Off the air

I spent a lot of time as a child looking at the picture above: it's 'Test Pattern F', which the BBC used as its off the air placeholder -- the TV equivalent of a .404 file not found message -- from the late 1960s. Originally of course we saw it in black and white, and it took me years to understand that it was a still photograph: as a child I thought the girl in the image was keeping very still indeed, and I would scrutinise it for long periods to see if I could spot her moving, scratching her nose or something while I blinked. When we finally got a colour TV in the mid-1970s, somehow I was astounded to see that it was actually a colour image.

The original photograph was taken in 1967 by BBC engineer George Hersee of his daughter Carole, who brought along her clown doll Bubbles (whom I always found a bit creepy: perhaps marking the start of my clown phobia) to the studio for the photoshoot. Carole Hersee was paid 100 pounds without royalties for the use of her image, which appeared on TV for an estimated total of 70,000 hours, equivalent to nearly eight years screen time. She got a lot of fan mail as a child, and was once asked to open a dog show. (The BBC recently brought Test Card F back on its HD channels, to help viewers tune their screens: the 'X' of the noughts and crosses game board is in the exact centre of the image.)

Meanwhile, unless something enormous breaks in the New Zealand art world I'm off the air myself this week, while I climb a mountain of work. Stay tuned, and see you back here on the 16th March when normal transmission will resume.

What's Left Behind III

Routemaster buses, c.1963. From Park Royal Vehicles.


When my family arrived in New Zealand in the late 1970s, we'd been told by many people to expect that it would be just like Britain, but warmer and less snobbish: the move halfway across the world would just be like moving to another British city, albeit somewhere a bit out of the way like Wales or the Channel Islands. On arrival, it took perhaps ten minutes for my child-self to realise that I had been seriously misled. It took another six months or so to feel relaxed enough with the culture (the differences in language; in humour; in the ways that people relate to one another) to be able to participate with any kind of spontaneity.

After a while, though, Britain receded in my mind to a point where seeing images of the Tower of London or Big Ben or the Changing of the Guard in a travel brochure looked as colourful and foreign as pictures of Prague or Istanbul. My memories of my English childhood grew no less vivid but receded into an odd disconnected state, like a series of surreal vignettes from a TV show involving double-decker buses and bomb scares and Fry's Chocolate Cream and the ministry of silly walks from Monty Python: some sort of mad mash-up of The Liver Birds, Dr Who, and Dad's Army, voiced over in the received British pronounciation of my preteen self.

We've been here thirty years now, and so whatever I am, it's more of a New Zealander than an English person. But there is still the odd moment when I catch sight of something and am transported back.

This morning it was the news that architect Norman Foster -- his firm, at least -- has won the competition to redesign the new London bus in time for the Olympics. Foster has gone into partnership with Aston Martin to come up with the proposal, which, with its bulbous curves and cheerful front end, looks like a chirpy new friend for Thomas the Tank Engine on the Fat Controller's railway. I also like the fact that Quantum of Solace is advertised on its side panel -- the Aston Martin DB5 was quite clearly the best Bond car ever. (My brother's Matchbox version featured an ejector seat to shoot the baddie up into the air ... on many family holidays under driving rain in the Cotswolds I wished our car were fitted with one ...)


Apparently Foster has gone for a wooden floor downstairs with a "salon" kind of feel: upstairs there's a glazed roof and solar panels to power heating. No mention, though, of the periscope so significant in my childhood, from which front seat passengers upstairs could spy on and make faces at the long-suffering bus driver down below, despite strict written instructions on a notice forbidding you to do so. (It was one of those 1970s things, like not looking directly at the sun or pointing a spud gun at anyone, that no one could help themselves doing. The more you were told not to the less you could help yourself.) Foster's obviously fond of tall pointy boy's-own kind of things: I imagine the periscope's a must-have.

