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Thankyou!

Cheers GNC! I should point out that it's actually my 2017 article from the FT that's currently on the blog... you'll have to buy the current issue to get the new stuff. :) I'll be regularly updating the blog with extra features, though!

It's my 'Haunted Generation' round-up on Page 37.

Sent you a DM, Moulinsart.

I've got a few duplicate back issues for sale, if anyone is interested? Happy to split them, and sell them individually if anyone is looking for single copies... feel free to message me with offers. I'd be happy with a couple of quid and covering the postage, really. The issues for sale are...

Report back, catseye... I'd be really interested to know what she said.

There's an episode of it on this... (although the price has rocketed since I bought mine - must have gone out of print!) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Look-Back-70s-Telly-Issue/dp/B002ZJ1JRC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1496649626&sr=8-4&keywords=look+back+on+70s+telly

For those of you still traumatised by Picture Box, it may disturb you further to note that Alan Rothwell and Humphrey Cushion frequently TEAMED UP. They're coming to get you. While you sleep.

I think the psychedelic elements are definitely there in some US kids TV of the early 70s, too... things like The Banana Splits and Scooby Doo have them. But it's a brasher, more colourful type of psychedelia, so the TV follows suit. They had Scott McKenzie and the Mystery Machine, we had Pink...

Sure, but I was definitely thinking more of otherworldy beliefs rather than just the latest diet or misleading political policy. People have always placed their faith in all kinds of things - both mundane and supernatural - but I think in the 1970s you'd have found far more believers in the...

Yeah, definitely. It was a brief era when the supernatural was part of the mainstream media, and included (in at least a semi-serious fashion) on primetime news and in national newspapers. I think it was a very credulous era, when the public in general were much more open to stories of strange...

It's the 'things that surely weren't meant to be unsettling, but are' that interest me - and evoke the feeling - the most, I think. Surely nobody intended the opening titles to Picture Box to be disquieting? It was a gentle daytime programme for schools. And yet the combination of the discordant...

Again... thanks Pete! It's definitely a feeling that not everyone got... I've met people of our generation (I was born in 1972) who are utterly baffled by the whole thing. Let's just say we're special. :) If you want to recapture the feeling, I'd definitely recommend you checking out some of...

Thanks so much... honestly, I'm so thrilled by the reaction to all of this. Yeah, I'm really fascinated by those examples of later hauntedness. Pye Corner Audio's Sleep Games is a great album for evoking some of that 1980s VHS weirdness.

Thanks Marion... that means so much. I was chatting on Twitter today about an important factor in 1970s unsettlement that I'd never previously thought about, that of childhood illness. Escape Into Night captures it perfectly, I think... that feeling of semi-hallucinatory drowsiness, during which...

Blimey, I had no idea... thankyou, I'll check that out!

Oh blimey, this one...? One thing I wanted to discuss in the article (but just ran out of space - something had to give!) was how much of this stuff was actually intentionally unsettling? Those Near and Far titles looks like the beginning of a horror film, but was that accidental? Did the...

Oh yeah, I could imagine it being right up Maconie's street! Or Mark Radcliffe... neither thought of them.

Thanks GNC! I was actually really excited by the things that Jim Jupp from Ghost Box said in the article... that younger artists were finding that material from the 1980s and 1990s gave them similarly 'haunted' feelings about their childhoods. Threads feels like a good cut-off point for me too...

Hello, it's Bob here... I'm the writer of the 'Haunted Generation' article. Thanks for the kind words, it was an utter labour of love, and I'm thrilled with how it looks in the magazine. This is the piece of music that sparked off my interest in the whole thing... it's called Roygbiv, and it's...

Aw! I'm very touched by that. Thankyou. Although I now feel the burden of responsibility, in case you don't like them... ;)

That's a fascinating analysis, thanks for that. I find Boneland to be the most touching of all of Garner's works, and it's definitely a book that repays the effort you put into it. I must have read it half-a-dozen times now, and I still don't think I'm anywhere near catching every nuance...

In that case, Weirdstone is probably your best place to start, yeah... a hidden world of fairylore, in and around our own, is pretty much the entire premise of the book! Hope you enjoy it. First Light is an anthology of tributes to Garner's work, with the likes of Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman and...

Nice to have created a potential convert... ;) I always recommend Elidor as a good starting point for the complete beginner, as it's a straightforward, standalone book, and probably the finest example of Garner's mastery of combining the fantastical with the utterly mundane (it's essentially...

Thankyou! My first article for FT after 20 years as a reader, so it was all a bit of an honour. And a real labour of love.