THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE RIGHT BACK [513]

We already know nothing comes for free, and signing up to receive a free television has compromises for its viewer. 

The “Telly”, taking a generic, colloquial name for its own, and only available in the United States at present, is exactly that, a free TV, and one that receives channels over the air in addition to the internet. Furthermore, it has two screens: a 4K HDR “Theater Display”, and a second strip screen under the built-in soundbar, a “Smart Screen” that acting as an assistant for video calls, news, weather and other information, while acting as the settings menu for the device without overlaying the main picture...

It also constantly plays ads. They cannot be turned off. Turning off the “Theater Display” won’t turn off the “Smart Screen” – only turning off the entire unit will do this. Blocking that part of the screen violates the user agreement.

I first heard about the “Telly” through the technology website The Verge, and Emma Roth’s review of it that begins: “The last few months, I’ve felt like I’m living in a cyberpunk movie.” The delivery driver brought Roth’s Telly to her house queried her about it, saying he read that the device takes its user’s data: “‘I know,’ I said, ‘That’s basically part of the deal.’”

The “cyberpunk” nature of the device is in line with similar stories I have seen recently about some Chinese toilets purportedly requiring users to scan a QR code and see an advertisement before receiving toilet paper, and Samsung showing ads on screens embedded into their smart fridges.

The answer from Telly Inc. to the question, “If Telly is free, how do you make money?”, sounds reasonable at the very least: “All smart TVs come with ads. But you’re still paying for the TV. All of that changes with Telly. Telly is so smart, that it pays for itself with the help of advertisers and data partners. We think it’s well past time you got cut in on the deal.”

The ”Telly” user agreement is a long one: you must be at least eighteen years old, commit to using the “Telly” as the main TV in your house, keep it connected to the internet, and not use any software or other items that interfere with or block it, or make any modifications to it, or sell, transfer or dispose of it yourself.

Once you have the “Telly” in your house, you must also abide by a privacy policy, for the device automatically collects activity and viewing data, information collected by its built-in camera and motion sensor – although the camera does have a privacy window – along with any voice commands, purchases made through the device, along with details of the network it is connected, along with any other devices connected to that network. This is required to help Telly Inc. personalise and improve the service provided, monitor trends, detect and prevent security issues and comply with legal and financial obligations.

This is on top of any information collected about yourself through the viewing of the device, like your name, location, contact details, demographic details, professional or employment-related information, education, user preferences and choices made. This information will be required for further improving the user experience, but also for advertising and market research purposes. You will have already given some of this information when you set up your Telly profile: “During the profile creation process, we ask questions about you and your household to provide a useful and relevant ad experience. Brands, in turn, pay for the non-intrusive ad on the second Smart Screen. That’s how you get Telly for free. Plain and simple. We think it’s well past time you got cut in on the deal.”

One thing I have not done with Apple, however, is provide them with debit or credit card details to prove my identity to them, or to help with fraud protection, or confirm I am complying with their user agreement - Telly does require this, specifically for those purposes, even if you are not to be charged for anything. 

“Smart” televisions come with similar user agreements for use of its apps and programs – I instead use a separate device for those needs, an Apple TV box that effectively extends the agreements I already made by using other Apple devices. Curiously, the “Telly” comes with a separate Android TV dongle for accessing streaming platforms like Netflix or Disney+, for only Telly’s own services, and Zoom for video calls, are built into the device.

So long as you can square all the above, the “Telly” is free to use. The user agreement states that if you cannot, its service could be restricted, or your ability to use the device will be stopped. Failing to return the device to Telly Inc. following this authorises them to charge a thousand dollars for the device... at which point the TV is presumably yours, and you can do what you like with it, reconnecting and modifying it however you wish. If that price sounds reasonable for what it can do, you probably already spent that on a similar screen without so many obligations.

THAT’S NOT MY NAME [512]

Who was T.G. Jones?

Did they get their start by opening a newspaper stand next to W.H. Smith? Did they keep a beady eye on each other ever since? Did T.G. Jones also open TV channels and a DIY store chain in the 1980s, again to compete with W.H. Smith? Did T.G. Jones know John Menzies before they sold their also-similar store chain to W.H. Smith? 

