DON’T BE AFRAID, 'CAUSE THERE’S STILL TIME [507]

In the 2024 film “I Saw the TV Glow”, a trailer for “The Pink Opaque”, the Young Adult Network drama enrapturing the isolated teenagers Maddy and Owen, includes the line, “It can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them”. This hits home toward the end of the film as Owen, eight years older, having resisted the call to escape his passive small-town life, tells himself, “It’s not real if I don’t think about it.”

I heard the second line when I first watched the film, but I only caught the first line on my second viewing. Owen tells himself to dismiss Maddy’s plan to take Owen back to the world of “The Pink Opaque”, to reassume his real identity as a character inside the show itself, having been banished to the “Midnight Realm” of our world by the “Big Bad” Mr Melancholy in the show’s final episode. Hearing the first line clarified to me the peril of staying blinkered to what needs to be confronted.

Films are not made to be watched like TV programmes, screen vastly reduced in size, sound compressed and funnelled down to small speakers, viewing spaces not acoustically optimised. I expected to get the most out of “I Saw the TV Glow” with a second viewing, but I had not expected to need it. So, harking back to my film studies degree, I was in a quiet room by myself, with pen, paper and (this time) a PDF copy of the script on standby, fully prepared to rock footage back and forth to ensure I hear each line correctly. It wasn’t that anyone mumbled their lines, even if the lead characters are teenagers, but I clearly didn’t have the volume up high enough on that first viewing.

I wanted to see “I Saw the TV Glow” for some time – no physical Blu-ray release has happened in the UK, so after a year I resorted to streaming the film, and I was not disappointed. The film’s allegory for the discovery of transgender identity, which I now know is also called the “egg crack” moment, preceded it, its writer/director Jane Schoenbrun reportedly having begun writing the script at the outset of their own transition process. 

The “white draft” of the script, dated 31^st May 2022, had a lot more jumping between different periods of time, which I took as evidence of the cracks appearing in the characters’ reality appeared, but the finished film proceeds more linearly to concentrate on Maddy and Owen’s relationship with the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show “The Pink Opaque”, a title I am guessing is deliberately, well, opaque, only because I don’t know why Cocteau Twins used it as the title of their 1986 compilation album.

Aside from self-inflicted sound issues, I had some frustration “I Saw the TV Glow” on its first viewing. For instance, there is a point where shots of “our world”, presented by the film’s regular widescreen aspect ratio and pin-sharp picture, overlaps with the squarer VHS-quality picture of “The Pink Opaque”, realities passing between resolutions. The second viewing confirmed this already elsewhere as the shots of the show’s character of Isabel are shown are repeated in both forms, and in parallel with Owen in “our world”, which I should really be calling the “Midnight Realm”. Later, as Maddy – or Tara, as she is called in “The Pink Opaque” – has an almighty long speech about what happened to her, how she crossed dimensions, and how she came back to get Owen. The script had Owen watching her monologue as intently as he watched the show, physically breaking up the long passages, but none of these reverse shots made their way into the finished film, making it look easier for Owen to dismiss the story later as a long ramble.

However, what I appreciated on the second viewing were when the parallels were drawn between Maddy and Owen, and Isabel and Tara. The pilot of “The Pink Opaque” had Isabel not knowing what was happening to her as her telepathic powers became apparent, later serving her in defeating foes with Tara, who lived in a different county – in the “Midnight Realm”, Owen can’t say more than a few words to Maddy, but they communicate via cassettes of the show, left in a neutral location to pick up. 

Elements from “The Pink Opaque” also appear in the “Midnight Realm” – an ice cream van, the ghost tattoo from Isabel and Tara’s necks – to reinforce the magic link between the worlds. I never had a show I loved enough to substitute for real life – I loved “The Simpsons” at their age, but not that intently – but with Tara being Maddy’s favourite character, and with her saying the show feels more real than real life, you are primed as an audience for when reality eventually flips...

...which is why Owen, as a character, is confounding. As a trans woman, I initially didn’t have the words for what I was beginning to realise about me, but I got them in the end, and acted upon them. Owen, however, doesn’t appear to make the connection when it is presented to him. As a teenager, he doesn’t know if he likes girls or boys, but he does like TV shows, going so far as saying, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m too nervous to open up and check” – even when he does, he closes himself back up. 

This passivity makes Owen a character without agency, consistently immobilised from saving the day, or himself – when Maddy tells him of his initial plan to leave town, he tells another friend’s mother that he “needs to be grounded”: “You can’t let me leave here with her. I don’t want to leave home.” Through the film, we see an adult Owen in front of a fire, alone in a forest at night – in the end, he puts out the fire.

This makes one scene particularly jarring upon watching it a second time, and after reading the script. Upon seeing the final episode of “The Pink Opaque”, Owen puts his head through his TV screen. His father pulls him out, Owen yelling, “this is not my home! You’re not my father!” He vomits something, obscured by the scratchy neon effect added to it – it is not just the “glow” of the TV, it is meant to be soil, from having been buried alive. You are left to assume this horrific moment was repressed by Owen, or repressed for him.

What starts as psychological horror film becomes a tragedy. The chalk drawings are topped with the message, “There is still time”. I have heard this sentiment, in the same context as “I Saw the TV Glow”, in two songs, Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” and Lisa Lougheed’s “Run With Us” – hell, throw in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” as well. The film does not explicitly say its story acts as a transgender metaphor, although its pink and blue colour palettes acts as a guide, but when a piece of art connects with you, you will see what you need to see, eventually.

AND ALL FOR UNDER A POUND YOU KNOW [506]

"CheapShow" album cover (art by Vorratony - vorratony.bsky.social)

You can never accuse the “CheapShow” podcast of having a surfeit of chodneys in the last ten years, and you can make of that what you will, especially I can’t be objective about how much this show means to me.

When I first wrote about Paul Gannon & Eli Silverman’s podcast in 2020, it had already evolved from its initial premise as an “economy comedy podcast” that brings you “intriguing, nostalgic and detestable items that fell through the cracks of popular culture” into a comedic assault on the English language supported by a panoply of grotty characters, like “Derek & Clive” with “The Goon Show” mixed in. I wish I could remember in which episode Paul said, “it’s all mouth talk, isn’t it”, as the phrase perfectly explains my love of “CheapShow” fringing on a Dadaist rejection of podcast norms like structure, context and sanity.

This culminated in 2023’s episode “The Wedding of Squishy Jim and Madam Ladyplops”, a kind of “Crisis of Infinite Earths” storyline – arguably begun in a 2021 episode that introduced the problematic crooner Bill Donut – that reset the podcast’s universe, leaving initially leaving jobbing actor Grumpy Sessions behind as the Psycho-Pirate that remembers what the world was like. Slowly, some of these characters have come back, as “everything old is new again”, but not as often as they once did – telling yourself not to create characters in a podcast where every utterance could become a name is not going to work, and neither should it.

Something the COVID-19 pandemic innovated in “CheapShow” were episodes that took place outside, taking in narrative-led quests, learning about the history of an area, and spur of the moment walks because the weather is too warm. It is one thing to have a podcast that can be a magazine one week, and an audio drama the next, but when you can no longer predict if the next episode will take place indoors, you realise that podcast formats have nothing against force of will. This is before you even get to the audio quality, setting a high standard that other podcasts rarely attempt, having never come across another that offered selected episodes in mono or stereo.

The level of professionalism that I find in “CheapShow” makes me also appreciate how delightfully ramshackle an episode can become, intentionally or not. The recent episode “Walk Hard with a Vengeance” was a sequel to 2021’s “Die Hard... on a Podcast”, the edifice of the podcast substituting for Nakatomi Plaza, and ending in an existential podcast void, but instead of being a tight, contained 38-minute action drama, the sequel was a two-hour-plus sprawling epic recorded on location at Crystal Palace Park, the tension coming from both whether Paul & Eli could save London from the bombs planted around the park, and whether they could hold themselves and the narrative together until they reached the final showdown, the villain having graciously given them extra time. If they were attempting a simultaneous display of anti-comedy with a critique of Hollywood action movie structure, then it worked.

“CheapShow” marked its tenth anniversary in June 2025 with a series of celebratory episodes, and with an album, released on vinyl record and MP3, available at the link through www.thecheapshow.co.uk. I cannot be objective in telling you how good this album is, and why you should buy it, collecting new and previous songs from the show like “Top Notch Western Romance”, “Teen Yeti’s Delight” and “The Lament of Captain Blueballs”, alongside new routines and interjections from Paul & Eli between the songs.

The reason I cannot be objective is tracks seven and eight on side B: “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” and “The Mayor Requests”, both by myself. I made a video in 2021 about the former, my entry for that year's Urinevision Song Contest, titled “How to Win a Song Contest, apparently”, while the latter, my entry for the following contest in 2023, was about signs dotted around a town reading “The Mayor Requests the Participance of the Inhabitants in the Protection of the Trees” – based on a real sign I once saw on the old city walls in Chichester – and why this was “because of what happened last time”.

I am happy that these songs have been received well over the last few years, and that listeners remember them fondly, but I hope to remain bemused about being on the end of such goodwill and kindness, especially with their being considered worthy of being committed to the physical format of a vinyl record (and, in very limited amounts, MiniDisc). I remember writing and entering “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” to see if I could write a good song, completing “The Mayor Requests” to see if lightning would strike twice – I should write songs more often.

NOW WASH YOUR HANDS [505]

From S.C. Johnson's website - free public tours are available

There was me thinking that the word combination “cellar door” was cited as the most beautiful in the English language by T.S. Eliot, a poet, when it turned out to have been J.R.R. Tolkien, in his position as a philologist, in his lecture “English and Welsh” in October 1955.

As far as I can find, it is not recorded what either of them thought of “Swarfega”. A portmanteau of a local term for oil or grease, and a corruption of the word “eager”, Swarfega originated from Derbyshire as a hand cleaner that could remove heavy-duty dirt without risking your skin. 

 

There is a story that Swarfega was originally intended, as a cleaner for silk stockings, much like Listerine was originally used as a floor cleaner before bad breath was recontextualised as ”halitosis” - it is true that the company that made Swarfega was named Deb, short for “debutante”, but nylon stockings made it to market before Swarfega, and personal experience of the body scrub-like consistency of Swarfega means you wouldn’t use it on anything delicate.

 

The reason any of this came to mind is, well, beyond me - I must have been daydreaming, and the mellifluous tone of “Swarfega” came to mind for no reason at all, inevitably leading to my wondering what the etymology of such a word could be.

 

I feel my thoughts move faster when I am daydreaming, perhaps from exerting little to no control over them, for as soon as I found out that the Deb group had been sold in 2015 to S.C. Johnson, a family company - all their TV ads end the same way - that led me to find out they are otherwise known as Johnson Wax, meaning the ultimate headquarters of Swarfega are now found in the famous Johnson Wax Headquarters building, famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright - now I am interested.

 

What I knew about the headquarters, a US National Historic Landmark where S.C. Johnson continues to be based, that uses brick as red as the Royal Albert Hall, was that Wright did not include windows due to late payments, using skylights instead – this one turns out to be untrue, more the result of preventing it from looking like a traditional building – and that one of the mushroom-shaped supports, columns that continue tapering to the ground, had to be built in order to be destroyed, in order to prove how much weight they could truly support.

 

Looking into the building’s design further, I am surprised by the open-plan arrangement of the “Great Workroom”, ahead of its time for its 1939 opening date, the effectiveness of the Pyrex tube-based skylights, and the display of artistry at every stage, right down to the bespoke clerks’ desks and chairs - I would like one of each. Every single part of the building could have been made more conventionally, but the consideration of whether everything could be designed a different way, with the intent of energising staff, was refreshing.

I felt energised myself by seeing these pictures, and it was down to having “Swarfega” come to mind. It pays to let your mind wander sometimes. 

I’VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING [504]

“How long is a piece of string?” is a question intended to end further questioning, as nothing specific is left to answer. Indeed, I may have asked it to myself to stop deliberating on what topic to discuss here.

As an idiom, it is used where an item, or a thought, has no finite length or end point - you could continue deliberating until you reach an actual end. That may be what I was looking for.

I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a ball of string, or what the previous ball was used for - I must have given it to someone who suddenly realised they needed some string, and I had exactly the right amount on hand. 

One supermarket I visited this week sold a 40-metre ball of string, located among parcel boxes and packing tape, and looking about the same size as any amount of string I would see in similar circumstances. Is this the median length of string, the average amount that the average person needs? Providing a longer piece then becomes a specialist operation, as must be needing it in the first place.

The supermarket’s string would have cost me £1.45 - discovering I had no conception of how much string should actually cost, I also realised I had no idea of the price of a pint of milk, but when I don’t have milk in my coffee, that left one less question to answer.

There is one way to answer my ultimate question, following a cursory search online: two hundred metres. This was for a roll of green-coloured garden twine, and while I could see deals on multiple rolls of string, no single roll exceeded this length. 

There does appear to be an answer for at what length does a piece of string become commercially unviable - anyone needing more than that probably owns the means of production to make it themselves. There are numerous claims, mostly in the United States, to the largest ball of twine on Earth, but I couldn’t verify if various pieces are being tied together in these cases, or if fibres are being twisted together to continue the original piece, and am I sure I want an answer to that? The spectacle of the ball’s eventual size appears to be what’s most important here.

