Friday Night Double Feature

Yesterday we christened our new garden shed / chalet / writing hut / beach house at the bottom of our garden. We took bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea and had them sitting on the veranda. It was a bit muddy out, so Fester the cat didn't join us. He's not really bothered about outdoors until the magnolia starts to blossom at the start of May. Until then it's enough for him to sit on the doorstep, front and back, a couple of minutes each day - sniffing the air with the look of someone tuning into the news headlines. I can't wait for the weather to clear, so I can sit working in our chalet / shed / beach hut.

Over lunch J. was bemoaning the lack of old films on telly, and the decision apparently made by BBC and ITV and everyone that they won't show so many black and white movies, because people don't know what they are any more. They think something's wrong with the telly when they come on. It's certainly true that you don't get many films older than about twenty years getting shown. Oh, maybe some war films in the afternoon, but that's no good to me. ITV thinks the only films ever made were James Bond ones. And those CGI animation things make me feel nauseous: Christmas Day telly was awash with the weird, shiny bright, synthetic stuff.

I just wish channels like BBC 2 and Channel 4 still did their late night double bills of horror and sci fi. When I first had a portable black and white tv at twelve, those late night showings were my whole introduction and schooling in film history, and also a whole storehouse of stories. The best run of films ever was Channel 4 going through the entire cycle of Universal Horror movies in the late Eighties. And, watching them, you'd faze in and out of sleep, catching some bits and missing out chunks of others... and piecing it together in a lucidly dreaming, half awake state.

So what you have to do these days is make up your own double bills with dvds. Last night I went all monochrome - delving into two ancient classics I don't think I've ever seen all the way through before: 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' and 'It Came From Outer Space.' The first has a Richard Mattheson script, so it is a perfect little fable. There's not a single beat or line out of place. Mattheson also wrote 'I am Legend' and 'Nightmare at 30,000 Feet' and I think of his stories as wonderful, succinct modern fairy tales. They're very distinct, but are often about one man completely on his own, left with the consequences of some amazing piece of weird bad luck - and having to be resourceful to stop himself going mad. 'It Came From Outer Space' is classic UFO paranoia stuff... but of a gentler kind than you'd expect, I think. It's about making bargains, making peace - about becoming civilised.

Something that struck me about both films was how wonderful their musical scores were. Has there never been a cd collection of the incidental music and themes from sf movies of that vintage? Those soundtracks would be wonderful things to write to... I can imagine sitting at the bottom of the garden in the beach house... with fifties sf film music bonging and clashing and wibbling away...