Naming a business after someone implies both history and vision: Boots, Cadbury, Sainsbury’s, Selfridges, Debenhams, Cath Kidston, Charlotte Tilbury. Making a name up hopes to imply and aspire the same: the JD Wetherspoon pub chain combines a character from the TV series “The Dukes of Hazzard” with the surname of an ineffectual schoolteacher the founder once had.

But the renaming of the high street stores and retail website of WHSmith to “TG Jones”, prompted by their sale to the private equity group Modella Capital at the end of June 2025, created a name designed to sound close to the original. WHSmith is now being a separate chain focused only on appearing at railway stations, airports and hospitals.

But “TG Jones”? A similarly common name to “Smith”, it also recalls the jeans brand Smith & Jones, the food brand Smith & Jones, the TV series “Alias Smith & Jones”, and the comedy double act Mel Smith & Griff Rhys Jones. As for the initials, “G” is next to “H”, and “T” is close to “W” – my guess is the rhyming “tee gee” was a helpful discovery. But so obviously basing the new name on WHSmith is detrimental to it so long as WHSmith continues to exist elsewhere, a confidence trick that didn’t have to exist.

Name changes made by businesses, or people, usually imply new starts, new approaches. But from the name down, TG Jones is all about continuity: with no material changes to stores announced by the new owners, it remains a bookseller, stationer and newsagent that continues to stock WHSmith-branded products, with newspapers and magazines stocked by the distributor Smiths News, and their floorspace will continue to be shared with Post Office branches and Toys “R” Us concessions. Even the sign above the door is still white text on a royal blue background, the only break with WHSmith being its use of a sans serif typeface.

I had been recommended a documentary on YouTube made by NHK World TV of Japan, which explained that a boom in stationery sales to the general public happened after the 2008 financial crisis when businesses stopped providing employees with pens, paper and notebooks. Either this boom didn’t happen in the UK, or WHSmith couldn’t compete on range or price. 

I mostly use Uni Ball Eye rollerball pens, but these are mostly bought from discount retailer TK Maxx or the supermarket Tesco, and the notebooks I use usually come from Amazon because I want is usually in a particular range, size or page count so specific that a high street store cannot afford the space to stock it. WHSmith, or TG Jones, is there when I want a newsmagazine, which it is likely to have, even if it doesn’t seem to stock “The New Yorker” near me anymore, or if I need a Post Office, or indeed anything I cannot wait for, which is something for which I cannot think of an example.

This is the predicament that now needs to be answered by Modella Capital. They are already owners of the “big box” chain store Hobbycraft, which will have some overlap in their ranges of stationery and art supplies, but their website states, above a picture of their chairman, “successful transactions include... Paperchase”, a specialist stationer once owned by WHSmith, its brand bought by Tesco when it went into administration in 2023. Here’s hoping TG Jones can make something of its name this time around. 

IT’S NOT TO LATE TO WHIP IT [511]

"New Traditionalists" alternative album cover

Having only discovered the genius of David Bowie after he died, and becoming enamoured with Kate Bush out of embarrassment for not having any of her albums [https://www.leighspence.net/2024/01/do-you-wanna-know-how-it-feels-432.html], I have, at the very least, understood DEVO, the “de-evolutionary” New Wave band and multimedia project, while it is still possible to see them live. As their catalogue of videos are restored and re-released to their YouTube channel, their work remains as vital and relevant as ever.

I first encountered DEVO many years ago, having had the name “Mark Mothersbaugh” drummed into my head as a child through his opening theme for the cartoon series “Rugrats”, also writing the incidental music alongside his brother Bob. I was pleasantly surprised by the big hits, formed of spiky synthesisers and guitars, driving rhythms and direct lyrics: “Whip It”, “Jocko Homo”, their idiosyncratic cover of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, and “Through Bring Cool”, a song so soaked with smart-ass attitude over being misunderstood – “eliminate the ninnies and the twits” and “time to show those evil spuds what’s what” – that I will never let go of it.

