Tome On The Range An Extract From Mark Fisher's Ghosts Of My Life The Quietus , August 28th, 2013 04:13

We're very pleased to have an early extract from Mark Fisher's new title for Zero Books published later in the year...

Theres no time here, not any more The final image of the British television series Sapphire And Steel seemed designed to haunt the adolescent mind. The two lead characters, played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, find themselves in what seems to be a 1940s roadside caf. The radio is playing a simulation of Glenn Miller-style smooth Big Band jazz. Another couple, a man and a woman dressed in 1940s clothes, are sitting at an adjacent table. The woman rises, saying: This is the trap. This is nowhere, and its forever. She and her companion then disappear, leaving spectral outlines then nothingness. Sapphire and Steel panic. They rifle through the few objects in the caf, looking for something they can use to escape. There is nothing, and when they pull back the curtains, there is only a black starry void beyond the window. The caf, it seems, is some kind of capsule floating in deep space. Watching this extraordinary final sequence now, the juxtaposition of the caf with the cosmos is likely to put in mind some combination of Edward Hopper and Ren Magritte. Neither of those references was available to me at the time; in fact, when I later encountered Hopper and Magritte, I no doubt thought of Sapphire And Steel. It was August 1982 and I had just turned fifteen years old. It would be more than twenty years later before I would see these images again. By then, thanks to VHS, DVD and YouTube, it seemed that practically everything was available for re-watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost. The passage of thirty years has only made the series appear even stranger than it did at the time. This was science fiction with none of the traditional trappings of the genre, no spaceships, no ray guns: no anthropomorphic foes only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time, along which malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity. All we knew about Sapphire and Steel was that they were detectives of a peculiar kind, probably not human, sent from a mysterious agency to repair these breaks in time. The basis of Sapphire and Steel, the seriess creator P. J. Hammond explained, came from my desire to write a detective story, into which I wanted to incorporate Time. Ive always been interested in Time, particularly the ideas of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, but I wanted to take a different approach to the subject. So instead of having them go backwards and forwards in Time, it was about Time breaking in, and having set the precedent I

realized the potential that it offered with two people whose job it was to stop the break-ins. (Steve OBrien, The Story Behind Sapphire & Steel, The Fan Can) Hammond had previously worked as a writer on police dramas such as The Gentle Touch and Hunters Walk and on childrens fantasy shows like Ace Of Wands and Dramarama. With Sapphire And Steel, he attained a kind of auteurship that he would never manage to repeat. The conditions for this kind of visionary public broadcasting would disappear during the 1980s, as the British media became taken over by what another television auteur, Dennis Potter, would call the occupying powers of neoliberalism. The result of that occupation is that it is hard now to believe that a programme could ever have been transmitted on prime-time television, still less on what was then Britains sole commercial network, ITV. There were only three television channels in Britain then: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; Channel 4 would make its first broadcast only a few months later. By comparison with the expectations created by Star Wars, Sapphire And Steel came off as very cheap and cheerful. Even in 1982, the chroma-key special effects looked unconvincing. The fact that the stage sets were minimal, and the cast small (most of the assignments only featured Lumley and McCallum and a couple of others), gave the impression of a theatre production. Yet there was none of the homeliness of kitchen sink naturalism; Sapphire And Steel had more in common with the enigmatic oppressiveness of Harold Pinter, whose plays were frequently broadcast on BBC television during the 1970s. A number of things about the series are particularly striking from the perspective of the 21st Century. The first is its absolute refusal to meet the audience halfway in the way that weve come to expect. This is partly a conceptual matter: Sapphire And Steel was cryptic, its stories and its world is never fully disclosed, still less explained. The series was much closer to something like the BBCs adaptation of John Le Carrs Smiley novels Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had been broadcast in 1979; its sequel Smileys People would begin transmission a month after Sapphire And Steel ended than it was to Star Wars. It was also a question of emotional tenor: the series and its two lead characters are lacking in the warmth and wisecracking humour that is now so much a taken-for-granted feature of entertainment media. McCallums Steel had a technicians indifference towards the lives in which he became reluctantly enmeshed; although he never loses his sense of duty, he is testy and impatient, frequently exasperated by the way humans clutter their lives. If Lumleys Sapphire appeared more sympathetic, there was always the suspicion that her apparent affection towards humans was something like an owners benign fascination for her pets. The emotional austerity that had characterised the series from the start assumes a more explicitly pessimistic quality in this final assignment. The Le Carr parallels are reinforced by the strong suspicion that, just as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the lead characters have been betrayed by their own side. Then there was Cyril Ornadels incidental music. As Nick Edwards explained in a 2009 blog post, this was [a]rranged for a small ensemble of musicians (predominantly woodwind) with liberal use of electronic treatments (ring modulation, echo/delay) to intensify the drama and suggestion of horror, Ornadels cues are far more powerfully chilling and evocative than anything youre likely hear in the mainstream media today. (Sapphire and Steel, Gutterbreakz)

One aim of Sapphire And Steel was to transpose the ghost stories out of the Victorian context into contemporary places, the still inhabited or the recently abandoned. In the final assignment, Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining caf. This halfway place is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Aug will call in a 1995 book of the same title, non -places the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism. In truth, the modest service station in Sapphire And Steel is quaintly idiosyncratic compared to the cloned generic monoliths which will proliferate besides motorways over the coming thirty years. The problem that Sapphire and Steel have come to solve is, as ever, to do with time. At the service station, there is temporal bleed-through from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steels colleague Silver puts it time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense. Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down. In one of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras. In this final assignment, the anachronism has led to stasis: time has stopped. The service station is in a pocket, a vacuum. Theres still traffic, but its not going anywhere: the sound of cars is locked into a looped drone. Silver says, there is no time here, not any more. Its as if the whole scenario is a literalization of the lines in Pinters No Mans Land: No mans land, which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, which remains forever icy and silent. Hammond said that he had not necessarily intended the series to end there. He had thought that it would be rested, to return at some point in the future. There would be no return at least, not on network television. In 2004, Sapphire and Steel would come back for a series of audio adventures; though Hammond, McCallum and Lumley were not involved, and by then the audience was not a general television, but the kind of special interest niche easily catered for in digital culture. Eternally suspended, never to be freed, their plight and indeed their provenance never to be fully explained, Sapphire and Steels internment in this caf from nowhere prophetic for a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.