I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.

DIES IRAE, DIES ILLA [534]

"The Temptation of St Anthony"

Once I was finally able to stand in front of the triptychs by Hieronymus Bosch that I was fortunate to see in Belgium, I came to realise that the level of detail in them was overwhelming. That said, I spent most of that trip with aching legs and feet from all the walking, every gallery visit being punctuated by finding opportunities to sit down for a bit, so the whole trip had its overwhelming moments.

I should have known all of this ahead of time. Having heard the term “triptych” more when talking about groups of large canvasses by Francis Bacon, what I am seeing here are altar pieces, cabinets made to be opened for the benefit of a single person, or small group of people, a level of intimacy wrecked by displaying them permanently open behind a wall of glass. I only realised once back home that another painting was on the outer panels of “The Last Judgement” on display at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, known as “Christ Crowned with Thorns”.

But the details... a hump-backed bird, with Goofy-like dog ears and wooden skis, carrying a letter on its beak wearing a red robe a hat comprising a funnel with a branch coming out of it, a bauble hanging from a branch (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a being comprised of a human head with legs coming from its metal shell, an arm coming out of the top holding a sword (“The Last Judgement”); a monk-like figure with a large head and no arms walks with a frame on wheels, an antenna coming out of their head (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a hooded blacksmith about to bring their hammer on a naked body slumped over their anvil (“The Last Judgement”).

Detail from "The Last Judgement"

No amount of description, and no amount of choice, will ever do justice describing the sheer... amount of imagery there is. Looking through Stefan Fischer’s book of the complete works of Bosch, as published by Taschen, the many pages that zoom in on detail, for example printing the dog-bird larger than it is in the painting, would make you think Bosch completed hundreds of paintings, despite only 25-30 works attributed to him or his atelier still being extant. The examination of his work, and the endless reproduction of it – of course we could have bought figurines of details from Bosch works in the gallery shops after seeing the real thing – truly makes every frame a painting.

I initially had the impression of the imagery of the hellscapes depicted in these altar pieces being an extension of the medieval doodles made in monastery documents by scribes, known as “marginalia” or “drolleries”, all strange creatures and people with trumpets coming out of their behinds. As much as I mentioned Bosch’s “personal inventiveness of his surreal imagery” last time, and wondering if there is a similar building of symbolism as would be found at the Magritte Museum, next door to “The Temptation of St. Anthony”,  bigger indicator was its subsequent influence, as indicated by Jan Provoost’s own “Last Judgement” featuring similar hellish imagery in one corner only a decade after Bosch’s death, and in the composition of more realist works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The presence of this imagery helps to decentralise the subject of each painting overall – Jesus is pushed to the top of “The Last Judgement”, and St. Anthony is to the right in his depiction, their depictions no longer than other elements in each work. You are forced to look everywhere, from left to right, from up to down, taking in the whole, zeroing in on detail, then considering the external artwork. The hellish imagery could indicate an inevitability of evil, or even its ultimate triumph, but having hundreds of years to get used to seeing such imagery, reproduced in any form, could indicate its inevitable slide into banality.

The most famous of all Bosch works is “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, which I have not mentioned only because I did not see it on my trip – it is found in Madrid, Spain, or across numerous gift items at the Groeningemuseum, when I was expecting them to have a “Last Judgement” notebook at the very least.

Detail from "The Temptation of St Anthony"

I HAVE SEEN EYES IN THE TREES [533]

The Last Judgement (c. 1500-1505)

This is the first of a two-part look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, where I talk about everything up to the point of describing the works I saw, which will be for next time.

Having no knowledge of Bosch’s work other than the intricate and surreal figures contained in perhaps his most famous single work, the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, I knew even witnessing the personally creative artistry in such works would be truly special. 

This would form a lynchpin of a family holiday in the Belgian capital of Brussels, with a day trip to the historical centre of Bruges, a holiday of walking around art galleries, and walking between them.

The three pieces I saw, were, from the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels, “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, and from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, “The Last Judgement” and “Triptych of Job”. All of these were painted in the early 16^th century, Bosch having lived until 1516.

If you already know your Bosch, you will immediately know where I will have slipped up: “The Temptation of St. Anthony” is a copy produced by Bosch’s atelier (workshop), with the original found in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, Portugal, while “Triptych of Job” is actually by an unnamed “follower of Bosch”. Only “The Last Judgement” is by Bosch, while acknowledging the input of his atelier.

I personally don’t think it mattered that I wasn’t seeing “original” works, not because of any questions over provenance, but more that I was getting used to the idea of the atelier, over the work of a singular person – it is not accurate to describe someone like Bosch, or Jan van Eyck, as like a film director, but once directors began to be talked about as “auteurs”, their vision as a “master” or “teacher” guiding a multi-person production, while painting the most important figures and details themselves, things began to make more sense. 

