by Adam Buxton
No less primitive than Outlaw, at least graphically speaking, was a game called Adventure, in which the player was represented by a single square block that could be moved around the screen to explore a series of ‘rooms’, ‘dungeons’ and ‘mazes’ – in other words, rectangles of various colours, some containing more blocks than others. The object of Adventure was to locate a ‘chalice’ and bring it back to your ‘castle’. Now and then blocky ‘dragons’ that looked like ducks would appear and move with alarming speed towards your block in order to eat you.
Most of the time the game was completely silent, with no music and only minimal sound effects, contributing to a state of tense hypnotic absorption during gameplay. Adventure was my introduction to the experience of navigating a virtual space, only a small part of which was visible on the TV screen, and the slow process of mapping and mastering that phantom universe occupied my thoughts by day and my dreams by night.
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RAMBLE
Last Christmas I bought a Nintendo Switch for my own children and gave them the same speech my dad gave me: ‘This is for ALL of you to share!’ Then I downloaded an Atari 2600 emulator, anticipating with relish the satisfying circularity of us all sat round playing Outlaw together. But the children found the sounds so maddeningly horrible that within a couple of minutes I was once again left blasting away on my own, while they went outside to dance, laugh and read to each other.
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The Timeshifter
The other technological game-changer for me back in 1982 was also introduced by my dad and ended up playing a significant part in my friendship with Joe Cornish and our eventual entry into the world of DIY television in the Nineties.
One of the perks of Dad’s job at the Telegraph was that from time to time he was sent free shit in the hope that he might mention the shit in one of his travel columns. One day he came back from the office with some state-of-the-art, solid-gold shit: the Sharp VC-2300H portable VHS video recorder plus XC-30 colour video camera.
Domestic video cassette recorders (or VCRs for younger readers) were only just beginning to become affordable at the time, with just a handful of video rental stores popping up in London’s wealthier neighbourhoods before becoming commonplace towards the end of the Eighties. Video cameras were even more rare, and outside the TV and film industries the only places you might find them were educational and scientific establishments and the bat caves of techy millionaires.
The gear Dad had been lent comprised a VCR about the size and weight of a modern domestic printer and a camera unit that had to be attached to the recorder by a thick rubber cable. All this was ‘portable’ to the extent that it was physically possible to hold the camera and carry the recorder at the same time, but if you wanted to use the thing outside it meant attaching a heavy battery that would enable you to record for about 30 minutes, assuming your back hadn’t given out by then.
Dad used the camera to film my last Sports Day at boarding school and I still have the desaturated VHS footage of me giving it one last spurt of effort at the end of the 800-metre race before coming in dead last. My mum can be heard chuckling off camera as Dad says sympathetically, ‘Well, the idea was a good one.’
It wasn’t until I started hanging out with Joe a couple of years later that I began to use the camera for anything more ambitious than the odd family home movie. Before then I was far more excited about using the VCR to tape programmes off the TV so I could watch them more than once – a concept that at the time was entirely novel, almost magical. I had to think carefully about what I would actually record, as we’d been supplied with only three 60-minute VHS tapes, and new ones were expensive and hard to come by.
The first programme I taped was Top of the Pops on 22 July 1982. The show included the video for ‘Driving in My Car’ by Madness as well as The Stranglers miming to ‘Strange Little Girl’ and, most exciting in terms of rewatchability, the video for a song that ticked the same boxes that Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ had a few months before: electronic; bored vocal; German. However, ‘Da Da Da’, a one-hit wonder by a band called Trio, made ‘The Model’ sound lush and overproduced by comparison.
‘Da Da Da’ was little more than a beat from a Casio VL-Tone pocket electronic keyboard on which the lead singer, a lugubrious skinhead in white T-shirt and suit jacket, played a five-note sequence during the chorus and sang in German: ‘Da da da, Ich lieb’ dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht’ or ‘I don’t love you, you don’t love me’. While the football-chant choruses of ‘Come On Eileen’ were filling dance floors across the UK, it was Trio that set my pulse racing and afforded me that wonderful punk epiphany that making intriguing music might not be the sole preserve of trained or even talented musicians.