Aside from whether twine counts as string, and avoiding further idioms about “the ties that bind” and so on, the human capacity for curiosity will continue asking questions beyond the point where the answer is found, as I know from experience. If your mind doesn’t like being still, it will look for stimulus from itself. Asking a question that stops debate only invites questions about that question. Here’s a question: did the first person to ask about the length of a piece of string actually need an answer, or was the request then kicked into the long grass. Did they have to call it a day before someone read the riot act to them?

How long is a piece of string? Exactly as long as I need it to be.

YOU’VE MADE ME SO VERY HAPPY [503]

YouTube has become my main portal for listening to music, apparently by mutual agreement.

I still own a Sony Walkman MP3 player, holding thousands of songs in CD-quality FLAC format, alongside the CD themselves, but I mostly have only my phone while on the move, along with the headphones that connect only to that phone. I also still subscribe to YouTube Premium  which, in addition to removing advertising from around all videos, allows uninterrupted listening while my phone is in my pocket. For someone who once said that music is their drug of choice, this is a beneficial arrangement: Google gets my money, and I get unlimited music in good enough quality against the outside noise.

YouTube’s 2024 Recap pegged my listening habits as “The Time Traveller”: “my listening traversed the decades, melodically exploring eras all year long”. The words “lively”, “giddy”, “hopeful” and “rock” were given as overall descriptors. Musical moods were classified, in descending order, as upbeat, uplifting, happy, fun and energising. I was also in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners to Sir Elton John, with Madonna, XTC’s psychedelic pastiche project The Dukes of Stratosphear, and Tears for Fears not far behind. I found myself taking pride in what the data proved and affirmed.

Despite a separate YouTube Music app has been available since 2015, I only use the main app to listen to songs like they were regular videos. Non-music videos are also mostly watched via my television, where I also only get recommended videos based on my subscriptions list, once I blocked several news channels first. This has created, for the YouTube app on my phone at least, an algorithm trained only to recommend music to me – looking at the main page of the app on Friday 4th July 2025 recommended songs to which I had previously listened, songs like them, songs used in other videos I had been watching while using YouTube on my television, or songs I haven’t listened to in a while. The only deviations from this are a strap of the top news stories, from the channels remaining unblocked, and a video titled “Analog[ue] tricks that make a song great”, in case I want to try it myself.

The YouTube algorithm has been so useful to me that the music recommendations it had made has become articles here: “Breaking Down Barriers”, Sir Elton John’s opener from his album “The Fox”, came from recommending the videos made for that album, while a link to his buried psychedelic album “Regimental Sergeant Zippo” alerted me to its existence. My love of the Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) was triggered by one track, “Rydeen”, being used as the background to a video of computer-generated animation. I may have heard “Take Me Home”, from Phil Collins’ enormously successful album “No Jacket Required” on the radio first, but listening to it on YouTube led me the ultra-infectious songs “Only You Know and I Know” and “Who Said I Could”.

I haven’t created a single music playlist in all the years I have used YouTube, only using the generic “Favourites” playlist, where songs sit among regular videos. I find myself sometimes going along with the mixes generated automatically by YouTube if I see songs I want to hear, but I most often make last-second decisions on what to hear next, sometimes acting upon the app’s suggestions. A recent lunchtime at work ran as follows: “Injected with a Poison” by Praga Khan (heard on the radio), “Break Out” by Swing Out Sister (YouTube suggestion), “Fire Brigade” by The Move (suggestion, heard previously), and “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News (suggestion, heard previously).

In all these cases, it was down to personal discretion as to which versions of the songs I heard. From searching artist and song names, do I then hear the official upload made fifteen years ago, or the alternative from an unknown channel from only three years ago? Sometimes, you must wade through numerous uploads to find the official one or settle before you get there. Age of video aside, the highest quality of sound available on YouTube, 256 kbps in AAC format, is equal to an iTunes download, and while I have gone on to buy a CD release to have the better quality, like “No Jacket Required” and “Regimental Sergeant Zippo”, there are many cases where I am not there yet. 

What I am finding myself increasingly doing is using YouTube for music at home as a shortcut over my Walkman – if everything is there, why go to my own library? If the quality is good enough for right now, why delay satisfaction until you get the best quality sound?

The recommendations themselves may also be of concern. I was recommended Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of “Fanfare for the Common Man” – the single edit, thankfully – but follows other recommendations from the 1970s and 80s: ELO, Swing Out Sister, Matt Bianco, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ABBA. The Carpenters, the theme to the BBC drama series “Howard’s Way”... Have I created a greatest hits radio station in my phone without realising, and should I consider it a problem?

This is why I always listen to the radio in addition to YouTube – you need to have someone share something new with you, because they won’t know what you have and haven’t heard.

I’D GET IT ONE PIECE AT A TIME [502]

As far as I know, the 8.2 litre V8 engine found in the gargantuan Cadillac Eldorado coupé and cabriolet from 1970-76 is the largest found in any production car. Originally rated at four hundred brake horsepower, regulatory changes in both emissions and the measuring of a car’s power reduced this to as low as 190 bhp, before Cadillac made the Eldorado an overall smaller car. Performance is unimpressive when viewed today, taking approximately 12.8 seconds to reach 60mph, on its way to a top speed of 110-115 mph, with an average fuel consumption of nine to ten miles per gallon.

In the eyes of a British person, that level of gas guzzling makes it cheaper to take the bus, before I also realised that figure is in American gallons, equivalent to about 7.5-8.3 miles per imperial gallon. Even if you don’t care about the environment, those figures would make you weep.

The existence of these different units of measurement can be found in the UK’s Weights and Measures Act 1824, which introduced standardised Imperial units for use throughout the British Empire. Meanwhile, the United States customary system of units, themselves standardised in 1832, derive from the previous British system that remained in use after the US became an independent country.

Encountering American units is a novelty for me because while imperial measurements have remained alongside the metric system in the UK, efforts to make businesses voluntarily comply with the system ended in 1980 [https://www.leighspence.net/2022/06/sixteen-tons-and-what-do-you-get-347.html], while certain units like cubic inches, bushels, furlongs, hundredweights and stones were prevented from use in trade by the Weights and Measures Act 1985, despite a 2020 amendment making them permissible to use as supplementary to other units. 

Therefore, a bottle of Diet Coke being described as twenty fluid ounces, or 1¼ pints, rather than just 591 millilitres was, for me, funny at the time, but also completely wrong. There used to be different measurements for different uses, like troy ounces and pounds for precious metals, and apothecary units for medicines, but the existence of separate wine gallons and ale gallons before Imperial standardisation explains why the American pint measure is too small: Britain continued with an amended ale gallon, adopting the standard 568 ml pint, while the Americans continued using the wine gallon.

