The Disruption

by Roger Luckhurst, Andy Beckett

An extended conversation between Andy Beckett (Pinochet In Piccadilly / When The Lights Went Out) and Roger Luckhurst (The Invention of Telepathy/ The Corridor) about "The Changes." ... Based on a Peter Dickinson trilogy, "The Changes", the 1975 BBC children's television series, features militant sonics, lost children, wandering Sikhs, strange weather, witch trials, sentient lode-stones; it stimulates an expansive meditation on petronormativity, The Angry Brigade, radical exurbs, free festivals, and postcolonial pastoralism.

34 pages, Staplebound

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

Reviews

[Simon Barraclough · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliantly informative yet informal chat between Prof Luckhurst and Andy Beckett about the weird moment of the 70s children’s TV programme The Changes and how we might have slipped into a similarly disrupted and subversive era in these post-referendum days. We need more of this kind of thing! Potted cultural and political accounts with a feast of food for thought.

[Chris Otto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deep-dive conversation into 1970s United Kingdom political and cultural changes, mixed with references to folk horror and psychogeography, if that's your jam.