If I only had DEVO’s songs, that would be enough. “Concept albums” are such a ubiquity that I hadn’t considered how much further DEVO took the notion of a “concept”. Indeed, co-founder and co-lead singer Gerard Casale described “de-evolution” as a “technique”, a philosophy informing the group’s outlook and work. 

Casale and friend Bob Lewis had already formed the initial idea that mankind was regressing, instead of continuing to evolve, through increasing dysfunction in society and herd mentality, when Mark Mothersbaugh brought to them a Christian anti-evolutionary tract titled “Jocko Homo: The Heaven-Bound King of the Zoo”, written by a Dr B.H. Shadduck in 1924. Having attempted to read it, I saw it was trying to say that the meeting of liberalism, rationalism and Darwinism had attempted to pass off skeletons as evidence of progress:

“Old bones only prove that brute races and families have passed and will pass. Rudimentary organs prove that equipment not used, be it a wing or a soul, becomes atrophied. THAT IS NOT EVOLUTION, it is the opposite. It is going the wrong way. Show us a species that is coming or an organ that is in the making. Show us how to grow wings where there are none.” [Capitals and italics are as per the original edition.]

The tract later states that “The scholar who believes the ‘fact’ of evolution, doubts the infallibility of the Bible. I know of no exception.” The DEVO song “Jocko Homo” provides its own answer: “All together now, God made man, but he used the monkey to do it / Apes in the plan and we're here to prove it / I can walk like an ape, talk like an ape, I can do what monkey do / God made man, but a monkey supplied the glue.”

The “Devolutionaries” that make up DEVO – its classic 1976-84 line-up is Gerald Casale (vocals/bass/keyboards) and Mark Mothersbaugh (vocals/keyboards), their brothers Bob Mothersbaugh (“Bob 1”, lead guitar) and Bob Casale (“Bob 2”, rhythm guitar and keyboards), and Alan Myers (drums) – present as identically-dressed agents of change, shedding light how humanity is devolving, while technology and cybernetic systems rapidly advance, encouraging people to recognise their plight, and recalibrate and reorganise as a result. 

I may have made this sound heavy-going for a very fun, surrealist and Dada-influenced band, but “Whip It” is a string of motivational statements about dealing with problems, its video only making the “whip” more literal. A further element is potatoes, referencing people and fans of the band as “spuds”, equating with a lowly vegetable often underestimated, as in the line from the song “I’m A Potato”: “I'm a spudman, I got eyes all around”.

While DEVO did not form in answer to it, the shootings by the Ohio National Guard of thirteen unarmed anti-war protestors at Kent State University in Ohio on 4th May 1970, killing four, loom large over the pre-history of the group – Gerald Casale was at the protest, one of his friends being killed there, while Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh were attending another campus at the university that day. Despite their proximity, there is no DEVO song specifically about the incident – this was left to distant observers like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, the Steve Miller Band, The Isley Brothers, Genesis and so on – but it underlined the serious intent of highlighting “de-evolution”.

As early adopters of music videos, conceiving and producing them themselves, DEVO completed a short film in 1976 titled “In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution”, building a narrative around performances that include characters General Boy and son Booji Boy. The film includes a “De-Evolutionary Oath”, adopting and repurposing a number of “Trick Rules” the “Jocko Homo” tract had “identified” as excuses for evolution theory, reappropriated as calls to action. For the sake of completion, these are: wear gaudy colours or avoid display; lay a million eggs or give birth to one; the fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live; be like your ancestors or be different we must repeat!

My favourite DEVO album is “New Traditionalists”, released in 1981 – it had to be, with “Through Being Cool”, a riposte to the band becoming “cool” after the release of “Whip It”, and employing a darker, more synthesised sound, albeit one caused by the master tape shedding oxide. “Beautiful World” may qualify as one of the best DEVO songs of all, a simple hymn to how great the world is... “for you, for you, for you”. The accompanying video creates a utopian montage of American cultural life, becoming darker and more menacing before the punchline of “It’s not for me” is reached.