Looking at Cadillac’s website today showed their non-electric cars’ engine capacity is now described in litres – the 8.2 litre Eldorado engine had instead described in advertising as 500 cubic inches, using the more common unit for car engine comparison at the time. Their page for the 2025 Escalade-V instead puts power output (682 bhp) and torque ahead of engine capacity, an added supercharger making the 6.2 litre engine size less of a factor in overall power. Elsewhere, the vehicles dimensions, from length and width to legroom and cargo space, is quoted in inches, or hundredths of inches (front legroom = 44.51”).

The most visible attempts at metrication in the UK was the decimalisation of Pound Sterling in 1971 [https://www.leighspence.net/2019/03/five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-i-love.html], followed three years later by teaching metric weights and measurements in schools. Meanwhile, the metric system in the United States was legally recognised and protected in 1866, and the Metric Conversion Act 1975 made it the preferred system for weights and measures in US trade and commerce. 

However, this voluntary nature, and the continued teaching of both American and metric measures in schools, means both Britain and America are content to use two concurrent systems, the metric system linking them both. That the United States dollar has equalled one hundred cents since it was introduced in 1792, before the metric system was adopted by either country in any other form, appears to be a total anomaly.

THE BLAST THAT TEARS THE SKIES [501]

Before today, I have only seen Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2004 anime “Steamboy” once, just after its English dub had been released. I remember it wasn’t in ideal circumstances: it is one of only two films I have seen while on a plane, the other being “The Matrix”, but while I had seen that film many times - I hoped the gun fire would keep me awake during the long-haul flight - I was also able to fill in the detail lost by the reduced resolution of the smaller screen and the drone of the jet engines. Therefore, while I have watched “Steamboy”, I have only seen as much of it as watching it on your phone would allow today.

This would not do considering the level of detail in Otomo’s production, rivalled in animation perhaps only by his own masterpiece, “Akira” (1988), effectively the cyberpunk counterpart to “Steamboy’s” steampunk portrayal of industrial Manchester and London. I can now properly see the application of computer-generated imagery in whirling cogs and machinery, and into the moving of our view within spaces, or around objects. Over four hundred shots in “Steamboy” use CGI, and these can only be noticed closely through how these elements move ever so slightly differently from hand-drawn elements, none of which you can see on a smaller screen.

The science fiction author K.W. Jeter coined the term “steampunk” in 1987 to group together “gonzo-historical” works by the likes of himself, Michael Moorcock and Faren Miller, while a tradition of Japanese fascination with Victorian industrial Europe was evident in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky”, released in 1986.

What I remembered of “Steamboy” was its having been set in the UK, and an “Akira”-like build-up and explosion. Watching it for the second time confirmed Manchester as the base where which the Industrial Revolution continuously pushed steam power as far as it could go - the Steam family is at the centre of these developments, in rivalry with Robert Stephenson, the real-life son of George Stephenson, around which a web of military and corporate espionage rages. The MacGuffin of the story is the “steam ball”, a pressurised power source with near-unlimited energy that defies explanation, Working much like a battery, three “steam balls” power a “Steam Castle”, built as a private pavilion at Great Exhibition taking place in London, which sheds its conventional armour to become a fortress that flies uncontrollably into the centre of London, destroying buildings as it goes.

I loved the film, with its sense of family humanising the machinery. I watched the full-length English dub of the film, with Sir Patrick Stewart as grandfather Lloyd Steam, Alfred Molina as father Edward Steam, and Anna Paquin as James Ray Steam, all highly inventive and intuitive about steam power to make science seem like magic, the metaphor of man becoming machine rendered literally in Edward to his detriment. The emotional pressure to succeed in their ambitions and to save the day helps to explain and mask the literal pressure of the machinery, which I only understood as far as the story needed me to understand it. However, having the corporate element of the military industrial complex being represented by a conglomerate head’s daughter, an analogue and namesake of Scarlett O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind” was a strange choice, but with there being no other female character for much of the film, you let that flourish slide.

The voices of Stewart and Molina, using their own accents, was perfect casting, but the Victorian industrial and imperial British setting was a lot to take in. I am very aware of my country’s history, but I know not to choke on the nostalgia of it: I visited post-industrial Manchester in 2019, stayed in a hotel that formerly housed a bonded warehouse and a hat factory; saw a still-working loom in the Museum of Science of Industry, with George Stephenson’s Rocket in the foyer; followed the disused train tracks alongside the new tram lines; and saw the rejuvenated media centre of Salford Quays, alongside the gallery of works by L.S. Lowry. Meanwhile, the might of the Royal Navy pored over in the London scenes highlighted both how much of its income the UK spent on defence at the time, and how many wars it expected to fight simultaneously at the drop of a hat.

I will be watching “Steamboy” again, but not until I see “Akira” once more. Ultimately, I spent much of my time watching the film thinking there will come a time when someone discovers electricity, and everything I have seen so lovingly depicted here will be wiped away, but I am more cyberpunk-minded than steampunk. Watch “Steamboy” for the family, but not for the nostalgia.

I’M BACK IN THE VILLAGE AGAIN [500]

Cover to The Ron Grainer Orchestra's soundtrack album

Surrounded by films, TV series and albums that I “will get to eventually”, my next experience must call out to me.

I do not understand how it took until two weeks ago before seeing, for the first time, “The Prisoner”, the postmodern and psychological science fiction spy drama that was first broadcast by ITV in 1967, but it arrived at the perfect moment.

I was in the right mood for a story about an individual shorn of their identity, dumped in a place where they must conform, their name and clothes assigned to them, kept constantly under surveillance, and forced to undergo psychological mind games to reveal information about the decisions they made.

Of course, for an allegorical story where all the characters are numbered, its setting and plots are surreal, individuality pitted against collective community, and need driving motive – for freedom, for information – its audience sees what it wants to see, and I am glad the premise wasn’t made more specific for that reason. I realised my above description of “The Prisoner” could also fit “The Matrix”, Neo being forced to exist as “Thomas Anderson” until they escaped the reality created for them.

I am fortunate that I watched “The Prisoner” by myself, forming my own view of it without knowledge of the extensive industry of merchandise, including clothing, further novels and comic books, and many books analysing the series – I will get to them all eventually.

What started this journey was ITV’s placing of the first episode, “Arrival”, on their YouTube channel “ITV Retro”, alongside episodes of “Thunderbirds”, “Stingray” and “Sapphire & Steel”. Not having uploaded subsequent episodes fast enough, I moved to ITVX, their own streaming service, where they saw fit to add four breaks for advertisements in each 48–50-minute episode – my solution was to watch at 10pm, when there was less inclination to sell to me.

I liked that I didn’t initially think Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six – we never learn his real name – was a spy. Someone living in a London townhouse and driving a Lotus Seven he built himself doesn’t automatically make Number Six a continuation of McGoohan’s John Drake from “Danger Man”, a show I’ve never seen. He could have been a civil engineer, or the inventor of a bottomless bag of peanuts – recalling the only time McGoohan reprised the role, on “The Simpsons” in 2000 – also with sensitive information wanted by the organisation behind The Village, represented by the constantly changing Number Two.