For whom the bell tolls

A couple of giants of the small screen have fallen: yesterday the deaths of Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGooghan came over the wires, prompting anyone who grew up in the 70s to dissolve into a series of soft-focus reminiscences. The seaplane arriving at the island; the gas being puffed through the lock; the diminutive Herve Villechaize shouting "De plane! De plane!"; the strange sentient white balloon; Montalbán's gleaming white three-piece; the vague feeling of unease common to both, as well as the use of golf carts and mini mokes; "I am not a number, I am a free man!"; "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Fantasy Island. I am your host, Mr. Roarke."

The Prisoner, of course, became a British cult classic. McGooghan, its star, was also its co-creator, and given his small-screen pulling power in the 60s, was empowered to produce one of the most genuinely experimental TV shows ever made. Filmed in 1967, it only ran to 17 episodes but like Fawlty Towers and Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em, it screened many, many times in Britain during the 1970s. Along with reruns of John Wayne films, the musical Oliver, and the 1950s version of Flash Gordon, it always seemed to be on in the school holidays.

By contrast, that camp classic Fantasy Island seemingly ran to a million episodes. Designed, like The Love Boat, by crap TV genius Aaron Spelling as a revolving door for low- and mid-grade guest spots, new jobbing actors were brought in each week. (What's Charo doing now, I wonder?) Playing out their fantasies on the island, nothing ever quite went as expected, and in the process the confused character learnt a little something about life from the enigmatic Mr Roarke. While The Prisoner was genuinely baffling (particularly if one was aged under 10 at the time), Fantasy Island was just a bit odd, but eagerly looked forward to for after-school viewing. The one was art; the other was formula, but they both made a mighty mark on the cultural landscape of my childhood.

For your viewing pleasure, here's Ricardo Montalbán's famous Chrysler ad for US TV: possibly the best car advertisement ever made. "I know my own needs ... I request nothing beyond the thickly-cushioned luxury of seats available in soft Corinthian leather."



Here's the seaplane arriving and the bell tolling for one last time:



And Rover, the killer weather balloon.



Unsuitable for children? You bet. Great stuff.

Paramount titles

Woke up to a truly great article in this morning's Guardian online (e.g. one constructed on just the sort of nonsensical track along which my own idle mind runs): newspaper blogger Scott Murray's ranking of six great TV title sequences.

I was completely with him on the quintessentially British existential angst of Reggie Perrin's naked pasty white bottom disappearing out to sea. Then I was bizarrely charmed to see the relentless twinkly creepiness of Picture Box again, which Murray accurately describes as "an utterly hypnotic film of a revolving jewellery box set to a pipe-organ waltz banged out by the hooves of Diablo himself".

And there's no question, of course, at least in our house, that the opening titles to Hawaii Five-O represent one of the greatest works of art of the late 20th century. (The title zooming up against the huge curling wave! The hula dancer! The molten lava flows! The jerky camera work, extraordinarily prescient precursor of a dozen nineties police procedurals! And that mad kamikaze helicopter shot which looks like it's going to end very badly indeed on the skyscraper's cornice, but which instead culminates in Jack Lord giving it, as Scott Murray says, the full Elvis from the balcony. Oh yes. Bring it back, please.)



But as for the chippy animated titles for The Good Life where the pastel flower petals slowly reveal the show's title, a sequence which Murray compares to the best productions of Saul Bass, the designer of the seminal graphics for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as title sequences for Psycho, Casino and North by Northwest, among many, many others ... No, no, a thousand times no, however many happy pre-watershed evenings in the mid-70s Murray spent watching it. (As did I, armed with a large bowl of Bird's Angel Delight. This was England.) Sorry, but absolutely not. You might as well include the opening titles for the Two Ronnies.

