In Donegal a friend runs a shop that’s thirty foot by fifteen foot of tacky wonderment. He sells everything from 15kb digital games to Elvis Presley clocks with legs swinging from a gyrating clockwork pelvis. On a visit to him a few years ago I found an object of absolute wonderment: a statue of the Pope, with something utterly, obviously wrong.
It had George Bush Jnr’s face.
I pointed this out to him and he shrugged. The devout are willing to turn a blind eye to such facial malapropisms it seems. Much of his stock comes from China, possibly from one of those intensive artisan towns where artistic wonders of mass reproduction are whipped out in mere hours. My theory is a Google image search went brilliantly awry resulting in a run of ecclesiastical George Bushs. There’s a photo hiding on the hard-drive somewhere that I’ll post when and if I can find it.
I wish I’d bought the damned bloody brilliant thing.
Part of Donegal, part of the Republic, part of the domain of paying for an RTÉ TV licence if you owned a set.
Except we couldn’t get RTÉ. Two channels of swooshing snow that would bring on epilepsy in a breeze-block were all that resided behind the pushbuttons of channels 5 and 6. There was however the odd Saturday when if the wind was blowing a gentle north-west, you stood five inches from the TV set, and you’d had a certain amount of honey-coated cereal, that your sugar-rushing brain could convince itself that the gaudy stripes of a Bosco presenter’s pants were emerging from the dancing, screeching blizzard of the complete lack of a TV signal.
It didn’t matter. We could get BBC1, BBC2, ITV in its regional form of UTV, and eventually, SexyTitsAdultCensoredBannedWhatAreThosePeopleDoingToEachOther 4.
I mean, Channel 4.
So the mental firmament of ephemeral televisual culture I daydream into is not Forty Coats or Wanderly Wagon; it’s Stig of the Dump, Ulysses 31, Noel Edmonds in his Swop Shop, Sandy Toksvig making sandwiches in No. 73, Philip Schofield, and, and, and…
And that’s just it. For some reason the titles of some of the shows that inhabit my memory didn’t make the cut. Every so often I’m plagued by a Pepper’s ghost in my imagination, a scene so vivid I could reach out and touch it, but lacking the substance of identity. I don’t know why I get so fixated on them, but I spent some of my happiest days inside the television. If that’s damning of modern living, I don’t care. I hold some of these shows in the same regard as a salivating antiques dealer appreciates fingering something Louis XVI.
For years I was haunted by a blonde girl, who lived in the future with people who weren’t her family, and who had an alien pet with a massively fluffy body. As much as I wringed my mental sponge into a bucket I could not remember anything about it other than my weak-kneed fondness for the lead, it was possibly Australian, and that it was on Children’s ITV (an entire children’s channel, within a channel! Kidception! No, no, wait, that’s a really dodgy looking neologism). With the advent of sewshawl meeja I took the opportunity to ask around, even recreating the alien from the frayed filaments of memory and posting it on Twitter and Facebook (that’s it up there). Some suggestions came back, but they weren’t even of the right vintage, and no-one recognised what I thought was the indelible form of the pink alien. I began to worry I’d created a false memory (the curator of this here blog has a friend who invented a Leaving Cert Irish story that never existed).
I googled loose combinations of keywords. Eventually I discovered and went to the TV Cream Ask the Family forum. I posted the above pic, and as much detail as my synapses could muster, and waited. For weeks. With nothing.
And then a lone genius replied and let me sleep peacefully again: “It looks like Luna. It wasn’t Australian, though. It was British. And it starred Patsy Kensit.”
Amazing. I went to YouTube, and there it was in all its sci-tirical brilliance. It’s even darker and funnier than I remembered it, a kind of Gilliam-esque nightmare bureaucracy with a Douglas Adams sense of humour.
It tapped into one of the most potent tropes of children’s fiction: the absent/dead parent(s) (Chronicles of Narnia, Box of Delights, Under the Hawthorne Tree, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events…). In Luna’s case we don’t know much of her origins, or if she even had parents (she was “batched” on the moon). Luna was our point of entry into this world, as she was as naive to it as we were. It ran for two series, with Kensit being replaced in the second series by Jo Wyatt, playing a different character who assumes the same name. A 9-year-old boy in Donegal had mixed feelings about that. Strange, new, mixed feelings. And the pink alien? Jazzmine, Luna’s alien pet; ‘a “little simple” (from the planet Sim)’. And it was orange, not pink.
Alas TV Cream has had to expunge itself of that beautiful forum as it was experiencing uncontrollable spamming so I can’t link to the thread. It also means next time I get that gnawing in my brain* of an absent TV title I’ve no recourse other than to bash myself over the head with an inflatable mallet like a wacky 80s kids’ presenter until I pass out, and that takes ages.
(*There’s one about Victorian-era children who lived in a big house with a magic garden where the statues came to life at night that I’m not even going to go into now. Gah! Solved, thanks to Simon in the comments below. It’s The Enchanted Castle by the prolific E. Nesbit. Edwardian, not Victorian!)
I think I spent at least an hour replaying the original clip of this, making myself sick the way you do when you’ve pigged out on processed crisps but won’t stop so long as there’s some left at the bottom of the tube. This above has more “heeeeeere”.
The scene eventually becomes like an irritatingly familiar song, and you find yourself donning shades and screaming along. Found via Broadsheet.
Soon, I will begin to recount the effects of growing up without RTÉ in a forgotten northern neck of the Republic. Nippers? No bite. Wanderly Wagon? Wheels came off. Where’s Grandad? Shame on you for losing him.
In Donegal a friend runs a shop that’s thirty foot by fifteen foot of tacky wonderment. He sells everything from 15kb digital games to Elvis Presley clocks with legs swinging from a gyrating clockwork pelvis. On a visit to him a few years ago I found an object of absolute wonderment: a statue of the Pope, with something utterly, obviously wrong.
Inishowen, c. 1980s.