What I would have liked to know is how copies came to be made of these works, but with any documentation for this unlikely to survive, you can only speculate as to who could afford to request one, and their reasons for it, in a time when images were rarely reproduced at all, rarer still to the same quality as the original.

But now, in are age of endless reproduction of images, I had only noticed the “follower of” notice by the “Triptych of Job” when looking on my phone later. I have talked about not being too keen on people taking pictures of art in a gallery, removing their ability to take in the work in the moment, and removing context like how Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” without considering how small the painting is in real life.

However, if you have fortuitously been afforded to encounter a Bosch triptych in full, then my guess is that you attended the gallery on the day, arranged to attend outside of normal opening hours, or you patiently waited for the right moment to take photographs of what you need before moving on, which in my case involved taking one picture to cover the whole work, then going in for details that either capture you in that moment, or that you have seen before. Only once you look at what pictures you took do you then start thinking about the lighting in the gallery at that moment, regardless of the settings of your camera, or why you neglected to think if there was any art on the other sides of the left and right panels, these triptychs having been made to be opened.

Once I have been able to put all of this to one side, I am left with what made me excited to see these Bosch triptychs in the first place, which is the personal inventiveness of his surreal imagery... which, as advertised, I will discuss next time.

YOU’RE A GENUINE PONY! [532]

Some things insist on being written about.

On Christmas Day 1975, BBC Two broadcast a studio-based rock musical retelling the Trojan Wars headlined by the great Bernard Cribbins, alongside former Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, and with a pre-“Evita” Julie Covington among the cast. The name of the show would be “Great Big Groovy Horse”.

Starring a young adult cast, with the then 46-year-old Cribbins in the nominal role as both teacher, narrator and Agamemnon, the breaking up an argument between two men over a girlfriend in a community club becomes a metaphor for confrontation between the Achaeans and the city of Troy, with Paul Jones plays Meneleaus, whose wife Helen (Patricia Hodge) was taken by Paris (Nigel Williams).

Man, you had to be there… literally, for apart from a repeat showing on BBC One two Christmases later, I don’t think it has been since, save for a viewer with the foresight and money to own an early video recorder.

The songs are catchy, acting as points to highlight emotion amongst Cribbins’s narrative, although the lyrics are very Seventies, and very Musical: “Paris, you’re a rat, you’re a mean cat”, and “Heed my word if you wanna get wiser, it’s the saddest little story that you’ve ever heard, everybody better heed my word”. You will also see people getting to belt out the line “you’re a genuine pony!” after describing the Trojan horse as a “tourist attraction”. The main point is to get across the outline of the story in as entertaining a way as possible, and it achieves that, but just don’t give yourself a test on what information it told you, as you realise you went with the flow of the songs.

You must use your imagination: the performers, singing into microphones with trailing wires, largely wear their own clothes, while the set is made of functional scaffolding, incorporating stairs, gantry and double doors, set on a floor marked out in black and white zones, marking out Troy by writing on the floor in purple. The bare studio walls are also seen occasionally. The Trojan horse itself, nearly twenty feet high and mounted on bicycle wheels, appears to be made of coloured blocks, like a computer game that couldn’t have been made yet.

Like “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was originally written to perform in schools, Elmgrove Junior School in Harrow originated “Great Big Groovy Horse”, the musical’s writers Simone Bloom & Arnold Shaw being friends of the school’s music teacher. Some BBC staff must have had children who attended there too, for the corporation bought the broadcast rights, recording its fifty-minute production at studio 1 of Television Centre in April 1975. I have seen later evidence from a local newspaper that the stage version was performed in High Wycombe as late as 1979. The producer of the TV version was Paul Ciani, who continued his career with Basil Brush, “Crackerjack!”, The Krankies and Keith Harris, later graduating to producing shows later in the evening like “The Kenny Everett Television Show”, “Call My Bluff” and “Top of the Pops”.

This production of “Great Big Groovy Horse” looked and felt like an upscaled version of “Play Away”, the children’s musical series that Julie Covington appeared in at the time alongside future star Jeremy Irons. Jonathan Cohen, musical director of “Play Away” and of incidental music for “Jackanory” and “Rentaghost”, co-adapted and arranged this production, and performer Kim Goody would later appear in “Play Away” and “Number 73”, alongside her work as a composer for shows like “Playdays” and “Mike & Angelo”. Meanwhile, both Paul Jones and Cribbins had stints reading stories on “Jackanory”, Cribbins in particular having appeared in everything from “The Railway Children” to “The Wombles”, alongside his own musical career with songs like “Right Said Fred”, “Hole in the Ground”, “Gossip Calypso” and a very affecting version of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady”.