The opening titles justify their three minutes of total length, portraying McGoohan as a forcefully determined individual – indeed, he is the only person to appear in every episode – driving his Lotus into Westminster, walking down a long corridor to resign his unnamed position, thunderclaps accompanying Ron Grainer’s theme tune. Gassed at home while packing for a holiday, notably by a man in black driving a hearse – the fade to black after McGoohan passes out invites guesses on the reality of everything that follows – and waking up to find both himself and his room transplanted to The Village, we get the barest of explanatory dialogue, indicating where they have ended up, what they are being called, who is talking to them, what they want, and what they won’t say – who is “Number One”.

McGoohan is perfect as Number Six – headstrong, resourceful and confident, with a sense of self that does not rely on anyone else. He knows exactly who he is – not having to explain what that is to anyone should be taken as a given, not as a challenge. I would hope that, if I found myself in a similar situation, I would know when to fight, but I know the situation portrayed in “The Prisoner” is an allegory taking things to extremes, but you should always be on guard for when things take a turn.

In making The Village a pleasant, controlled community that Number Six ideally will never leave, what stops me from wanting to go there for a week was being unable to identify inmates from their guards, everyone a possible informant. With the Edwardian clothing and festive air abounding, does The Village evoke nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler, and everyone knew their place? Whether or not, the look of it did make me search for room rates at the Hotel Portmeirion during while watching the first episode.

My favourite episodes were early in the series’ run, balancing contemporary psychedelia and Cold War paranoia with themes of dream manipulation (“A. B. and C.”), doppelgangers and identity theft (“The Schizoid Man”), indoctrination (“The General”) and conformity (“A Change of Mind”) – being labelled in the latter episode as “unmutual” is as good as “cancelled” today, including the psychological torture, but without the simulated lobotomy. 

However, constant surveillance in “The Prisoner” means that any story could be subjected to “deus ex machina”: any character sympathetic to Number Six could really be working for Number Two, or think that Number Six is there to test their loyalty, while any location to which Number Six escapes could be part of The Village. Any scene could cut to Number Two watching the same view on a screen, camera seemingly available at all known points, commenting on the action, and revealing that all we have seen was under their control the whole time, because that is the community that The Village creates.

I don’t know if invention or necessity led to later episodes becoming more outlandish in their approach to storylines: transplanting Number Six’s mind another man’s body, McGoohan filming elsewhere at the time; beginning one episode as a Western, titled “Living in Harmony”, with Number Six as a sheriff who resigns for his own reasons, then imprisoned for his own safety, finally revealed as a roleplay using hallucinogenic drugs; and “The Girl Who Was Death”, featuring Number Six undercover as an English colonel, and later in a Sherlock Holmes costume, was really Number Six telling a story to children in a nursery, Number Two’s hope being that he would drop his guard enough among them to reveal more about himself.

I have since read that McGoohan wanted “The Prisoner” to be a seven-episode mini-series, but production company ITC, run by Lew Grade, who also owned ITV franchise ATV, wanted a twenty-six-episode series he could sell to American networks – what was hoped to be two thirteen-part series became one of seventeen, that took over a year to shoot. “The Prisoner” ultimately aired on CBS on Saturday nights during the summer of 1968, in place of “The Jackie Gleason Show”, directly opposite NBC’s broadcasts of Roger Moore in “The Saint”, another of Grade’s series. 

Most fortunately for watching “The Prisoner” today is its having been filmed in colour, again required to sell the show abroad, meaning I can enjoy a high-definition transfer of the original 35mm elements today, light years from the murky 405-line black and white TV standard in the UK of 1967. An odd outcome of this situation is revealing the artifice that would have been covered on first broadcast – back projection, photographed and painted backdrops, studio sets replicating outside scenes – that I chose to interpret as further evidence of the covert operations by Number Two and The Village, a further layer that no-one ever intended. However, iconic as it is, the “Rover” weather balloon monster, looks silly no matter how you look at it.

As famous as McGoohan’s cry from the end of the opening titles, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” is a line from the opening episode: “I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.” To get by in the real world, where the footprint of your identity is on record to make your day run, I realise that I must agree to all the above, but I want them to be correct – if we are all to be “prisoners”, as the show insinuates, then allow me some agency. I can admire Number Six, but I don’t want to be in his tennis shoes.

I’M WORKIN’ ON MY REWRITE [499]

In “The Further Adventures of an Artificial Intelligence Refusenik”, I have realised that, if I ever need to prove that I am indeed the author of anything to which I have placed my name, I may need to go back to writing out that work longhand or, at the very least, plan them out using pen and paper.

This may sound like the latest stop on a road to paranoia, but for as much flak as people gave Ed Sheeran for revealing how he employs a videographer to record his songwriting process, to avoid further lawsuits over perceived breaches in copyright, his need for incontrovertible proof of his own creative ability speaks of how much the assertion of authorship has, well, been taken as written up to now.

I have found it hard to write much in a creative capacity recently because the presence of A.I. makes the act of writing mechanical in a way that threatens my dream of making it a livelihood, a threat I could not have envisaged when I started writing articles in 2016. The continued use of A.I. may require people to prove they did not use it to write anything, from a letter to a news article, from a short story to a complete novel. Rather than just needing to have something in my writing to help make me stand out, or to protect my ability to write, what we all need is something that proves that consideration was made into what words were used.

What highlighted this issue to me the most — although, to be honest, sniping about A.I. reliably rouses me anyway — was the use of em-dashes. The apparent story regarding these is that, because the ChatGPT program uses em-dashes as its default dash, not distinguishing its use with that of an en-dash or a hyphen, marks it as a red flag. An em-dash is used when you want to make a separate point within a sentence, like I did two sentences ago, but I know I am guilty of not selecting the correct dash while typing, which ironically could save me here.

It makes me wonder if this is acting as a kind of A.I. “watermark”, like imperceptible watermarks that can be added to A.I.-generated images, an irony when A.I. is often used to remove more visible ones. If A.I. doesn’t know when to use the right dash, but consistently uses the same wrong one, is this evidence of a wrong-footed style that acts as a deterrent for people to choose their own words instead? 

Not really, as while Google has created an open-source “SynthID” that records the weighting given to the choice of words by its text-generating programs, something similar is required for every other program that does the same. Until then, self-declaration is the name of the game, suggesting its own questions of motive depending on the answer.

People shouldn’t be left with the words they need to get by, or to have them mean enough for what they need. Playfulness needs to replace the paranoia. All we have our words, which I will need to write in ink.