Now, I have the greatest respect for anyone with the temerity to put out "best of" lists in the public arena. It's a practice that takes an ounce or two of courage -- or equally the possession of the hide of a rhinoceros. To broadcast one's personal opinion on cultural matters inevitably invites -- at least if the Arts and Letters to the Editor pages of The Press are anything to go by -- dissension, disagreement, and quite probably ad hominem attacks. Many times I've thought that an art curator who puts together a group show, or an editor who produces an anthology, might as well pin a sign to the seat of their pants saying "Kick me". Any reviewer worthy of the name, whether amateur or professional, whether writing in a public forum or chewing the private fat, will immediately come up with several sterling examples of notable omissions from the enterprise as well as several unpardonable inclusions. Ha! Woeful. Take that, etc. That's why curators, editors, bloggers and other assorted cultural list compilers should ideally be drawn from among the ranks of those who like a good argument. Rarely, however, is this the case. (Although blogging makes the possibility of a good stoush far more immediate than in years past.)

Having been on the sharp end of some pointed second guessing myself over the years, it is therefore somewhat sheepishly that I propose some addenda to Scott Murray's list of the great TV opening credits.

For example: how could he have possibly gone past The Prisoner? "I am not a number, I am a free man!" Rev engines. Enter mysterious man in top hat. Cue nerve gas through the keyhole. Etc etc.

For old times sake, I'd definitely pop The Professionals in there ... if only for the titles' undoubted role in the building of genuine excitement each week. "Anarchy. Acts of terror. Crimes against the public. To combat it, I've got special men. Experts from the army, the police, from every service. These are the professionals." Right you are, Cowley old son. Send 'em in.



And then there's the good 'ol boys. Just can't help myself with this one. Guitars, car chases, explosions, cut off shorts, Waylon Jennings; what more could you ask for? As if that weren't enough, the big guy's stories about he and his mate climbing in and out of the windows of his '67 Datsun Bluebird in emulation of the General Lee are the stuff of (rather dubious provincial) legend in our house. (It's just not the same these days with a Holden Vectra and a suit.)

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And of course there's The Avengers, and Doctor Who, and Blakes Seven. But the real contender, the one that might actually give Saul and Elaine Bass a run for their money, is David Milch's opening sequence for Deadwood (which as I may have mentioned before is clearly the best programme in any genre ever to appear on TV, ever). Guns, blood, mud, grit, gold. I must have watched it fifty times without tiring of it.

Jeez Scott Murray, The Good Life? What were you thinking?

Angry of Christchurch

This morning, I am irritated. I have the hump. I am toey, I am cross, I am vexed, I am incensed, I am quite possibly incandescent with rage. I feel like the mad angry man in Kenny Everett's legendary 'Angry of Mayfair' sketch, railing against the world and attacking the TV camera with a vicious furled brolly. Grrr! Take that, you filthy swine.

What's exercised me is a small piece of local news, which wouldn't warrant being picked up by the national news services, yet it's part of a growing national -- not to say international -- problem.

Here's the story. A developer, responsible for various vile cookie-cutter subdivisions with "executive residences" picked out in poo-coloured brick on tiny sections on the city's old green belt, wants to demolish century-old farm buildings at Mount Magdala, on the outskirts of Christchurch, to put up still more of these.

The notable farm buildings under threat of the bulldozer are unusual in the history of New Zealand's rural architecture in that they were brick-built in the European style enclosing a cobbled central courtyard. The buildings have a group 2 heritage listing in the Christchurch City Plan, which requires a resource consent for their demolition. Even an architect hired by the developer to assess their heritage status confirmed that they should be retained.


A consortium of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, the Christchurch Civic Trust and the Halswell Residents' Association urged the council to buy and restore the buildings for an estimated $752,000, suggesting they would make ideal artists' studios, and perhaps a cafe or neighbourhood tavern, but the Christchurch City Council swiftly rejected the idea at a meeting in April, giving their consent to demolish the buildings. The Council's fallback position was to agree instead to spend $75,000 installing a "gazebo" on nearby reserve land recording the historic importance of the area and the farm buildings. The heritage consortium then took the Council to the Environment Court.

