WOEBOT

TV Zeit

I got this nice graphic insert with my copy of The Advisory Circle's "Mind How You Go" with this image on it:

I wouldn't want to second guess Julian but I reckon test cards must be the inspiration behind it. It's kind of an apt symbol within what Simon is calling "hauntology", because it represents a TV which is both switched on and off, at once dead and alive.

Fittingly I've spent all week building graphics for a TV show which builds historical "trees" out of BBC TV programmes, tracing the paths of actors, directors and writers through the years. Whilst hunting the web for information I came across this great website: "The Test Card Gallery", and naturally enough thought of The Ghost Box massive.

Here are a few of my favourites:

...very "Dada" spooky and mute...

...nice bit of visual corruption...

and this one which has a wicked eighties feel to it:

The purpose of the test card is to let technician dweebs like me to check the luminance and chroma values on monitors and to eyeball any "artifacts", which are televisiologic graphical mis-representations. Bugs. In the use of one as an icon I guess there's an allusion to the kind of behind-the-scenes occult-ish quality of technical knowledge and the mysteriousness of it to outsiders. On reflection it's strange that the BBC technicians of this time were so unmediated that they were allowed to hijack the beeb's output and bewilder the populace with this bizarre constructivist imagery. It's not the sort of think you'd see nowadays is it?

The Advisory Circle's "Mind How You Go" shares all those things we love about Ghost Box, who have rightfully provided the blogosphere (and beyond) with a poster act unrivalled since Nick's The Junior Boys. Listening to it I was struck quite forcibly, not with a tangled web of half-baked pseudo-philosophical thoughts and maze of musico-cultural references (the usual reaction...) but of a recollection of a person. That person was Steve, the polytechnic student who rented a room off my parents when I was five years old living outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, who gave me a textbook on Paleontology and who would play me Jean Michel Jarre's newly-released "Oxygene". Steve seemed impossibly tall and hairy, but I still liked him a great deal.

I'm extremely keen that Jim and Julian take my advice and approach Radio 4 Somerset with Belbury Poly's "Farmer's Angle". Beyond irony, it'd make the perfect soundtrack to some agricultural news program. The Hyperstitionists say that it's better as a "imaginary" soundtrack, but I think it'd be a superb "front-page" conceptual coup to have it blaring out of the combine-harvesters.