Dave the Lionheart in Chalus

I was in Cussac, Limousin, making an album with the reknown Wreckless Eric and the unknown Robert Rotifer. I was just the bass player. I learned my parts and got them down. I was finished in two days and had too much free time before my return flight. I was trying to behave myself and stay out of trouble but the ‘cabin fever’ of the recording studio was unsettling.

Discovering a disused train line that ran from nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres to Chalus was a lifeline. Lost railway tracks make me calmer. You’d like me more if you met me tracing some lost route through the hills and valleys.

I wore a hat with a British Rail badge because I’m a cock-end. People still said ‘Bonjour’ to me. The line ran 13 kilometres and I decided to walk there because I’m a fuckwit who doesn’t know how long a kilometre is.

South West France has been garnished liberally with Britons. I met seven British humans and four British dogs. I saw a Union Jack in a garden, seriously I did.

In Chalus I felt blisters forming on my feet. The word ‘taxi’ was met with laughter and I knew I’d have to walk all the way back. I decided to refuel.

Dave runs Hotel du Central in Chalus and has done for four years. He struggles with his French and his French struggles back.

“Champignons are mushrooms, right? Oignons are onions, they speak for themselves,” says Dave. He wears sports clothes, but doesn’t do sport.

“It’s the masculine and the feminine,” says Dave explaining his linguistic hurdles. “Lemonade is feminine, beer is feminine, but shandy is masculine. Now beer is, primarily, a man’s drink. I know women drink beer, but it is primarily a man’s drink.”

Dave uses the word ‘primarily’ to underline his words. Dave was on a roll; he had momentum.

“Now power tools! Half of them are feminine! I don’t know where it all comes from. I really don’t.”

Richard the Lionheart was killed in Chalus. He was a French speaking English King who spent little time on British soil. There’s a statue of him outside Westminster.

Trains in Science Fiction 2: Survivors (Terry Nation 1975 – 1978)

Two things.

This won’t be the last time I talk about ‘Survivors’. Not by a long shot.

But this will be the last time I make the distinction between the desolate, savage and truly shocking series, ‘Survivors’ from 1975, and the glossy, glib, Doctor Who-lite remake from 2008.

We only talk about the original Survivors here. I say so.

‘Survivors’ is the third most famous creation from Terry Nation after the Daleks and Blake’s Seven. A virus wipes out 95% of the population of the world. This is portrayed with unrelenting bleakness. Three quarters of the cast are killed off in the first episode. In fact no cast member is ever safe in ‘Survivors’ with major characters being culled every other episode. Only one original cast member makes the whole three series.

Post apocalyptic and ruined worlds always tick my box. If good science fiction is about ‘what ifs’ then the destroyed earth has to be the ultimate premise. Threads, Day of the Triffids, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, I love them all.

‘Survivors’ deals, with starvation, looters, rape, rabid dogs, martial law, fascists and small pox, occasionally in the same episode. We live in a time when the word ‘dark’ is used to describe a Harry Potter movie, but for once there is no other word. ‘Survivors’ is truly dark.

Let me give you some for instances.

In the episode ‘Law and Order’ a mentally challenged boy is wrongly accused of rape and murder. Our ‘heroes’ debate over what is to be done with criminals in a world without courts and prisons. They have a show of hands and take the boy outside and shoot him, then find out he didn’t do it.

In the episode ‘Corn Dolly’ Charles proposes that the women should let him impregnate them for the future of the human race. Two women fall pregnant but then die because they eat rotten fish.

In the episode ‘Revenge’ Vic, who has previously been permanently crippled and left for dead by Anne, tries to commit suicide. He then seeks revenge but then pleads with Anne to finish the job and by slaying him with a sickle.

One of my personal favourites is ‘A Greater Love’. Paul travels to a ruined Birmingham to gather vital medical supplies where he contracts a new fatal plague. On his return he is treated in quarantine by his rubber suited girlfriend. She declares her love for him as she administers a fatal injection.

Trains are used prominently three times in Survivors.

In the first episode they are used to demonstrate the broken links of the crumbling society. Train stoppages are shown as one of the first tears in the fabric. Great Malvern Station in Worcester is used as a location and doubles as 'Brimpsfield'.

In the second series Ruth travels to London and discover a dirty, broken London living in the rat infested London underground stations, Hanwell Station and Camden Station are used.



A lot of fans don’t like the third series but really this is where ‘Survivors’ gets most bizarre and feral. The cast are now dressed in rags and ride on horseback. The first steps to recovery and infrastructure are shown via the revival of a steam railway. The Severn Valley railway is used and the beautiful Headstone Viaduct is shown in another Series 3 episode.

The series is a long way from faultless. Producer Terence Dudley appears to not know what continuity is and thus decides to do away with it completely. The acting can be decidedly middle class and stilted. The dialogue can clunk. Although I love the slow ponderous pace, this may prove sluggish for the modern viewer.

What makes ‘Survivors’ fantastic though is it’s total singularity. It sets out with a goal, to tell you how absolutely foul the majority of people become in times of crisis and their complete determination to survive. It never blink’s from this intent, it never wavers.

'Survivors' can be bought pretty cheaply in a box set.

Trains in Science Fiction: Deathline (1972 Dir: Gary Sherman)

These obsessive interests are havens; they are warm duvets on November nights.

When two merge, the resulting ellipsoid in the venn diagram becomes the mother lode.

Deathline is not quite science fiction, although what else can you call a group of stranded London Underground workers who evolve and mutate into a family of cannibals? It was promoted then, and packaged now, as a horror film (in America the film was called ‘Raw Meat’). Blink and you’ll miss Christopher Lee’s cameo, an obvious attempt to associate the film with the British Hammer series.

It really isn’t a horror film either though. Like many of my favourite films it doesn’t know quite what it is. It almost climaxes too soon with a blistering title sequence, featuring blurred neon, overloaded Moog, funky Helvetica and prostitutes.

Here it is if you don’t believe me.



You want to see all of it now don’t you?

The film was shot largely on location at the Russell Square and Warren Street Underground Stations. Writer/Director Gary Sherman takes his time with the camera and plot. Many tense minutes are spent slowly panning over the monster’s lair in the imagined abandoned ‘Museum’ station. As the cannibal tends to his dying family we are made to feel sympathy for him. This is a beauty and the beast story. He hesitates before eating the pretty heroine but the only words he knows is a garbled version of ‘Mind the gap’.

The best thing about the film is Donald Pleasance, but then Pleasance is the best thing about any film he is in. He plays a surprisingly realistic Policeman in an unrealistic London. The disappearances on the underground seem to be a minor annoyance to him. In fact even though his character has plenty of screen time he does nothing to advance the plot or find the underground train monster. We get a expanded look into the life of what could have been a bit part. It’s as if all the scenes from ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ had been inserted into ‘Hamlet’.

In my imagined version of the 1970’s Donald Pleasance continued to play, Inspector Calhoun in a whole series of London set horror films. He wouldn’t investigate, or ignore, pirate zombies on the River Fleet, phantom Route Masters and ghost dogs along the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

At the time of writing ‘Deathline’ costs about £5 on Amazon. Go get it.