This morning I read in the Press that the legal appeal has been thrown out of the Environment Court due to a technical error by the Council, which had provided a map showing an incorrect location for the buildings, thus rendering their supposed Grade 2 historic "protection" null and void. The buildings had no protection, because the map was inaccurate, therefore there was no case to be argued either way. Thank you and good night.

Presumably the bulldozers are revving their engines as we speak.

As this story's developed over the past year, I've noted various instances of what city councillor Yani Johansen describes as "cultural terrorism". Developers, he says hold "heritage buildings hostage. They then demand excessive amounts of money from a public body in order to secure their safety." You might also call it visual vandalism, cavalier disregard for our history, or sheer low-level venality. (With Mount Magdala one might now also add, incompetence, but then having worked in the public service myself I know that things are not always what they seem.)

What amazes me is the lack of comprehension that retaining heritage buildings actually contributes to economic development. People want to live in good-looking cities! All around the world, where tough sanctions have been effected to stop the developer's wrecking ball, property prices have risen steadily and creative, economically-productive people have been attracted to move in. Although no doubt well-intentioned, erecting a gazebo with a notice commemorating the notable historic building that once stood on the spot is simply ridiculous.


So, once again, a gated subdivision with no public or commercial buildings will rise up in the middle of what was farmland. As many houses as possible will be shoe-horned into the site. Without local shops or community amenities of the sort which could have been retrofitted into the Mount Magdala farm buildings, women and small children will be trapped out there during the day, needing to hop into the car even to pick up a bottle of milk. The breadwinner will need another car, to join the endless nose-to-tail single-person commute into the city each morning. No wonder each house comes with at least a double garage.

For all its erroneous pretensions to be a city which takes pride in its built heritage, this kind of issue isn't peculiar to Christchurch. I've been struck by the resonance of the unhappy fate of Mount Magdala's farm buildings to the similarly-aged Dakota Stables on New York's Upper West Side. Just about to be designated a historic landmark building on account of its round-arched windows and serpentine ornamentation, a demolition crew was hired to hack away at the building's notable cornices.

As the New York Times reported:

"Once the building’s distinctive features had been erased, the battle was lost. The commission went ahead with its hearing, but ultimately decided not to designate the structure because it had been irreparably changed ... The strategy has become wearyingly familiar to preservationists. A property owner is notified by the landmarks commission that its building or the neighborhood is being considered for landmark status. The owner then rushes to obtain a demolition or stripping permit from the city’s Department of Buildings so that notable qualities can be removed, rendering the structure unworthy of protection."

It seems that NYC, like Christchurch, has a city plan you could drive a bulldozer through. And developers frequently do, with impunity. Urgent legislative changes to protect our built heritage are needed at a governmental level to shut this nonsense down.

Quick, where's my brolly? I feel a savage venting of spleen coming on...

The end of the world as we know it

All the fuss and bother over what might potentially happen when they turn the key in the ignition of the Large Hadron Collider this evening (sucked into a black hole! time flowing backwards! a jolly loud bang!) has reminded me of the classic techno-panic children's TV series of the mid-1970s, The Changes.

It ran for 10 very scarey episodes: the basic premise was that electric pylons throughout the country suddenly started emitting a high-pitched noise which drove people to destroy all technology and riot in the streets. Fridges, cars, toasters, alarm clocks, and perhaps most oddly -- soda streams -- all took a serious beating in the first episode. (The Hillman Imp in the image above is in the thick of it.)

After witnessing her father smash up the family's TV set in a mad frenzy, the heroine (12 years old in the show; a diminutive 18 in reality) became separated from her parents and had to travel through an unrecognisably feral England complete with menacing pitchforks and bad dentistry to get to France (where the pylons were probably still OK) to be reunited with them. Along the way she encountered a gang of robbers stealing children from the newly medievalised villages, and in a hideously frightening episode was tried as a witch. The only help she received along the way was from friendly Sikhs who appeared to be unaffected by the awful noise. (Unclear why this should be.)