My next adventure with the VCR was figuring out how to use the timer record function and convincing Dad that if he got hold of some longer videotapes I could record some war documentaries and boring opera shite for him to watch of an evening. Thereafter the highlight of my week became the day that I’d get back from school to find Mum had bought the new TV and Radio Times. I’d sit at the kitchen table with a hefty slice of Battenberg and one of Dad’s yellow highlighters (being careful to leave the top off and not put it back where I found it when I was finished) and scan the listings for anything interesting being shown past my bedtime that I could tape and watch at the weekend.
Most of what I taped was worthless crap that I’d fast-forward through on the lookout for gore, robots or boobs, but there were a few films that I ended up watching many times, even going so far as to break off the plastic tabs on the spine of the video cassette to prevent them being accidentally recorded over.
Rollercoaster was a thriller about a theme-park safety inspector on the trail of an extortionist blowing up rides with radio-controlled devices. It had everything: rollercoasters, which I adored and associated with our trips to America; radio-controlled devices and violent deaths, which all fine young men find exciting; George Segal, who seemed nice and funny; Timothy Bottoms, whose surname was ‘Bottoms’, and in one scene, which took place at the opening of a new theme park, a peculiar band playing two songs that I liked. Over a decade later I realised the band was Sparks and when I found the album that contained the songs they played in Rollercoaster (1976’s Big Beat), the sense of closure and satisfaction was worryingly profound.
Another film that achieved protected VHS tape status that year also had a baldly descriptive title. Alligator was about an alligator that gets flushed down a toilet as a baby alligator, then starts munching sewage workers once it’s grown into a giant alligator. Though entirely tame by modern standards, it was one of the gorier films I’d seen up to that point and, looking back, I can see it was a crucial part of my training for the day I would watch Alien. To that extent it was probably about as useful as jogging to a sweet shop to prepare for a marathon (though not, of course, for a Snickers – pffrrrt), but the fact that I wasn’t scared by Alligator made me feel that I could probably deal with some pretty hardcore cinematic mayhem.
I experienced a subtler but far more enduring form of mind-mangling when I taped a film being shown late one night on BBC Two called Dark Star. It was a piece of low-budget sci-fi about a small group of hippy astronaut men touring the galaxy in a claustrophobic ship in order to blow up unstable planets. They did this using artificially intelligent bombs that chatted happily to the crew before being deployed.
I expected science-fiction films to feature clean-cut, straightforwardly heroic leading men, but Dark Star had five hairy weirdos (one in cryogenic stasis following a fatal seat malfunction), and none of them was especially heroic or even very likeable. The film also had an unusual sense of humour, and to the hypothetical question, ‘What would it really be like to live and work on a spaceship?’ Dark Star’s answer was, ‘It would be boring and crap.’ According to some people I showed it to over the years, the same could be said of the film itself – but I thought it was funny and full of moments that stuck with me for yea
rs.
One of the best things about Dark Star was John Carpenter’s electronic score, which did a great job of transporting me beyond the cheap homemade sets to somewhere appropriately strange and science fiction-ish. There were also other bits of music in the film that were entertainingly inappropriate: easy listening, some surf rock and, best of all, the theme tune: a country song specially written for the film called ‘Benson, Arizona’, which is still in my list of Songs That Make Me Struggle Not to Cry.
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RAMBLE
SONGS THAT MAKE ME STRUGGLE NOT TO CRY
These aren’t sad songs so much as songs that have something in them that turns my sentimentality tap on full.
‘S.O.S.’
– ABBA
Unrequited love is dreary and depressing for all concerned, but this makes it sound like standing on top of a mountain as fireworks go off while the meaning of life is revealed (and the meaning of life turns out not to be a disappointment).
‘DANCE THE NIGHT AWAY’
– THE MAVERICKS
I think people assume I’m being ironic about this or suggesting it would make me cry because it’s so crap, but no, it’s the opposite. I think it’s so good, so brilliantly produced and defiantly uplifting that it makes me weepy. No need to tweet how disappointed you are by my poor taste – it won’t make me like it any less.
