Oh gee is folks, it's showtime.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want closed sodas, pop popcorn, and no monsters. In the Projection Booth, everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring, got it off?
Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with the authors of the Scarred for Life series. That's Scarred for Life Volume one, two, and three, all available at lulu dot com. They are also behind the Scarred for Life podcast as well as a live show. They being Steven Brothers Stone and Dave Lawrence. They took the time out of their schedules to talk to me about
their series. I had a wonderful discussion. I have to say that it was prompted by a comment that was made on a episode that we did, oh quite a few years ago now, when we talked about Miracle Mile, which really helped capture the nuclear paranoia that had gripped the world at that time, possibly a little bit earlier. And one of the listeners to that episode told me that I was overreacting, that there was no reason for
me to be as scared as I was by nuclear annihilation. Well, yeah, it's kind of hard telling a ten, twelve, fourteen year old that, especially when it's all over every piece of media that you can possibly think of, including television, comics, movies, books, music, and these caardful life books really bring that home. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Stephen and Dave for their time. I hope you enjoyed this interview.
Guys.
I am super excited talk to you about your book series and also your podcast and also your live show. My gosh, you guys are doing a lot of stuff. Stephen and Dave, tell me a little bit more about yourselves, and really, what's the backstory before you even meet.
We met at Forbidden Planet, at the comic shop chain in Britain. I think there's one in New York as well. I went there for twenty three years and Dave was the oldest customer through that. I've always said this.
Longest serving, longest, even not the oldest, longest serving.
One day, I will remember the longest serving through the doors. And as happens, they become a friend of the shop, then just become a friend, and Dave would bring in buckets of biscuits. We'd make cups of tea and coffee and just have a nice natter, and it's gone for life. Born from a conversation we had him work with me and Dave and Cole I made who worked a Forbidden Planet.
It was a really quiet morning. There was no deliveries, there was nothing to do, so reading bits, kids, drinking tea, and it was one of those conversations where it was do you remember this from when we were kids? Remember that comic with the shark that was going around and
biting people in half? And remember that TV show about the Standing Stones that was terrifying with the horrible theme music toward film board games even And it must have been about what an hour and a half at least Dave, that we were chatting, probably a couple of hours before we had to start working. But I realized everything that we were talking about was horrible, violent, shocking, scary, inappropriate.
We were talking about like the racist sitcoms that we grew up with in the seventies, and most of it was aimed at children. So I wanted to read a book that I just assumed somewhat somewhere I had written about the dark Side of seventies and eighties pop culture and couldn't find one at all on the internet anywhere. So next day in work I was chatting to Call about it and he said, you enjoy writing, why don't you write it? And I just laughed in his space. I
wasn't a professional writer. I just enjoyed it as i'll be. But I couldn't shift it from your head. So I was making lists, making noteses Over the next week. I realized one of god gans a huge task this was going to be to write this book. There was so much to write about. So the next time Dave was in the following week, I said to Dave, like, you enjoy writing as well, actually writing this book together, and he said yeah, and David you can take over from here. It was it's crazy, wasn't it.
Well, that's absolutely when we did the lack of material that it seed me these massive lists of stuff. I came up with massive lists of stuff. There's so much in the seventies that we could probably do another book for the same size the first one, which is seventy to forty pages, and fill it with all new stuff easily. So yes, So Stee said, you want to write this book.
So I said, yeah, And I think the fact that we're working out together kind of propelled us onward a bit, I think, because I think if we'd done it on our own.
We have just given up at some point.
In point of fact, a guy, a friend of ours, Johnny Mains, said to us, after the first book, you can tell you know professional writers, because no professional writer would have attempted what you've done. You know, it was such an incredibly all encompassing thing we did that nobody would attempt it. People would picked one thing that they pick horror films, they pick TV shows or record whatever.
But we did. We try to do everything.
Yeah, I remember he said, a normal human being would have split that book into six books just like that.
So we started writing back and forth.
After three and a half very long years, Volume one came out in March twenty seventeen, and we had a conversation the day that Stee was about to hit publish and we're saying, oh, how many you think to go to sell?
How many do you think?
And Stee that if it sells, I think it was three hundred in my lifetime.
I'll be happy.
And I'm the wild optimist here about a thousand, and we've just got a big giddy thinking that a possible. I think we've reach Steve's targets on day one.
Yeah, on day one we read sease.
