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You see, the ghost-laying didn't take
All recordings are ghostwork to begin with, but Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (1972) goes the extra meta-mile. It's hard to describe without employing its own hauntological vocabulary; its plot is so dense with ironies of reaction and repetition that we may well question whether its human actors have any more agency than the endlessly looping instants they study; it pulls the viewer as well as the characters into its spectral apparatus. I can't remember not knowing its conceit of ghosts as imprints of history, but it was only about fifteen years ago that I discovered the existence of the teleplay itself. The BBC commissioned and aired it for Christmas and I thought it might suit this particularly bleak midwinter. Taproot texts can be tricky to encounter after the fact of their descendants; fortunately, ghosts are all about transcending time.
What books and artifacts are to the unfortunate antiquarians of M.R. James, the paraphernalia of audiovisual engineering are to the characters of The Stone Tape: the tools for unearthing something that for everyone's sake should have stayed centuries down, even when they were looking for the future instead. No one arriving at Taskerlands in the late fall of 1972 is a paranormal investigator or even in a frame of mind for ghosts. They're the R&D team of Ryan Electric Products, billeted for secrecy in a chaotically retrofitted Victorian country house and charged with discovering a new recording medium revolutionary enough to "put the boots in old Nippon," as the national anxiety over the up-and-comers of the electronics industry demands. Instead of the compact disc, however, they find a bare stone room containing some dry-rotted paneling, a rusted pile of tins of WWII-issue Spam, a Christmastime letter in a child's scrawl, and a ghost. At least, most people would term it a ghost, although Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), Ryan's abrasively assured director of research, prefers to think of it as "a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation." Footprints scurry frantically through the empty room, echoing differently for every listener. A woman in a white pinafore runs up the half-flight of worn stone steps to nowhere and screams, screams to stop her audience's heart. It's the same set of screams every time, exact as a voiceprint. Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson), the reserved and overtaxed site manager, articulates the horror: "A living person in that pain, you can try and help them. Here, you can't." Nonetheless, Peter pushes on with his electroacoustical investigations which feel increasingly as irrational and obsessive as séances until the analyses produced by Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), the team's programmer and the most finely tuned observer of the apparition itself, convince him that the quite common ragstone of the abandoned storeroom is their AV grail, a mineral format more responsive, immersive, and direct than any strip of silver halide or ferric oxide, which after all can play back only to the ears or the eyes, not straight to the human brain. "Costume jewelry, the thirteen-channel earring!" he laughs, tweaking his team's ears and noses and nipples with tech-bro giddiness. "Coronation Street, Double Your Money, Come Dancing, War and Peace—" Of course it all goes wrong. At least Betamax didn't strand its users in the Neolithic.
In this fable of scientific breakthrough and overreach, it is all but expected that Jill as the sole woman on the team should be positioned as its most psychically sensitive member, but the cliché is mitigated for me by several factors, beginning with her intelligence. She's not a passive ghost-meter from whose emotional responses men draw rational conclusions; she's the person who turns data into information, charting the peaks and valleys of spectral activity over the years, collating the differing sensitivities of her colleagues in order to establish a threshold for manifestation and the mechanism of heat exchange that powers it. Buffeted by the effects of the room and nagged by the fear of a suffering revenant instead of a mere "dead mechanism," she asks better questions than the man who runs with her answers and even after the program of the stone tape has played out once again to its grisly, immemorial end, the shredded printouts of her results vindicate her theories over his conceit. More equalizingly, she's not alone in her perceptions. Evidence of the haunting extends from the scarred childhood of a local barman to stories of "duppies" picked up from a Black American G.I. to the sad little petition of Martin Tasker, who solemnly asked the ghost to "please go away" for Christmas in 1905 and died a childless recluse in a house that even an exorcism couldn't stop from screaming. With the control-group exception of the "ghost-proof, like color-blind" Stewart (Philip Trewinnard), all of the team experience it to some degree. Only Jill seems able to glimpse its terrified girl's face, but the stolid Hargrave (Tom Chadbon) can corroborate its movements and both he and Collinson swear with repeated exposure that they can almost make out words. The footsteps that are barely audible to class clown Maudsley (John Forgeham) are "deafening" to old pro Eddie Holmes (Michael Bates). Even Peter, generally sensitive as pig iron otherwise, hears the screaming for the first time while still outside the room. It unnerves all of them, however they try to cover with schoolboy humor or the dryest of technical jargon, and some of them unravel. At the violent height of Peter's ghost-hunting, not Jill behind the console of her teleprinter but Hargrave in a weeping panic shrieks, "It's in the computer!" Lastly, if Kneale isolates Jill by her gender, he doesn't seem to have done it by Smurfette reflex: her work environment is a toxic swamp of laddishness and the script knows it. On their first day at Taskerlands, while a shaken Jill recovers from an eerie near-collision with a pair of oblivious vans, the rest of the team fill the construction-crowded courtyard with boisterous honks and whistles, cracking dirty jokes, jostling for approval, all but yelping like the simile with which Peter excuses them to the startled security guard, "They've got to do it, like dogs peeing on something." Encouraged by their boss' cocky style, their rowdy camaraderie is a lark if you're on the inside of it and a microaggression a minute if you're not—Jill gets moments of bonding or respect from her teammates one-on-one, but collectively their frat-pack mentality always seems one guffaw from exploding into real violence, like the weird christening rite of "sacrificing the Martian" that saw her gangling assistant chased into the half-finished entrance hall and his rubbery costume ripped off him in pieces like a sparagmos. One of their other tricks is putting on racist impersonations of their Japanese competitors. There again, Peter with his naughty stage-brogue imitation of Ryan's CEO sets the tone. I couldn't help wondering if Bryant had ever played Henry Higgins, "all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone"; he certainly does his best to motor right over Jill. Despite or because of their sexual history, Peter's no support even at her most obviously fragile, alternately coaxing and negging her with self-centered patronage: "Oh, my Jilly. You're a very female one." It should be reassuring that the plot isn't a contest between her fears and his skepticism, but his eagerness to exploit the commercial possibilities of a historical trauma—followed by his absolute refusal to hear anything more about the haunting after he's colossally fucked it up, driven his team half to nervous exhaustion and let himself in for encroachment by a rival and perhaps even destroyed the precious mechanism of the room itself in his short-sighted ambition and self-owning need for control—may be even more distasteful than if he'd never listened to her at all. It won't turn him a profit, so call the woman who discovered it crazy and move on. It's hard not to notice that he's got his new secretary in bed by the time he's coldly, finally dismissing Jill; that even sympathetic Collinson can't be bothered at a moment that could have made all the difference. Perhaps there's nothing so unusual in the forces stirring in the very deepest layers of the stone, ablated to activation by Peter's reckless blasts of sound and light. Across the centuries, a woman can be the most disposable thing.
I can't tell if it should be viewed as an in-joke or a touch of psychogeography that Taskerlands is played by Horsley Towers in Surrey, the one-time home of programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, whose colleague Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) professed one of the earliest versions I can find of the theory of residual haunting, a vision of the globe as a palimpsest of every movement that ever disturbed its atoms, the faintly ceaseless waves of words and actions propagating on through earth, air, and water until the planet itself should wipe the record by ceasing to exist. In A Canterbury Tale (1944), this notion comforts: nothing of the past is ever really lost, no matter what upheavals or merely forgettings may come between. In The Stone Tape, it's the worst. "How far are you trying to go back?" Stewart asks curiously, watching Jill crunch numbers like a woman in the grip of a fever or a possession. She speaks as if she's inside her own answer already: "A long way." The distance from 1972 to 1890 or even 1760 falls away into the gulfs implied beneath the scratched surface of a Victorian under-maid's screams. Taskerlands itself seems caught uneasily between times, its dungeon-like foundations that might be Saxon and its eccentrically Victorian outer flint and brick and its gut conversion into the sleek neutral tones of the streamlined '70's still missing panels, dangling wires, as half-there as an audible, insubstantial ghost. Sapphire and Steel would despair of these indiscriminately mixed triggers, their only unifying content a kind of visual technobabble of oscilloscopes and line printers, parabolic microphones and TV cameras, thermal sensors and reel-to-reels of the same magnetic tape which Peter began his mission statement by deriding as fragile and obsolete, yet it's the gold standard of the uncanny when the rattled Cliff (James Cosmo) protests, "I got them on my headphones!" while the objective witness of his tape unspools only white noise and the sounds of the team's confusion, nothing of the omnidirectional clatter of footsteps or those