of possessive love. In the real world, June is tentative in her approach to Roland, anxious as a new member of the family not to impose herself on him and attempt to replace his mother, or to act as a go-between for Roland and his father. Her cautious concern and worry over how she should treat Roland are reflected and inverted in her mirror self, which is also a projection of Roland’s uncertain feelings about this new mother figure. The third level is that of authority, represented by the Governor of the castle, who derives from the police sergeant who sent him running into the lift and thus to his imprisonment. Roland is literally sent down to hard labour at meaningless drudgery in the kitchen dungeons. Here, everyone goes through repetitive cycles, neither knowing nor caring what they are producing or who, if anyone, will actually get to eat it. The child labour all derives from the kids on the high-rise estate, the cohorts and hangers on of Ripper. They are at the bottom of the pile here in the castle, and represent a condition of aimless, unquestioning serfdom, of an acceptance of predestined fate which Roland is determined to rise above. His efforts to set them free are greeted with resentment, since they are comfortable in their slavery, relieved at not having the burden of choice thrust upon them. In a wider political sense, the kitchen dungeons stand for a Britain in decline, overcome with apathy and despondency, and which no longer offers any meaningful labour. It is a place whose old-fashioned values seem increasingly hollow and tokenistic.

Bureaucratic maze

The fourth level is a bureaucratic maze in which any request for information or civic permission leads to a proliferating paperchase of self-generating forms issued by self-important clerks until eventually you begin to lose sight of what you were after in the first place and your identity becomes ever more worn away. The bureaucrat, encountered in many thinly disguised forms, is identified by his desk placard as Voysey. His counterpart in the real world is Voss, the harried-looking building manager for whom everything is too much trouble. His evasion of responsibility ensures that the environment in which Roland lives continues to deteriorate and become the territorial kingdom of violent gangs. He is a representative of a social order which has slipped beyond the control of the general populace and into brute survivalism. He castigates the individual for his own entrapment whilst administering the mechanisms which ensure that such a state endures.

Headphone crown

The final level, the pinnacle of the tower, finds Roland confronting and usurping the power of the Lord of the castle, having first defeated his warrior guard, the samurai version of Ripper who appears once more before the last set of stairs. The Lord is analgous to Roland’s father, Ron, a deliberate similarity in names suggesting the centrality of their relationship to the story. Roland thus completes the reversed (and slightly watered down) Oedipal path which had begun with his encounter with his new mother. In the outer world, Ron is a musician wholly pre-occupied with his ‘sounds’ who lives largely in a headphone world, cut off from communication. In the castle, on his throne, his crown incorporates his headphones and he initially dashes off before Roland can ask his advice. Prompted by a seemingly duplicitous Vein, he forces him to give up the key around his neck at swordpoint, thus acceding to the position of king of the castle. The next episode follows Roland as he attempts to exercise his new found power to make right all the injustices and inequalities which he has encountered along the way. He finds that there is considerable resistance to the imposition of his new systems, logical and enlightened though they might be. His predicament addresses the problems of what to do once have earned the freedom of choice; how do you go about introducing your ideas into the world and affecting change, and what happens when it chooses to resist. The adult world, with its responsibilities and requirements, has to be navigated through negotiation and compromise.

The invisible jury - addressing nobody

The last episode sees Roland put on trial, held responsible for the trail of consequences which lie in the wake of his progress through the tower. This trial scenes conjure a particularly absurdist world and are perhaps what Bob Baker and Dave Martin had in mind when they coined their Kafka for Kids caption. There is certainly an air of Kafka’s Trial about this one. It is also vaguely reminiscent, albeit on a far less grand scale, of the trial at the climax of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. As with David Niven’s airman in that film, who is simultaneously undergoing a critical operation on his brain, the implication is that Roland’s own safe return to the world is dependant on the outcome. The trial ultimately forces Roland to confront himself and be the judge of his own worth, as the vanishing jury suggests.

Upon returning to the real world, Roland goes about putting the lessons which he has learned into practice, facing up to the twin bullies of the headmaster in the cathedral school and Ripper in the high-rise and establishing the possibility of a closer relationship with his father. He also puts away childish things, which in this case consists of his monster models and magazines (including a copy of Hammer House of Horror magazine, I couldn’t help but notice. I wonder if he enjoyed John Bolton’s Father Shandor strip). It is through the resources of his imagination that he has come to feel stronger and more self-reliant in the world at large, however, so they have served their purpose. In this sense, the story is at least in part an argument in favour of the value of the literature and fiction of the fantastic. It acknowledges the dangers of a wholesale retreat into escapism, whilst suggesting that a temporary retreat into an imaginary world can help bring a renewed perspective to the real. He’s also got rid of his Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews posters. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s tempting to read this as a rejection of the fag-end of the prog-rock triple-gatefold era, particularly with Roland sporting a punkish sleeveless T-shirt. Anyway, having asked his dad whether he minds calling him Roland rather than the non-committal ‘son’, the frame freezes (in Quatre Cents Coups style) on his face, and we are left with the image of him smiling. There is a feeling that in the end is a new beginning

King of the Castle

King of the Castle is a remarkably ambitious piece of writing by Baker and Martin, a series whose coherence and thematic richness bears repeated viewing. The inclusion of all the elements which will go into the construction of the fantastic world in the first, real world episode is very skilfully and unobtrusively achieved. The direction is interesting at times, too, particulary at the ends of episodes, where a shot is held and an element of the scene zoomed in upon in short incremental steps. The acting is a little variable, which is understandable given the youth of much of the cast, but serves its purpose. Talfryn Thomas is particularly excellent as Vein (in many ways the major character besides Roland) in a role which gives him a break from his customary comedy Welshmen (he’s good in Doctor Who and the Green Death too, mind). The theme tune is a good, off-kilter version of the I’m The King of the Castle nursery rhyme, with crashing, Messiaen organ chords intruding when the lift is seen to malfunction in a shower of sparks at the end of the credits. King of the Castle was nominated for a BAFTA in 1977 but lost out to another type of children’s story entirely: Oliver Postgate’s colour retellings of the tales of Ivor the Engine. At least they lost out to the best. Bob Baker would eventually collect his BAFTA some twenty-two years later for a similarly hand-crafted piece of animation featuring the characters who he had helped to create (and whose adventures he had scripted from the start): Wallace and Gromit in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’. Baker’s writing partner Dave Martin sadly passed away in 2007, but their co-creation K-9 looks set for a revival in the near future. Find out more, and read about his other projects, at Bob Baker’s entertaining web site.