Target day one. And this is all from self promotion. This isn't with any big promotional campaign behinds. This is on Twitter, Facebook, that kind of thing. It's not us having big billboard adverts anywhere. And we reached I think now that this point we're about over the three books. We've got about twenty twenty four thousand books sold at
this point. Yeah, and then blossomed from there. We got a brief radio interview on our local radio station, Radio City, and then we got contact by who's now a good friend of ours, Bob's issue said that you want to come on my radio show and talk about the books, which we did for an hour. A whole hour was devoted to the books on BBC Radio Teas. And then he said, you want to come up and do a compile of live conversation of a small vegan restaurant, you know, And we did that in the back room of that
as our sixty people attending it. It was packed out. And then he said basically he said there's some money in this. We could do a live show based on this, and that's how we got into doing the live shows. Yeah, it's gone on from.
There, the electronic music record label Castles in Space. There's been two music albums inspired by Scotred for Life and the TV shows we grew up with. We've handed it interest from two TV production companies to turn it into a documentary series. It's bizarrely Yeah, that's the little show that we did with Bob. He said, it proves there's an audience. He said, we can take this on the road. If we can do a little vegan restaurant in Teesside, we could do Manchester, we can do Birmingham. And we
love doing shows. We love them. They're just meeting the people who read the books is just lovely.
When you put out the first volume, did you call it volume one? Did you know that there was going to be more already?
Yeah, it was scard Blake Volume one, the nineteen seventies because originally it seems insane now, but we were going to do everything in one book, which is just ridiculous. So we knew originally we were going to do two. Volume one the seventies Volume two the nineteen eighties, but we realized how much television there was to talk about in the nineteen eighties, so on we had to with the nineteen eighties into two books. So it just became a trilogy because we had to make it a trilogy.
Like you said, these books are seven hundred pages for the first one. It's massive. These are massive books.
We have volumes one and three about seven and forty pages each, which is the action you can do on our pubishing platform. Therefore forty with that absolute maximum, Volume two I think is five hundred fifty something like that somewhere around the flave on the bark, so that's two thousand pages worth of material there. I think it's about a third of a million words. This because it's quite a low type as well, so that there's a lot in there.
So when there's value four coming out.
This is the thing we get asked more than anything, is when are you doing the nineteen nineties book? And the answer is never, And the reason for that is we made they believe the seventies and eighties are unique decades. The nineties to us personally, the nineties was one long ten year party. It was the only decade decade I've
lived through. There was good times. And our scuard Fly era specifically begins with a TV show called The Owl Service in nineteen sixty nine and ends with ghost Watch in nineteen ninety two, and we believe after that, see the edges are standed off and the safety wheels go back on. We just don't think the nineties isn't this card flight decade at all. It's a specific era. But
we do have loads of plans future projects. Next year, we're going to do two short story horror anthologies inspired by the old lurid All horror books that we grew up with. And in twenty twenty six we're going to do a Rito Hardback annual, the kind of things that kids in the seventies eighties they still do, the wake up on Christmas Day and unwrap your you kind of be no annual or your two thousand and eighty annual.
So there'll be full of comic strips and stories and puzzles and things related to what we talk about.
Were there shows and movies and things that you guys just weren't aware of when he went into this and that you got turned into absolutely In fact.
Even now we still get messages on Facebook on x Twitter as was oh have you seen this, and we go.
Now that's amazing.
That would have definitely gone in, would have known about it.
So that it's just endless to go back to us. THEA said about the nineties book. The reason I think, as well, we're not going to do a nineties book is because the seventies and eighties books are about us growing up. So what you've got is the nineteen seventies. It's this little kids sitting here from a teley watching scary things of the telly. Our fears are ghosts and monsters that you see all the TV. And then in the eighties were teenagers going out into the world getting jobs for.
The first time.
So our fears are more about unemployment or AIDS or and I particularly talk about in the second book living quite near to Birknhead, place called birk Andhead. Birkenhead used to be a very rich town because of shipbuilding, and then it's on the wrong side of the country rules like the history of the ship building has gone away, so it's very poor out. I talk about visiting the local I'm trying to use.
The Bacon word garbage dump.
Where you'd see people unemployed, people waiting to put through the bellache and I find something to they can sell or use. So it was a very deprived time. But our fears are real. They're not the monsters and ghost any well. The real things was getting off.
Nutrier wore a third of volume three devoted to nuclear war, because, as Dave said, things got real for us. And I remember the period between nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four. I don't exaggerate. Every single day I would think, is this the day they pressed the button? And yeah, we were still going to see Ghostbusters and Gremlins and listening to Juran, But the idea that we might die any day randomly was always in the back of our head.
I think days, right, It's who we were, It's what those decades were. In the nineties, and obviously every decade as it's bad moments. But all I can remember is going out clubbing. Everyone was drunk, everyone was on ecstasy, was a party, and I think part of that was a reaction to the idea that we survived the eighties, we got through it. Let's just have some good times.
