'I've had enough of ghosts waging war on us!' Eric Idle's dead dad, boomer resentment, and Sapphire & Steel

 I recently decided I should vary my televisual diet so I wasn't just watching old Tom Baker Doctor Who serials, so I started watching Sapphire & Steel, one of many attempts by ITV at doing their version of the BBC's perennially popular franchise, and one of the better ones. It's popular with the hauntological crowd: one of Mark Fisher's final essay collections opens with an essay about the show's final serial. I want to talk here about the second, or, in the show's terminology 'Assignment 2: The Railway Station'. But first, a diversion for another bit of Twitter talk. 

As last Thursday was a day ending in Y, a lot of people on Twitter were angry at millennials. One of those people is Eric Idle, and that Thursday Eric Idle decided to vent his anger at millennials facing the struggle of living at the end of humanity in a very familiar fashion. To a user complaining about a life beset by multiple crises, two pandemics etc, Idle (b.1943) decided to retort 'So is Hitler bombing you?' 

It was pointed out to Idle by numerous people on Twitter that this was a bit rich, given that the period of his life during which Idle himself was being 'bombed by Hitler' coincides almost entirely with the period of his life when he was shitting himself and trying to learn that books are for reading, not eating. When it was further pointed out to Idle that as a member of the generation that came of age in the postwar years he was, historically speaking, extraordinarily lucky, doodlebugs or no doodlebugs, Idle retorted that we had no right to make light of his suffering, as his father had died during the war. 

Only he didn't, as Twitter user Jill Scott Heron pointed out:

Eric Idle's father Ernest served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and fair play to him for doing so. But he died in a road accident while hitchhiking home for Christmas months after that war had ended.

And that's what brings us back to the second Sapphire & Steel serial, because the antagonist for most of its eight episodes is an alliance between a disparate group of ghosts who have all suffered war-related deaths, and a malevolent cosmic force, referred to as 'the darkness', which is feeding on their resentment over the fact their deaths were all in some way unfair. The series gives us three examples: the main personified antagonist, Private Sam Pearce, a British Tommy who was shot and killed after the signing of the armistice; three shipbuilders who perished during sea trials of a submarine they were repairing; and a bomber pilot who perishes in a doomed plane one flight away from being demobbed. Ernest Idle could easily be added to that number: a man who died too late to be one of the war dead, but too early to be feted as a member of the Greatest Generation. One can blame neither his spirit nor his son for feeling resentment over this, over Ernest dying so close to the men with their names on memorials, but not in a way that would get his own name on one. Ernest's resentment, too, could feed the darkness (which might even take some pleasure in noting that 'Ernest's resentment' is univocalic). 

'The Railway Station' is a fascinating example of the kind of programme you really couldn't make today, as the popular right-wing pseudo-truism has it: not just because the serial format of shows like Sapphire & Steel and classic Doctor Who has been all but abandoned by contemporary television (indeed, the only recent attempts I can think of are Torchwood: Children of Earth and, more recently, Flux, and while CoE still holds up, Flux sucked), but also because, in our poppy-obsessed times, can you see anyone at ITV greenlighting a show in which, for the majority of the run-time, the antagonist is personified as a noble British Tommy Atkins? A noble British Tommy who is, moreover, shown to be brimming with resentment and rage against the living, and who behaves towards the show's protagonists with open contempt and even a hint of sadism? It would be like Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor facing a villain based on Captain Tom. Which, incidentally, they should totally do. 

Having mentioned Children of Earth, my favourite joke in it: the name of the estate agents

What's interesting to me about watching this serial now, in 2022, a year in which we're all profoundly bored of boomer rants like Idle's, is how contemporary it feels in a way which, again, modern sci-fi media would probably rather not explore, not just because of the political themes but because modern sci-fi lacks Sapphire & Steel's sense of the abstract, of the metaphorical, the magical. If you compare Sapphire & Steel to something like Loki, it's clear how much more work has gone into making the world of Loki and the Time Variance Authority seem believable and realistic even though the central conceit behind the show - Magic Police who travel around fixing time - is essentially the same as the older show, though the degree to which Sapphire, Steel, and the various other Elements they find themselves working with are cops is left ambiguous. In Loki, we get an educational video explaining how time travel, multiverses and the TVA work, delivered by Miss Minutes in a knowing nod to Mr DNA in Jurassic Park. In Sapphire & Steel, we get an introductory voiceover explaining that 'All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension', cautioning against the use of 'transuranic heavy elements...where there is life', and finally informing us that the titular elements 'have been assigned' and are then left to catch-as-catch-can as far as whatever else is going on - putting us in almost the same position as the human characters who encounter Sapphire and Steel, though slightly better off than them because as audience we are privy to their telepathic conversations - something which 'The Railway Station' handles very deftly, as it happens, with these conversations between the duo gradually leading us to realise dark things are in store for that story's human companion, the psychic investigator (in the Guy Lyon Playfair rather than Patricia Arquette in Medium sense), George Tully. 