The Changes has become somewhat confused in my memory with another equally terrifying programme that screened at around the same time -- a multi-part documentary in which a group of British people, including children, lived under Iron Age conditions for a year. (No underpants! No toilet paper! No sticker books!) It was probably the first reality show ever, but instead of the relative luxury of the Big Brother house, the poor "contestants" on Living with the Past (though their only prize was the blinking show finishing) were forced to live in a dreary encampment of freezing thatched roundhouses and to trudge through thick clayey mud to the primitive long drop dunnies (placed 500 yards or so away for fear of typhoid). My parents were alarmingly keen on self-sufficiency in the 70s, as well as camping, but I was extremely grateful they didn't volunteer our family for this TV horror.

The Changes ended with the heroine's discovery of an ancient lodestone that had been placed in a cavern by Merlin and which had somehow been activated and was calling the country back to a simpler time. Can't remember how, but she got it to stop; and a battalion of cars, which had stalled in a massive traffic jam, started again in an extraordinarily memorable -- if somewhat improbable -- shot as Britain returned to normal.

The Changes managed to cover several hitherto unrelated tropes of the 70s in Britain at once; civil disobedience, fear of technology, an interest in Arthurian legends, going back-to-nature, and smashing up TV sets (the latter popularised by prog rock bands in hotel rooms). As with a lot of TV I watched in the 70s, it was probably vastly unsuitable for the children for whom it was intended, and has produced a lifelong thoughtfulness around electric pylons.

I can't imagine that the world's going to end at 7pm tonight NZ time when they start up the Large Hadron Collider, but there's a slight air of risk contingent upon the whole venture which is both appealing and slightly alarming. (I suppose if they knew exactly what would happen then it wouldn't be an experiment. Would it.) Each generation, it seems, has its own Armageddon myths: so far in my lifetime we've encountered potential obliteration of our way of life by technological meltdown (the 70s), nuclear war (the 80s), and Y2K (2000). (Can't remember what it was in the 90s -- an asteroid crashing into the Earth? An enormous tidal wave sweeping the globe? Bruce Willis is bound to have made a movie about it, whatever it was. Or Michael Stevenson some art.) More recently our doomsday events have included Peak Oil, international terrorism, the possibility of a global pandemic like bird flu, and now it's a black hole sucking civilisation in after it. Probably.

See you tomorrow. I hope.

New Zealand History

As a child growing up in England in the 1970s, I didn't know much about New Zealand. My only sense of it was as a sort of big farm, a long way away; the place where the butter and lamb and crunchy green apples came from. It was somewhere near Australia, which we'd done at primary school (flash floods in the outback, duck-billed platypuses, kangaroos, orange earth) and which I knew was at the end of the world. New Zealand was even further away than that, like the Outer Isles in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but without the talking animals.

When I knew we were going to move to New Zealand, I did some research in my Children's Pears Encyclopedia. There were people called Maoris who lived there, who sounded interesting and a bit scarey. They did war dances and wore grass skirts and poked their tongues out. There was a rugby team. There was a place where mud boiled in the ground. A kiwi was a fat brown bird with a long beak. Someone who'd been there said that everyone in New Zealand played sport, which worried me considerably as I was more of an indoors-ish reading books type of person, the sort of child who would always keep going to the back of the line when you had to jump over the vaulting horse at gym. Would they make me jump over it? Even more concerningly, English people were always referred to by New Zealanders as whinging Pommy Bastards. I wondered how I would deal with that.

The best aspect of moving to New Zealand was that it was an island in the South Pacific. I knew this meant golden sandy beaches, coconuts, palm trees, hot weather. The unfamiliar phrase 'temperate climate' occasionally snagged in my mind like a hangnail, but I thought it must just mean a different kind of tropical.