hopeless, agonized, trapped, unending screams. But that's the language of folk horror, where reaching for the future is an invitation for the present to slip out from underfoot and then there's nothing but to plunge into the past, or meet it where it rises to us, in a terrible space where a woman can fall to her death from a height that hasn't existed for seven thousand years. "Some deep-level record—so old—and shapeless—" What it looked like to previous generations, we never learn; it makes hideous sense that we see it now in the willemite-green of an oscilloscope trace, hear it as the churning throb of a degraded signal, and while it might be consoling to imagine it as a kind of Lovecraftian wild hunt lying in wait for its quarry in the depths of time, I suspect it is no more aware of the victims it pursues into its ancient pattern of sacrifice than the research team are of their own reenactment of tragedies past. The end is the same, one more time round on the turntable of events that never even occurred where they now replay, brought with the stones from their megalithic bed. "Quarried ever since Roman times," Collinson said of the lichen-colored limestone back when it looked like the wave of the future, not the drag of the past. "Most of medieval London's built of this stuff." You feel a haunting so old, so deep, and so dreadful should at least have the decency to be autochthonous. But then you can take a recording anywhere, so long as you have the technology to play it, and we ourselves are the players of the stone tape. It's not in the computer; that would be safer. Like every story, it happens in our heads.
If you would like this story to happen in your head, it appears to be available on Region 2 DVD, although courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme I watched it with a mild case of generation loss on on YouTube. The original production was shot on video with the atmospherically winter-toned results I associate with so much of this decade; the modest budget either permitted or obliged director Peter Sasdy to focus on the performances, which of necessity tend toward the high-keyed but mostly ground themselves in the recognizable dynamics of a bad workplace, and the electro-chthonic sound design by Desmond Briscoe of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which blurs disturbingly between the hums and blips and chatters of the team's equipment and the auditory excavation of the haunting itself. I don't know that I love it as much as similar explorations by Alan Garner or P.J. Hammond, but if I ever had the chance to screen it as part of a festival, I'd run Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986) as the pre-feature short. Watch or close your eyes, the ghosts play either way. This tape brought to you by my timeless backers at Patreon.
What books and artifacts are to the unfortunate antiquarians of M.R. James, the paraphernalia of audiovisual engineering are to the characters of The Stone Tape: the tools for unearthing something that for everyone's sake should have stayed centuries down, even when they were looking for the future instead. No one arriving at Taskerlands in the late fall of 1972 is a paranormal investigator or even in a frame of mind for ghosts. They're the R&D team of Ryan Electric Products, billeted for secrecy in a chaotically retrofitted Victorian country house and charged with discovering a new recording medium revolutionary enough to "put the boots in old Nippon," as the national anxiety over the up-and-comers of the electronics industry demands. Instead of the compact disc, however, they find a bare stone room containing some dry-rotted paneling, a rusted pile of tins of WWII-issue Spam, a Christmastime letter in a child's scrawl, and a ghost. At least, most people would term it a ghost, although Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), Ryan's abrasively assured director of research, prefers to think of it as "a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation." Footprints scurry frantically through the empty room, echoing differently for every listener. A woman in a white pinafore runs up the half-flight of worn stone steps to nowhere and screams, screams to stop her audience's heart. It's the same set of screams every time, exact as a voiceprint. Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson), the reserved and overtaxed site manager, articulates the horror: "A living person in that pain, you can try and help them. Here, you can't." Nonetheless, Peter pushes on with his electroacoustical investigations which feel increasingly as irrational and obsessive as séances until the analyses produced by Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), the team's programmer and the most finely tuned observer of the apparition itself, convince him that the quite common ragstone of the abandoned storeroom is their AV grail, a mineral format more responsive, immersive, and direct than any strip of silver halide or ferric oxide, which after all can play back only to the ears or the eyes, not straight to the human brain. "Costume jewelry, the thirteen-channel earring!" he laughs, tweaking his team's ears and noses and nipples with tech-bro giddiness. "Coronation Street, Double Your Money, Come Dancing, War and Peace—" Of course it all goes wrong. At least Betamax didn't strand its users in the Neolithic.
