There's an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988, Russel Grant popularised the astrological phoneline, accepting only a modest fee from his publisher in exchange for the free advertising the column generated for his highly lucrative pay-per-minute chatlines. Before long, this became standard practice. All astrologers had to set up their own phone line. Unfortunately, without Grant's celebrity status, few made much actual money out of them.
By the late nineties, the bottom had rather dropped out of the chat line business, but by that time the low fees for astro-copy had become standard practice. Nowadays companies on the internet will generate horoscope columns for syndication for no more than £3, where once a star gazer could expect a hundred times that for their talents.
While we may snort and think good riddance to bad rubbish, it's worth remembering that horoscope columns remain as popular as ever with readers - it's just that the people who write them are no longer getting paid properly. Aside from the rather obvious parallels with the music industry, there's something broader at issue here, concerned with the question of who is authorised to write the future.
Once upon a time (not that long ago) the future was written by artists, and by speculative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller. At a certain point, artists seem to become embarrassed by the question of the future, epitomised perhaps by Gyorgy Ligeti's notorious (1961) unlecture entitled The Future of Music, in which he stood silent, impassively before the class, only responding to the calls and jeers from the audience by writing musical terms on the white board as 'directions' to the noise-makers.
Mostly, the people talking and writing about the future today work in marketing, or in computer software. That is, if they have anything positive to say about it. Of course, there are plenty of different artists and theorists prophesying some form of catastrophe or other on practically a daily basis. But the astrologists task of looking forward with hope, and with the kind of optimism that actually makes doing stuff a bit easier, is steadily proving itself to be as easy to generate automatically and artificially - with the right software - as a Chopin etude.
There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV's (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai ("It's mine! I found it!"), which seems mysteriously to match another in the museum, found a hundred years ago beside a skeleton that had been dead for hundreds more; and Matt's painting ("He found it in an old junk shop") that seems to offer the key to the strange events taking place in Milbury. Co-written by former Dr Who script editor, Trevor Ray, the series is structured like an ouroboros, almost like one of Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops. The village is apparently trapped in a "psychic bubble" or "time circle" and the discovery of these objects seems to imply a kind of fault or slippage between different cycles, different levels of the moebius strip.
Several British films and TV programmes in the 60's and 70's transpose the classic dystopian theme of an individual or small group against the ominous and threatening community from its traditional future city to a more rural, or at least far from metropolitan, setting. Children of the Stones borrows liberally from all of them: the pagan themes, masks and morris dancing from The Wicker Man; its rituals and chanting and supernatural mystery from Nigel Kneale's film, The Witches, for Hammer; and the sinister newspeak greetings shared by the community insiders ("Happy day!") from The Prisoner ("Be seeing you!"). Children of the Stones, however, was made for children's television, anticipating the pre-tea time strangeness of The Tomorrow People.
Like The Tomorrow People, one of the most extraordinary things about Children of the Stones is its music, only in this case achieved without the aid of Delia Derbyshire's VCS-3 synthesizer. Producer, Peter Graham Scott recalls hearing a piece by Penderecki on the radio while driving to the show's location in Avebury and being so inspired to suggest to composer Sidney Sager that he try something similar. Sager agreed to the use of a choir, only insisting upon adding the solo soprano voice which completes the haunting opening theme. The theme was sung by The Ambrosian Singers, started by British early music specialist Denis Stevens and famed for their pop collaborations (including the intro to 'Inside' by Stiltskin) and light music collections. It is based around the acoustic (or Lydian dominant) scale, favoured by Bartok and Franz Liszt for its tonal uncertainty.
Based on the results, the piece by Penderecki may well have been his Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (1970-73). The music shares with Penderecki's great choral work more than just its unusual technical effects - whispering, groaning, murmuring, wailing - also its post-Second Viennese School melodic leaps and cross-wise motion. We hear shades of Berg and Berio, but also Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. It's sweeter than Penderecki, warmer and more repetitive. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the happy smiling faces of the supplicants and the eerie, strangely weightless dissonance of their chant makes up a large part of what is so uncanny about this most singular of programmes.
Went the Day Well, Cavalcanti's first proper feature for Ealing Studios in 1942, is like an episode of Dad's Army directed by Michael Haneke. Scenes of brutal horror erupting in the midst of this quiet rural community, shot in stark high-contrast black and white, anticipate The White Ribbon, even down to the way both are presented very much as a told story. What makes Went the Day Well so shocking is that it seems to start off just like any other Ealing Comedy. The first twenty minutes or so could have been Passport to Pimlico, or The Titfield Thunderbolt. Suddenly minor comic characters are dying as heroes with more of your pain and sympathy than most leading men or women can draw. The film was based on a short story by Graham Greene, and the scene where the priest refuses to follow orders from "from those who are the enemies and oppressors of mankind" and is promptly shot could almost be taken for his signature (even if the BFI claims very little of Greene's story ended up in the film). William Walton's music is also very good - even his little Johann Strauss pastiche used as an early clue to the invaders true identity.
Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)
Richard Wagner
Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)
Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)
Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)