I also love how they masqueraded as a corporation, press releases and all, for their most recent album, 2010’s “Something for Everybody”. I now know the famous red ziggurat “energy dome” hats were influenced by the work of scientist Wilhelm Reich, and that I would need to insert a hard hat liner not just for comfort, but to allow the hat to collect energy properly. I find it hilarious that they created the fake Christian pop band Dove, in order so they could appear as their own opening act, one that couldn’t be better than they were. I’m still not sure about the deliberately anaemic cover versions of their own songs in the “EZ Listening Muzak” tapes, originally created to stop live venues playing other bands’ songs before their concerts, but I think they are growing on me – the “EZ” version of “Come Back Jonee” sounds like I may have heard it in an episode of “Rugrats”.

This hasn’t been a case of me recounting lore or building a story. I have been genuinely fascinated by discovering DEVO’s vast body of work, and wanted to share my findings. At the same time, I hope it is as clear as possible that art and politics are not separate, and all art is political as a result – even if the group were just reflecting their current time, that engagement also confirms their intentions in creating that work, and in their continuing to perform it. This notion forms the basis of the art critic John Berger’s book “Permanent Red”, published in 1960:

“But why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality of artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action.”

And so, I love DEVO, and I love how their work energises me. 

WHO ARE YOU? WHO, WHO, WHO, WHO [510]

Copyright: Spartina Productions / Busboy Productions / CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Following on from my discussion about “The One Show”, and with “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” ending in May 2026, I am not likely to become famous enough in time to answer the “Colbert Questionert”, a litmus test made of questions that makes a guest truly known, with a title punning on the pronunciation of the host’s name.

While I have already said I don’t usually watch the American chat shows for their interviews, I make an exception for this feature to see how various people answer the same questions, and whether they see each question as a need to make a snap judgement, or whether it gives pause to ruminate, or another chance to perform. Either way, I can see the “Colbert Questionert” continuing to the podcast that Colbert will inevitably do next - maybe I will be properly answer it someday.

I imagine some questions (or answers) are cut for time, so not all the following questions are heard being asked to everyone, and so I have no guarantee of this being a complete list of all the questions. I treated them as snap judgments, so these answers are as true as I can make them.

Best sandwich?

In alphabetical order: chicken, lettuce, salad cream, tomato.

 

What is the scariest animal?

If not man, then spiders.

 

Apples or oranges?

Oranges: messier to deal with, but a softer, less acidic taste. You don’t really get apple-flavoured chocolate.

 

What was your first concert?

The Cross, at Gosport Festival in July 1993. It was the solo / “other band” project of Roger Taylor, the drummer from Queen, with lots of guests. With it still not being long since Freddie Mercury died, it was undeniably thrilling to clap and hold your arms out to the chorus of “Radio Gaga”, as the man who wrote it sang it to you.

 

Cats or dogs?

Not a pet person, but cats.

 

What's one thing you own that you really should throw out?

A small circular pillow with a painting of a hedgehog printed on it, a runner-up prize from a family Christmas Day quiz some years ago.

 

Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?

Yes, from Paul Gannon & Eli Silverman of the "CheapShow" podcast for their vinyl album, but in a non-committal “if you want to” kind of way - of course they did.

 

What do you think happens when we die?

My energy is redistributed, and things carry on from there.

 

Favourite action movie?

“The Matrix”, a choice apparently shared with both Sandra Bullock and Matt Damon.

 

Window or aisle?

On a bus or coach: window. On a plane: aisle.

 

Favourite smell?

Real vanilla.

 

Least favourite smell?

Excrement of any kind.

 

Exercise: worth it?

Disguise it as a good walk, then I’m sold.

 

Flat or sparkling?

Flat - if a “still” Diet Coke ever comes to market, I will be first in line.

 

Most used app on your phone? 

Its web browser, for nearly two thirds of the time, constantly reading and searching for things.

 

You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it? (You can listen to music whenever you like, but when you do, it is only this song.)

“Station to Station” by David Bowie, specifically from his “Stage” live album – the exhilarating rush of “woo-hoo-hoo-hoo, it’s too late” by its end makes it a better version for me than the original studio version.

 

What number am I thinking of?

Fourteen. (I know it’s wrong, it’s always wrong.)

 

Describe the rest of your life in 5 words?

Wouldn’t I like to know.

