(First published in Electronic Sound magazine #95, November 2022)
COUNTRY MATTERS
Holed up in a hidden corner of some secret, rural idyll, Stephen Prince is dedicating his life to exploring the darker side of the pastoral experience. So what began as ‘A Year In The Country’ has lasted for almost a decade…
Words: Bob Fischer
“Often, rural areas are shown as being isolated, otherly places. And that isolation allows them to create a world unto themselves, free from the influence of the outside world. I wanted the book to focus on films and TV programmes that explored this…”
Stephen Prince sounds enthused and ebullient discussing his pet subject. Since 2014, his multi-media project A Year In The Country has delved into the uncannier aspects of the rural experience across a series of hugely enjoyable releases. His excellent new book, Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands, is his third anthology of thoughtful and exhaustively-researched essays on the “wyrd” as depicted in popular culture. From big-hitters like The Wicker Man and Bagpuss to relative obscurities (1951 documentary Oss Oss Wee Oss, anyone?), it’s a collection obsessed with the minutiae of deliciously pastoral disquiet.
“The landscape in Britain often seems layered with myth and history,” he continues. “Everywhere you go, it’s like you’re walking on echoes. Added to that, the stories from the films and TV shows we’ve watched can seep into those places. The first time I went to Portmeirion, I really wasn’t sure if I was in the real world, or on the set of The Prisoner.”
This love of bucolic oddness stems, he explains, from a childhood spent in a tiny Pennine village.
“When you’re a kid you live in that world of imagination,” he remembers. “In my head, the local river became the scene of battles from Doctor Who. But also… the Cold War was going on. I remember being ten and wondering how I could build a nuclear shelter in my bedroom.
“And I literally grew up among Cold War sirens. I had a friend whose family lived in a house that was part of the Tourist Information Centre, and they had one in their front room! So I’d go round with a head full of robots and spaceships, and on their windowsill was a device that – at any moment – might tell me I had four minutes to live before I was incinerated.
“So these were some of the initial seeds that, many decades on, became A Year In The Country.”
He talks the talk, but he also walks the walk… presumably along a darkening forest trail, with a wizard’s staff in his hand. A decade ago, Stephen swapped metropolitan hurly-burly for a return to country living, and it’s clearly been a transformative experience.
“I’d been living and working in some very urban areas,” he explains. “And perhaps subconsciously I was looking for a change. I listened to a friend’s copy of the 2004 compilation album Gather In The Mushrooms – The British Acid Folk Underground, 1968-74 and it really seemed to open something up in my mind. The same friend also had a copy of Trunk Records’ soundtrack to The Wicker Man, and through that I somehow stumbled upon Ghost Box Records. A big album for me was The Advisory Circle’s Mind How You Go… I remember listening endlessly to ‘And The Cuckoo Comes’ from that record. So it was like all these things set up new pathways in my mind.”
So listening to Ghost Box made him give up the rat race? He pauses for thought.
“It maybe spurred me on. I’d been living in a rural area for a couple of years before I started A Year In The Country, and during that time I was researching a lot, working out how I could interact with some of the atmospheres we’ve been discussing. It was a whole new area to explore and enjoy.”
Asked to select one example from the book that epitomises the strangeness of the British rural experience, he nominates a 1978 instalment of the BBC’s Play Of The Week anthology series. A surreal combination of Folk Horror and science fiction, with regular Play School presenter Toni Arthur in a starring role.
“Stargazy On Zummerdown!” exclaims Stephen. “You can’t imagine it being commissioned today, even as some kind of fringe theatre production. Let alone something on primetime BBC TV! It has political theory combined with Morris Dancing, starships, Monty Python-esque gangs of marauding accountants… all set in this utopian, post-apocalyptic world. It’s genuinely odd, a real cultural curio.
“And even when programmes like that are distributed on Youtube, there’s still a sense of discovering something secret. Nowadays, people are interested in films being restored to crystal-clear High Definition – and I’m not knocking that – but these programmes are so different to that. They’re blurry, smeared and a bit grimy. It’s almost like they’ve become spectral versions of themselves…”
A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands is available here:
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-a-year-in-the-country-cathode-ray-and-celluloid-hinterlands-book-released/
Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/
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