A Year in the Country
Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands
Stephen Prince
A Year In The Country 2022
Writer, musician, photographer and cultural pathfinder, Stephen Prince has been mapping hauntological themes in popular culture for the best part of a decade. His umbrella project A Year In The Country encompasses books, albums and a website that catalogue his comprehensive Ordinance Survey of the Wyrd. Previously an urban flâneur, whose journeys into the Soho night were gathered in his Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity photo-journals (2013), Prince turned rural psychogeographer after relocating to his native Derbyshire in 2014. His quest really began, growing up glued to the BBC’s Bagpuss (1974) and Thames Television’s Shadows (1975-8) – programmes that suggested to their wideeyed viewers that a portal into another realm could only be a shop door away.
These formative influences join 22 further selections, from mainstream TV to experimental arthouse cinema, examined in Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinter-lands. Prince’s path winds back to the post-War era, with the “time capsule” rural Lancashire landscape captured in Bryan Forbes’s sublime directorial debut, 1961’s Whistle Down The Wind, in which farmer’s daughter Hayley Mills mistakes fugitive convict Alan Bates for Jesus. Forbes used original AngryYoung Men Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to render his screenplay in authentic dialect. The duo went on to pen Southern TV’s 1979-81 Worzel Gummidge, a series Mackenzie Crook was determined to ignore as he devised his 2019 “recalibration” of Barbara Euphan Todd’s novels – the most recent work addressed here – to awaken consciousness of environmental issues in his youthful audience using oldtime scarecrow magic.
As the Haunted Generation come of age in the Eighties, things get really interesting. Themes of Cold War espionage and catastrophic government failure cast long shadows across this very different decade, channelled by
