Bloody NEL: Time and Timothy Grenville by Terry Greenhough (1976)

Is it possible to imagine a book that would look more at home on my shelves than this one? Or, you know that uneasy sensation you get when you suddenly start to feel like a ‘target audience’?

Terry Greenhough (1944-2002) seemingly enjoyed a brief but productive literary career in the latter half of the 1970s, with five science fiction novels and a historical romance seeing print between ’75 and ’80, four of them within New English Library covers.

‘Time and Timothy Grenville’ (note the curious similarity to the author’s name) was the first of his SF efforts. I’ve not read it yet, but sf-encyclopedia.com tells us that, “..typically of this writer [it] somewhat discursively exploits an uneasy, oppressive relation between the world at large and its protagonist in a story of complex Time Travel and Aliens, in which Earth itself proves to be at stake.”

By that as it may, I’m going to point to the echoes of both Alan Garner and Nigel Kneale in the back cover blurb, and single this one out as a potentially key exemplar of stone circle-sploitation - a phenomenon largely unique to the late 1970s that I’ll write an unconvincing monograph (or at least, a Found Objects post) about one day.

The SF Encyclopaedia page linked above also helpfully credits the cover art on this edition to prolific NEL SF artist Ray Feibush.

#4 Psychomania (Don Sharp, 1972)

“The word, mother, is FUZZ..”

‘Psychomania’ first entered my life, as it entered the lives of many people in this country I suspect, through a late night TV screening. Back in the glory days when they used to fill early morning airtime with old horror movies, the BBC used to pull this one out of the hat on a surprisingly regular basis.

For a while a few years back, I remember that I had a VCR on which the ‘record’ function had broken or something, and my brother used to occasionally video stuff I might like off the TV for me. One day he called me up, and said something to the effect of hey, there’s this thing on tonight called ‘Psychomania’ – British movie, 1972, about a gang of bikers who get turned into zombies or something - sounds like your sort of thing, d’you want me to record it for you? Yeah, sounds great, I said, and thought no more about it.

The next day, my brother, not usually a big horror movie enthusiast, called me again. “I’m watching that movie, ‘Psychomania’, right now,” he said “and it’s… extraordinary – seriously, you’ve got see this.” He described it to me as being completely unlike a conventional horror movie, and more like some offbeat comedy/drama in which incredibly bizarre supernatural things keep happening. In retrospect, and with more understanding of the aesthetic landscape of low budget British movies in the early ‘70s, I’m not sure if that’s really an accurate description, but I definitely see where he was coming from. Although the film’s imagery and plot-line, and its sinister opening sequence, immediately mark it out as horror, there is something that from the outset is different about ‘Psychomania’ - something utterly unique and sublimely weird.

For one thing, all of the violence in the film (and it ends up with a pretty high body count) either takes place off screen, or is played for laughs. None of the usual tension and titillation of a violent horror film is even attempted. In fact, there is something almost quaint about the film: along with the lack of explicit bloodshed, absolutely no reference is made to sex or drug use, and there isn’t even any bad language (unless you count the petrol station attendant’s immortal cry of “I’ll teach you a lesson, you long ‘aired git”). For a movie that is ostensibly about anarchic undead bikers unleashing a whirlwind of havoc upon the British countryside, ‘Psychomania’s wholesome and genuinely quite humane approach to the material is as mystifying as it is delightful. Quite why the film was initially released in Britain with an ‘X’ certificate is beyond me – I can only assume it was either self-imposed in an attempt to corner the horror market, or that the BBFC took umbrage with the generally mind-bending tone of proceedings, the comedic suicide montage, or the shocking portrayal middle-class miscreants on two stroke motorbikes knocking workmen off ladders and upsetting trays of buns as they blaze a trail of righteous destruction through the new-build shopping precincts of the home counties.

Attempts at evoking a ‘gothic horror’ atmosphere, or indeed the atmosphere of a biker film, are sporadic at best, but the aesthetic identity that takes their place – that of an otherworldly, almost naive early ‘70s Englishness, is so potent that it practically glows, with an otherworld palette of pale greens and browns. ‘Psychomania’ is, quite simply, one of the most wonderfully strange films I’ve ever seen, and furthermore, one whose cultural concerns mesh with my own so perfectly, it was always going to be love at first sight.

When I saw the opening titles, in which the skull-helmeted Living Dead motorcycle gang ride in slow motion about a green-lit, fog shrouded stone circle as John Cameron’s incredible psyche-fuzz theme plays, I knew this was gonna be good.

When said bikers were revealed to be an unlikely alliance of weedy, plum-voiced English youth with names like Gash, Hinky, Hatchet and Bertram (Bertram?!?) sewn onto the back of their jackets, headed by human dynamo Nicky Henson, doing his best impression of Malcolm McDowell in “If..” in the role of aristocratic gang leader Tom Latham, I knew this was gonna be BRILLIANT.

