Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture
Your PopCulteer is still running a little slow, so the photo essay we planned for today has been moved to Friday. In its place, we shall share graphics for some really cool stuff happening near (or at least within driving distance of) Charleston this weekend. Remember, you can check the Gazette-Mail for a much more comprehensive list of things going on in town this weekend. I’m just bringing you the cream of the crop.
If you read yesterday’s explanation of why The AIR is in reruns this week, you know that your PopCulteer was in Chicago last weekend. We made a brief trip up and were able to squeeze in a chance to see “True West” at Steppenwolf, plus we did some other fun things in the 95 degree weather (117 with the heat index).
I’m currently paying the price for my excusion into the high heat, but it was worth the hassle and, luckily, didn’t hit me until we got back home.
We stayed in a different hotel than we normally do. The Wit, a DoubleTree Hotel right on the edge of The Loop, turned out to be a wonderful choice, with a great view of the Marina Towers (that’s them at the head of this post), and terrific amenities. The fact that the front door is maybe thirty feet from the nearest L platform was an added bonus.
We were only in town for about fifty hours, and we crammed a lot of good times into that short stay. We hit Lincoln Square where I did something I hadn’t done for more than a year. I videotaped a band. You’ll have to stay tuned to PopCult to find out what’s going to happen with that footage. We also got in some shopping and visited a very cool pop-up experience that you will see in this space tomorrow.
Also, we saw “True West,” and when we hopped on the Red Line back to our hotel, we noticed Francis Guinan, a Steppenwolf ensemble member who played a role in that play standing on the platform, and since we’d seen him in three other plays, we followed him onto the train and stuck up a conversation. He was very gracious and kind and generous with his time, and we spoke until we all got off on the same stop. We were at our hotel, and he had another 40 minutes or so of commuting ahead of him before he was home, but it was a wonderful way to end a great day and I want to thank him for his time once again.
I didn’t take too many photos on this trip (I didn’t even take my phone to the theater), but I did get a few cool images to share. You’ll see some of them below, and a very special set of photos tomorrow.
Another view of the Marina Towers, in full daylight, as seen from our hotel window.
Look down a little and you get a great view of The Chicago River, which is best viewed from within an air-conditioned hotel room, at least on a day like this.
It’s rerun time again this week on The AIR as we give our listeners a chance to catch up with some of our favorite episodes of our music programs from the last few months. It’s still great stuff, and you can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…
As many of you know, The AIR, PopCult’s internet radio component, is pretty much a one-man show (with considerable help from Mel Larch and our friends at Haversham Recording Institute in London). That means that when I’m not feeling great, something’s gotta give, and this week it’s the new programming on The AIR.
By way of explanation, your PopCulteer has made no secret of the fact that he has an auto-immune disorder called Myasthenia Gravis. This disease causes my immune system to attack the membranes that transmit nerve signals to my muscles. In the reverse of the way things usually work, the more I use a muscle, the weaker it becomes. It can be very serious, but I am fortunate to have an extremely mild case. I am not completely off the hook, though.
One of the major pitfalls of MG is that its effects worsen in extreme heat and cold. If you were in the United States last weekend you can probably see where this is going. Last weekend my lovely wife and I made our way to Chicago for a quick theatre trip. The heat index in the Windy City was about 117 degrees last Friday and Saturday.
Now, the way heat affects me (and keep in mind that every MG patient is affected differently) is that I do fine for a day or three in extreme heat, and then it hits me like a ton of bricks and I feel like five kinds of hell for a few days. That’s where we are now. I had planned to record Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to the task. I made the decision, since the Haversham shows are scheduled to take this week off anyway, to just use reruns for everything this week so that I can recover from the trip and put together a few special photo essays from the trip, as well as cover some of the news out of SDCC and write about the revival of Toys R Us.
