the rag-and-bone shop of the head
I've been watching the second series of Look Around You. Among all the retro-spoof fun, they keep referring to another programme called "Tlentifini Maarhaysu". As in "Now let's go on another enchanting visit to...". It's never explained what Tlentifini Maarhaysu is. The most you see is some Spirograph-like spinning graphics. And yes, exactly, they've put their finger on something I've never managed to articulate before, because it really was like that.
Before they had Dempsey's Den, a chunk of the afternoon dedicated to kids and featuring children's presenters and puppets and the Birthday Roller, there was Good Afternoon With Thelma Mansfield on RTE 1, and whoa boy was it random. They would put on five- or ten-minute animated shorts in the gaps between the programmes, surreal little films and cartoons often in foreign languages and with no explanations attached. These things seemed deeply disconcerting to five- or six-year-old me, watching after school in a brown and orange sittingroom, cross-legged on the brown carpet in my brown cord dungarees, some time in the early 80s. Every so often since then a memory of one of them will pop up and take me by surprise, and I'll wonder if they really were that weird or if it's just that everything seems strange when you're that young and don't know how anything connects to anything else.
But now we have the internet, and I've been on a trawl through YouTube, and some of these things are out there. Yes, they're still freaky. Especially this one:
Animated video for Kraftwerk's Autobahn. Spinning women with flames for heads! Hovering mouths! Aaaa!
And this one won't let you embed it in a post, but: The Butterfly Ball. Three minutes of utter colour-saturated hippiedom. Frogs that turn into plants. And, apparently, some guy from Deep Purple on vocals.
If you're reading this and a memory of something you saw or read as a kid comes up, maybe something you haven't thought about for years or decades, I challenge you to try and find it again, and then come back and tell me about it. I want to hear about things that don't get an immediate groan of nostalgic recognition round the table when you mention them in the pub; stuff you think no one else remembers. Bring me the fossils in your brain.
Before they had Dempsey's Den, a chunk of the afternoon dedicated to kids and featuring children's presenters and puppets and the Birthday Roller, there was Good Afternoon With Thelma Mansfield on RTE 1, and whoa boy was it random. They would put on five- or ten-minute animated shorts in the gaps between the programmes, surreal little films and cartoons often in foreign languages and with no explanations attached. These things seemed deeply disconcerting to five- or six-year-old me, watching after school in a brown and orange sittingroom, cross-legged on the brown carpet in my brown cord dungarees, some time in the early 80s. Every so often since then a memory of one of them will pop up and take me by surprise, and I'll wonder if they really were that weird or if it's just that everything seems strange when you're that young and don't know how anything connects to anything else.
But now we have the internet, and I've been on a trawl through YouTube, and some of these things are out there. Yes, they're still freaky. Especially this one:
Animated video for Kraftwerk's Autobahn. Spinning women with flames for heads! Hovering mouths! Aaaa!
And this one won't let you embed it in a post, but: The Butterfly Ball. Three minutes of utter colour-saturated hippiedom. Frogs that turn into plants. And, apparently, some guy from Deep Purple on vocals.
If you're reading this and a memory of something you saw or read as a kid comes up, maybe something you haven't thought about for years or decades, I challenge you to try and find it again, and then come back and tell me about it. I want to hear about things that don't get an immediate groan of nostalgic recognition round the table when you mention them in the pub; stuff you think no one else remembers. Bring me the fossils in your brain.