In this fable of scientific breakthrough and overreach, it is all but expected that Jill as the sole woman on the team should be positioned as its most psychically sensitive member, but the cliché is mitigated for me by several factors, beginning with her intelligence. She's not a passive ghost-meter from whose emotional responses men draw rational conclusions; she's the person who turns data into information, charting the peaks and valleys of spectral activity over the years, collating the differing sensitivities of her colleagues in order to establish a threshold for manifestation and the mechanism of heat exchange that powers it. Buffeted by the effects of the room and nagged by the fear of a suffering revenant instead of a mere "dead mechanism," she asks better questions than the man who runs with her answers and even after the program of the stone tape has played out once again to its grisly, immemorial end, the shredded printouts of her results vindicate her theories over his conceit. More equalizingly, she's not alone in her perceptions. Evidence of the haunting extends from the scarred childhood of a local barman to stories of "duppies" picked up from a Black American G.I. to the sad little petition of Martin Tasker, who solemnly asked the ghost to "please go away" for Christmas in 1905 and died a childless recluse in a house that even an exorcism couldn't stop from screaming. With the control-group exception of the "ghost-proof, like color-blind" Stewart (Philip Trewinnard), all of the team experience it to some degree. Only Jill seems able to glimpse its terrified girl's face, but the stolid Hargrave (Tom Chadbon) can corroborate its movements and both he and Collinson swear with repeated exposure that they can almost make out words. The footsteps that are barely audible to class clown Maudsley (John Forgeham) are "deafening" to old pro Eddie Holmes (Michael Bates). Even Peter, generally sensitive as pig iron otherwise, hears the screaming for the first time while still outside the room. It unnerves all of them, however they try to cover with schoolboy humor or the dryest of technical jargon, and some of them unravel. At the violent height of Peter's ghost-hunting, not Jill behind the console of her teleprinter but Hargrave in a weeping panic shrieks, "It's in the computer!" Lastly, if Kneale isolates Jill by her gender, he doesn't seem to have done it by Smurfette reflex: her work environment is a toxic swamp of laddishness and the script knows it. On their first day at Taskerlands, while a shaken Jill recovers from an eerie near-collision with a pair of oblivious vans, the rest of the team fill the construction-crowded courtyard with boisterous honks and whistles, cracking dirty jokes, jostling for approval, all but yelping like the simile with which Peter excuses them to the startled security guard, "They've got to do it, like dogs peeing on something." Encouraged by their boss' cocky style, their rowdy camaraderie is a lark if you're on the inside of it and a microaggression a minute if you're not—Jill gets moments of bonding or respect from her teammates one-on-one, but collectively their frat-pack mentality always seems one guffaw from exploding into real violence, like the weird christening rite of "sacrificing the Martian" that saw her gangling assistant chased into the half-finished entrance hall and his rubbery costume ripped off him in pieces like a sparagmos. One of their other tricks is putting on racist impersonations of their Japanese competitors. There again, Peter with his naughty stage-brogue imitation of Ryan's CEO sets the tone. I couldn't help wondering if Bryant had ever played Henry Higgins, "all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone"; he certainly does his best to motor right over Jill. Despite or because of their sexual history, Peter's no support even at her most obviously fragile, alternately coaxing and negging her with self-centered patronage: "Oh, my Jilly. You're a very female one." It should be reassuring that the plot isn't a contest between her fears and his skepticism, but his eagerness to exploit the commercial possibilities of a historical trauma—followed by his absolute refusal to hear anything more about the haunting after he's colossally fucked it up, driven his team half to nervous exhaustion and let himself in for encroachment by a rival and perhaps even destroyed the precious mechanism of the room itself in his short-sighted ambition and self-owning need for control—may be even more distasteful than if he'd never listened to her at all. It won't turn him a profit, so call the woman who discovered it crazy and move on. It's hard not to notice that he's got his new secretary in bed by the time he's coldly, finally dismissing Jill; that even sympathetic Collinson can't be bothered at a moment that could have made all the difference. Perhaps there's nothing so unusual in the forces stirring in the very deepest layers of the stone, ablated to activation by Peter's reckless blasts of sound and light. Across the centuries, a woman can be the most disposable thing.