So we’ll be bringing you episodes of our shows from April and May this week, and The AIR will return with all-new programming next week. You can see the schedule below…
Your PopCulteer’s artistic muse is still New York City this week, as we give you a digital painting of a view of 42nd Street, done up in the style of pre-WWII magazine paintings. It’s sort of like being awed and inspried by nature, only in an Urban setting, without so much nature involved. I would’ve tackled this as a piece of real-world art, but my fingers are not cooperating during this hostile-to-Myasthenia-Gravis weather we’re having. I’m not sure how much more milage I can get out of my May trip to The Big Apple. This series might be over now, or it might have a week or two left in it. You’ll just have to check back next Monday morning to see.
Meanwhile, you can click this image to see it bigger.
Over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, this week we bring you a Monday Marathon featuring four more episodes of Syndey’s Big Electric Cat that we didn’t run during the marathons last Thursday and Friday. We still want to salute Sydney Fileen and her recent birthday. plus a lot of our listeners enjoy listening to New Wave Music all day long. That begins at 7 AM.
At 3 PM Herman Linte’s show, Prognosis, now holds court on Mondays. This week we bring you an encore of a recent program, since the Haversham crew are now off on holiday in Spain.
Prognosis will be followed by a classic episode at 5 PM, and then by replays of last week’s Psychedelic Shack at 7 PM, Radio Free Charleston at 8 PM and RFC International at 9 PM. Then at 11 PM we kick it back over to Prognosis, with an eight hour marathon of great progressive rock.
You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…
In honor of yesterday’s fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, this week we’re going to revisit a previous Sunday Evening Video, and re-present Tim and Lisa Weedn’s NASA documentary, The Edge of Utopia. We first brought this to you over a year ago.
I’ve told you about the work of Studio Joe, Tim and Lisa Weedn, and the work they do making hilarious stop-motion videos with action figures, many of whom look a bit Joe-ish. You can see their work HERE and HERE.
That’s not all they’ve done. Between 1995 and 1996, Tim and Lisa wrote, produced, and directed a full-length documentary for PBS. With a huge assist from the fine folks of NASA’s film library at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Tim and Lisa created a fast-paced hour that celebrates America’s amazing space program.
The Edge of Utopia will take you back to a long-forgotten era when intelligence was considered a virtue, and science had not been disrespected and co-opted by special interests. We never would have been able to go to the moon if the Koch Brothers had been throwing their money around back then. This film shows what we can accomplish when we put politics aside and treat scientists and engineers with respect. It sure would be great to get back to that situation. In today’s world, that goal seems farther away than the moon did back in 1969.
The program aired on PBS in 1997 and 1998, then took a trip to the Cannes Film Festival where it was picked up for a five-year world tour. It was particularly ‘big’ in Canada, Poland, and Australia. As Tim says, “Not bad for our first effort. Low budget as low budget gets. We mastered on S-VHS then had it kicked up to Beta Digital for broadcast. Particularly proud of the music score which I composed and performed.”
Thanks again to Tim and Lisa, for making this available.
This week we head back to mid-October, 2013, for an episode of The RFC MINI SHOW starring The Renfields. That would be West Virginia’s favorite Transylvanian punk group, The Renfields.
This special three song mini-show was recorded at Shocka-Con in September, 2013 and serves as a preview for the Radio Free Charleston Halloween specials, also shot at Shocka-Con, which will run for the next two weeks in this space.
In addition to sporting more songs from The Renfields, the Radio Free Charleston Halloween specials will also include music from The Big Bad, HarraH, Foz Rotten, The Nanker Phelge and The McGees. There will also be dancing from The Wayward Girls School of Burlesque and in a huge departure for Radio Free Charleston, interviews with some of the Shocka-Con guests.
That’s all in The RFC Flashback starting next week, but this week, enjoy The Renfields in the RFC MINI SHOW performing “The Last Man on Earth,” “Machete A Go-Go” and “Burning Revenge.”
The PopCulteer
July 19, 2019
Today we’re going to look at a controversial TV show from Britain that you’re probably never heard of before. To be honest, I had only heard the name of the show, but didn’t know the story behind it, and I’m a pretty huge Anglophile.
Longtime PopCult buddy, Spike Nesmith of Sky 1065 in Clarksburg fame, turned me on to the story of this show via Facebook, and it’s a heck of a tale of corporate broadcast skittishness.