When Tom winds down by taking his sweetly innocent girlfriend Abby toad-hunting in the local the cemetery and tells her “it’s not me that scares you baby, it’s the world”, before he returns to his gothic/modernist family home and waltzes around the hideously decorated living room with his psychic mother (Beryl Reid!), telling her “you know why the fuzz called, mother? We blew a fellow’s mind tonight; it was beautiful – he went straight through the windscreen”, my jaw had just about hit the floor.

By the time Tom had cornered the family retainer Shadwell (George Sanders) and demanded to know, “..why did my father die in that locked room? Why do you never get any older, Shadwell? And what is the secret of the living dead?” (the last question masterfully delivered just as he takes a bite out of a gigantic sandwich), I was fully converted.

And by the time Tom had entered aforementioned locked room for an astounding psychedelic trip sequence featuring shrieking feedback, menacing toad-god visitations and flashbacks of his parents selling their baby son’s soul to the devil…. well let’s just say I was busy cancelling upcoming appointments in my diary and preparing to dedicate the rest of my natural life to the intensive study and appreciation of this thing known as ‘Psychomania’.

Subsequently, ‘Psychomania’ continues much as it has begun - with a parade of demented highlights that almost never lets up. I could spend thousands of words listing them up for you, but probably best if you just watch the movie. Practically every scene is seared onto my brain indelibly, making me grin and cackle as I walk down the street, over five years and over a dozen viewings later. Still though, I guess there might be those of you reading who are unfamiliar with the film, so… it’s just something that’s got to be done I suppose (deep breath):

After his locked room freakout, Tom commits suicide by driving full speed off a motorway bridge. The grieving gang hold a burial for him amid the standing stones, interring him upright on his bike! Gang member Chopped Meat sits at the graveside with a guitar, and lip-syncs to the timeless ballad ‘Riding Free’ (“he really got it on / he rode that sweet machine just like a bomb..”). Later that day, a man who looks a bit like Mr. Bean takes a shortcut through the standing stones when his car breaks down, and is startled to hear the sound a revving engine emanating from beneath him. He tries to run, but is cruelly mown down by a resurrected Tom, as he explodes out of the earth like a weird biker movie phoenix! After enjoying some “carnage at the pub” (as one of the track titles on the Trunk Records soundtrack CD puts it), Tom returns to the gang and informs them that he has indeed discovered “the secret of the living dead”. Apparently, all you need to do to achieve immortality and superhuman strength is to kill yourself, whilst believing that you will come back. Simple as that! Quoth Living Dead second in command and red leather-clad femme fatale Jane Pettibone; “oh man, what are we waiting for..?”

Cue cinema’s greatest ever comedic suicide montage, some extremely perturbed Morris Minor-driving policemen, and a rampage of bloodless undead biker anarchy that leaves the whole of Walton-on-Thames cowering in terror!

Deepening the glorious mystery that is ‘Psychomania’ are the rather vague circumstances by which the film came into being. Reading the plot synopsis above, you might reasonably expect it to be the work of one maniac auteur, but no, ‘Psychomania’ seems to be a film that forced its way into existence simply through… I dunno, osmosis or something – an accidental masterpiece that no one seems to want to raise their hand and take credit for;

Independent producer Andrew Donally allegedly picked it for production simply because it was the only one of a pile of potential projects that his financiers jumped at. Don Sharp was hired as director simply because he was seen as steady hand with a knack for filming good action scenes. Sharp is still alive, but to my knowledge he has never seen fit to comment on the film (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know). And, despite their enthusiastic performances, most of the surviving cast now seem either baffled or deeply embarrassed by the film’s cult following.

If authorship of the film can be placed anywhere, it is probably with blacklisted American screenwriters Arnaud d'Usseau and Julian Halevy, who made a brief but highly successful comeback in the realm of early ‘70s Euro-horror, penning both ‘Psychomania’ and the similarly inventive/joyous ‘Horror Express’. Clearly those guys had some pretty singular mojo going on, making me wish Hammer or somebody could have put them on the payroll, but even so – chances are d’Usseau and Halevy didn’t consider themselves to be going much more than cramming together currently sale-able plot elements, hoping to make a quick buck.

Trying to determine quite where the incredibly strange totality of ‘Psychomania’ came from is likely to remain a thankless task. Probably best just see it instead as a confounding, life-affirming oddity that arose fully formed from the freaked out mire of its particular post-‘60s, pre-‘70s cultural moment – the perfect cult film, revved up and ready to go. It’s not ‘Psychomania’ that scares you, baby - it’s the world.

Mysterious Britain at the BFI.