If you can find “Great Big Groovy Horse”, give it a try, for it is a great time capsule for what British children’s TV could produce in 1975. I wonder how many watched at the time, seeing as its competition on BBC One that Christmas Day was “The Morecambe & Wise Show” with Diana Rigg.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT [531]

Ten years and counting...

I remember writing “16/02/2016” on the box of a spare lightbulb, having just screwed the other two into the light fixture in my bedroom. 

These were the first “energy-saving” bulbs I had bought, having decided that even their cost, at £15 for three, will be cheaper in the long run, over incandescent bulbs that wouldn’t survive the year. I was also making the switch from “warm white” to “cool white” light bulbs, reasoning that simulated daylight has its benefits – I don’t have any form of seasonal affective disorder, as far as I know, but I am not comfortable in gloominess or darkness either.

I figured these will last for a few years – they were rated to last for sixteen thousand hours, or 1.8 continuous years, so figured that, when I need to replace them, bulbs like them will be easier to find than ordering them online. Having now entered March 2026, I am still waiting for both moments come to pass.

What I bought were “corn cob” bulbs, cylinders lined with white LEDs in their most common form, squares of yellow phosphor covering a blue diode. They remain surprisingly effective, a level of light that makes people wonder if I ever sleep – they are not dimmable, but each bulb uses only twelve watts of power per hour – but I always thought warm white was too akin to candlelight, and what I wanted was brightness. 

Admittedly, the bulbs are bright enough that I only need to use two of the fittings in my light fixture, but that level of cool white light, and the fixture’s ability to swivel around, act as an effective fill light when I have made videos for YouTube. Later, a petrol station nearby would replace their sign displaying their prices with one using the same LEDs, legible from a great distance, but I remain undeterred.

I have again started to think about getting replacement light bulbs, but only because I have entered uncharted territory – after ten years, they really could stop working at any time, and I know having only one working bulb does not produce enough light for the room, and produces too many shadows, so I need to be ready. I have considered buying smart bulbs, using an app on my phone to select warm white light if I wish, or other colours entirely, but they do not produce enough overall light – I would need at least three of them, each one costing as much as the original pack of three bulbs did. Supermarkets, the place most people would buy their bulbs, also sell only the most popular bulbs, i.e. warm white only, but even DIY stores don’t routinely sell cool white bulbs that produce enough light for me – it makes me wonder if my long-lasting bulbs are illegal in some way.

So, what I need is a plan: do I find a like-for-like replacement for my long-lasting bulbs, or do I find other ways of solving the same problems they solved? Shall I get separate key and fill lights for when I return to making videos, and get less powerful bulbs for the room? Any which way, I won’t be living in darkness.

DON’T TELL ME IT’S NOT WORTH TRYING FOR [530]

I had been waiting to see the Looney Tunes film “The Day The Earth Blew Up” for longer than I realised, so I was surprised to find my local cinema had already been showing it for a week.

The Looney Tunes characters have become to Warner Bros. what the Muppets are to Disney: a well-loved and historic franchise subjected to multiple reboots in search of nostalgia, relevance or both, before ultimately finding success by just letting it do what it does. The revival of “The Muppet Show” on Disney+, a one-off special with the possibility of further episodes, proved the formula still works if given a confident script and the right special guests, while the latest “Looney Tunes Cartoons”, running on HBO Max from 2020-24 and headed by Pete Browngardt, returned their characters to the hellzapoppin’ era of the 1930s and 40s, inspired by director Bob Clampett. “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, directed by Browngardt, extends this series from 3 to 10-minute shorts to feature length, and proves that all you need to do is let the characters breathe.

Originally conceived for a release to Cartoon Network and HBO Max in 2022, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” instead received a theatrical premiere in June 2024, and has slowly been released around the world since then. Distributed by Vertigo Releasing in the UK, with little or no advertising, I am watching a film that has already received a home video release in other countries.

“The Day the Earth Blew Up” begins with both an asteroid and a UFO hovering into view, the latter crashing through the roof of the film’s stars Porky Pig and Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza). They were adopted as babies by the Mufasa-like “Farmer Jim”, who instils them with the belief that, so long as they stick together, they will be responsible. However, with their house now in peril, they need to find work for the first time, inexperience and irresponsibility limiting them to push-button work at their town’s bubble gum factory. Porky and Daffy encounter Petunia Pig, (Candi Mylo), an eccentric scientist at the factory in search of the perfect flavour, and whose initiative is needed when Daffy discovers that goo from the UFO has been dumped into a gum that is being relaunched, putting consumers under the control of The Invader (Peter MacNicol), who wants a bubble blown around the world.

The one thing I loved about the new “Looney Tunes Cartoons” was the return of Daffy Duck to his original characterisation. Instead of being a scheming foil for Bugs Bunny, Daffy is instead unpredictable and uncontrollable, to his and others’ detriment. Porky Pig, instead of being a foil to Daffy, is now the nominally responsible one, the Hardy to Daffy’s Laurel, acting as the conscience for the pair. With Porky’s attention swayed by Petunia, and with Daffy destroying her more practical plan for defeating The Invader, both friction and literal tears will come before Porky and Daffy realise how they can complement each other, and save the world together.

The twist that The Invader is also trying to save Earth – the bubble gum was meant to bounce the oncoming asteroid away from harm – was a good idea, although I did find it a little forced that The Invader didn’t make his intention known earlier in the story, unless you reason that the bizarre scheme of blowing a bubble around Earth could only be done by force, let alone an alien travelling across galaxies to drink Boba tea.

The “Looney Tunes” characters already work across a feature-length running time, as proved so many times, but I don’t know if “The Day the Earth Blew Up” will herald more. There was meant to have been “Bye Bye Bunny”, a Bugs Bunny musical film, but this had been cancelled, with Eric Bauza having recorded dialogue and songs for it. Notoriously, “Coyote vs. Acme”, a live-action and animation hybrid to be released in August 2026, was shelved three years earlier for Warner Bros. to obtain a tax write-off, before allowing its producers, Warner Bros. Animation, to find another distributor for the film, much as it has done with “The Day the Earth Blew Up”. 

Perhaps the prospect of more Looney Tunes output in 2027, including a revived “Bye Bye Bunny”, should be taken as recognition by Warner Bros. of the true value of their franchise. Of all their characters, only Porky, Daffy and Petunia appear in “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, so there should be plenty of opportunity for other characters to get their own spotlight.

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE [529]

With so many visions of the future in narrative fiction having proved to be incorrect, mostly because they were written to comment on the present at the time of their creation, it does not mean that I should subsequently be nostalgic for visions of the future that, for all the longing and hope they generate, did not come to pass.

That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing “The Jetsons” again. As of February 2026, the HBO Max streaming service is weeks away from launching in the UK and, while its US version has a spotty record of maintaining access to animated shows, regardless of how recent they are – so much for the Internet being permanent, I suppose – this may not be true elsewhere in the world.

More than Hanna-Barbera Productions flipping its successful show “The Flintstones” from the Stone Age to the Space Age, “The Jetsons” is about a family living in a utopian society one hundred years in the future, where people live above the clouds, work only a couple of hours a week, and need only exercise their fingers.

However, because it was first broadcast in 1962, the family is still a two-plus-two unit – father George, mother Jane, children Judy and Elroy, with pet (talking) dog Astro, and their robot maid Rosey. This makes it a standard family sitcom, but one where the family is the only familiar feature. 

Whereas “The Flintsones” is more like the “present day”, but with a Stone Age sheen – any device can be opened to find to being worked by an animal, saying “it’s a living!” – “The Jetsons” will have a little more ingenuity to its jokes, like George being caught in a traffic jam of flying cars, until a message appears to fly to a different place, but all the others do so as well, or a robot having a malfunctioning voice that requires it to knock itself to work properly, like a human would do to an old TV. The future has arrived, but it isn’t perfect.

Everything from buildings to cars in “The Jetsons” are in the space-age Googie style, prevalent from the end of the Second World War, but the show appeared just as ostentatious fins and rocket motifs started to disappear from American cars, replaced by cleaner Modernist lines. Predictions of flat TV screens, videophones and flying cars were also tempered by then-current understanding of how technology worked: a device that could 3D-print your dinner was programmed by inserting the right punched card into a slot, instead of selecting from a screen.

It is interesting to compare “The Jetsons” with “Futurama”, a similarly future-based animated show that has been revived more than once over the years. “Futurama” has a more cynical, ironic edge, and its world is more identifiably our own – one in which you can imagine yourself living, despite being set a thousand years into the future – than the utopia of “The Jetsons”, without sliding into dystopia. This familiarity has meant “Futurama” hasn’t needed to retrofit its idea of the future as the decades have progressed – rather than just being the style of the show, the buildings in “The Jetsons” are on poles to lift them above the pollution on the ground, an addition made with “Jetsons: The Movie” in 1990.

It appears I am not the only one done with “The Jetsons”, as talks were reported in October 2025 for a live-action version of the show, starring Jim Carrey and with Colin Trevorrow directing. With no-one having any comment on this report, least of all Warner Bros. as the owner of the property, we have nothing to go on about what the vision of the future in this version, apart from Trevorrow’s extensive background in science fiction films, from “Star Wars” to “Jurassic World”. So long as it looks forward, and not down, I’ll be happy.