Hardwicke House was supposed to be a regular sitcom when it debuted on Britain’s ad-supported, over the air network ITV in 1987. Set in a fictional London school, the show’s focus was mainly on the teachers, who were an odd lot of discipinarians, slackers and crackpots. The students had their own issues as well. The series of seven episodes kicked off with a one-hour debut, followed the next day by a standard half-hour program.
Due to public outcry and ITV nervousness, the show was yanked from the schedule, and has never been shown again. Five episodes were never aired, including one with guest stars Rik Mayal and Ade Edmondson (seen left, with Roy Kineear). Rumors at the time claimed that the master tapes had been wiped and that the show was lost forever.
This was not the case, but a planned 2018 DVD release was cancelled a the last minute.
The show is really unusual. While starring many veterans of typical “safe” and relatively harmless British sitcoms, like Roy Kinnear (George & Mildred), Roger Sloman (We’ll Think of Something), Tony Haygarth (Farrington Of The FO) and Duncan Preston (Victoria Wood – As Seen On TV), Hardwicke House was an attempt to create a show in the vein of the “alternative comedy” style which was then the hot thing in the UK with shows like The Young Ones, Comic Strip Presents, Saturday Live and French and Saunders. One notable bit of casting among the students is the school bully, Slasher Bates, played by Kevin Allen, uncle of pop star Lily Allen, and a Comic Strip regular.
The unoffical Hardwicke House website explains more about the unorthodox presentation of the show, “It was a brash, over-the-top, somewhat surreal offering with larger-than-life characters. And unusually for a sitcom, it featured no laughter track and no studio sets; it was filmed entirely on location.” This website is the source for most of my background info on the show, and you should check it out for way more details on the show than I can give you here.
Hardwicke House was filmed during the summer of 1986 for Central TV (a local ITV subsidiary) and was scheduled to be shown between February and April 1987. The show was written by Richard Hall and Simon Wright, and it was their first attempt at a sitcom. Wright had previously worked on The Comic Strip Presents and was part of the alternative comedy movement.
Characters on the show use racist, abusive, insulting language, often around children, and there are even implied pedophilic tendencies among the school staff. There’s also bits of surreal slapstick and a tiny bit of endangering students.
Judging the program by today’s standards, it’s pretty tame stuff. You’ll see darker, meaner comedy on almost any episode of Family Guy. But in 1987, in the UK, on ITV and on a program scheduled to air at 8 PM, this was a bit of a shock to the system.
For years the program was a holy grail for fans of British alternative comedy. Five of the seven episodes have never aired, and have never been officially released. After the DVD release was pulled, many fans gave up hope of ever seeing this show.
Then a few weeks ago master tape copies of all seven episodes were posted to YouTube, where you can watch them all for free…at least for now. The most shocking thing about watching these today is how inoffensive they seem. Our culture has changed quite a bit in the ensuing 32 years.
To prove that point, how about we post all seven episodes right here:
Episode One: “The Visit” The one-hour debut introduces the main characters and shows what happens when the South African Ambassador to the UK visits the school.
You can see the rest of the series after the jump…
Although the crew at Haversham Recording Institute are well into a two-week holiday in Spain, The AIR is going to spend a couple of days saluting legendary London DJ, Sydney Fileen, who is both our presenter for Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, and one of the principal owners of London’s leading independent voiceover studio. You can tune in at The AIR Website, or just twonk the magic ploonker right here on this embedded radio player…
Thursday and Friday from 8 AM to Midnight, The AIR will present some of the best episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, as Sydney Fileen celebrates an unspecified milestone birthday. Sydney began her career during the heyday of punk music and pirate radio, and while she transitioned to legitimate announcing and has had a long career as one of the most recognizable voices on the British airwaves,
Sydney’s roots in New Wave music run deep, and she produces Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as a labor of love for The AIR. The least we can do is run a special marathon in observance of her special day.
Listeners can get their retro jollies with the likes of Depeche Mode, M, Missing Persons, DEVO, Lene Lovich, Thomas Dolby, The Police, Duran Duran, Human League, The Clash, Romeo Void, The Dickies, The Stranglers, Hazel O’Connor, The B 52 and dozens of other artists who were cutting edge back when that phrase actually meant something.