BFI Flipside’s “Mysterious Britain” evening last week got off to an odd start in not quite the manner the organisers had anticipated, when Bruce Springsteen apparently announced a surprise public appearance to promote a documentary about himself, and claimed NFT Screen # 1, where the Flipside screening was due to take place, for that purpose.

I would have loved to witness the meeting between The Boss’s people and the soft-spoken British cinema archivist types, but needless to say, we’re now devoid of leg room, crammed into the substantially smaller NFT # 2. I don’t know whether or not late-arriving ticket-holders had to be turned away and given a refund, but I’m glad I got in early.

After a brief apology/explanation from curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler, it’s on with the show, the general gist of which is a collection of brief TV extracts dredged up from the BFI vaults, illustrating the British media’s approach to investigation of ‘strange goings on’ throughout the mid 20th century.

Proceedings begin with a 1973 broadcast on behalf of The Aetherius Society, a supremely weird religious sect based around the “sixty miles of audio tape” recorded by one Dr. George King, who claimed to be channelling the pronouncements of a holy being from Mars, who urged earth’s major religions to combine into some kind of benevolent mind-meld, turning back the tide of evil and atomic destruction. The footage of a young altar boy earnestly charging a battery with ‘prayer power’, backed up by an ethnically diverse congregation of four, was pricelessly eerie, as was the thought of an era in which BBC ‘community outreach’ funding could filter down to letting dubious outfits like this lot spread their message of hope via late night BBC2.

Next up, a 1972 edition of “The Sky At Night” which sees Sir Patrick Moore mixing it up with the druids during their midsummer rituals at Stonehenge. Sir Patrick says he found the druids to be pleasant and genuine bunch, before politely informing them that their veneration of the stones is clearly a load of bunk in the face of new research which reveals the Henge’s true function as a “primitive astral calculator”. “Well, there’s always 1973”, he cheerfully announces as the druids shuffle off at the end of their ceremony, disappointed that the overcast sky denied them a glimpse of the dawn. Words to live by indeed.

Sticking with standing stones and knighthood, Sir John Betjeman turns up next, narrating a short subject on the earthworks and stone circle at Avebury for a 1950s Shell Motor Oil travelogue series. Betjeman’s observations on the subject, though interesting, are strictly by the book, but the film is beautifully photographed. Black & white footage of the mysterious monoliths standing alone in a field of daisies and long grass with the scattered brick cottages on either side, is incredibly evocative, expressing the very heart of ‘weird England’ as it quietly thrived in the days of our parents and grandparents, almost too perfectly for words.


Next we have a full edition of an absolute genius ITV series from the late ‘50s entitled Out of Step, in which Daniel Farson, a sort of bullish proto-Boris Johnson figure, tracks down people who hold unusual views, and proceeds to antagonise and mock them. This week: people who believe in flying saucers! Are they cranks, frauds, or simply misguided? Farson’s first stop is the roof garden of the Rt. Hon. Brindsley Le Poer Trench, whose crumbling UFO paperbacks and inherently hilarious name certainly played a role in my childhood. Lord Trench gets bonus points for beginning his answer to the question ‘why do you believe in flying saucers’ with “well, speaking as the editor of Flying Saucer Review…”, and for repeatedly stressing that his sighting reports come from “serious, highly trained observers”, as opposed to, I dunno, some random bozos who just like wandering around staring at the sky. We get straight to camera statements from various of these observers, my favourite of which was a man who looked like a Dan Clowes caricature come to life, whose evidence of strange lights in the sky is somewhat undermined by the fact that his sightings have all taken place “in the area between two aerodromes”. If the aliens were to set up a base-camp on earth, he reasons, it would probably be in Stafford.

Subsequently, Farson seeks an opposing view from the retired Astronomer Royal, who sits in his drawing room absent-mindedly pondering the weight of the supplies these space-fellows would need to bring them to our solar system, and interviews a dentist who claims he was taken for a ride to Mars and Venus by interplanetary visitors (“if I may say so sir, it certainly sounds like one of us is being taken for a ride..”), and who states that the women on Venus were very beautiful indeed.

Looking back after subsequent decades in which the whole UFO mythos has taken on an increasingly dark and troubling tone, this programme’s light-hearted approach to the subject was a wonderful reminder of how simple and wholesome the whole business seemed prior to the arrival of cattle mutilation, recovered memory syndrome, suicidal cultists and the ever-present intimations of child abuse. I don’t know whether any other episodes of “Out of Step” have survived, but if so I’d love to see them – this one was a hoot.


