Another film from the BFI's Britain on Film site. As ever, click on the image above to view it there.
This is a 1961 travelogue taking in haunted sites across Britain. What interests us most is the opening, where David Jacobs (in a suit) is seen with a young lady on top of the Stiperstones, before Edric and his wild hunt put in an appearance up there.
The superstition I know is not that it will rain if you sit in the Devil's Chair. Rather it is that if those rocks are shrouded in cloud then the old boy is sitting there himself.
Edric and his followers also put in an appearance in Malcolm Saville's Seven White Gates:
Suddenly Jenny gave a stifled little scream and pointed up the track which led to to the mines. Shadowy in the thickening mist, the two girls seemed to see a figure on horseback waving ghostly arms but no sound of hooves came to their straining ears. Then, far away on the hilltop, it seemed to Peter than tiny, gnome-like figures flitted in uncanny procession.
Jenny turned and wailed into Peter's shoulder.
"Peter. It's true. It's them. They're riding again. What shall we do. Peter? We must hide our eyes. We mustn't even see them. Don't Look. Peter."
"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.
A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.
"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.
"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.
Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.
Allison Keyes on a rediscovered manuscript that casts light on the Tulsa massacre of 1921 - an attack on a thriving Black neighbourhood.
Alexandra Lange contrasts the reactions to Garden Bridge and Pier 55 - "Two cities, one designer and one strategy – to build a privately funded park above a river."
"Thanks to my older brother, I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee." Ian Jack reviews a new life of the paper's editor David Astor.
"[Jack] Cardiff achieved many of the visual effects in camera by drawing inspiration from the use of light and colour by such artists as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh." David Parkinson looks back at Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus.
"One of the reasons I can’t stand United is the air of sanctimony that hovers over the club. If Mourinho takes them back to the summit it ought to puncture that – it’ll show they’re no better than anyone else, just another plaything for the great man’s ego." David Runciman is right about Jose's re-emergence at Old Trafford.
Yesterday the papers were full of the news that the World Health Organization had been sent an open letter signed by 150 health experts calling for this summer's Olympics to be moved from Rio de Janeiro or postponed.
The experts fear the virus could spread more rapidly around the world because of the influx of Olympic visitors to the Brazilian city, which has a high incidence of the disease Zika.
Today, as I expected, the great and good are telling us not to worry our little heads.
I have now watched all 26 episodes of Gideon's Way on Youtube. As I said in my first post on the subject, one of the pleasures of the series is the regular appearance of actors who later became famous in other roles.
So it is that in one episode (Boy with Gun) you will find both Sir Oliver Lacon from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Wally Batty from Last of the Summer Wine.
That first post showed you John Hurt and Michael Cashman. Here are some more familiar faces.
The Conservative Party's advice to agents in marginal seats at the last election contradicted official Electoral Commission advice, suggests Mark Pack. Alwyn Turner remembers Michael Gove as a young Scotsman on the make: "No one could have behaved more naturally than he in a staffroom that looked as though it were unchanged since 1954."
Does Little Sheffield show small economics can revive a post-industrial city? asks Gareth Roberts.
Anthony Gottlieb on the rise and rise in the reputation of the philosopher David Hume.
Simon Kuper examines the reasons for England's World Cup victory in 1966: "Perhaps the men of 1966 really were a generation of giants who put all future English footballers to shame. Or perhaps what happened is simply that the fittest, luckiest and most sober team of that summer squeaked a narrow victory in a three-week tournament at home."
"When police Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) tries to find material witnesses for the case, he comes up short. Even stranger: none of the Lake’s are mentioned on the passenger list for the ship they arrived from America on the week before...." The Retro Set watches Bunny Lake is Missing, an minor but intriguing British film from 1965.
I have a new weakness - or rather I have revived an old one.
The Gideon stories were a series of police procedurals written, under the pen name J.J. Maric, by the extraordinarily prolific John Creasey between 1955 and 1976.
For some reason I took to them while I was at school even though they were already dating markedly by then.
Now I have discovered that the whole of the Gideon's Way TV series has been uploaded to Youtube. There were 26 of them made for ITV and broadcast in 1965 and 1966.
John Gregson took the title role, playing him as a world-weary liberal who sometimes had to reign in his keener subordinates - a sort of prototype for Morse and Wexford.
Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.
One of the pleasures of Gideon's Way is spotting familiar actors in unfamiliar roles. I have watched only a few of the shows so far, but already I have seen Inspector Wexford masterminding a bullion robbery, Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs running a gang of pickpockets and fences, and Arthur Daley committing arson,
Then there are the pleasures of spotting actors on the way up.