 

Congratulations, I am known.

WE WERE RUNNING AGAINST THE WIND [509]

The Mercedes-Benz A-Class saloon

For someone that cannot drive, I talk about cars a lot, mostly about how they were designed, like the Citroën CX, or because they provoked a silly culture war, like Ford replacing the Cortina with the Sierra.

Both as an observer and passenger, little is left to do wrongly in building a car, decades of lessons having been learnt. This was what I thought upon seeing a Mercedes-Benz A-Class saloon, which purported to be a “sub-compact” version of their larger cars, while competing on size and price with the Volkswagen Golf, Audi A3 and Vauxhall Astra. All these cars have similar sweeping lines, rounded edges and recessed door handles, numerous attempts at achieving the most aerodynamic shape of vehicle producing an “average” shape.

And yet, the choices Mercedes-Benz made – the low, aggressive front nose, the rounded boot, and shutters that control air flow through the grille – meant they claimed, when it was introduced in 2018, that it had the lowest-drag co-efficiency of any production car. The hatchback version achieved a figure of 0.25, while the saloon achieved 0.22, which is better than a Tesla Model 3 or BMW 3-Series, while matching that of the Porsche Taycan.

If this had been the 1980s, the number “0.22” would have been written somewhere on the car, just as the 1982 Audi 100 had “Cd 0.30” emblazoned on its sides, such was the monumental achievement. That the A-Class has now been axed, without any further fanfare, by Mercedes-Benz, now preferring to focus on larger cars, without any further fanfare, speaks to how easy producing an aerodynamic shape is expected to be.

Drag co-efficiency, measuring the resistance on an object as it is moved through air, water or other “fluid” environment, was once a major selling point for a car. Put extremely simply, a drag co-efficiency score comes from measuring drag – the force opposing an object as it moves through an environment – versus the mass, speed and surface area of the object.

Car companies want to reduce the drag on their cars because it makes their cars faster and more efficient without needing to produce more power, while speaking to build quality through removing any areas where air can be trapped, by both smoothing out body panels and reducing or eliminating the gaps between them. The TV ad for the Audi 100 dramatised this as letting go of parachutes that were holding the car back. 

However, regardless of how the drag-co-efficiency score is produced, the fact that that the lower to zero the score is, the more aerodynamic the object must be, is enough to make use for marketing purposes. For example, the “jelly-mould” styling of the Ford Sierra was a major departure from the boxy styling of the Ford Cortina it replaced, taking some time to grow on British car buyers, but in reducing drag co-efficiency from 0.45 to 0.34, reducing fuel consumption from the engines that were carried over from the Cortina.

Computer-aided design advanced both the drafting and refining of a car’s aerodynamics over the testing of clay models and one-off prototypes. Citroën famously achieved low drag on a number of cars, including the SM coupé, and CX and GS saloons all achieving a figure of under 0.35 during the 1970s, but the British Leyland Princess range, later becoming the maligned Austin Ambassador, only managed around 0.40, typical for a 1970s car designed on paper, but also of poor fit and finish. The Austin Allegro has also been panned as a car more aerodynamic when driven backwards, but I could find no figures to claim either way.

Now that an “average” car shape has been reached – a child drawing a car would now draw an egg with wheels than a three-boxed shape – drag co-efficiency means little. The Ford Puma SUV, the biggest-selling car in the UK, achieves a figure of 0.31-0.32, like its competitor, the Vauxhall Mokka – I guess it is something about being that bit taller off the ground than a regular car. The Audi A3 couldn’t beat the A-Class with 0.28-0.29, but it is at least still in production. Even the latest Cadillac Escalade, essentially a large building moving at speed, has a figure of 0.36. Tesla, BMW and Mercedes-Benz can reach towards 0.2, but only with their saloon cars.

I had to look – the card game “Top Trumps” did not use drag co-efficiency in their car-themed sets, as doing so may require renaming the game.

ONE, ONE, ONE, ONE, ONE [508]

Aside from when, in 2011, host Matt Baker asked then Prime Minister David Cameron “how on Earth do you sleep at night?”, because he sincerely wanted to know, the defining moment of “The One Show” was in its Wednesday 27^th September 2017 episode where Mel Brooks, of all people, started saying, “what a crazy show this is”, confounded by a show that, after all the attempts made on British television to replicate American chat shows, has proven to be the one show that worked.

