- Orbital Operations
- Posts
- Corridors And Edges
Corridors And Edges
Orbital Operations for 25 September 2022
Warren Ellis
September 25, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta at the autumn equinox. This is kind of a fill-in edition, as I'm deep in concept generation this week and there hasn't been a lot of space for anything else. Also, some disgusting local animal dug up my poor baby carrots. I have a lot of construction to do this winter if I'm going to successfully grow vegetables and herbs, and this may include spring-loaded pungee sticks and some kind of trebuchet. I presume all urban gardeners in Britain do this and I just wasn't told. Which is the most acceptable direction in which to launch cats from your garden by trebuchet? Towards the sea?
On the other hand:
I started this plant from seed in June. End of September, it's produced its first cucumber. I did not actually expect it to bear fruit this year. I am absurdly pleased by this.
We are deep into pre-production stuff on PROJECT WRITTLE 1, while I figure out what 2 and 3 are. For those just joining me, PROJECT WRITTLE is a slate of audio-drama podcasts I'm creating, writing and co-producing. The generation of WRITTLE 2 has stalled — sometimes you start with what seems like a really good idea, but when you bring it to full outline it just kind of sags in the middle and doesn't want to go anywhere, and that's where that idea is right now. The beat outline just fades out towards the end.
In the meantime, I'm waiting on my final notes for the WRITTLE 1 scripts, so that I can produce clean versions. These will include more thoughts towards soundscape design, so the sound people have more to grab on to. This is going to be really interesting for me.
Autumn means making roasted tomato and red pepper soup, and tapping a few drops of something warming into my espresso, like this Suffolk Spiced Rum. (Also available on Amazon, somehow.) This is, honestly, my favourite time of year.
On the other side of the county to the Suffolk Distillery - Radio Mothership, for autumn dreaming.
My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to orbitaloperations.com , where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts.
TV
I'm across a lot of research stuff right now.
This is part of where my head is at for two projects.
Now, THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE is very obscure, and unsurprisingly so. Made in 1966 - and remember THE AVENGERS tv show was in full swing well before then — it doesn't know if it wants to be modernist spoof or surreal drama, or modernist drama (there is some weirdly adult biting dialogue and surprising emergences of sex) or surreal spoof (on a fraction of THE AVENGERS' budget). It is, in theory, the story of a British covert security department and the wars waged between it and a vengeful female criminal mastermind in a world of high science and low magic. In practise? There are moments where it plays like "what if the LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN team remade CALLAN?" This is a few years before McGoohan's THE PRISONER, and you wonder what the reaction to CORRIDOR PEOPLE would have been if they'd dropped the broad comedy. (Which I presume was there to smooth off the weirdness and edginess.)
As Kim Newman notes:
...profound thought has gone into this – in ‘Birdwatcher’, Kronk reports to his superiors, a dark roomful of varied establishment types (bishop, general, cricketer, etc) who stand on pedestals and rant clichés at each other. It could as easily have come from an avant garde theatre piece as a Monty Python sketch, and it’s possible that this loose committee of the country’s clueless owners are the eponymous corridor people (the title is never referred to in dialogue).
Note also that the scene he refers to becomes quite chilling. Before it turns into a Greek chorus reciting "Breathes There The Man" by Sir Walter Scott. It's peculiar. For all its ridiculousness, an oddly haunting piece of work.
Also obscure now, and no less peculiar, is ARTEMIS 81. At the time of its broadcast, though: oh, the noise. See, it was broadcast on the evening of December 29, by the BBC (these were the days when there were only three tv channels and most people were stuck indoors from Xmas Eve to New Year's Day) and it's three hours long. And, um, here's a description:
For the 1981 viewing public, however, decades before programme-pausing Personal Video Recorders (such as ‘Sky+’ and TiVo) there could be no such respite. Over the course of three hours, they were thrown into and around the Manichean, byzantine intricacies of a plot focussing on successful science-fiction novelist Gideon Harlax and his (girl-)friend Gwen Meredith, as the pair investigate a series of unusual suicides. It turns out that the deceased had all been passengers on the same North Sea ferry from Denmark to England, along with world-famous organist Albrecht von Drachenfels. The imperious Drachenfels is later revealed as a mere pawn of cosmic forces – his theft of a Pagan artefact from a Danish museum one element of a nefarious, potentially apocalyptic grand design.
To avert Armageddon, Harlax must somehow enter and traverse a kind of parallel reality – one which looks, sounds and feels like a dystopian vision of over-industrialised, late-1970s Eastern Europe – while shaking himself free of his ingrained, solipsistic detachment. At its core, Artemis 81 traces the halting, sometimes painfully traumatic transition of an intellectual from ivory-tower solitude (Harlax has been, literally, building himself a tower) towards fragility and feeling – towards spiritual/emotional rebirth, towards the possibility of human love…
So there you are, fat with turkey sandwiches, snaffling the last of the Christmas selection-box chocolate, tin of Watney's Pale Ale in hand and ready to be entertained by a long tv film starring the hugely popular tv sitcom actor Hywel Bennett... oh, people were furious. Tricked into giving three hours of their lives to a longform experimental television play featuring Hywel Bennett, once one of Britain's finest and bravest actors, giving an incredibly controlled, furious performance.
It was written by David Rudkin, author of the transformative PENDA'S FEN and generally bloody brilliant writer. I must have been around 11 years old. I was confused and mesmerised. Most other people were just confused. Including, apparently, the providers of the DVD seen above: the title is ARTEMIS 81, referencing a star, not ARTEMIS '81 referencing the year.
If you don't know EDGE OF DARKNESS - and I mean the unsurpassed original, not the US-set movie remake - then, honestly, you don't know television, or writing for television. Sorry. Author Troy Kennedy Martin was a master of the form, and this was his highest achievement.
And TWIN PEAKS Season 3, well... I'm sure you've seen it and have Opinions.
All these things surround a particular space. The uncanny shatterzone of Weird Fiction, the confluence of crime and myth. That's where I'm at right now. In some ways, it's probably where I've always been.
GOT MORE TIME?
KEEP READING
Quiet week on LTD this week.
I am sitting in front of the fireplace with a Manhattan, the new issue of The Modernist and the new issue of Gardeners' World. I hope you are sitting somewhere comfortable, with a good drink and good things to read. Take care of yourself.
W