The reason these books are called Scarred for Life is because people our age always say only God, you remember that scene from that TV Do you remember the window scene from Salem's Lot Starred Me for Life? Do you remember whatever scenes from a film it's garn me for life. There's not much from the nineties that I can say, Oh, it's got me for life. People always say when me, and they've post things on social media loads of the reactions to always I can't believe we survived the seventies
or eighties. Both people will only ever say that about the nineties in relation to the amounts of drinking jokes. It's a different.
It is amazing speaking of nuclear war. Of course, you've got movies like The Day After in Threads where they're just directly looking at this, but then it seeps into everything. It seeps into the TV shows that you're watching, or even the comedy film you look at like real Genius or spies like Gus when they were talking about missile defense systems and deterrence for nuclear missiles coming in. It's just amazing how even our comedies were scarred or with the politics of the time.
Absolutely, there was a comedy series in Britain called Three of a Kai, which had three comedians acting out very sketches, and one of the sketches is about the four minute warning, the nuclear alert warning going off, and two of the characters are going to have sex because I think they can think to do for the four minutes they've got left. That still always says in the live shows, anybody can get and maintain an erection in the last four minutes of your life when you're about to get new it's
a better man than me, and me as well. But yeah, it was everywhere. It was in comedy and in particular I mentioned this to you before the start of the recording.
It was in music.
We do a top ten nuclear pop songs in our live shows, and it was a big test to cut it down to ten nuclear war songs.
There's a lot.
A number one obviously is the classic Frank he goes to Hollywood two Tribes, so there's a lot in that.
Yeah.
It was in comic We had nuclear war in comics two thousand and eight. Judge Dread the flagshied character. There's a story from nineteen eighty two called the Apocalypse Tour where Mega City Jude dread City goes to war with the sobs and they obliterate half the city and kill four hundred million people, and the after effects of that story is still being felt today. And I'm a big
computer game of video gamer and board gamer. Nuclear War was in board games and video games, and there's a game called Supremacy, a board game from the eighties, which is quite risk. It's all the players trying to take over the world, but if it gets to death con one, you can start flinging nukes that you know the players. So it came with little black plastic mushroom clouds that you put on the board so no one could joint to those territories. So, yeah, there's a strange time.
That's amazing. Wow, what were some of the things that you discovered while you were doing your research that you hadn't been aware of before, because of course you're coming from a very personal place as far as these things scarred me. But as you're looking at the other material that you weren't aware of, what we were just like, oh my god, I can't believe this exists.
There's a TV show called Shadows of Fear from the early seventies. It's a psychological thriller anthology with an incredibly nasty streak, and it just fell down the back of the sofa of television history, and I remember watching it. I found out about it, read about it, thought this sounded like God's Wife material. It's one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. It's unrelentingly nasty, and it was one of the things that made me think this era was just full of genuinely full of
some of the best television ever made. But I think we churned it out and we became used to it. I know people have watched Shadow for Shadows of Fear for the first time. We were Twitter followers, Facebook followers, and he always come back and goes it was incredible. I've never even heard of it.
I've never seen.
Anything written about it, but there was shadow of things like that were amazing, but just became forgotten.
I've course I've just remembered too, in particular one called scarf Jack that I sent it to you.
I sent the link to you to know something the look at this.
Do you remember my reaction? The thing it was, there's about twenty five shocked baship, which we have.
This concept in our books as a thing called the four forty five club, and what it is is basically rich Telly when you got home from school. In the acting about four ish, four fifteen, four twenty would be something very gently it'll be a puppet show on and something like that. Four forty five The gloves Rough the programs they showed at four forty five were unrelentfully grim and scary and they're horrible. One in particular, Thestashi's till
talk about very briefly. There's one called calf Jack, set during the Irish Rebellion of seventeen ninety two, I think, and Irish villagers being essentially progress are all shot by British soldier English soldiers. This, by the way, it's on TV at the same time as the Northern Ireland troubles are going under, the ira abobbing campaigns, hungry strikes were going on and the else. It was a very unfatching
depiction of British basically English forces in Ireland. And the reason he's called scarf Jack is that in the first episode he is hanged. Two people game give him news around his neck, string them from a tree and then they talk about their future plans. While in the foreground, the two legs of the victim are swinging slowly backwards and forwards across the screen. That was a kid's program at four forty five in the afternoon.
Dave, Dave, do you remember you sent me screen grabs of the opening thirty seconds.
With all the children with the blood creer like they've been shot dead.