“The One Show” began on BBC One in 2006 as a continuation of the old current affairs series “Nationwide”, but is more like an adult version of “Blue Peter”, covering various consumer items and colourful, interesting stories from around the UK, bridging the gap on weeknights between the regional news and the rest of the evening’s viewing. After a pilot run of shows in Birmingham, it moved to west London in 2007, then in 2014 to BBC Broadcasting House, just off Oxford Street, increasing its ability to attract big-name guests talking about their current projects, but not at the expense of the show’s existing mix of items, gaining it a reputation for varying degrees of randomness in its subjects, and the occasional handbrake turn in tone.

This makes sense for me. I watch “The One Show” every day, and I never usually watch other chat shows as a result. The usual go-round of promotions means you will see people talking about their projects in multiple places, and to that end, both “The One Show” and the weekly “The Graham Norton Show” usually bring out all their guests at once to increase engagement. Perhaps, with most high-profile people having their own podcast, they don’t need the likes of a Michael Parkinson, Terry Wogan or Johnny Carson to open them up for the public. If anything, being interviewed on “The One Show” means having to compete with the stories brought by the show itself.

Back to 2017, “The One Show” had gone from talking to Mel Brooks about his stage adaptation of “Young Frankenstein”, to picking up a story about someone named Patricia, who was trying to find a lost relative. Alongside Brooks was, of course, Russell Crowe, there to perform with his band as well as talk about his career; and Lesley Joseph and Ross Noble, who were starring in “Young Frankenstein”. Said Matt Baker, “we just turn the page and move on,” while co-host Alex Jones joking said, “right, now let’s focus Patricia now, alright?” Replied Brooks, “this is nuts, I want you to understand that.” The same episode included items about picking up rubbish from motorways, an award ceremony for vending machines, and finding manta rays off the Hebrides. 

Admittedly, this episode of “The One Show” was an hour in length, as it normally shoves this much material into half that time – the most recent broadcast, on Thursday 21^st August 2025, had actors Brian Cox and James Norton in the studio, but also filmed and live pieces ahead of the Women’s Rugby World Cup, and the unveiling of the latest “Strictly Come Dancing” contestant.

However, “The One Show” has answered the question that eluded British television for years: how to have a nightly chat show, particularly in the form presented in the United States by the likes of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. There have been recent efforts, like ITV’s “The Nightly Show”, that only lasted for two months in 2017, and “V Graham Norton”, lasting for eighteen months on Channel 4 in 2002-03, before Norton moved to the BBC for a weekly show that is currently only broadcast for half the year. “The Jack Docherty Show”, which launched with Channel 5 in 1997, was the closest these shows came to matching the American formula, with house band, host monologue, sketches and other items before the chat, while coming from a theatre in London’s West End – however, it was cut from five to three episodes after a year. Even when Terry Wogan had his evening chat show on BBC One from 1985-92, it wasn't every night, Tuesdays and Thursdays being taken by "EastEnders" instead.

The only US chat show I see with any regularity, via YouTube, is “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, although I have also seen, when they have come up on TV, similar shows hosted by David Letterman, Jay Leno, Craig Ferguson and Conan O’Brien. In all cases, I will tune in for the monologue, then the sketch or further item afterwards – my favourite of these has been Letterman’s “Is This Anything?”, a collection of various circus and vaudeville acts all appearing at once, followed by the phrase, “wow, that was really something!” After that, I usually turn off – the only variation on the standard celebrity interview on any of these shows is the “Colbert Questionert” (pronounced “questionnaire”, to rhyme with “Colbert”), where everyone is asked the same questions to gain insight: window or aisle seat, first concert, apples or oranges, describing themselves in five words.

I guess what I want more are review shows – instead of celebrities talking about what new films, shows or albums are coming soon, I want someone to tell me what they are like. In the meantime, “The One Show” will provide enough time for an interview, before talking about gardening, or the price of electricity bills.

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.