‘I’M NOT THE MAN I USED TO BE’
– FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS
Funky drummer breakbeat + melancholy chords + sense of regret = Buckles struggling not to cry.
‘LILAC WINE’
– NINA SIMONE or JEFF BUCKLEY
Both versions do the job.
‘ONE DAY I’LL FLY AWAY’
– RANDY CRAWFORD
On occasions when I’ve made a mess of something in my life, I like songs that indulge my feelings of self-pity and promote the fantasy that I might just escape somehow, maybe by assuming a new identity and plying an honest trade in a small rural community in New Zealand or somewhere like that. By the end of the song I’ve usually thought through all the practical problems with the New Zealand plan and I try to start clearing up the mess.
‘DISNEY GIRLS’
– THE BEACH BOYS
The Beach Boys are celebrated for their excellent goofy surf pop and their complex, hallucinatory evocations of mental turmoil, but they also had a good line in corny and sentimental stuff like ‘Disney Girls’. It’s a song about that feeling of being overwhelmed by modern life and yearning for a simpler, happier, more innocent time, while acknowledging that those good old days may never have existed. ‘Reality, it’s not for me,’ admits the author.
‘GRACELAND’
– PAUL SIMON
When the Graceland album came out in 1986, I thought it sounded like a boring old white bloke trying too hard to look more ‘authentic’ by hanging out with ethnic musicians. Then a few years later I went on a trip where for some reason it was the only tape I had with me and it got under my skin. Now the ‘losing love is like a window in your heart’ bit in the song ‘Graceland’ does me in every time.
‘SUFFERING JUKEBOX’
– SILVER JEWS
Give it a listen and read about the man who made it and if you don’t find it moving, well, then I guess you’re just the most evil, cold-hearted person in the world. Or maybe it’s just not your sort of thing.
‘BENSON, ARIZONA’
– JOHN YAGER
Missing people is easy. Connecting with them is harder, as anyone who has ever made an unsatisfactory call home from a business trip will attest. But if you were working in outer space, you wouldn’t even be able to call home and missing them would be even sweeter and even sadder. Ah, the simplicity of outer space!
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The character I liked best in Dark Star was the memorably named Sergeant Pinback, played by Dan O’Bannon (who also co-wrote the movie). Pinback’s makes video diaries detailing his efforts to get along with the rest of the crew, decades before the concept of video diaries became familiar via TV reality shows and internet vlogs. Pinback’s responsibilities include looking after an alien life form that he found on a foreign planet and brought aboard the ship as a pet. The alien is clearly an inflatable beach ball that’s been painted red with black and yellow spots and has two clawed feet obviously being worn as gloves by one of the film crew, but with basic puppetry and some amusing burbly sound effects, it comes to life completely, especially in a confrontation between Pinback and the mischievous alien that plays out in a lift shaft, an idea O’Bannon hung on to for Alien years later, when he wrote the screenplay.
The climax of Dark Star is a philosophical debate between one of the artificially intelligent bombs and crew member Lieutenant Doolittle. After sustaining damage in a meteor shower, the bomb is unable to detach itself from the ship but is determined to detonate regardless as it received an order to do so. In an effort to convince it otherwise, Doolittle engages the bomb in a discussion about the difficulty of knowing for certain whether anything is real. Those kinds of ideas were new to me when I first saw Dark Star, so I felt I was watching something clever and deep rather than just eavesdropping on a couple of students who have recently discovered cannabis.
Later, when I learned about the concept of mutually assured destruction supposedly acting as a deterrent to nuclear war, it reminded me of Doolittle ‘psyching out’ the bomb and I couldn’t quite believe that the safety of the world relied on a similarly dopey exercise in philosophical doublethink.
It Started with a Kiss
Somehow I made it through the first ten years of my life without absorbing any accurate information about sex whatsoever. Sure, I knew it was dirty, shameful and wrong, but beyond that, I was clueless.