YOU CAN’T START A FIRE WITHOUT A SPARK [498]

Procrastination is the defining style of my writing, a last-minute culmination of what I have sent too long thinking about. That it does not read this way is more a testament to the craft of writing, the “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration” of committing yourself to completing a cogent work hundreds of times.

Despite this, I would rather my writing not become a race. For example, I was recently asked to write a witness statement for someone completing an apprenticeship course. Once I knew the date for when it was needed, that immediately allowed myself into thinking I need not write anything at all until nearer the time, but I had the time to think of what I needed to include. Meanwhile, I started to worry too much about the small things: how precise in detail did I need to be, and how long did the statement need to be – things that were not specified, but might make a difference to who needed the finished piece.

In the end, the completed statement, delivered on the day before it was needed, was exactly what that person required, and I need not have worried, despite having manoeuvred myself into a position where I did. What was worse, it took only minutes to write, but I gave myself a week of thinking time.

Therefore, I have sought to address this problem, making my writing process more productive. Ironically, I had wanted to conduct this earlier, but the copy I ordered of Robert Boice’s book “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” was lost in the post, requiring me to order it again. While geared towards academic writing, the book’s direct approach was recommended to me as an aid to self-discipline – it is not just a matter of turning up earlier, it was what happens once there.

The major draw for me was a “Blocking Questionnaire” devised and standardised by Boice in tests on hundreds of people, its categories used across the book to help you locate the advice you then need. Broken into three sections, you are asked to assess a series of reactions to facing a tough writing assignment, the emotions that creates in yourself, and how you would approach completing it. With procrastination only one possible bock, I was interested if it was my only block, or a symptom of something larger.

Sixty-nine considerations later, the most memorable being “I’ll feel like writing if I do something else first”, and “If I were working efficiently, writing would come more easily, in more finished form”, my “Overall Blocking Mean Score” came to 5.13, just tipping from an indicator of inefficient writing into there being more serious problems, with recurring disruptive blocks. However, the maximum possible score was 10, so I was assured that any identifiable problems would be easier to address.

Categorising my scores revealed a more interesting issue: with little between them, procrastination was ranked joint third with apprehension about the work at hand, with “perfectionism” being a larger factor, and “rules” being largest of all.

What should I take from these results, apart from reading the rest of “Professors as Writers” to address them? I have more insight into what is either causing procrastination, or what it is covering. Based on the answers I gave, the blocks appear to be more emotionally and socially led. I have no problem with writing itself, but how writing makes me feel, and thoughts of how others will react, matter more – then again, they always do.

“Rules” was not an answer I expected, but the rules I put around completing the witness statement shows they do have an effect. I have been setting myself the target of completing a weekly article on various subjects, at five hundred-plus words in length, but that is more a deadline, or obligation, set outside of the act of actually completing it – at least, that is how I think of it, but is the act of setting myself a task triggering the construction of barriers, when all I have to answer to is myself? Time to read the rest of the book...

CAN’T YOU FEEL THE TOWN EXPLODING? [497]

I decided to use the famous shot of Buser Keaton being framed by the window in a falling wall, from his 1928 film “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, to illustrate exactly how I have felt since the UK Supreme Court decided that, for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act, that transgender women did not count as women – I would have been flattened by the wall, had I not known where my marker was, which in Keaton’s case was a nail.

The monolithic stature and sheer audacity of the stunt means its context is rarely considered. After an hour of a comedy plot involving a rivalry between paddle boat owners, into which an effectual son of one captain arrives, along with his girl friend from college, a cyclone comes in to destroy the harbour town, at which point it becomes a disaster film – Keaton, in hospital, looks up as the building is torn away. His bed is blown through a street and a stable, avoiding falling masonry, until it stops outside a house – its occupant, seeing a crack opening the side of the house, jumps out of the top floor window and onto the bed, saving his life. Keaton, looking obliviously into the street, does not see the façade as it then falls, effectively entering the window the man had just leapt from. 

From there, every possible physical gag about walking into the wind, and last-second avoiding crumbling buildings, leads to a final escape on the steamboat. It is an extremely well-handled sequence, coming from someone either supremely confident in their ability to conceive and execute these stunts so effectively, or so lax in their judgement to have endangered themselves so recklessly in the name of entertainment, financial problems and alcohol abuse having contributed to the latter narrative. 

“Steamboat Bill, Jr” was also the last of Keaton’s films to be made independently, before a move to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that saw his creative control gradually eliminated. His previous distributor, United Artists, had already began to insist on the monitoring of expenses after Keaton deployed the most expensive shot in silent film history, the destruction of a steam engine and a railway bridge in “The General” (1926). The cyclone sequence in “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, one seventh of the film’s running time but one third of the budget, replaced a planned flood sequence, although a real-life river flood also forced this change. In short, as Keaton reached his creative peak, he was becoming less trusted.

As I said, I knew where my marker was. I have held a Gender Recognition Certificate since 2017, having done everything required of me to prove my status as a transgender woman was stable and permanent. My gender was changed in law for all purposes, as the Gender Recognition Act 2004 stated. At no point was anyone telling me that I didn’t know myself, or that I am instead autistic or have borderline personality disorder because it fit the limits of their understanding. I am perfectly fine, and the matter was settled.

Since the Supreme Court decision on Wednesday 16^th April to define “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean “biological” sex, because we all speak of ourselves in terms of washing powder now, it has felt like open season on trans people, despite gender reassignment being protected under the same act. I have been most perturbed by the tendency for the Supreme Court decision to have settled the matter morally, that trans people were never what they said they were, but I think the people saying that now only do so because they feel emboldened. So what – the terms “gender ideology” and “gender critical” appeared years after my formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and the phrase “live and let live” pre-dates all of them.

In May 2025, there are too many reasons to be apprehensive. Interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission appears to ban trans people both from the bathroom of their appropriate gender, and from their biological sex in certain situations, presumably if they “pass” in their gender too much, but I can’t be allowed to have nowhere to go. I can also still play a sport, so long as the association providing it is comprised of no more than twenty-five people. This is ahead of full guidance expected in the coming months. Meanwhile, I wrote to my MP asking for confirmation that my legal paperwork is still valid – I await their answer.

But I have not been made an outlaw. I have not been deemed an undesirable presence in society. Enough people treat trans people with dignity and respect to balance out those who say they should be, then do nothing more. 

Unlike Buster Keaton, I don’t feel that people have less trust in me because of my situation, but other people could not trust themselves with the subject and concept of gender, so it has been decided for them absolutely. Policing of gender will now be unavoidable – can you prove yours?

