Children’s television has often been bizarre and surreal. All manner of strange things were done on Vision On, for example, but the Magic Roundabout took this surrealism to new heights. Created by Serge Danot, this originally French show included Florence, an ordinary girl, Dougal, a bossy, pretentious dog, Brian, a chirpy snail, a flying cow called Ermintrude and Dylan, a guitar-wielding rabbit who was constantly falling asleep. The episodes ended when Zebedee, a red-faced, moustachio’d magician with a spring instead of legs, bounced in to tell everyone ‘Time for bed’ before leaping off again. Supporting characters included the bearded Mr Rusty and a talking cannon with a British accent. I gather that the original French show was supposed to be satirical and actually rather boring. The English version, narrated by Eric Thompson, was completely different. Thompson dispensed with the French story and characters and made up his own dialogue when he projected it onto his front door at home. The result was so hypnotically strange that adults started trying to get home early so they could watch it. As with another favourite children’s TV series, Captain Pugwash, rumours soon developed that it was not as innocent as it seemed. In the case of Pugwash, the rumours were that the character’s names were all sexual references. They aren’t. The Magic Roundabout and its characters, on the other hand, were suspected of being the products of drugs. Oh yes, and Florence was supposed to be sleeping with Zebedee. This hidden subtext behind a supposedly innocent children’s programme was the reason the series was cancelled. None of this is remotely true. The reason it stopped was because Danot and his team simply stopped making it.
But it was and still remains a massive hit, spawning books, toys and DVDs. I’ve drawn Dougal because in many ways he was its star. He would set out on an adventure each episode, with the other characters joining in to offer advice. In one episode, he decided that he was going to be a great film maker, sporting sunglasses and carrying around an Edwardian movie camera. ‘Eat your heart out, Ken Russell!’ he says at one point, as he intends to become a great revival to the contemporary avant-garde director. In another episode, he went looking for four-leafed clovers, but to his chagrin Florence and Brian found any number. Brian, always cheerful and keen to help, was often the butt of Dougal’s sneers and put-downs. In some ways he reminds me now of Tony Hancock, with his pretensions and put-downs towards his friends.
The Magic Roundabout is a genuine children’s TV classic, and another show that produced echoes in other programmes after its cancellation. In one episode of the Channel 4 comedy series, Spaced, the female lead, played by Jessica Hynds, goes for a job. The interview, however, is so boring and complicated that she drifts off into a reverie, accompanied by the Magic Roundabout’s theme.
And here’s the music and the title’s sequence, which I found on Raymond942’s channel on YouTube.
More fun SF art. This selection of covers for UFO and Flying Saucer comics, most of which seem to have been published by Gold Key, comes from the book Saucer Attack by Eric and Leif Nesheim, published by General Publishing Press in 1997. Subtitle, ‘Popular Culture in the Age of flying Saucers’, the book looks at the books, films, toys, TV series, hymns, pulp magazine short stories, comics, and, of course, the Mars Attacks bubblegum cards, which appeared following Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947 of the unknown aircraft, which flew ‘like saucers skipped across water’. The SF pulp published in the 1920s to early 40s also depict strange, saucer-like alien and human spaceships, showing the pop cultural influences on the UFO phenomenon and its imagery as it would develop later.
The text at the bottom of the page reads
Sci-Fi and UFO storylines struggled as the -60s wore on. Some managed to survive- like UFO Flying Saucers, which lasted into the mid-70s with several reprint issues that featured earlier stories.
The scanned image on this page is probably too small for most of our to read comfortably. To make it larger, click on the image.
A little while ago I put up a series of posts about real, 19th century inventions, which now seem like the weird machines of Steampunk Science Fiction. This is a subgenre, which imagines what the world would have been like, if the Victorians had invented spacecraft, time travel, interdimensional travel and other elements of Science Fiction, or had completed and fully developed real inventions like Babbage’s mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, steam carriages and dirigible aircraft, like that flown by the French aviator Giffard in 1854.
One of these real Steampunk inventions was the monorail. A steam-driven monorail system was designed by an American inventor and entrepreneur. This astonished me, as I always associated the monorail train with the technological optimism of the 1960s and ’70s. It was an invention for a technological age that never happened. After writing the article, a reader posted a comment on the piece kindly pointing out that a steam monorail system had been built in Eire. the track and its train have been restored, and are now a tourist attraction. The commenter included a link, and if you go to that website, you’ll see the train in question. It is very definitely an Irish train, as its been decorated very patriotically in green.