Yeah, but literally like children lying in a river with blood pouring from the nose, blood pouring from the ears because they've been shot dead. And it's just the opening of a kid show.
The other one, I think we talked about absolute classic. If anybody wants to watch, it's called one called Noah's Castle. Noah's Castle is again. This is sudden TV problems in that era which TV had various regions and the regions played their own program that the phone network, and this
was Southern TV. And it's about a near future Britain in which something has happened has caused hyperinflation, invasions out of control, and people are starving to death, bodies in the streets starves to death, and it is heavily implied that schoolgirls are prostituting themselves for food. Again, this is a kid's show at four in the afternoon. It's about a man who holds food which is has been made a crime. He's holding food and he's prepared to protect
it with a gun. There's one point son finds out he's holding food and I look like he's gonna shoot when.
You believe he's gonna shoot him, it's a protect his secret.
And also the father invites into the home is former boss who is basically to keep his secrets. He's prepared to pimp out his own seinage daughter and possibly even his younger one was from tech. If this absolutely ever left in my math, but again the kids four forty five in the afternoon, these are things I discovered when raving the first.
I found it very interesting reading your book because of course you're coming from a British perspective. I'm here with my American perspective. But our countries were so tied together, especially between Maggie and Ronald. And you'd see even going back to what was that TV show that you guys had that inspired the Genesis video with all the puppets splitting image, spit spitting image, right, splitting image.
They were two of the main characters.
A lot of times it was a special relationship, was a big thit. We had a lot of American imports in the seventies, but the nineteen eighties was when the floodgates opened and we were constantly getting these what felt like to us impossibly glossy, almost like phil Nic American shows, who get the A Team and Night Rider and a she wrote and everything, absolutely everything. That's why in volume one there's very little American stuff in the first book.
But in the second book that we did you'll see, like we do bits about the animations.
That came over.
There was real Ghostbusters and Rambo and RoboCop cartoons, and V was a huge thing. V shut the country down over the summer and the summer of nineteen eighty four the Los Angeles Olympics, BBC one and BBC two showed the Olympics, and ITV, the commercial channel, bought V and V the Final Battle and no one was watching the Olympic because the whole country was watching the reptile in vapers take over America. But this is the thing I think. There was always the glamour and the fascination of it.
It was the world was a much bigger place back then, before the Internet, so we would have Dave, do you remember Kelly Moltith, Yes, I did remember Kelly. Yeah, American comedian who had his own show and best clears stick was I'm an American that would seemed impossibly glamorous to us. So with the American eye view of Britain, and we'd
have American comedians as show hosts treated like royalty. I remember reading all my Marvel comics and DC comics and I would learn who Wayne Newton was through all the kind of the references and the comics, and I knew what hostless twinkies were. So America was this really glamorous country to us?
Yeah?
That wasn't Britain, was it.
Yeah.
I think one thing our books are it's a kick against that though, because when you say the eighties, people do think of Neon bright colors and they think of Magnum growing up in his for our world it is well that was we were gray, we were grim, and we've always did that great grim. I think a Brittish sensibility to be a little bit more grim, but not so optimistic, as it's proved by many of our TV shows.
But you've got a lot of that stuff.
I still don't know what about stuff is so mistick.
I'm by America. Do apologize, but.
But we keep Oh if you did not mention Land the Lost, We're like, no, we never got it, we never saw it. We haven't seen it, still don't.
Really it's oh, yeah, no we didn't. We didn't know what Land of the Loss was. No, it was just the thing I'm fascinated by. If I can ask you a question it as an American, what do you make of our books?
I was telling Dave, I'm a little bit of an Anglo file so some of this stuff is familiar to me, some of the TV shows, some of the references, but not all of it. So it was very interesting to practice open and look at another culture that is so similar but yet so removed at the same time, and just to see, oh, what are these shows that they're watching.
Some of those shows would slide into our lives. I remember writish show I can't remember the name of it, that was on Nickelodeon when I was a kid, and I was just like, this is terrifying. And of course whether they call those the touch moments from the doctor who behind the Sofa, Yes, we had. I especially remember Tom Baker, of course, and some of those episodes were terrifying.
Have you ever seen Blake seven, Mike, we won't spoil the ending. It's one of the most famous endings in TV history. I would say it's up there with the Prisoner. It's on a level with the prisoner. It's still discussed to this day of Void. All spoilers because I don't want to spoil anything. But basically the premises it's a
gango reason fighters stroke terrorists. They make no bones about the fact that these people are terrorists as well, striking out against an evil glactic federation in the far future and are led by a guy called Blake who is this idealistic rebel, but the rest of his group are criminals, the space pirates, hackers, the people who have committed crimes. They meet in a prison. But what a lot of people forget is do you know what Dave you tell us better than me.
Basically, the Federation, which is the ruling government of the space, basically decide to discredit Blake by having him accused of child more station imagine that in a show. Now you have your hero and he's accused of being a child elect For the first episode, right.
The Church episode, I transmitted that eight pm.
Yeah, would not get on, could not get past the script The worst part about it is that to back up this accusation of child more station and they essentially brainwash children into believing it really happened. And those children then have the rest of their lives the memories of being molested in the head to discredit this political figure. And he's found guilty of this crime and he's shipped off, and that no point later on is he acquitted of it.
So many of the people he deals with, for all they know he's a child molester and he's their main hear of the show. That's probably a uniquely British angle on something. I always say that I don't think that American TV would go with that at all.
There's no sense of demographics of focused groups back then, was there. It was just make your show. Here's a load of money, make your program and will show it.
It was an era of creative freedom don't entirely think exists anymore in Britain.
Nowadays. They have pitch meetings.
And they go in and say, make us a show like I don't know, the Spectamorus, make us a ship like that, or make it like the Antique road Show with this happening up. But in those dates, people just made these wildly iconic quirky shown she couldn't put into any category really and just showed them that was interesting. One because they were doing a show back in the newspaper Offits and for some reason or the second series of Fearing Figures, whatever, we got this load of money.
What should we do with it?
They gave it to a guy and said, go make us a show, and he ran and made this really scary paranormal show called the Amga Factor. Were basically to investing his invest paranormal phenomenon and it's strong stuff.
Because a storm didn't it. Mary white House went mental over one of the episodes. One of the episodes showed someone suddenly burst into fire and went to deaths. But it was the idea that the BBC suddenly had all this money and just thought, oh shut that, let's just make this incredibly scary, bizarre show and we'll just transmit it. But there's no free airings, there's no notes, there's no anything us through things on the air. It was a wild West, it really was.
In case anybody listening doesn't there, Mary White's House was a morals on paying it. She started off in the sisties writing articles on how to bring up your son so who doesn't turn up gay? So she was a Christian world campaign and she had to think of the national viewers in this association and any probe would all that offended her personality. She would then campaign strongly against.
Another example would be The Singing Detective, which is at Tennis Potter production, first episode of the a sex scene and I believe she counted the number of pelvic thrusts in the scene to complain about this. She was outraged. In fact, in many ways, the Singing Detective led to her dow for as a solicitive voice in moral campaign because she said the writer Dennis she said that scene was autobiographical and he had watched his mother having sex
with a guy in the woods. She was then sued by Poster's mother and she went on to defend herself by saying that she was on medication and made her say stuff that she didn't belie even and it's just it was, but anyway, it was the also fared down for I think as a moral campaigner.
Yeah, I'm mostly familiar with her from the whole video Nasties campaign.
That was a big one for me. I was always been a huge horror fan. But the video nasty era in the eighties. I still look back with us at that era. But she was in the papers every three seconds trying to get all these films banned, and normal films got scooped up in that hysteria. The war film The Big Red One, purely because of the type, there
was a not scene. But in Britain, the video nasty era, it became this thing amongst teenagers and people in the twenties where it became a ready made checklist of films to tick off. It didn't matter where they were rubbish, and I've got to say eighty percent of them were just awful films. It didn't matter because I could ring me mate and say I've just watched the Bernie, I've
got it uncopied, I want to come round and watch it. It was a succession of holy grails that you just had to watch to find out that Texas changeaw Massacre, the Exorcist, Clockwork Orange were all freely available in America. Blew my mind as a teenager because you had to accumulate a network of contacts to see these things. In the eighties, it was.
Quite the time.
My favorite thing about that story say, is when you talk about the grading system for the videos, Oh, this was.
Absolutely real and it wasn't just a Liverpool thing. This was around the country. You develop the grading system, you'd say to you one of your friends, I've got Anthropopacus the Beast on copy. It would be a ten generation copy. The grading system would be crystal or mint, which meant it was pretty much a perfect copy. Then what do you thought, was it degraded but still would it was
still a copy? But the most common grade for video nasties was it's watchable, which basically means you can just about hear things and you can just about make out figures through the snowstorm figure of twenty generation. Well, you would genuinely go around me mates and say, I don't know, I've got kind of ill show of the accession. It's watchable and you'd be trying to figure out what's going on.
But amazing.
The thing I'm always fascinated by, too is to see cultures reflecting one another, like watching The Young Ones with the episode I think It's Oil where it suddenly becomes Dallas parody and I'm just like, this is great to see how Dallas is being reinterpreted back to us as far as the perception of these characters, and just to see, of course the four lads just completely change their characters
in that skit, that whole part of that episode. I love that kind of stuff and I did see some of that in the book as well as far as Oh, this probably came from this American thing being reflected back in British culture, and I just thought that was fascinating as well.
To see American takes on Britain. Because if you'll have the Cologne where Colombo goes Britten, and you can guarantee there'll be a guy in a bursky in half one of the height guards walking past. In the background, there'll be a red bus to be a sound box, all these icons that aren't entirely accurate depiction in our country, the Dick van Dag's accent, for example.
So there's a lot of that in the comments that I was reading where I don't know Spider Man would come to one of my favorite two parts Spider Man stories and a spectacular Spider Man comic in the very late eighties, I believe it was a very early nineties. He comes to Liverpool for two issues except this is before the Internet. Obviously no one had provided the artist or writer with residence. So we've got a huge golden
gate bridge banning Liverpool and burking ahead. We've got missed everywhere and gas lamps and all the streets are cobbled. It's basically Liverpool is like eighteen eighty nine London, and I adore it because we was just a guilty I think we were just as guilty as stuff like this, because while as they said, we were in the middle of this huge unemployment crisis minus strikes and you name it to us America, we were completely aware that Dallas
and Dynasty was impossibly glamorous. It was almost a fantasy land. But even just normal American sit soap operas was to put glamorous to us. We had Coronation Street and eas Standards, which is this our bleak everyday life thing, and even American soap operas like fulcon Crest and well the other Oh my god, this is everyone's won the lottery.
Tell me a little bit more about your live shows. What do you guys do You talked about the Top of the Pops with the nuclear war songs. What else do you guys do for however long you're on stage, we're going to stay for about I said nineteen minutes. I think plus a half. In our Q and A.
At the end, we just we talk about all sorts of stuff.
I talk about a.
Thing called Alternatives three, which is nineteen seventy seven April Fool's joke.
Oh, you guys were famous for your April Fool's joke. I've seen some of those.
Yes, in the fifties they did one about spaghetti trees in Switzerland. But as in nineteen seventy seven and this Angler TV, it was made at a fake documentary called Alternatives three about how the Great and the Good were being what you thought was the brain Dray was actually the Great and the Good being taken off planet to a space station on the foreside of the room before being taken to Mars because the auth was dying and if you were watching the program, you'd been left behind
and you were doomed. April Fols joke, nineteen seventy seven. The only problem was it didn't get shown on April first. There was a backlog of programming. It was a strike a show on June twentieth, sir. Everybody believed this was true Cook.
Whereas Whistle Come would you talk about don't we?
It's basically me, Dave and Bob Fisher and the host. He writes for magazines like fourteen Times Electronic Sound, Doctor Who magazine in Britain. So the three of us, we've got a PowerPoint slideshow. In part one, we talk about the seventies when we were all little kids. We to have a little memory of the first thing that really scared us about Doctor Who. We talk about Walsal Gummich. We talk about the idea that a lot of horror
back then was unintentional. There's Worzel Gummich whimsical children's show in Britain, and a character called Nosey Bond, and we were both designed as July magical characters. They're both terrified,
absolutely terrifying. Then we talk about the paranormal. There was a big paranormal boom in the seventies, public information films obviously these many horror films that would just pop up during advert breaks, and we have a little fifteen minute break, and then we talk about the nineteen eighties and when stuff got real. We've got like the age, hysteria and unemployment.
We talk about Noah's Castle, a lot about threads nuclear war, and that's when we do a there's a very famous British show called Top of the Pops flag Ship music show, so we do a Top of the Pops countdown of the top ten nuclear war pop songs, plat around that with they we end up with ghost Watch.
I think it ends. But we talk about all that kind of stuff, don't we do. There's a lot more in there.
We talk about an awful martin a quite short periods are French Chu Christ Dummies, there's French must dummies. Still got a rack in a story be from watching After Start the Spiders.
Lots of stuff. Yeah, we talked about a lot of stuff.
It's a good time. It's very lighter to comedy show, but very informative. We do try and get loads of faction information in there, even when it's bleak stuff we're talking about. We do keep things late.
Yeah, laughs.
So I was I was saying one little bit and I do. At the end of the Top of the Pops thing is I talk briefly about Leins nine and red balloons. I actually contacted Norad to ask them whether balloons in the air would actually trigger and the American military response, thinking they're not going to get back to me and so, and strange enough they did, and they sent me a lovely email from Ken or somebody saying, no, we wouldn't actually go to nuclear war over.
