Petitionage.

It has come to my attention that over the past forty eight hours, this blog’s number of followers has nearly tripled. Which is… cool. Apparently Blogger has selected me as a ‘blog of note’. That was nice of them – cheers to whoever was responsible.

I hope that some of you new readers like what I’m doing enough to stick around. It’s all fairly self-explanatory I suppose. There are films, which I watch, and talk about. There are books, which are mainly things I’ve found in charity shops that appeal to me because they have striking/exciting/weird cover designs, although recently I’ve started writing short pieces about authors whose work I’ve actually been reading too (in a genre fiction context at least). Sometimes I might post videos of short films or trailers of note; sometimes I may do other things, who knows. But that’s basically yr lot. Music I do on my other blog.

Anyway, the point of this post was initially going to be to draw people’s attention to the banner above, which I initially saw on Celluloid Highway the other day. I can't be bothered to figure out how to make the image link to the petition as stated, but here's a link.

I guess it’s fair to say it’s probably something like the 500, 000th most important issue one could conceivably sign a petition about, but still, when it comes to causes I can whole-heartedly get behind, “getting old horror movies shown on the BBC again” probably ranks up there with eliminating world hunger, restricting international arms trading and letting the children boogie.

Because, well… I won’t launch into my standard diatribe about how TV’s become so worthless I don’t even own one anymore, but man, up until a few years ago, the BBC used to show some GREAT stuff late on Saturday nights. In fact, it’s stuff I first saw in that magic slot after Newsnight Review that is perhaps chiefly responsible for turning me into an active fan of horror/cult films, rather than just a passive ‘yeah, they’re pretty cool’ consumer. It was on late night TV that I first saw “Psychomania”, Michael Reeves’ “The Sorcerers”, John Gilling’s “The Night Caller”, Anthony Balch’s “Horror Hospital”, “Incense For The Damned”, “Plague Of The Zombies”, the list goes on – all fantastic films, many of which are unavailable on domestic DVD to this day. And even when nothing especially mind-blowing turned up, the opportunity take in as much of “Lust For A Vampire” or “Scream And Scream Again” as I could before I drifted off to sleep is one that all lonely, penniless young people should be able to avail themselves of after the pubs close on a weekend.

Despite the subsequent digital TV ‘revolution’, there’s now nowhere that shows this stuff, or anything remotely comparable re: worthwhile old movies. Surely digging ‘em out of the vaults can’t be any more expensive than buying in more shitty made-for-TV thrillers from America? How else will our children learn about ritual decapitation, the occult properties of graveyard toads and whether or not Joan Collins stands a chance against a psychopathic Santa Claus?

So, er, yeah. You get the picture.