But this dreamlike, metaphorical quality is precisely what allows Sapphire & Steel to so effectively explore an idea like the role of resentment in, to borrow a line from that suspect pair of Johns Savage and Lydon, England's dreaming. All three cases of neglected wartime death that we encounter are located in familiar contexts, all slightly altered in some way. When we first encounter Sam Pearce, much is made of the send-off he and his fellow troops were given at the railway station: cheering crowds, a band playing 'Pack Up Your Troubles', all very much the lost innocence of Larkin's MCMXIV. But this leads us down a false trail as a viewer, trying to fill in bits of Sam's story before we know it: crucially, before we know the cruel, ironic detail that he was shot eleven minutes after the signing of the Armistice - the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, meaning that his death, though orthogonal to Britain's official commemorations of its war dead, will never be counted amongst them. The three shipbuilders who are killed in the unseaworthy submarine in 1938 are the Rosie the Riveters of wartime propaganda, but are shown, in a seance conducted by Steel (using Sapphire as his medium), to be angry and bitter about their deaths, which they see as a result of what we would now call corporate manslaughter rather than as acts of heroic sacrifice (working class resentment of authority was something which would have been very much in the air at the time this serial went out: indeed, early episodes of it were shown twice due to an unplanned break imposed by a television strike during its original airing); and we see the bomber pilot fruitlessly touring mess halls and being turned down because, as the last of his squad, he's regarded as a Jonah. All five (there are three shipbuilders) are denied a place in the grand national pageant into which our myths about the 'Blitz spirit' recast the wars of the twentieth century: all are excluded in some way from the lost innocence, the barrack room bonhomie, the esprit de corps. 

It's easy to see who these people would be now: people like Belly Mujinga, dead of covid after being spat on by a petulant racist during the days when we were all clapping for the NHS; the delivery drivers we leave out of our nostalgic conversations about being on furlough; people like the Afghan translators we left behind in that country to be murdered by the Taliban while making sure we got our dogs out. Like them, all the ghosts in 'The Railway Station' have suffered deaths which we leave out of our national narrative because those deaths make it more complicated: and their resentment is used by the darkness to sustain itself as it falsely promises them a return to life and revenge on the living. 

Our hero, trapped in barbed wire, is mocked by a sadistic British Tommy.

Of course, the darkness which controls our nation's dreaming now motivates a different source of resentment: not the resentment of those left out but resentment of those people themselves, by those who made out okay. You can see it in the apoplectic anger of our establishment media when people suggest we acknowledge the crimes of our Empire. You can see it in the weird neuroses people have about acknowledging the obvious fact that coffee shop baristas are working class. You can see it in the property developers who mocked the people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire because they felt those (largely black and brown) people were getting too much public sympathy. The best examination of these resentments remains the late David Graeber's 'The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the Brexit Election' which, among other things, gives a historically on point explanation for Idle's hissy fit (and the fulminations of those like him): 

'One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.'

These days, the resentment to which our legacy media gives most voice is the resentment of the world-historically fortunate for those who remind them just how very fortunate they are, of which Idle's ire at millennials is a perfect example. Let's end, then, with a note of caution for these fortunate resenters. You see, as pointed out above, the alliance between the resentful ghosts and the darkness does not hold for the entirety of 'The Railway Station'. Late in the story, Steel confronts Pearce and gets his revenge for the latter laughing at him strung up in barbed wire by pointing out he is being used by the darkness.  Pearce and his fellow spooks will never return to life and get revenge on the living: instead, they are condemned to forever play out their charade, mustering at the railway station so the darkness can feed off their resentment. Doomed to play out the same old grudges forever, all to nourish an inhuman, Lovecraftian entity which couldn't give a shit about their bad luck beyond the fact their anger makes them succulent. 

Perhaps Eric Idle is happy to be food for the Old Ones. Me, I've always set my sights higher.