Check out the music that made the broken promise of a brave new tomorrow on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, all day Thursday and Friday on The AIR. Our regular schedule will return next week.
Okay, so it’s going to be insanely and dangerously hot this weekend, and your PopCulteer isn’t even going to be in town, but there are two cool things you need to know about that are happening this weekend.
First of all, Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the day that Man landed on the Moon. The Apollo 11 mission saw the Lunar Module drop to the Moon’s surface, and Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on a celestial body. I was following along with my GI Joe Astronaut and Space Capsule (it was the wrong type of space capsule, but I was six years old, so you need to cut me a break). This changed the world and the course of history, and led to some really cool toys for a year or so.
Saturday at 5 PM at Camp Virgil Tate, The Kanawha Valley Astronomical Society and The Kanawha County Public Library will present Contact Light: 50 Years Since the Small Step, a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11. KVAS will open the doors to the Breezy Point Observatory for Lunar and other celestial viewing.
The Boone Maxwell Lodge will be open so the public can meet members of KVAS and view different types of telescopes. On top of that, a display of space memorabilia covering the space age will be on display and WVSOAR will have a display or rockets as well as a rocket building clinic where you can build and launch a rocket for a small fee.
Starting around 10:45PM a replay of the original television broadcast of the historic Moonwalk will be shown 50 years to the minute. The KCPL will be also hold it’s celebration of the finale of it’s summer reading program. Events will be held in the Brooks Daughtery Dining hall. Pre-registration may be required.
This will be a great observation of one of the great technological achievments of the 20th Century. You can find out more at the Facebook Event Page, and at the KCPL Reading Program Page and the Contact Light page.
Meanhwile, if you think it’s too hot for science and learning, you can head over to Ridenour Lake in Nitro for the Ridenour Regatta, a day-long event that will see water fun, motorbike races, vendors, inflatables and an outdoor showing of the movie, Jaws. Check out the Facebook page, and the graphic below for details.
This week, our Tuesday schedule on The AIR , PopCult’s adjunct radio station, only offers up one new show. We have a new episode of Radio Free Charleston, bringing you yet another hour of terrific local music. You can hear it if you zip on over and tune in at the website, or you could just take the easy route, and listen to this embedded radio player…
The new RFC kicks off at 10 AM (with a replay at 10 PM– all times EDT) with a brand-new episode. . This week’s show is once-again loaded with great local music by some of the Charleston area’s finest musical artistes. We open the show with new music from Emmalea Deal, and continue with great stuff from The Cannon Sodaro Band, Todd Burge, Kevin Scarbrough, Time And Distance and more.
You should be able to click on the episode number above the playlist that follows, and go to a page where you can download and/or listen to a low-res version of this week’s show.
Check out the playlist:
Emmalea Deal “Queen”
Adam Cox “Free And Independent State”
Cannon Sodaro Band “Hard Times”
Todd Burge “The Cheerleader”
Cast of Paradise Park “Something For Nothing”
Jonathan Mason “Killing Me, Ohio”
William Matheny “Tonight and Every Night From Now On”
Farnsworth “Roll Me Up”
Geronimo “Once My Home”
Time And Distance “Cooperfield”
Kevin Scarbrough “Salamander Man”
Axis Everything “Timedog”
Blame The Day “Breathe”
Seven Minutes To Midnight “Hey John I Did Imagine”
Tim Truman “Ballad of Oscar Wilde”
Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8PM, exclusively on The AIR.
The rest of our schedule on Tuesday, and for the rest of the week, will be filled with encore episodes of our regular shows. The Haversham Recording Institute in London is shutting down for a couple of weeks of holiday in Spain, following a grueling schedule of engineering for Wimbledon. With yours truly still a bit under the weather, I decided that The Swing Shift, which I host, and Curtain Call, which I produce for Mel Larch, can take the week off as well.
Thursday and Friday this week, The AIR will present two days of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, in honor of our New Wave program’s presenter, Sydney Fileen, who will be celebrating an unnamed milestone birthday on an unnamed beach in Spain. We’ll remind you of that on Thursday.
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