This hasn’t been the only example of such trains I’ve found. They even existed as miniature toys. Looking through the book Mechanical Toys: How Old Toys Work by Athelstan and Kathleen Silhaus, with photos by Nelson McClary (New York: Crown Publishers 1989) I came across the illustration below of a toy monorail train, stabilized with a gyroscope and powered by a single wheel. It was produced by the Ely Cycle Co., of Britain, in 1912. It was first patented in Britain in 1908, and then in Germany in 1911, where it was also manufactured by Suskind. The text notes that it was stabilized by a gyroscope long before Sperry used it in aircraft and ocean liners.
The use of a single wheel is also like the various Science Fictional vehicles that similarly have only one of these, like the monocycles in Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat. This toy, and others like it, show a whole world of Victorian and Edwardian invention that seemed to anticipate a technological future that never quite happened, as well as the immense inventiveness of the manufacturers.
I used to be a fan of the newspaper cartoon strip, Bloom County, which was syndicated in America and over here, in the pages of the Guardian, in the 1980s. Set in the American Midwest, and with cast of characters that included a corrupt lawyer, a talking penguin and his similarly loquacious animal friends, and a primary schoolboy working as a cub reporter, it commented on and satirised the social and political conditions of Reagan’s America.
One of the issues it commented on was the increasing power of television advertising over the minds of the young. This was when TV shows, like Masters of the Universe, were appearing which were tied to lines of toys, and whose purpose was really to promote them.
At the same time, politicians and the public were becoming increasingly concerned about media bias, particularly on television.
In this cartoon from Bloom County, a worried mother tries to get her husband to notice how the television is brainwashing their son into buying a line of toys, somewhat like the Masters of the Universe figures. But her husband isn’t listening, being brainwashed by his television into voting for a particular senator.
If you can’t read it, click on the image to enlarge.
Even though this cartoon dates from c. 1988, nearly 30 years ago, that issue hasn’t gone away. It’s come back with a vengeance in the way Trump’s popularity as a television presenter on the American version of The Apprentice undoubtedly helped to get him into the White House.
And in Britain the media, including the BBC, has been resolutely determined to attack, belittle and sneer at Labour party and particularly Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Momentum, the most egregious bias being shown by Laura Kuenssberg. Instead of Senator Glump as the person people should be voting for, this cartoon could easily be republished today with the TV telling them to vote for Theresa May. As for being a ‘Bolshevik weenie’, this is the line that the Tory press and the Blairites in Labour have been using against Jeremy Corbyn by smearing him as a Trotskyite. Just as the Republicans fell over themselves in fits screaming that Barack Obama was a dangerous Commie Muslim Nazi, who wanted to destroy all Whites.
Things don’t seem to have got better over the past three decades.
It’s time to stop this nonsense right now, and shake off challenge the lies of mainstream media.
Yesterday I put up a piece about a performance of Karel Capek’s classic play about a robot rebellion, RUR, at the Czech national library a few years ago by a theatre group, Café Neu Romance, using lego robots. The theatre company was the creation of Vive Les Robots, a Danish company set up to encourage public interest in robots and robotics. I said in the article that I thought it would be good if the play could be performed by full-sized robots, to give it the stature it deserves. I realise, however, that was unlikely given how massively expensive the animatronic technology is, that brings to life robotic puppets like Ry’gel from the SF series Farscape.
One British company, Engineered Arts, has created such a full size mechanical actor. It’s called Robothespian, and there are a number of videos about it on YouTube. The video below shows it, appropriately enough, talking about R.U.R. as part of Café Neu Romance, a robot arts festival, at the Czech National Technical Library in 2012.
Robothespian has also appeared on British breakfast television. In this clip from the Beeb’s Breakfast TV programme from 2014, the two presenters talk about, and sometimes to Robothespian with Dr Nigel Crook of Oxford Brookes University. The robot was created by Engineered Arts as a research project to explore the ways people interact with robots. Crook explains that it can respond to a number of voice commands, and the two presenters ask it questions such as what advantages robots have over human beings. Crook also explains that despite this ability, real intelligence is a long way off, and the problem of giving the robot the ability to hold a genuinely intelligent, wide-ranging conversation is very challenging. So right now, the machine responds giving the answers programmed into it by a human operator.
Robothespian, or Artie, as it is called, from RT – Robothespian – replies to the question about its usefulness that robots can perform simple, repetitive tasks accurately without tiring, or needing to go for breaks. They ask it if it could do their job. Its answer is that it certainly could, as all they do is read from an autocue. So when does it start?
The machine has a range of expressive hand gestures, a moving mouth, and two screens in its head, which show images of eyes. These blink, helping it show a number of expressions. They also show hearts, like those shown in the eyes of cartoon characters to indicate they have fallen in love. The two presenters are, however, advised to stand a few feet away from the robot. Crook explains it is compliant, which means that, unlike an industrial robot, it won’t blindly continue to perform a gesture if it accidentally strikes someone who happens to stand in the way. Similarly, it’s possible to pull the robot’s limbs away from where they’ve settled without damaging it. Nevertheless, the presenters were advised to stand clear of it just in case it accidentally flipped back and struck them.
As well as delivering monologues, Robothespian can also sing, giving a hilarious rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, and do impressions, like Darth Vader from Star Wars. Crook explains that it was built to act as a guide at museums, festivals and exhibitions. The two presenters ask about its gender, and are told that it’s creators think of it as male, as it’s been given a male voice.
Also on the show is a little feature about a robot toy, Caspar, which is used in schools to teach autistic children. The toy was being tried out as a teaching tool as autistic people can find it immensely challenging understanding other’s emotions. They also like things in a very set order. Caspar is useful in that its responses, although intended to mimic those of humans, are always the same. For example, when it smiles, that smile is always the same smile every time it makes that expression. And this regularity and constancy of expression is intended to be reassuring and non-threatening, so that the child using it finds it easy, or easier to do so, than more conventional forms of interaction with people.
Robothespian isn’t cheap. Crook explains that it costs about £50,000. Despite this, Engineered Arts have built more than one of them. In this video from last year, 2015, two of them sing, ‘I Am Not A Robot’.
I find robots and robotics interesting, but I am very much aware of the problems they pose. There are the general philosophical issues like human identity and uniqueness – how long before they develop real intelligence and consciousness, start performing sophisticated task like creating art or composing music, or resent at their enslavement and control by humans? There are also the very real social and economic problems caused by their manufacture. The more industry is automated, the more real jobs, that could be performed by people, are lost. The Beeb a few months ago broadcast a documentary which forecast that in the next 15-20 years a third of all jobs could be lost in Britain. You can certainly see it in retail, where a number of companies have replaced human staff with self-service tills, where you scan in yourself the items you want to purchase into the machine, which then takes your money and hands you your change and receipt. If we aren’t careful, this will lead to the emergence of a society very much like that of 2000 AD’s Megacity One. Judge Dredd’s home city has, thanks to robots, a massive unemployment rate of 95% or so. As a result, most people’s lives are marked by boredom and despair, a situation brought home in the classic ‘Judge Dredd’ story, ‘Un-American Graffitti’, featuring Chopper, a teenage lad trying to escape this crushing social malaise through ever more daring pieces of graffiti artwork. 2000 AD and the ‘Dredd’ strip in particular always had a very strong element of satire and social commentary, and this was one of the most outstanding examples of the strip telling an entertaining story while also describing the real situation many of its readers faced for real due to Thatcherism.
And unfortunately, despite the boom years of the 1990s, the prospect of long-term unemployment and grinding poverty has got worse, due to globalism and the spread of neoliberalism as the dominant political and economic ideology. This will only get worse unless humanity finds ways to manage robotic technology wisely, to create jobs, rather than to the replace them.
This will annoy nearly every woman and also a very large number of men. Looking round one of the charity bookshops in Cheltenham yesterday with a friend, I found a whole load of pamphlets from the Institute of Economic Affairs. They’re a right-wing, free market thinktank connected with the Tory party. I think they were also trying to promote themselves as non-party political when Tony Blair was in power, as I think he was also very sympathetic to their message. Put simply, their pro-privatisation, anti-welfare, anti-poor – one of the pamphlet’s was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Pauperism, anti-Socialist – another was Von Hayek’s Socialism and the Intellectuals. And anti-feminist. Two of the pamphlets were anti-feminist screeds, intended to encourage women to forget any notions of equality, independence and a career, and return to their traditional roles as wives and mothers.
The two pamphlets were entitled Liberating Modern Women…From Feminism and Equal Opportunities – A Feminist Fallacy. They were collections of essays on individual subjects within the overall theme of rebutting feminism. The contributors seemed to be an equal number of men and women. Among the policies they recommended were measures to preserve the family from break up and end ‘no fault’ divorces. They claimed that men and women pursue different goals because of innate biological differences. And rather than being a patriarchal institution, the family was actually a matriarchy. They also attacked women working, because it meant that the household economy was now based on two people having an income, whereas before it was only the husband’s wage that was important. And, almost inevitably, there was an attack on single mothers. Left-wing welfare policies were attacked for taking them out of the jobs market and placing them into ‘welfare dependency’.