I’ll be fine, somehow – I think the law may still be on my side. In the meantime, hoping and coping produced the following playlist, unexpectedly all from the 1970s:

The Real Thing - Can You Feel The Force

Jackson Browne - Doctor My Eyes

Fleetwood Mac - Don’t Stop

Wings - With a Little Luck

David Bowie - Starman

Elton John - Crazy Water

Slade – How Does It Feel

AM I LIVING IN A BOX? [496]

For as much as the film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920) is celebrated for bringing German Expressionism to cinema, while providing the foundations on which the horror film genre were built, the first thing it brings to my mind was its having been filmed entirely inside a studio whose floor measured only six by six metres, or about twenty feet each way – I don’t know if it was a cube.

Finding the space to make a film is never a concern for anyone watching the finished work, but it may dictate if that film can be made at all, whether by availability, permission or cost. However, knowing it is perfectly possible to produce a multi-layered work of art, encompassing many locations and actors, within the dimensions of a large living room, means that nothing is impossible, so long as you can scale your production to that space.

To that end, the theatrical painted backdrops of “Caligari” work to provide setting, mood, light and depth, although not necessarily depth of field – if it were not for actors appearing in front of them, the backdrop props and floor could have appeared to be one painting. They are surreal, almost medieval, and designed to unsettle, appearing like stark, monochromatic prints from woodcuts.

There is conjecture about how “Caligari” came to be portrayed in a German Expressionist style, as it was not stipulated in a surviving script, just as there is conjecture over whether its framing story, planting the tale of a doctor using a somnambulist to murder people into the mind of an asylum patient, was mandated to make the story easier for audiences to handle. To me, it doesn’t matter: the film’s imagery is burned into my retinas, just as the eyes of the somnambulist Cesare look through you.

Few other films look like “Caligari”, but its constricted studio size and low budget adds to a notion that the film’s bold artistic choices were made due to the practical concerns of when it was in production from 1919-20. Lighting effects were also much harder to achieve in the silent film era, making the painting of contrasting blacks and whites onto the backdrops – and, through make-up, onto the actors – an easier path to achieving contrast. 

The small Lixie-Film studio, located in the Weissensee area of Berlin, was originally built in 1914, at a time when many film studios were still essentially greenhouses, trying to catch as much natural light as possible, in any way possible – attempts in chiaroscuro in early silent films would have been made with natural light. Carbon arc lights were only introduced in 1912, entering theatres before being adapted for filmmaking, and with film stock at the time being insensitive to red light rendered tungsten-based incandescent lighting as useless. The manufacture of film stock sensitive to the whole colour spectrum would begin in 1927, just as adding sound to motion pictures became a further headache for studios to overcome.

The expressionistic effect of “Caligari” has taken on a different meaning for me on more recent viewings. I initially saw it in rather poor public domain prints, the outlines of what the art direction intended reducing details down to shades and impressions of light and darkness. Subsequent restorations of the film, and Blu-ray and 4K home editions, means that individual brushstrokes can be properly admired, painting light as much as painting with light.

I SEE THE PEOPLE WORKING, AND SEE IT WORKING FOR THEM [495]

It may be strange that I even have notes to share on using a laptop computer, as more people than not will have a computer in this form. However, I have only started using one in the last month, which was not by choice, and my experience has reinforced why I would not do so willingly.

The computer I use at work was initially a desktop computer, a “tower PC” housing a large motherboard and spinning hard drive. This was later replaced by a “thin client” desktop PC that used a smaller solid state drive, used less power, and more similar to the specifications you can find in a laptop computer – as battery capacity has improved, and as processors’ power consumption has been reduced, any remaining gaps caused by compromising for a more mobile form factor have been reduced or eliminated.

The local final step has been reached, and I have now been given a laptop computer to use. I have never been given a laptop to use before, and I have never considered buying one myself, and I remembered looking at this thing like I was a caveman discovering fire. My immediate thoughts were that I hated the tiny keyboard and trackpad – I really can only use a full keyboard and mouse, having the space on a desk to do that – and the screen was too small, despite being of average laptop size.

This laptop was not for me to work from home, as I don’t do that, but it does keep me at work marginally longer by physically taking it out of a locked drawer every day, then packing it away at the end. The secure internet connection that was required was easier to implement through software, but it means more manually logging into programs and remembering login details to work.

Instead of having two screens on my desk, I have now also been introduced to the idea of the monitor-based docking station, the keyboard and mouse from my old computer now plugging into the one monitor left on my desk, to which the laptop connects through a USB-C cable and becomes the secondary screen, half the size of the one it replaced. It looks odd, and it makes me want to get an eye test despite being due one anyway.

On top of this, I am afraid of breaking the thing. It has a plastic case, and I have already once dropped it into its locked drawer harder than I expected, so I am dreading when I will fracture a corner, or break a hinge, or open and close the laptop enough times to over-flex the ribbon connector between the screen and the rest of the unit. The act of locking, in an eclosed space, an electrical device still warm from over eight hours of use, still gives me reason for concern – the desktop unit stayed in the open.

Of course, this is all nitpicking. Advances in computing, components and miniaturisation mean that the components of the average consumer computer will be similar regardless of whether you have a desktop or laptop model, and previous compromises that had to be made for a more mobile form factor no longer apply, battery capacity on laptops now allowing for all-day use on one charge – the difference between desktop and laptop is now down to personal preference, unless you require a gaming PC with enough fans to keep the processors cool.

But when you are given a situation where wireless internet connections drop out because you need to log back into a program to re-establish it, or when you realise the USB-C connection wasn’t charging the laptop at the same time, or the mouse suddenly stops working for some reason, you realise that solutions for many still involve compromises for some. For me, thankfully having the space at home for a desktop setup, desktop computers are the simpler choice because they cause less anxiety - mostly because I only have to use them, not handle them.

YOU CAN'T PUSH IT UNDERGROUND [494]

Lately, I have come to feel that I am always running out of time. I may start the day with a to-do list in my mind, and the best of intentions, but deadlines abound: what do you need to get done, or have ready, before you leave home, start work, or before you go to bed? What free time does a working day leave you, and how much drive you possess to use that time productively as well? Or should you wait until the weekend, and will you have the energy to do anything about it then?

This predicament nearly derailed my attempts to put something out this week. For the record, and in case I ever change it, I put out a social media message every Friday to say what I will be writing about for the coming weekend - this is a practice I picked up from old 1950s drive-in films, particularly Ed Wood films like “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, where the poster would be created first to generate the interest, and hopefully funding, to make the film. This time, I realised that at no point during the preceding week, I had given any thought, or put aside any time to think, what I could possibly be writing about next.

When I first thought of squaring the circle, of addressing the problem by making it the subject, I initially dismissed the idea as a pathology that needed to be worked out in its own time, and not as a discussion to be reasoned with towards a conclusion. For me, it boils down to a feedback loop: an anxiety over not being productive enough with my own free time, and the linear nature of time itself, where every moment is a moment you won’t have again, which creates anxiety. In terms of addressing it, this will again be something to ringfence time to properly address it – ironically, that might also be the answer.