This, for instance, is a young John Hurt on the run from prison. (You can see an even younger Hurt on this blog as an undergraduate in The Wild and the Willing.)
And this young man is now in the House of Lords. It's Michael Cashman, formerly of EastEnders and the European Parliament, in his first role. At this stage of his career his chief means of conveying emotion was hunching his shoulders.
Above all, though, there are the pleasures of the location footage. This is London before turbocapitalism and moral relativism. It's a city of quiet suburbs and decaying warehouses where the villains are cornered and the police inevitably round them up.
The former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, makes the case for helicopter money.
David Boyle is characteristically illuminating: "I have no problem in principle with contracted out services, but note that the contracts tend to be won by companies whose main skill is the delivery of target data to their commissioners."
"Labour’s new members have arrived at the expense of the Greens and the assorted Judean People’s Front parties of the far left. Those new members are still fighting their #1 enemy, the 'Blairites', some of whom have decided, for various reasons, that enough is enough and have left." Jake Wilde dissects zombie Labour.
"Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations." Zadie Smith on her father and British comedy.
Rob Baker nominates his Top 8 Swinging Sixties London Films. Groovy! Laura Reynolds maps London's lost lidos.
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal.
But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are.
When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.
Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, has stated repeating two comedies that take me back further than that.
When I was 11 my favourite radio comedy was The Men from the Ministry. I suppose its anti-Whitehall ethos has its roots in post-war resentment of socialism by the comfortably off - think of the fuss over the Tanganyika ground nut scheme - but it was immensely good natured.
The comedy was in the hands of pros like Derek Guyler and Richard Murdoch,* and it managed to be funny despite, even because of, its formulaic plot.
Their General Assistance Department would have two projects on the go, get them mixed up (perhaps sending the letter referring to one project to the other and vice versa) and there would be a news bulletin describing the resultant chaos.
They would fear the sack, but then discover that their boss was happy with it for some reason and live to cause chaos another week.
So ingrained is the show's comedy in my own sense of humour that I recently heard a joke that I stole for one of the first couple of Lord Bonkers' Diaries. (It is a sobering thought that those first diaries are nearer in time to my 11-year-old self than they are to me today.)
But I can go back further than that.
Radio Four Extra has started to repeat The Clitheroe Kid, which was my favourite radio comedy when I was 8.
You'll get a good idea of Jimmy Clitheroe's schtick if you watch the video above of him with George Formby. He was the ultimate precocious, cheeky schoolboy.
Except that Much Too Shy was made in 1942 and Jimmy Clitheroe was born in in 1921. Which means that he was already 20.
Because Jimmy Clitheroe - and that was his real name - suffered thyroid gland a birth and never grew after the age of 11, remaining 4ft 3in tall.
So by the time I fell in love with his show in 1968, he was 47. He still turned up for recordings in schoolboy cap and short trousers, but he had the face if a middle-aged man. That is why his television and film career had foundered by then.
Jimmy Clitheroe died in 1973, at the age of 51, after taking an overdose on the day of his mother's funeral.
* Richard Murdoch married into the family of Market Harborough's doctor. When he had his appendix out in the cottage hospital here he was plagued by urchins demanding to see "Stinker". He entertained them by putting his bare feet up on the windowsill and wiggling his toes.
"People who are not very bright have this terrible tendency to pick a side in major intractable geopolitical conflicts, and support it as if it was a football team." Dan Davies offers a fair-minded account of Labour's problem with antisemitism.
John Blake puts Ken Livingstone right on Hitler and Zionism.
"The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force." David Conn on the lessons of Hillsborough and the longest inquest in British legal history.
The Shropshire Star collects local residents' memories of the filming of Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth in 1949: "I shall never forget Jennifer Jones’ feet. She did all the running up Pontesford Hill and up to the Devil’s Chair in bare feet, and her feet were bleeding. She was absolutely brilliant, a lovely looking girl."
James Curry remembers his grandfather, the Revd J.P. Martin, who wrote the immortal Uncle books.
Adam Gopnik reviews a new biography of Paul McCartney.
This must be most awkward exchange since Tony Blair was asked to name one of the Newcastle United players he claimed to have watched as a schoolboy in the 1960s.
"This tells you everything you need to know about the desperate, empty campaign being run by a gang of politicians who’ve stepped beyond mere incompetence, and have ended up somewhere truly nasty, surrounded by supporters who love every bit of it." Rupert Myers is damning about the Brexiteers' assault on President Obama.
Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.
"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.
It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.
Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.
The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.
Nicholas Whyte has been ploughing a lonely furrow with a series of posts on the early 1970s children's television series Here Come the Double Deckers.
Although this fell precisely into my era, I fear I can recall disliking it at the time. Even then I sensed it was peopled with stage-school brats and aimed too shamelessly at the American market.
As a result I viewed the later careers of two of its stars - Brisnley Forde of Aswad and Peter Firth - with mild scepticism.
I struggled with Spooks in particular. MI5 just would not employ a former member of the Double Deckers and that is the end of the matter.
Still, I am the last blogger qualified to complain about obscure enthusiasms, and Nicholas's latest Double Deckers post has turned up a top piece of trivia. In fact he wins my Trivial Fact of the Week award.
That trivia concerns an episode of the show called Barney, in which the children befriend an entertainer down on his luck and (inevitably) put on a show with him.
Barney was played by Julian Chagrin, who a few years before had been one of the tennis players watched by David Hemmings at the end of Antonioni's Blow-Up. You can see this scene in the video above, which Nicholas included in his own post.
He calls it "the very odd 1966 film Blow-Up," but I think he meant to call it "a key moment in both the creation and the examination of the myth of Swinging London".
Nicholas also reveals that Chagrin appeared as the secret lemonade drinker in the R.White's television commercials.
The song in them was sung by Ross MacManus, the father of Elvis Costello.*
But you knew that already.
* I like Carl Wilson's observation that "a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Elvis Costello's own songs.
George Osborne's budget announced the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation, as John Elledge demonstrates.
"As anyone involved in the fight to save London’s council housing knows, the boroughs at the forefront of the social cleansing of our city over the last fifteen years are Labour boroughs." Architects for Social Housing are not taken in by Labour's rhetoric.
Michael Gerson says the Republicans are staining themselves by sticking with Donald Trump.
Exposure to nature makes people happy and could cut mental health inequalities between the rich and poor, argues Natasha Gilbert.
The decline of Ricky Gervais is itemised by Joe Bish.
Dirty Feed shows that the first episode of Fawlty Towers was originally filmed as a pilot. That version differs significantly from the broadcast version: "In the reshot section, Danny’s grapefruit is far larger and has a cherry on top, compared to the rather meagre offer on display once we cut to the wide shot." Such obsession is to be applauded.
We all know that the comedian Al Murray is a direct descendant of the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
But our Trivial Fact of the Week reveals that he is also the great nephew of the actor Stephen Murray.
A young person writes: Who was Stephen Murray?
Only the star of the radio comedy The Navy Lark, Sir Francis Walsingham to Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R on television and star of such post-war films as London Belongs to Me and The Magnet.
Garth Stahl explains why white, working-class boys shun university.
"The word 'Zio' was part of the club’s lexicon, despite its connotations eventually becoming widely known." Alex Chalmers on why he resigned as co-chair of Oxford University Labour Club.
Andrew Allen says the government should forget the idea of an trans-Pennine road tunnel.
Sarah Mills looks at the way the Girl Guides' evolving badge programme reveals wider changes in society over time.
"I remember crying all the way through the scene where he did the 'Singin' in the Rain' number. And my sister said, "What are you crying for?" and I said, "Well, he just seems so happy.'" Michael Koresky interviews the film director Terence Davies.
"I don’t think I have ever wanted something to happen more in sport in my entire life than for Claudio Ranieri’s side to win the Premier League," says Gary Lineker.
"Eric's family hope you can join them for an afternoon to celebrate his life and work at The Royal Institution, 2.00pm on Thursday 30th June 2016. There will be a number of guest speakers, audio visual clips and music, followed by light refreshments." Details of the memorial service for Eric Avebury,
"I wish I'd never decided to work in an immigration detention centre," says an anonymous article on politics.co.uk.
Stephen Williams presents an electoral history of Bristol Liberal Democrats 1973-2016.
"Newsagents reached parts of the population that most booksellers and stationers hadn’t previously: the working class. Newsagents could provide a one-stop shop for working-class autodidacts in the interwar period." Misplacedhabits on the need for a history of newsagents' shops.
"Get Carter was different from all other films in that it somehow ‘belonged’ to the north-east – projecting and validating a tough-but-tender image of the region that chimed with the area’s self-romanticising view of itself." Neil Young on a great film, 45 years on.
Railway Maniac on a little piece of Lincolnshire railway history: the Allington Chord.