I can't tell if it should be viewed as an in-joke or a touch of psychogeography that Taskerlands is played by Horsley Towers in Surrey, the one-time home of programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, whose colleague Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) professed one of the earliest versions I can find of the theory of residual haunting, a vision of the globe as a palimpsest of every movement that ever disturbed its atoms, the faintly ceaseless waves of words and actions propagating on through earth, air, and water until the planet itself should wipe the record by ceasing to exist. In A Canterbury Tale (1944), this notion comforts: nothing of the past is ever really lost, no matter what upheavals or merely forgettings may come between. In The Stone Tape, it's the worst. "How far are you trying to go back?" Stewart asks curiously, watching Jill crunch numbers like a woman in the grip of a fever or a possession. She speaks as if she's inside her own answer already: "A long way." The distance from 1972 to 1890 or even 1760 falls away into the gulfs implied beneath the scratched surface of a Victorian under-maid's screams. Taskerlands itself seems caught uneasily between times, its dungeon-like foundations that might be Saxon and its eccentrically Victorian outer flint and brick and its gut conversion into the sleek neutral tones of the streamlined '70's still missing panels, dangling wires, as half-there as an audible, insubstantial ghost. Sapphire and Steel would despair of these indiscriminately mixed triggers, their only unifying content a kind of visual technobabble of oscilloscopes and line printers, parabolic microphones and TV cameras, thermal sensors and reel-to-reels of the same magnetic tape which Peter began his mission statement by deriding as fragile and obsolete, yet it's the gold standard of the uncanny when the rattled Cliff (James Cosmo) protests, "I got them on my headphones!" while the objective witness of his tape unspools only white noise and the sounds of the team's confusion, nothing of the omnidirectional clatter of footsteps or those hopeless, agonized, trapped, unending screams. But that's the language of folk horror, where reaching for the future is an invitation for the present to slip out from underfoot and then there's nothing but to plunge into the past, or meet it where it rises to us, in a terrible space where a woman can fall to her death from a height that hasn't existed for seven thousand years. "Some deep-level record—so old—and shapeless—" What it looked like to previous generations, we never learn; it makes hideous sense that we see it now in the willemite-green of an oscilloscope trace, hear it as the churning throb of a degraded signal, and while it might be consoling to imagine it as a kind of Lovecraftian wild hunt lying in wait for its quarry in the depths of time, I suspect it is no more aware of the victims it pursues into its ancient pattern of sacrifice than the research team are of their own reenactment of tragedies past. The end is the same, one more time round on the turntable of events that never even occurred where they now replay, brought with the stones from their megalithic bed. "Quarried ever since Roman times," Collinson said of the lichen-colored limestone back when it looked like the wave of the future, not the drag of the past. "Most of medieval London's built of this stuff." You feel a haunting so old, so deep, and so dreadful should at least have the decency to be autochthonous. But then you can take a recording anywhere, so long as you have the technology to play it, and we ourselves are the players of the stone tape. It's not in the computer; that would be safer. Like every story, it happens in our heads.
If you would like this story to happen in your head, it appears to be available on Region 2 DVD, although courtesy of
ashlyme I watched it with a mild case of generation loss on on YouTube. The original production was shot on video with the atmospherically winter-toned results I associate with so much of this decade; the modest budget either permitted or obliged director Peter Sasdy to focus on the performances, which of necessity tend toward the high-keyed but mostly ground themselves in the recognizable dynamics of a bad workplace, and the electro-chthonic sound design by Desmond Briscoe of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which blurs disturbingly between the hums and blips and chatters of the team's equipment and the auditory excavation of the haunting itself. I don't know that I love it as much as similar explorations by Alan Garner or P.J. Hammond, but if I ever had the chance to screen it as part of a festival, I'd run Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986) as the pre-feature short. Watch or close your eyes, the ghosts play either way. This tape brought to you by my timeless backers at Patreon.
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