I was first made aware of the concept of sexual intercourse when, for a short while aged around seven, I formed an odd friendship with a boy at school who, like me, was chubby, smutty and full of shame. I went round to his house one day and he revealed to me that his dad had stashed a variety of pornographic magazines under the carpet in the loft. We got some cakes and looked at the pictures. It wasn’t long before our societal programming kicked in and we started to feel guilty, but rather than being put off, we doubled down. ‘We like cakes and sex magazines!’ we declared. ‘We’re SUPERPIGS!’
After a couple of these sessions, I decided I was no longer comfortable identifying as a Superpig and that was the last time I looked at pornography while eating cakes, at least with another person in the room.
Because my parents seemed too nice to ever do the kinds of things I’d seen in the carpet porn, I decided that sexual intercourse was not necessary for human reproduction. My theory was that women simply became pregnant from time to time, and if they wanted to have a baby, they just let it carry on growing until it popped out. If being pregnant wasn’t convenient, they could take a pill and the foetus would evaporate, like a headache. As far as sex was concerned, that was something extra you could do if you were a pervert or a Superpig, but there was no way my mummy and daddy would ever do anything like that.
For a while my ground-breaking reproductive notions went unchallenged. Then one day, in one of my first proper biology lessons, the teacher asked if anyone knew which animals were able to reproduce asexually. Enjoying the unusual sensation of having the answer to a teacher’s question, I stuck my hand up and began to outline my Spontaneous Pregnancy Theory. There was a strong ripple of laughter from my fellow students, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I was looking forward to seeing the gigglers humiliated when they discovered that, actually, young Buckles was correct: of course humans don’t need to have sex to reproduce; that would mean the willy of every single child’s daddy had gone in and out of their mummy’s fanny until seeds came out, which would be completely appalling. You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when it turned out the teacher was a Spontaneous Pregnancy Theory denier.
To his credit, he handled it nicely and didn’t laugh in my face, but he made it clear that
, contrary to my position, every human baby ever born had been the result of sexual intercourse. As one last desperate face-saving measure, I put up my hand again and said, ‘Well, not EVERY baby …’
‘Yes,’ said the teacher, ‘every single baby.’
‘Not Jesus,’ I said as the bell went.
Once in a while my unfamiliarity with both birds and bees was mildly useful. Daniel Bradford, a boy from the year above who was always on the look-out for clever ways to humiliate people, approached me one day outside the dining room and showed me his hand, which he held in a claw shape as if it had been paralysed. He pointed to the clawed hand and said, ‘Wanker’s cramp. D’you get it?’ The joke was that he was demonstrating how a hand might look after excessive masturbation, and I was supposed to say, ‘Oh yeah, I get it,’ to which he would then reply, ‘Eurgh! You’re sick! You get wanker’s cramp!’ Unfortunately for Daniel Bradford, I didn’t understand a single word he was saying and he had to repeat the set-up three more times before I said, ‘No, sorry, I don’t get it,’ at which point he huffed off in medium dudgeon.
More often, however, my lack of accurate sex info led to deep anxiety. One night as I lay asleep in my room I had a dream that featured June Whitfield from Terry and June, a British sitcom about suburban married life that I would sometimes watch when I was out of options. In the dream, June (who must have been nearly 60 at the time) was straddling me as I lay in her garden. Terry was out or busy inside the house, I suppose. She raised her skirts as she lowered herself and the next thing I knew I was awake and ejaculating into the folds of my pyjama bottoms.
Completely freaked out, I cleaned up, stuffed the soiled PJ bottoms under the bed, put on a fresh pair and tried unsuccessfully to get back to sleep. No one had warned me about nocturnal emissions and I now believed I was an out-of-control little sex pervert with granny issues. The next morning at breakfast I prodded at the moat of Golden Syrup around my Ready Brek, nauseated with shame and anxiety. ‘It Started with a Kiss’ by Hot Chocolate was playing on the radio and every time I heard the song over the next few weeks it served as a powerful reminder that I was a sick freak.