When we left England, it was 14 below in the west country. We drove up to Heathrow through massive snowdrifts, sometimes following the snow plough through the deep country lanes. No one spoke much in the car. There was some thought that we might be cut off from the main road. The world was white, and quiet. A crow flapped from an oak. The car smelt of dogs and Wellington boots and warm plastic. On the M5, the snow turned into grey slush, then disappeared altogether. South of Swindon, a big road sign said 'Granada', and we turned into a motorway service area. Over ham and soggy tomato sandwiches, I wondered why this place had the same name as the title at the end of Coronation Street, but Mum said it was named after somewhere in Spain.


I think about it now, and my memory of the last day in England is almost entirely in black and white: the silver of the rain through the cafeteria window, the smoke of hot breath on the glass, the muddy grey of bulldozered snow, the pearly gleam of the surface water on the black road. In all this the only colour is my fizzy orange drink at the Granada service station, glowing like a Belisha Beacon, smudged at the edges.

As we approached Auckland, my father said, "You kids ready for the first look at your new country?" I knew this was an important moment. I waited a second, took a breath, then leaned over and looked out of the aeroplane window. It had been raining, and the creeks and rivers were brown and swollen. The fields -- I hadn't yet learned to call them paddocks -- seemed an unnaturally bright green. There were some sort of twisted scrubby trees growing in mud by the water's edge. I surveyed the landscape as we came in to land, increasingly desperate to find something of significance, a detail which would mark the moment, something to say 'This is New Zealand'. There was nothing.

The memory is less a recording device than a blank page waiting to be imprinted. Finding no fixed point in the scene unfolding through the aeroplane window, my memory of arriving in New Zealand has settled on a generic "grunts arrive at base camp" kind of shot from half a dozen Vietnam War movies -- Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill. I hear the whump whump whump of the chopper blades, and down below the land is a waterlogged tapestry of brown and green, camouflaging Victor Charlie as he slips silently into the jungle.


The memory differentiates between experience and fact, and supplies its images accordingly.

I clearly remember, for example, that at one of the watershed moments of my childhood, when the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, was regenerated into the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, that Baker appeared in colour while the rest of the screen was in black and white. Much like my memory of the fizzy drink in the motorway cafeteria, everything has become compressed. We got our first colour TV in 1974 or 5, not long after Baker took over control of the Tardis; although it was during Pertwee's innings that the programme began to be made in colour, I only ever watched him in black and white. And until now I've never actually seen the regeneration sequence in colour.



We stepped out of the airport building into a hot breathless nor-wester. It was 1979. The sun seemed brighter, nearer somewhow; the sky was vast. My memory of our arrival at our new house in New Zealand is one of brilliant colour: spires of shocking pink phlox in the garden, an enormous bumblebee in sherbet yellow stripes nosing past the window, the rosy blush of a trayful of nectarines, an indescribably exotic fruit to English people in the 1970s. The end of my English childhood was shot in black and white; life in New Zealand began in full colour. The fizzy orange drink at Granada -- somewhere between the Alhambra and Coronation Street -- is the point in the middle, the moment when one life started to become another.

Memories of weather

Over the past few days, prompted I think by memories of similar weather, I've been thinking about a time when we were students, vegetarians, bus riders: the long cold afternoons on the dusty carpet in front of the Conray heater, smoking cigarettes and making compilation tapes. Or evenings in the public bar of the Gladstone under the sardonic eye of the fat barman Lou and the regulars, talking nonsense about German cinema and making a jug of beer last until closing. It was on one of those sort of occasions that I remember a meandering conversation where we listed all the children's TV programmes we'd watched in the late 60s and early 70s. It's the sort of thing you wouldn't have time to do today (or maybe you'd blog it instead). I was a bit younger than everyone else, so there were programmes I'd never heard of; but having grown up in England, there were strange programmes I'd seen that no one else had, such as Mary, Mungo and Midge:



And the very peculiar Crystal Tipps and Alistair, which until I found it again recently on YouTube, I half-suspected that I had invented:



It's odd, though, as I distinctly remember Crystal Tipps being a riot of bright, swirling, psychedelic acid colours, a visually overwhelming experience like a sort of happy Clairmont painting for kids, and it's clearly not like that at all: the animation looks like it was done with felt-tip pens on a typing pad. Somehow my memory of the programme has synchronised and updated itself, quite erroneously, in keeping with the aesthetics of the new screen technologies that have developed since then. But equally, maybe that brightness and intensity is common to all childhood memories.

