(Lawrence spinning a yarn, Mugwump facilitating)

Newsletter #7

Last night it transpired that even putting the kettle on can lead to no end of difficulties...Tonight, well, it only takes a simple parish magazine to unleash something decidedly strange and malevolent.

Belbury Poly (Jim Jupp) is the co-founder of the remarkable and other-worldly (well this world rendered other) Ghost Box label- an organisation dedicated to revealing the strangeness and weird potential of late 20th century British culture.

His Name Was Legion by Sir Andrew Caldecott resides perfectly in parallel with the Ghost Box Mythology. From the Belbury Poly Parish Magazine, Jim has this to say about their approach to Weird Tales for Winter and tonight's tale specifically.

I was asked for a Belbury Poly contribution and the author Lawrence Norfolk kindly agreed to adapt and read. Lawrence and I spent an interesting four weeks reading as many supernatural stories as possible. We quickly ruled out MR James as too obvious a choice and we also felt my old favourites like Blackwood and Machen from weirder end of the supernatural spectrum were not quite "Christmassy" [when Tales was first scheduled to air]enough. So ploughing through some more anthologies of obscure early twentieth century exponents of the genre we hit upon Sir Andrew Caldecott.

Andrew Caldecott was a colonial civil servant during the 1930's serving as governor of Hong Kong and then Ceylon. Later in life during the 1940's he began writing ghost stories, two anthologies of which were published, Not Exactly Ghosts and Fires Burn Bright. Caldecott's post war fictional world is tweedy, polite and teetering on the brink of insanity. Although some of the tales follow the pattern and atmosphere of MR James, Caldecott generally stops short of the big reveal, and the supernatural agency in the stories is inferred by events. Horrifying questions linger in the mind, in a way that prefigures the more sophisticated stories of Robert Aickman.

One story  in particular, His Name was Legion, stood out as having a great affinity for the Ghost Box world dealing as it does with a fake parish magazine, and spirit channelling through TV and radio equipment.

Until meeting Jim & Lawrence, I was entirely unaware of Caldecott's work and have sinced dug deeply into the archives of this fascinating writer, a reaction that I'm sure you will all share after tonight's broadcast...

PS- and on an entirely personal note, the divine Aickman (referenced above) is my own personal hero of the weird tale and is certainly worth further investigation

until tomorrow dear listeners

jonny mugwump