Two resources have been sent my way to address these from different angles: “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” by Robert Boice, a book with comprehensive diagnostic tools to assess productivity problems, and to build and maintain – I got a laugh from randomly opening at a page where someone had told Boice, “My God, you’re asking us to change our whole lifestyles!”, only to be told that they were the ones in control. The other was an article by Oliver Burkeman titled “The unproductivity challenge”, attempting to address the “completionist urge” by setting aside time to do nothing at all: “You’ll be claiming your right to exist, and to enjoy existing, regardless of your productivity.”

I may not be able to shake off the feeling that everything I have written here is a placeholder where a better idea for an article would have been, but this is the problem when you have an obligation to yourself to produce something new each week.

DON’T BLAME THIS SLEEPING SATELLITE [493]

As soon as I realised the cover date, I knew I had to take it. I had come across an eBay listing for a TV listings magazine where many of the programmes listed were never broadcast or never made.

Once it arrived, the only portent was in a corner of the contents page: “Readers of BSB TV Month will be aware of the merger between BSB and SKY which has resulted in the formation of a powerful new force in British television – British Sky Broadcasting. Unfortunately, news of the merger was announced too late for the exciting changes to be incorporated in this month’s issue.”

This merger was announced on 2nd November 1990, which I have talked about previously [https://www.leighspence.net/2023/10/did-we-fly-to-moon-to-soon-418.html], but on screens, it would appear as a takeover. The cover date of the magazine was 1st December 1990 to 1st December 1991 – British Satellite Broadcasting’s Now, the current affairs and arts channel ceased broadcasting on 1st December 1990, followed the next day by the Galaxy entertainment channel, with any programmes saved being folded into Sky One and Sky News. BSB’s competitor with MTV, The Power Station, would eventually end in April 1991, while their functionally-named The Sports Channel and The Movie Channel would continue under Sky branding.

You wouldn’t know any of this from reading “BSB TV Month”. The image of BSB contained within it is of a very bullish broadcaster ready to put on a show for the coming Christmas, ready to build on its successes into 1991, but the background story of the ruinously expensive launching of a satellite, getting dishes onto people’s homes, and then forcefully competing with Sky leading to an impasse and merger, creates the hindsight that renders the entire enterprise as hubris. What is worse, many of BSB’s shows were never kept following the merger, so all I have of these are the listings in this magazine.

Galaxy opened up each weekday morning with their children’s programming block, Galaxy Club. Its idents showed four human-sized letters with legs that spell CLUB, but the magazine tells us they have names and personalities: noisy Clive, quiet Lucy, bossy Una and brainy Benjamin. They are rarely on screen long enough for this to matter. Its flagship shows were “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”, renamed in the UK to avoid references to ninjas; “Kid’s Court”, its version of the Nickelodeon dilemma-solving show, hosted by Andrew O’Connor; and “Playabout”, an analogue to the BBC’s “Play School” featuring (now Baroness) Floella Benjamin. Also seen during the day would be soap operas, like CBS’s continuing shows “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless”, alongside BSB’s own “Jupiter Moon”, a sci-fi soap set on a space station university, and produced by former “Crossroads” and “The Archers” producer William Smethurst – this is just about the only BSB show ever to be released later on DVD.

Now opened each morning at 8.00am with “The Day Today”, a straightforward news round-up now only notable for how Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci used that name four years later for their satirical show – BSB’s own satire was on Galaxy at 10.30pm each night, in the oddly-named “Up Yer News!” Both shows were fifteen minutes in length, and a lot of similarly short shows appear all over Now’s schedule twice a day: cookery show “Plat Du Jour”; a show simply titled “Parenting”; topical interviews in “V.I.P.”; consumer show “You Can Do It”; and viewer write-in discussions with “Now Listen”. Perhaps their brief length was to try and catch their audience at various times, and to fill up the remainder of the hour left when Selina Scott’s current affairs show, “First Edition”, Sir Robin Day’s “Now Sir Robin”, Ann Leslie’s “Answer Time” and Geraldo Rivera’s chat show ended after forty-five minutes.

BBC Worldwide and Thames Television launched UK Gold, the first channel essentially dedicated to repeat broadcasts of old favourites, in 1992, but until then, Galaxy filled spaces across its evening schedule with BBC sitcoms like “Are You Being Served?”, “Till Death Us Do Part”, “The Young Ones”, “Porridge” and “Dad’s Army”, with “Doctor Who” and “Grange Hill” shown at the weekend. More current imported comedy shows also featured like “Night Court”, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”, “Murphy Brown” and “Kids in the Hall”, described as “Python for the 90s”. Drama would be older BBC shows Like “Secret Army” or newer imports like “Hill Street Blues”, “Hotel” and “China Beach”. Completing the “something for everyone” effect was evening quiz show “One False Move” and “31 West”, an entertainment show similar to how BBC One begins each evening with “The One Show”. Of particular note is Saturday night’s “The Happening”, a cabaret hosted by Jools Holland from London’s Astoria, its atmosphere perhaps feeding into his “Later... with Jools Holland” on the BBC. 

For the record, The Power Station, while opening each weekday morning with “Power Up with Chris Evans”, the radio DJ’s first TV show, includes a “Power Hour” of different genres each day, chart shows also by genre, a youth culture magazine named “Sushi TV”, and a heavy emphasis on live concerts in the evening, ranging from Faith No More to Rick Wakeman and Kenny G – its mix appears a bit more VH1 than MTV, if that still makes any sense.

So far, so good. “BSB TV Month” assumes you are buying the magazine because you are already watching the channels – there is no explanation of how to obtain the service, or how much it costs, for people wanting to find more, apart from enticing existing subscribers to opt into The Movie Channel for an extra £8.99 per month. (It seems that the standard subscription cost for the decoder box and other four channels was around £12.99 per month, on top of the initial £250 installation cost via Comet stores.) The rest of the magazine’s advertisements aim upmarket, with the new Ford Orion saloon, Pioneer hi-fi systems, the Lego Technic range and Fisher Price, while a company in Wales is selling a box to broadcast your decoder box’s signal to other TVs in your house, something apparently illegal if the signal is over 10mW in strength.

If BSB had reached Christmas Day unscathed, what would they have broadcast? Bill Murray in “Scrooged” adorned the front cover of “BSB TV Month”, its lunchtime showing on The Movie Channel followed by “Time Bandits”, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and “Crocodile Dundee II”. Now, extending its weekend arts programmes into Monday, would have showed a ballet of “Sleeping Beauty”, and Placido Domingo leading Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore”. Galaxy, meanwhile, were showing their regular programmes alongside Christmas specials of “Porridge” and “Steptoe and Son” – this would also have been the plan for Boxing Day. The BBC didn’t show them that Christmas, but neither were they showing “Up Yer News!”