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The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film & Television
Some cinematic paths lie neat and well-tended, others are ominously overgrown and ignored. Dig down deep to find the bodies beneath...
Occult rites are staged in hippie strip clubs; music hall dame Old Mother Riley haunts a vampiric Bela Lugosi; TV puppet Sooty doles out intoxicating pharmaceuticals; velvet-voiced Vincent Price presents a full-fat cookery programme...
Veteran film curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt crack open the caskets of forgotten or neglected British films and television to serve up a feast of curiosities to tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile. Their unflinching, all-embracing investigative gaze is as likely to reassess an established classic as it is to focus on cobweb-covered delights like pioneering 1930s female film director Mary Field’s beautifully bizarre The Mystery of Marriage, the much-maligned Doctor Who epic ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, underground offerings like Anna Ambrose’s experimental art piece Phoelix and Andy Milligan’s bawdy bloodbath The Body Beneath.
All is grist to this monstrous mill, as the authors tamper with outmoded video formats and meddle with magenta-bias safety film in their mission to finger-paint an entirely unexpected, highly irreverent and thoroughly personal picture of film and television culture in twentieth-century Britain.
Occult rites are staged in hippie strip clubs; music hall dame Old Mother Riley haunts a vampiric Bela Lugosi; TV puppet Sooty doles out intoxicating pharmaceuticals; velvet-voiced Vincent Price presents a full-fat cookery programme...
Veteran film curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt crack open the caskets of forgotten or neglected British films and television to serve up a feast of curiosities to tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile. Their unflinching, all-embracing investigative gaze is as likely to reassess an established classic as it is to focus on cobweb-covered delights like pioneering 1930s female film director Mary Field’s beautifully bizarre The Mystery of Marriage, the much-maligned Doctor Who epic ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, underground offerings like Anna Ambrose’s experimental art piece Phoelix and Andy Milligan’s bawdy bloodbath The Body Beneath.
All is grist to this monstrous mill, as the authors tamper with outmoded video formats and meddle with magenta-bias safety film in their mission to finger-paint an entirely unexpected, highly irreverent and thoroughly personal picture of film and television culture in twentieth-century Britain.
- GenresFilmNonfiction
373 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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108 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 27, 2020
Wonderful
June 16, 2020
This book is good fun. You can tell the authors enjoyed writing it, and that they love these cult/forgotten/underground films and tv shows. It makes a really interesting read overall and you get to see and read about details you won't find in any other book - I mean, Vincent Price's cooking show?! Amazing.
For me, what keeps it from five stars is how much the book points to who the authors know: there are a lot of stories about their nights out with directors or friends or events, and that's not really why I bought the book. This is entirely personal, some people love these anecdotes. For me, it felt like a distraction from otherwise really good discussions on these little-known films and shows.
For me, what keeps it from five stars is how much the book points to who the authors know: there are a lot of stories about their nights out with directors or friends or events, and that's not really why I bought the book. This is entirely personal, some people love these anecdotes. For me, it felt like a distraction from otherwise really good discussions on these little-known films and shows.
September 13, 2024
One of the best books on British cinema and culture I have ever read, a true celebration of some of the more wayward highways and byways of genre film and television and always intelligent and witty and never sneering at this frequently overlooked subculture. A joy
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews