Listen to Milligan’s Monorail by Paul Fillingham. Presented by Debbie Irwin (ElevenLabs) and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace.

I am on a monorail. At Butlins, Skegness, in the 1970s.

I’m fourteen years old, suspended above the chalets and the candyfloss and the optimistic clatter of the British seaside holiday, and I’m crying. With laughter. And the other people in the carriage think I’m mad.

The book in my hands is Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan.

I had no critical vocabulary for what I was reading. No framework, no context, no understanding that Milligan was actually processing genuine trauma, the real horror of the war, through the only lens that made it survivable. I just knew it was the funniest thing I had ever read. And that the laughter had something underneath that I couldn’t quite explain.

I still can’t, entirely. But I’ve spent the rest of my life making things that try.

Skegness does something to you if you arrive at the right age, in the right era, with the right level of attention.

The Butlins monorail was pure Americana - a vision of the future delivered to the British working class during the holiday fortnight for the pits and the factories like Players, Pretty Poly and Raleigh. Gleaming, optimistic, slightly absurd. Riding above the amusement arcades, the theatres and the bars down below, bathed in the marine blue of the East Coast light on a clear day. The sea always there at the edge of things, the breeze ‘so bracing’ (of course) and indifferent to it all.

I didn’t know then. But I was storing all of it. The melancholy underneath the cheerfulness. The gap between the promise and the reality. The way a place can be funny and sad at the same time without being either.

Decades later, a fictional seaside town called Binley Bay would appear in a science fiction novel I was writing. It had been evolving gradually since that monorail ride.

The film exposure came at the same age. It had a distinctly British flavour and came from a peculiar window that existed around 1968. How I Won the War, Richard Lester, (1967). If.... Lindsay Anderson, (1968). Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, 1969. A kid from a Notts mining village absorbing them on a Comprehensive School Film Studies Course before anyone had explained what they meant or how to decode them.

If.... didn’t feel like cinema. It felt like validation. The school as a repressive institution. Authority as performance. The line between what is happening and what is imagined never resolved. Anderson’s deliberate cuts between colour and black and white leaving you uncertain which world you were in. That level of uncertainty resonated with a fourteen year old who would never work down the pit like his Dad.

Easy Rider had three brilliant things. 1. Jack Nicholson. 2. Jack Nicholson on release from county jail, toasting Nottingham’s famous rebel writer, D.H. Lawrence. And 3. Jack Nicholson riding on the back of a chopper motorcycle. Oh and wearing a ridiculous gold football helmet - that’s four things... I could go on.

I was already obsessed with Americana. Apollo was on TV. Marvel Comics in my hands. Sci-fi paperbacks in the local library, and Bazooka Joe bubble gum hurting my teeth. America existed in my imagination as a mythological construct, vivid, romantic, and slightly unreal, viewed from the self-sufficient bubble of a mining village.

Easy Rider confirmed the darkness underneath the myth. It also confirmed that the darkness was worth investigating.

Art school arrived in 1977. Mansfield College of Art, then Clarendon College Nottingham. Then in 1980, Leeds Poly, Fine Art - a mixed-media course modelled on the Bauhaus. The idea that all creative disciplines belong together. That making and thinking are one and the same.

My tutor at Leeds was Jeff Nuttall. Author of Bomb Culture. Poet, jazz trumpeter, exuberant provocateur, larger than life, full of mischief and Tetley’s (ale not tea). His poetry was packed with whimsy and bodily functions. I have an LP of Nuttall poetry readings and it’s really funny. But also quite sad. Nuttall was a man who worked with the likes of Yoko Ono, and had turned his own macabre imagination into a creative methodology.

I was in good hands. Dangerous hands, but good ones.

At Clarendon College, my friend Markie, a mature student who had grown up in Marin County California, introduced me to the beat poet Richard Brautigan. His peculiar lightness and whimsy, was embedded with something much darker. His surreal imagery landing quietly in your subconscious where it took root.

Markie shared Brautigan with laughter and anecdotes, the way the best books get passed on. She is no longer with us. Neither is Brautigan. But his books remain.

In the Fine Art Sound Studio, equipped with a Roland TR808 Rhythm Composer, funded with my student grant, we made music that owed something to all of the above - the cut-up techniques of Tristan Tzara and William Burroughs, the post-punk energy of the Leeds music scene, the playful melancholy of Brautigan, the dark comedy of Milligan. We called ourselves Smart Cookies. We played at the Poly and Nottingham Palais. We released demo tapes that came to nothing. Thirty years passed before our self fulfilling prophesy Loud and Lonely was released on vinyl.

In 1984 I sold the 808 and bought a BBC Computer. The next creative toolbox for me to open.

I tell you all of this because Houdini Window didn’t just appear from nowhere.

The story of a murdered magician, an escaped monkey called Elvis and a computer called Big Baby’ all converging on a sleepy seaside town - came from fifty years of accumulated culture, processed through every project, every platform, every collaboration that followed.

The dark comedy that makes you uncertain whether to laugh or cry. The melancholy underneath the cheerfulness. The gap between the official version and the truth, and objects that carry secret histories their owners don’t even recognise or even understand.

Milligan on a monorail. If.... in a cinema. Markie and Brautigan in a life-drawing class. The TR808 beating away in the Poly sound studio. All of it paying forward to a Seaside Sci-fi novel now approaching ninety-thousand words and counting.

Skegness started it.

I’m finishing it in Morecambe. Not far from the bookshop where at the height of the American moonshots in 1970, I bought an Apollo 11 pendant and an Outer Space magazine that was originally printed in the 1950s. The cold war pages were really dated and had a certain musty smell, the rockets looked ridiculous, anachronistic and not like Apollo at all. It contained articles by Werhner Von Braun and fake photographs of flying saucers dancing around power lines, but I cherished those pages all the same.

Listen to Billy’s Chinwag Theme.

Anyhow, Toodle-pip as we posh TV Celebrities say.
And remember. You Make Magic Real.

Houdini Window is a Seaside SciFi production by Paul Fillingham, with editorial support from screenwriter Adrian Reynolds. Sound Design by Thinkamigo. Follow our journey here on Substack.

Listen to Topographic rabbit holes. Presented by Debbie Erwin and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace.

The Endless Elevator

Sometimes you experience something in a gallery where a work just grabs you. A recent visit to Tate Modern did just this. You see, I’ve attended many exhibitions over the years and I have to admit that although I’m pleased the Tate Modern exists, it’s never really felt like a good place in which to view art. This former coal and oil fired power station is so vast that the artworks often seem dwarfed. The endless escalator rides between the different floors just compound the emptiness of it all. Remarkably, the gallery is entering its twenty sixth year, so it’s beginning to show its age - closed displays, ceiling tiles removed, apologetic warning signs, scuff marks, scrappy interpretation panels and not enough art. I’m guessing the maintenance and repair costs for the place are horrendous.

Cold War Terror

For the first time, I explored the dimly-lit belly of the former oil tanks, where skeletal Giacometti figures remind us that the cold war and the threat of nuclear anihilation never really went away. What I could do with a space like this!

I enjoyed inhabiting these darks spaces and knew that my mobile phone camera would never be able to capture the ambience. I snapped a pic. I was right, the auto exposure sucked the life out of the image.

Sticks and Stones

Ascending the shopping centre escalators I found a number of art installations that are more suited to the vaccuous spaces of Tate Modern. Richard Long’s walks and assembled stone and slate circles really work here. But they are so tactile that it’s easy to set off the security alarms.

Henri Matisse once said that sculpture was something you tripped over when you stood back from a painting.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, no such security existed, and it was tempting to slip foreign objects like keys, notes, tickets and other ephemera into the folds of a Barry Flannigan scultpture and other works that were housed in the old Tate Britain in Pimlico - I did this often.

I like the scale of these works. The artist Henri Matisse once said that sculpture was something you tripped over when you stood back from a painting. He was right of course. Because exhibition spaces can be as important as the works hanging on the walls.

Shit and Die

This creative playground is everything. It’s probably why I can’t get Bruce Nauman’s works out of my head, with its noisy repetitive video loops and gaudy neon signs and banal flickering random phrases like ‘love’, ‘hate’ and ‘shit'. And why I go back for more, sometimes dragging friends along, to their utter bewilderment.

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Houdini Window

Anyhow, I’m in the middle of this novel that I’m writing. And I often discuss publishing formats with my friend and editor Adrian, who is helping me exorcise the weaker aspects of my story. We’ve worked previously on multichannel storytelling projects, expressing themes and ideas in essays, video, comic strip panels and performance. I like this immersive approach to stories, and can envisage Houdini Window being released in a number of different formats. We are after all creating entire worlds.

Delivery Dancer

So, wandering through Tate Modern, I chanced upon a room devoted to a work by Seoul-based artist, Ayoung Kim. The room was rendered in oversized wall-to-wall comic art panels, arranged in sharp diagonals - an instant trigger for the 1960’s TV Batman fight scenes stored in my brain.

I watched her short film about a contemporary despatch rider whose food deliveries are late due to becoming distracted by a dancer, a creative engagement which results in punishment for failing to deliver on time.

Video Trailer for Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancers

ROtring Sketch

The theme is so contemporary and relatable that it became instantly memorable, just like Nauman’s artwork. I soaked up the gallery space, the images (still and moving), the sounds, and the giant wrap-around illustrations on the gallery walls made a big impression on me.

It made me think about how I want to stage the story of Houdini Window. I don’t have an answer for that right now. But I do have some interesting aspects of the story that I am currently developing. It also got me thinking about visualising the story. Not just the Gen AI impressions of characters like Duke Silverman, or Carlos and Cordelia. But getting a sheet of A4 paper and sketching a map with a ROtring pen, developing the story in scratchy little pictograms and annotations.

Sketching was raw and felt good and resulted in some fresh perspectives for the story.

I know that the Nottinghamshire-born author Alan Sillitoe drew maps for stories like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (1959). Sillitoe was an RAF navigator just after WWII and was fascinated by maps. There are other examples of authors using maps. Adrian mentioned AA Milne who wrote Winnie the Pooh and published a map of the Hundred Acre Wood. And I’ve definitely seen other examples.

So, I’m going to doodle with maps as an experiment and hope that I dont get lost down too many rabbit holes, because it’s time to finish off the episode outlines and get this thing into the world.

And remember, in the words of Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace

‘You make magic real!’

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Above: Cordelia Kim and Carlos Basquez Gallego, modern day characters from Houdini Window.

So, you’ve had this great idea

Listen to Intent and Disipline - Substack voiceover by DellaRayne, ElevenLabs.

Houdini Window is my first attempt at long form fiction. And it’s taken some time to get this project moving, years in fact. The inertia and paralysis experienced by anyone with an idea is well understood. This Substack rabbit hole was inspired by the PodCast Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam. More specifically You 2.0: How to get out of a rut’.

The Podcast (which I highly recommend) mentions a mice maze created by Psychologist Clark Hull, which he used to demonstrate a behaviour where an initial burst of fresh activity, is followed by a lull, then a flurry at the end when the goal is in sight. This is the goal gradient and is essential to understanding engagement (Engagement has been a theme in my professional research and design work all week, but that’s another story).

So the creative journey goes like this… The BURST | the PLATEAU | the SPRINT

The plateau of course is where creative ideas go to die.

Atomising the end goal

In the Hidden Brain Podcast, Adam Alter talks about breaking big goals down into sub-goals or ‘Atomising’. It’s not rocket science. Atomising is a familiar concept that has been explained many times and I’m sure you’ve heard it too.

As a writer (or any kind of producer) these sub-goals can be very small - To atomise the goal, requires discipline and intent. Which brings me around to this word ‘intent’. I’m reminded of a childhood memory from Butlin’s Holiday Camp where displayed in large letters on a service building was the phrase ‘Our True Intent is for Your Delight’.

What is your intent?

This word ‘INTENT’ has been appearing explicitly in my writing for Houdini Window. The intent of my characters (good or bad) has profound consequences for them. You don’t know my characters yet, but that’s OK. One day I hope you will, and I think you will like them, or at least some of them.

“Our True Intent is All For Your Delight” was a famous Butlin’s slogan, originating from Shakespeare and used for marketing, especially for the iconic, highly staged John Hinde postcards from the late 1960s/early 1970s, capturing a colourful, escapist vision of British holidays. It signifies Butlin’s core promise of providing fun and entertainment, a value they still aim to uphold by delighting guests. - Google

Above John Hinde postcard. To unaccompanied children, the monorail at Skegness was futuristic, practical, exciting and free.

Seaside sci-fi

I guess what I’m taking from this is some form of validation for my delightful 1970s working class, childhood experience at Butlin’s, so easily dismissed by jet-setters (you know who you are). But now being expressed in my Seaside sci-fi (tm) - Now there’s a genre to be reckoned with! The neon sign with the word ‘INTENT’ writ-large has been locked in my brain for decades. But has since been plugged in and is now flickering into life all over the place.

A note about writing

In desperate moments of inertia, George RR Martin, writer of Game of Thrones talks about setting alarms for what seem like absurdly small periods of time, with the intention of writing something, anything, no matter how small. This is good advice.

To atomise the goal, requires discipline and intent

So, today is another day of ‘Intent’ making incremental steps towards a bigger goal. Let’s hope the intent is good, because when the characters of Houdini Window have bad intentions, the consequences are often worse for them.

This Substack Rabbit Hole was adapted from a note in my Scrivener application that I am using to write Houdini Window. I hope to orient myself around this unfamiliar platform as I share these random thoughts with everyone and no one.

Above: Splashdown off the East Coast.

Houdini Window on instagram

Website and serialised audiobook imminent!

It’s part of the narrative ‘lore’ aspect of my Houdini Window story. Clean HTML, easily customisable. Then adding thumbnail and depiction images from existing AI characterisations.

I created a folder on my houdiniwindow.com webspace and uploaded the resulting HTML. And it looked great (at least on desktop).

Cover up

The death of one of the main protagonists in my story in the opening chapters is a critical part of Houdini Window. The death is effectively covered up by the authorities using financial incentives and official press releases.

The production of artefacts representing this deception is a great exercise - it adds to the Houdini Window lore, which can be read alongside the main story.

The CELEBZ publication created with Gemini is very authentic, giving just enough detail to suspend belief and adding further layers to an already dense plot.

Having created a great looking website for my gossip column, the next stage was seeing how Gemini could modify the code so that it was mobile responsive. I must admit I nearly died when I first saw how awful it looked on my phone.

When researching how to get responsive code from AI, several links mentioned Gemini Canvas, which I presume is a code building environment.

However, this time around I didn’t really want to devote to much energy learning a whole new way of working - I have a novel to write after all!

So, I persisted with Gemini, my ancient copy of BBEdit (bare bones edit) and a browser. There were a few frustrations and I had to work hard to resist the temptation of resorting to Wordpress - ‘stick with it’ I kept telling myself.

I continued working with the CELEBZ page for some hours, making design refinements, copy changes and generating more graphic elements. I discovered that AI coding is more of a conversation, it feels like co-creation, demanding the same level of engagement as making generative images, sound, and video. Activities that are often far from quick and sometimes excruciating!

I do feel that it was advantageous to have some HTML and CSS experience in order to direct Gemini accurately. But I found it really convenient to have Gemini clean up code that would normally be a bit ugly after a few hasty edits. And when things were a little flaky, it was possible to pass the code back to Gemini and ask for improvements to be made!

From the outset I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. And working with AI, I achieved my goal. It was necessary to challenge the outputs sometimes and to see where human intuition is still valuable. But I was impressed by what could be achieved and maybe encouraged that I still had to put my thinking cap on in order to get something of sufficient quality.

CELEBZ is here: https://houdiniwindow.com/lore/laurie-death.html

Space Exploration

Back in 2012, Yentob described The Space – a project which shaped my understanding of digital media – as a platform supporting artists and organisations engaging with new audiences.

The project became a digital touchpoint in my own creative journey – overcoming a minor stroke – establishing Thinkamigo – and collaborating for the first time with writer and educator James Walker. It was a moment that echoed the spirit of innovation Yentob brought to British arts broadcasting throughout his career.

Above - Don Letts and Alan Yentob at the launch of The Space in 2012.

RIP Arts Editor Alan Yentob

Today I learned that Alan Yentob has died, aged 78. As an editor, broadcaster and director, Yentob was both advocate and catalyst for the arts, responsible for some of the most innovative television of the past half-century. To list all his arts programming achievements would be like trying to map the entire internet on a napkin. So, I’ll focus on a couple of personal connections – those digital and analog touchpoints that shaped my own journey.

I first met Yentob in 2012 at the Royal Festival Hall, alongside music producer Don Letts and author Will Self, at the official launch of The Space – the experimental, on-demand arts platform co-funded by the BBC and Arts Council England for the Cultural Olympiad.

Our digital literature project, The Sillitoe Trail, found a home there, bringing together over seventy creative practitioners from Nottinghamshire to explore the region’s cultural identity, just as Alan Sillitoe had done with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Above - BBC Arena - message in a bottle title sequence, accompanied by Brian Eno’s repetitive guitar track.

Arts Television in 1978

But my connection to Yentob goes back much further. Once upon a time in 1978, I was an art student growing up in Robin Hood county, where the trees were green with possibility, the coal mines dark and foreboding, and the art schools full of bright young things, paper, charcoal and life models.

At art school I was prolific, painting, drawing and studying art history – not old masters, but contemporary artists – the more contemporary and contrary, the better. Local libraries offered a few books about modern artists, and contemporary practitioners were covered in magazines like Art International and Artscribe. The latter being styled more like a fanzine than an arts publication.

There was always a tradition of arts programming on British television. But with a few exceptions – Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel and the occasional Southbank Show hosted by Melvyn Bragg – these programmes were largely highbrow and rather dismissive of popular culture.

BBC2 was the innovator at the time, and aired Arena, an arts magazine programme that had just been handed over to its new editor – Alan Yentob.​ During Yentob’s time as editor, Arena received six BAFTA nominations and three BAFTA awards.

Above - Magritte’s familiar bowler hatted Belgians motif.

Capturing the Extraordinary

Now, if we think of television as a kind of information network composed of nodes, links, signals and receivers. Arena didn’t just show art; it became a landscape of language and images, of clever jump-cuts, animation, collage and reconstructions. It also provided a space for student film makers to shine. People like David Wheatley whose film about René Magritte faithfully captured the mysterious world evoked by the artist’s Surrealist paintings.

Magritte’s bowler hats floated like clouds on our family’s TV screen with the suggestion that the ordinary world could be gently rearranged, as if the laws of physics had taken the night off. It was a place populated by charismatic art collectors like George Melly – riffing like a jazz musician should. Arena programmes like The Private Life of the Ford Cortina, broadcast in 1982 were like the essays of the French semiotician Roland Barthes – required reading in the field of sociology – who investigated the popular iconography of the everyday and the banal.

In 1978, VCR’s were still a couple of years off – at least for the domestic market – we had them at school of course – chunky Philips N1502 machines that recorded 60 minutes of black and white video and were used to playback the early years sex education programme Living and Growing, thus avoiding all the embarrassment experienced by our long suffering biology teachers.

Being resourceful, I recorded the Arena programme on a portable cassette recorder, snapped black-and-white stills with my Soviet-made 35mm Zenith-E camera, capturing the sense of wonder that Arena inspired – I still have those black and white negatives somewhere.

The cassette tape could be replayed over and over, so that the message became engrained, the sound effects eagerly anticipated, the voice-over recited – word for word. The images, scored with the 625 alternating scan lines of the analogue screen became iconic shadows, providing more collage fodder for my sketchbooks. Everything was deconstructed to its component parts.

Above - Sex Pistols and Buffalo Gals impresario Malcolm McClaren – the best Mayor of London we never had – on the 1984 Arena programme Beat This! A Hip-Hop History.

The Butterfly Effect

The Magritte episode – broadcast in those first days of Yentob’s reign – was a door left ajar in the mind, revealing that reality could be edited, painted, or simply imagined away. Its impact was, in a sense, a demonstration of the butterfly effect – that a single programme, broadcast on a winter’s night, could ripple through your imagination, inspiring new ways of seeing and making.

By 1984, after I had finished art school, Arena was legitimising artists like Afrika Bambaata in Beat This! A Hip-Hop History – the first arts programme that I ever recorded to videotape – and one that still feels fresh today – well actually, quite a few vintage Yentob edited Arena programmes possess a certain vibe that is timeless and have the power to inspire future generations of artists – if only they weren’t so siloed – but accessibility to artefacts and ideas is another topic entirely that I won’t cover here.

In 1978 I was just one art student, learning to see, waiting to be hooked-up and connected. And, Arena, under Yentob, was a poem disguised as television – a rich network of ideas, and a mixed-media touchpoint before the digital age had even begun.

Links

Yentob talks about The Space digital arts platform

The Sillitoe Trail – All the rest is propaganda

Wikipedia entry on BBC arts programme Arena

A short film about bottles on BBC iPlayer
(8 mins. Requires VPN connection outside UK)

Multimedia lobby to the Arena programmes

John Coulthart on student film maker David Wheatley