Read balloons, which is good to know, which is good. It was reassuring.
You talked about how you do a Q and A afterwards. Do you notice the same themes or TV shows, movies, anything like that constantly coming up?
Shait thinks it always be threads. There's a specific one. There was a bit of a holy grail was discovered last month. We always get at least one person in the Q and as mentions a thing called the Hexham Heads. There was a nineteen seventies early eighties current affairs kind of lighthearted magazine show called Nationwide. It was just after children's television and just before the Big Adult Chosen the Evening.
Nationwide had a kind of ten minute segment in nineteen seven about basically these two kids in a little town called Hexham dug up these two stone heads and took them into the house, at which pointed there was like poltigeist activity with the next door neighbors in their house all kinds of stuff happening. The next door neighbors said they were walking in the middle of the night. There was a half man, half sheep creature walked into the bedroom. There was a woman called Dr Anne Russ. She was
an expert in stoneheads, ancient stoneheads. She took these heads to analyze them, took them back to her house. She was walking in the middle of the night by a werewolf. She said it was an actual werewolf on its hind legs. So nationwide reported on this, and this was at six pm in the evening, and it didn't spare anything. There's a shot of a severed head, it's fake on a tree branch. You've got a short clip of Oliver Reed from Casel the werewolf suddenly like a jump skirt and
telling this terrifying story as if this is real. This happened where wolves exist, and it terrified everyone who watched it. But the footage was lost for decades and it was unheerthed by the BBC archive last month. So it became a bit of a news story and it did not disappoint. But this is the thing everyone in the Q and A section, I would say it's ten percent the shame themes come up again and again and the other eighty
percent of people completely surprising us. Was really personal, though some of it doesn't make sense at all, because when you're a kid, I'm scared. My first memory had been scared by anything on television. It's being I think I was three or four and scared of something on Eschame Street. It was numbers of black background and numbers shooting towards the screen, and I was convincedly, we're going to smash out at the screen and come into the TV the living room.
My childhood fear was a TV show called Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I don't know that everybody to marka we have no idea of doing about. But it is actually a bit like Champion of the Wonderhorse, but it's a to kangaroo, right to go?
What's that gif? The boys out of the world, that kind.
Of thing, right. I was absolutely terrified of this thing. I used to cry every time he came. At the very start off the titles as a whistle, and every time that whistle came, I started crying. I don't know why my mom put it on week after week. I'll be obvious with you I do not know why they kept being put out there.
I was true.
Besides, I actually wrote a peace of bat for the first one, and they didn't.
Make it in the end because we didn't have enough roote.
I discovered that when you see Skippy's hands doing anything, what that actually is. They had a bit of a kangaroo, a goat of kangaroos, and have a lot of kangaroos, and they had a caul and rather than have a big part of dead kangaroos, they thought, Joe, what well, we're used as watch as we can, and they took the arms and made them into novelty backscratches. They touted the cards off the dead kangaroos and made them into
novesty backscratches. Every time you see your towns, that actually Skippy's cousin if there murdered time turned into a novelty backscratcher.
When we love the show, we'll never get bored during the shows. But we're doing this mostly the same thing every time. But we loved the Q and A section. It always starts off quiet because people are shy and don't want to put the handle. But by the end of it, after about twenty twenty five minutes, it's turned into this mass group discussion and then we've all got to go home. We've got an idea and we were thinking about doing a one off show with a view to see how well it does. Just a Q and
a just a group discussion. So we just have this informal no plan, no script. We're calling call it the Scardfully Support Group. Anyone who was damaged by the city, who came and get your trauma out and we'll just have a big group discussion and have a good old time.
They get the three books, you've got, the live show that you do, and now tell me about the podcast.
We were contacted again. This is opportunity falling into our labs. Really, we're contacted by a DJ from Absolute Radio which is in London. He does a drive stash, a guy called Andy Bush, and he says, do you want to do a podcast? There's these great books we love to podcast. So we said, yeah, I go on, then why not. We put a call out for guests and I think it's fair to safety. We've been amazed at the number of people said yeah, well do it.