My friend decided to buy them to see how extreme, shocking and bonkers they actually were. Though he insisted that I tell the woman on the desk when paying for them that we we’re buying them because we agreed with them, which raised a smile from her. While walking round town afterwards he said he would have felt less embarrassed holding these pamphlets if he’d had something less offensive to put them in, to disguise the fact that he had them. Like one of the porno mags. I didn’t recognise most of the contributors to the pamphlets, but one name stood out: Mary Kenny. She had been a journalist for the Guardian or Observer, but moved to the Torygraph. My friend was also shocked, as the Institute of Economic Affairs has been on Channel 4 News several times. It’s one of the organisations they’ve gone to for ‘balance’ discussing particular issues. My friend’s point is that they’re policies are so extreme, they really aren’t providing any kind of reasoned balance at all, just more far-right opinion.
There’s an attitude amongst some Republicans in America that feminism really is a terrible Marxist plot to destroy Western civilisation, despite the fact that it existed before Marxism, and its campaigns for votes for women and equal opportunities cross party-political boundaries. Despite the institute’s arguments, there really isn’t one of their views that isn’t vulnerable to disproof. For example, it’s true that men and women tend to perform different jobs, and have different personal goals and attitudes. But it’s very debatable how far this is due to biological differences. A few years ago, back in the 1990s there was a lot of interest and noise about supposed sex differences in the organisation of the brain. Men’s and women’s brains were made differently, and this was why men were better at maths and parking cars, and women were better at language and communication, but couldn’t read maps. Since then, the situation has reversed slightly. One female neuroscientist, Cordelia – , wrote a book a few years ago arguing that any psychological differences and intellectual aptitudes that differed between the sexes weren’t due to physical differences in the brain. With the exception of individuals at the extreme ends of the scale – very ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ brains, brains are just brains, and you can’t tell their former owner’s sex simply by looking at them.
As for feminism itself, it’s probably fair to say that many women do feel caught between their careers and their families, and would like more time to spend raising or attending to their children. But their entry into the workforce, and pursuing jobs, hobbies and interests previously reserved for men are the product of profound needs and desires on their behalf. It isn’t a case that they have been somehow brainwashed or indoctrinated by some kind of feminist ‘false consciousness’. For example, you can hear from older women how they felt when they were young, when they wanted to play with boy’s toys, like train or construction sets, like Meccano, but were forbidden by their parents. Or wanted to try their hand at ‘boy’s’ subjects at school, like woodwork. Or join in with boy’s games like footie or rugby. This doesn’t mean that all women wanted to do all of the above, only that a sizable number did want to do some of those, and felt frustrated at the social conventions that forbade them to. When the feminists in the 1960s argued that women had a right to do traditionally male jobs and pursuits, they were articulating the desires of very many women. They weren’t just abstract theorists speaking only for themselves.
As for the statement that the entry of women into the workforce has made family finances more difficult, because mortgages are now based on a double income, that’s also very open to query. It might be that the change to women working has had an effect, but I’ve also seen the argument that women had to go out to work, because the income from the husband’s wages alone wasn’t enough to pay the bills.
As for the family being a ‘matriarchal’ institution, the status of women has changed over time. But in the Middle Ages, women were basically their husband’s chattels. And in the West, women didn’t automatically have a right to hold their property independently of their husbands until the Married Women’s Property Act in the late 19th century. One of the early feminist tracts from 19th century Germany was a polemic attacking the way women’s property automatically became their husband’s on marriage.
I’m alarmed by the break down of the traditional family, rising divorces and absent fathers. I always have been, ever since we did ‘relationships’ as part of the RE course at school, when the news was full of it. But part of the problem isn’t the ease of divorce, although it became more difficult and expensive when Blair was in power. It’s the fact that many people do find themselves trapped in unhappy relationships. Some idea how much of a problem this was can be seen in some of the jokes about how awful marriage was and quarrelling spouses. At a far more serious level, you can also see it in accounts of men, who walked out on their families, and took up bigamous marriages elsewhere in the days when divorce was difficult and all but impossible unless you were very wealthy.
The two pamphlets were published a little time ago. One dated from 1992 – twenty-four years ago -, and the other from 2005, about eleven. But they represent an attitude that’s still very present in the Conservatives, and especially in right-wing newspapers like the Daily Heil. A week ago the Tories elected Theresa May as their leader, and will no doubt be presenting themselves as the ‘pro-woman’ party. This shows the other side to them, the one that’s beyond and underneath Cameron’s rhetoric of flexible-working hours, and the Tories’ embrace of female leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
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