Sixteen years into a darker future, and a queasy orange glow of deteriorated video tape colour hangs over a short news item about a young Birmingham couple sitting meekly whilst an exorcist (Church of England, apparently !?) banishes a poltergeist from their chilly-looking council house. The ghost has been doing terrible things, like turning the cooker off and hiding the husband’s wallet under the bed. The vicar conducts the ceremony from a little xeroxed booklet entitled “Exorcism”. I don’t know who wrote it, but it all sounds a bit fishy to me. Whilst we may be tempted here to focus our ghoulish retromancy on the kitchen’s lurid bad-trip flock wallpaper or the husband’s Tony Iommi approach to personal grooming, the truly notable thing in this case I feel is the way the parents leave their toddler to play unaccompanied on the front lawn for an extended period of time as they dutifully accompany the priest in his somewhat questionable business.

Back to the comforts of the black & white era, and next we have a delightfully baleful short programme from 1964, in which a BBC reporter recruits a cheerfully imaginative local historian to help interpret the remnants of several apparent folk magic ceremonies conducted in ruined churches in East Anglia. The presenter gives us a right mouthful in his introduction, automatically linking these rather generic magical talismans with a survival of pre-Christian Celtic tradition, which he then defines as “..the worship of Pan, or Lucifer”. Hmm. Anyway, he gets the biggest laugh of the night when he announces “it may be shocking to us to learn of the survival of these dark traditions, over fifteen hundred years since Christianity was accepted as the sole religion of the British Isles. But then… this is Norfolk.”

Perhaps my favourite item of the evening was a contemporary news investigation of the infamous Highgate Vampire flap, a sequence of events sparked by a spate of grave desecrations which took place in Highgate Cemetery through 1970. As The Sun reported on 19 August 1970; “A man armed with a wooden stake and a cross went on a vampire hunt in a cemetery. But all he found was the police. And they arrested him. Alan Farrant, aged 24, told magistrates at Clerkenwell, London yesterday: ‘my intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart’”.


Farrant, a “former tobacconist of no fixed abode” according to this news item, was subsequently acquitted in court, and when we join him here he’s up to his old tricks again, clambering over the wall of the cemetery after-hours for his regular anti-Vampire patrol. Farrant insists he has seen Satanists at work in the cemetery at night, consorting with the figure of a glowing eight foot high vampire, and that it is up to him to try to stop them.

Meanwhile, the supremely Garth Marenghi-like Mr. Sean Manchester, self-styled president of the British Occult Society, considers Farrant a rank amateur, going about his own unauthorised nocturnal vigils with a more sombre demeanour and an altogether more expensive-looking crucifix and stake combo. The British Occult Society appears to consist largely of Manchester presiding over counterfeit Golden Dawn rituals in his darkened bedsit (WHITE MAGIC, he insists). When he illustrates the best methods of destroying a vampire for our reporter, he speaks with the authority of a man who has seen Peter Cushing’s performance in ‘Dracula’ more than once.

The view of the long-suffering Highgate Cemetery caretaker on the impending occult battle transpiring on his territory? “Well they’re a load of bloody nutcases, aren’t they” he sighs, sweeping up the broken glass of another nocturnal trespasser. It is notable I think that many of the incidents that inspired this vigilante action in the first place (a body dragged from it’s grave and beheaded, another staked with an iron spike, etc) seem perhaps to have been the result of some similarly misguided anti-vampire activity; if not the work of morbid schoolkids, then possibly of Farrant himself, or some other sorry soul who’d taken all those Hammer flicks a bit too much to heart..?

From the ridiculous back to the sublime, the screenings conclude with “The Living Grave”, a half-hour TV drama from 1980, scripted by Penda’s Fen writer David Rudkin, based around the premise that a young woman under hypnosis is channelling the spirit of Kitty Jay, tragic subject of a well known Dartmoor folk tale, whose grave is apparently marked with fresh flowers to this day. Mixing highly convincing hypnosis scenes, in which we witness a psychologist slowly guiding ‘Kitty’ back through the details of her life, with documentary-like footage of a some guys visiting the locations she is describing, “The Living Grave” is an extremely effective work, using its paranormal conceit to draw us completely into the short, sad life of a rural orphan girl in 18th century England.

Although far more straight-forward than “Penda’s Fen”, “The Living Grave” is no less poignant in its forceful demonstration of the way in which the past can live on in the present, not through the contrivances of spooks and hauntings, but through the continuation of stone and wood and landscape, like the oak beam in the barn where Kitty Jay’s tale ends, holding the memory of a disgraced 18th century teenager kicking away a bail of hay and hanging herself, as we see a 20th century farmer beneath it, messing around with some fertilizer sacks. It’s all happening at once, after all. Certainly the most chilling moment I experienced over the course of this 21st century Halloween, and a fitting end to another exquisite evening of retromancy from BFI’s Flipside strand.

Outside the auditorium, it looks like someone has knocked over some of those rope cordon thingys, and torn some posters off the wall. By the back entrance, some heavy looking security types are loading gitar flight-cases into a Transit van, saying stuff like “Ok, we’re all done” and “go, go!” Boy, it sure woulda been cool to see Bruce Springsteen.