I hadn't recalled that Mary, Mungo and Midge sounds like it was narrated by Winston Churchill, either: another example of the organic fabrications of memory, dispelled by YouTube. It's strange to think that 1970 was closer in time to the Second World War than it is to the present day. In my early childhood, the War (as it was known then, as in "Don't mention the") seemed like something that had happened in another world, in another lifetime. But Mary, Mungo and Midge now reveals the same sense of cultural distance from the present as footage of the bombing of Dresden or the liberation of Berlin. It's an odd feeling when the popular culture of one's own time starts to look like a historical artefact.

Grow, Grow, The Lightnin' Tree

To the general disquiet of friends and family, I often start singing, quite unconsciously although with alarming volume, when I'm doing something dull like cutting sandwiches or putting the washing on. It's a nervous tic akin to that extremely annoying character in a Jacques Tati film (is it Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot?) who continually hums brass band music under his breath, imitating the sounds of the instruments. "Tumtitumtitum, breet! breet!" This morning I was running through a brief but compelling medley of 70s TV themes (Warship, Black Beauty, Hawai'i Five-0) when I got stuck, as usual, on the lyrics to Follyfoot.

"Down in the meadow/ where the wind blows best/ the lightning tree/ stood up to the test./ Its heart went crack/ when it heard the clap/ the terrible crash/ of the thunderclap," I warbled. Not for the first time, I felt that this may not be the correct version, though I have been delivering it with gusto for several decades now. Struck with inspiration, I looked it up on YouTube.


Hmmm. Unsurprisingly, I found that I appear to have misremembered the words. (Though "the lightning rent from the firmament" would be a bit much for any 5 year old.) While it was a great pleasure to see the lovely Steve and Dora again, and also to clock that bit of by-play with the cap between Slugger and Ron ("Look over there!" "Where?" "Gotcha!"), it was oddly disappointing to watch.

It's not the thing itself. The characters are still strong: Dora leading the poor broken-down old horse and looking soulful under her early 70s Quattro helmet hair, a distant ancestor of the mullet; Steve tough yet approachable in his high-waisted jeans and leather jacket; the Colonel twinkly-eyed and puff-puffing in an avuncular fashion on his pipe. The concept has remained fine, its execution still a puzzle to young minds: are they all hiding behind the lightning tree in a line, waiting to pop out one by one, or is it a neat bit of stop-framery? (Dora appearing by magic in the shot might provide a clue.)

No, the source of my disappointment is, I think, the sheer availability of the clip; the way in which my memories of watching it as a small child have now been irrevocably altered by access to the original. It's not so much that I got the lyrics wrong -- a run-of-the-mill pop culture mondegreen which
I probably won't bother to correct; like Elvis, I do like the idea of a cracked heart -- but that my memory has now been overtaken by the new experience of watching it again.

Storytelling is all about the memory of a memory; it relies on distance from the source. It's as much about forgetting as remembering. Stories, like misremembered song lyrics, grow and change organically over the years until there's a point at which the original has almost entirely receded, and what you're drawing upon is the memory of having told, or sung, the story before. That's when it becomes personal -- your story, your song. So although YouTube is a vast collection of cultural memories, it equally promotes the death of personal memory through its perpetual preservation of the source. (Though I must admit it was good to see this again.)


Having access to the archives inevitably changes our view of history. In our increasingly digitalised world, I wonder if knowing in advance that something's going to be archived will change the kind of memories we'll seek to lay down.