THE BODIES BENEATHThe Flipside of British Film & Television

by William Fowler and Vic Pratt

Foreword by Nicolas Winding Refn

Paperback

£15.99

148mm x 210mm

400pp

ISBN: 9781907222726

ORDER HERE

“The missing links of british cinema…glorious…punk rock” – Nicolas Winding Refn

“Compiled with love and a true fan’s passion for the subject matter… one tidy little volume that feels
solidly academic and readily accessible to all in equal measure.”

The Irish Times

JOIN US ON THE FLIPSIDE…

Some cinematic paths lie neat and well-tended, others are ominously overgrown and ignored. Dig
down deep to find the bodies beneath…

Occult rites are staged in hippie strip clubs; music hall dame Old Mother Riley haunts a vampiric Bela
Lugosi; TV puppet Sooty doles out intoxicating pharmaceuticals; velvet-voiced Vincent Price presents
a full-fat cookery programme…

Veteran film curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt crack open the caskets of forgotten or neglected
British films and telly to serve up a feast of curiosities to tempt the palate of even the most jaded
cinephile. Their unflinching, all- embracing investigative gaze is as likely to reassess an established
classic as it is to focus on cobweb-covered delights like pioneering 1930s female film director Mary
Field’s beautifully bizarre The Mystery of Marriage, the much- maligned Doctor Who epic ‘The Trial
of a Time Lord’, underground offerings like Anna Ambrose’s experimental art piece Phoelix and Andy
Milligan’s bawdy bloodbath The Body Beneath.

All is grist to this monstrous mill, as the authors tamper with outmoded video formats and meddle
with magenta-bias safety film in their mission to finger- paint an entirely unexpected, highly
irreverent and thoroughly personal picture of film and television culture in twentieth-century Britain.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

William Fowler and Vic Pratt are both film archivists, writers, and curators, and have programmed
numerous cinema screenings at venues internationally. In 2006, they co-founded The Flipside
initiative at the British Film Institute. Every month for seven years, they presented weird and
wonderful, offbeat, unseen and outrageous film and television, welcoming a host of acting and
directorial talent.

Will and Vic write regularly for many different film publications and anthologies, and contribute
programme notes for screenings, DVD and Blu- Ray releases including the BFI Flipside label.
THE BODIES BENEATH / AUTHOR: WILLIAM FOWLER, VIC PRATT / PUBLISHER: STRANGE ATTRACTOR
& MIT PRESS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Strange Attractor have made their name by publishing the esoteric, the ontological and the
downright weird, and The Bodies Beneath certainly meets these requirements. Put together by
William Fowler and Vic Pratt, creators and curators of the BFI’s Flipside brand, it is an exploration of
those areas of British film and television that broke new and weird ground, but that have been
largely lost to the popular imagination, if not the annals of history.

Digging into the BFI’s extensive archive, Fowler and Pratt began Flipside as a series of events at the
Institute’s Southbank headquarters, before overseeing a programme of releases on DVD and Blu-ray
that bring the forgotten and the half-remembered back into our homes. Some of the titles featured
in the book have been given DVD releases, but others are obscure, unseen except by deep divers
into the BFI’s online subscription service.

The book is divided into sections covering sex, war, documentary, sci-fi and more, and runs a zig-
zagging gamut from vintage Sooty hilarity to the terrifying The War Game, with stops along the way
for mondo, horror, folk traditions and Barry Evans. Beginning with the beguilingly-titled (and sadly
lost) 1899 short Cricket Match on a Fishing Smack During a Heavy Sea, the authors set a cut-off point
for their explorations in the early 1990s, when DVD began to supplant VHS and the emergence of
the internet left few things truly forgotten. In this, it’s a book that fits neatly into the recent
hauntology genre, and there is plenty that will delight and unsettle fans of such victuals.

Fowler and Pratt take turns in writing, although they have a common voice, and it is an accessible
tome despite its academic referencing. If the book has a drawback it’s that, even at 398 pages, it’s
too short, and you’ll find it’s best devoured in bite-sized chunks with breaks taken to watch what is
available of what they’ve essayed so attentively.

This is an essential buy for fans of uniquely British film and television from a world before culture -
and by that, you can infer American culture - went worldwide. Spend a few hours with The Bodies
Beneath and you’ll hunger for those days to return. Nostalgia is what it used to be.

BFI Flipside is a label offshoot of the BFI, dealing with forgotten UK films and TV given new leases of
life on DVD and Bluray. This book aims to cover similar ground and gives us a look at cult and truly
forgotten visual media up until the early 1990’s, films and TV that broke new ground, and some that
are just downright weird. It is designed to cover those films and tv that rarely made the leap out of
VHS land, and bring them to a new generation.

With a very short introduction by Nicolas Winding Refn, who claims that this movement is Punk
Rock, the book goes on to prove that there are few restraints when it comes to the material covered
in this book.

The book is divided into sections and covers various films and tv programmes in the same way that
Danny Peary’s Cult Movies or the Psychotronic Video Guide would have. There will be things in here
you will have most likely heard of, such as Danger Man (Patrick McGoohan’s series he did directly
before The Prisoner) to an 1899 short Cricket Match on a Fishing Smack During a Heavy Sea, which
lets face it, no one outside of Fowler and Pratt have probably seen. The book, just shy of 400 pages
covers too much to read in one sitting, and is not that kind of book. This is a book to sit and dip into,
devour in small chunks. If you are into British film and television and like to discover new weird and
wonderful things, then The Bodies Beneath is one to grab.