Most of it absolutely gobsmacked. This is the thing we've got reeverals, celebrity followers on social media, and this is the thing. We've just contacted them through social media and said, would you like to do this? Do you know inside Number nine and legal gentleman Mike, Yeah, we're Rishier Smith, Jeremy Dyson, people like that would just said absolutely love the books. We've discovered how many celebrity kind of fans of the books through contacting them. So we've been blown
away by the reaction. It's been amazing. But the the idea is we get famous people on it's talk about their rear, their influences, the things they love. They listed the three things that's guarded them for life as a kid, so we get to find that out as well. So we've got people who aren't necessarily famous, but they created this stuff, so the listeners will know the stuff that they created. Then you've got people like, like I said, Rucey Sheersmith, a lot of buy famous British celebrities who
I didn't know. Loads of them would go oh, I'm massively into video nasties and I'm like, really, so they have this kind of secret love of horror. But I think the nice thing Davis We've discovered out with Dave. All these people are generally called on to chad shows or podcasts to talk about this thing that they're famous for. We certainly talk about that, but we want you to
talk about your love of horror. We want you to talk about your love a video that it's the things they never get a chance to talk about, and you can see the passion come out, which is lovely. So we've done two episodes of season two so far and they've been amazing.
One of them is Grady Hendrix because he has on his own Twitter anyway, So Grady Hendrix with a horror writer.
He was brilliant. He was absolutely pliers. Yeah, so.
That's gonna be a good listen when it comes out early next.
You think, oh he was at Dela Light. Absolutely based on the guests who've already had, we started contacting proper a list does and they can only say no, So why not?
Yeah?
I mean I contacted Ryan Reynolds with no hope. He's don't actually get back to me at all. He's invested in Wrexham and I am twenty four percent Welsh, so I've got some hopes.
I don't imagine this is a full time gig or is it. Do you guys have day jobs.
I choose their children for maths because I've got a maths degree and that's what I was doing for many years. I was a private tutor. I would ideally like to this full time, to be honest with you, because it's watched for for and about maths.
What I worked in Forbidden Planet for twenty three years until twenty twenty, then kind of worked eighteen months in a gaming cafe in town in Liverpool City Center. But my kind of day job, I'm an illustrator digital artist. I work for a walk gaming company called Crooked Dice. It's Warhammer forty thousand little miniatures fighting except it's based around on the TV characters from the seventies and eighties. So it's an absolute dream job. So you've got kind
of relator versus night Rider, that kind of thing. I do the box art on the character cards and stuff like that.
Is that why the books look so good? Especially those covers?
Oh bless you?
It was? Yeah.
I designed one and two. I never had the time to paint to cover until volume three, but I painted the cover to Bollime three and lay them out. It's just stuff I enjoy and get paid for.
They're based on specific things arely those stay. Their first covers based on I think it's Countdown Annual, isn't it, and the second one's based on Smash It's.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
It was a British comic from the seventies called Countdown. It was a very specific design for Want of the Annuals Volume two the eighties. It's based on a music magazine called Smash Hit, which had very distinctive design. Chanson Volume three is based on a British comic called Looking, which was based on film and TV stuff from the seventies and eighties. So British readers immediately go, ah, I know what you've done there any thing Kndaly.
I recognize Smash Hits. I didn't recognize the other two. So what is your guys' link tree? Where can people go to find out more information?
It's just a link tree for Slash Scarf for Life.
If you want to buy the books, you go to Lulu dot com and just type in Scarf Life finds once or three and you'll find the.
Podcast is on a Google scard for Life podcast and you'll find it there.
Yeah, that's the same we wereye on Spotify and Apples you will find us.
Stephen Dave, thank you so much for your time. This has been so nice talking with you guys.
It's been lovely. There's a British comedian called Ken Dodd who ran for decades, but he was famous. His live shows would run for six al because he loved the bolling so much. But I think this is the problem me and Dave. If we can talk all day, we look we just once you started.
As absolutely well, le'll just keep going that. We don't stop. We can do another ten hours here, keep absolutely yeah.
Yeah, but it's been lovely.
Shut shelters to get away.
The boys are going, tell us general is a party time? If it is, can you're gone starting to weed on all. Don't think they're weird. I'm tired.
Don't think who's too smooth?
It's not less after crying saying it's some.
Mistake, it's sounderstand it's sound mistake, it's understand. After the laughter, let's die away all the bias.
They're fine, No surface notice, no not much time said.
You got the bad guys on the road.
Don't try to say you're sorry. Don't say he tore his girl.
They've gone and grab.
Don't doty.
He's not the only one seen.
Its SERVI stay. It's sunderstand. It's so mistake. It's sunderstand.
Sell us, commander, what do you think?
So you know that you love me?
Know?
That?
Is it on them?
I'll be on the bridge.
We should all throw in the tower. They'll not fight out to school, not in the spinest dollar.
Something you'll fail.
Listen the card and flower.
It's sound Stay.
It's understand its soundstay, its sounderstand.
It sounds stay.
That's all the stuff. It's some story that's a stop.
It's so the sturn that's all.
It's so the stay that's on the stop.
And it's so stay sound it so the space.
That's a good stuff that's on the story.