| Dreamland and Return to Dreamland This is a late night filler that seems to crop up periodically on UK TV.Made for Sky TV probably.The first programme seemed definitely pro aliens and retrieved UFO's,the 2nd was definitely sure there wasn't any at all.Talk about building them up to knock 'em down! What I noticed was the way the 2nd programme seemed to ignore the key evidence in the 1st programme so it could present it's knock 'em down presentation.It hardly inspires confidence in the research team when they totally missed the dubiousness of their evidence before they put it on air the 1st time.But now they're definitely right this time and the frontman dramatically gives us the earthshattering coup that what he said before was rubbish! For me the jury is still out on what is going on in Dreamland,but almost unbelievably clumsy programmes like this do look like disinformation rather than ordinary good old fashioned media exploitation.But who knows?Perhaps it's a bit of both. |
| Fortean TV Gone but sadly not missed. Now this programme seems made out a different mould than your standard spooky story freak shows.This was a programme that took a whimsical,knowing elitist position.It knows that the subject mattert it is handling is absurd and so we get the presentation to match.The reason why it believes it is above it's subject matter,is that it basically promotes the psycho-social approach to paranormal phenomena.Which is just a more modern way of saying that they are all symptoms of mass hysteria.And that's what it endlessly pedalled ad nauseum.The rest of the programme seemed more suitable for Eurotrash in it's depiction of odd behaviour than for a programme on anomalous phenomena I mean i'm a compulsive watcher of anything paranormal on TV but in the end even I couldn't raise the enthusiasm to watch it,it was just so dull. Strange but true Strange but true was a cut above the rest and I think it was mainly due to story consultant Jenny Randles the veteran paranormal researcher.It was a real sign of the times when a primetime TV prog on the paranormal took a favourable approach to it's subject.Do you remember Arthur C Clarke swanning up and down the beach on his island retreat in Sri Lanka making sweeping,dismissive judgements at the end of each subject.His pat answers so completely failing to deal with the evidence presented I got the feeling he hadn't seen the footage himself.The contrast in styles between the two was most marked on how SBT portrayed the critical view,it being reduced to mere soundbite which was then dismissed,quite rightly in my opinion,as failing to explain the complexity of the phenomena properly. The basic success of the show was the strong cases it presented in comparative depth,for a mainstream audience that is,and has probably done more to convince the average person in the street of the reality of the paranormal than all the experiments in parapsychology put together. |
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| Dreamland and Return to Dreamland |
| Fortean TV |
| Strange But True |
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| The X Files Oh god! Somebody put it out of it;s misery. As the present series drags itself through the last laps on terrestial TV I assuming it surely it can't last much longer,it's hard to see why it was ever so popular.But it was.The X files together with the Simpsons took the world by storm and reflected America's growing maturity and a sense of cynicism towards it's society and it's government,in the dying embers of the 20th century Mind you,I thought it was extremely light entertainment right at the beginning and I knew they were going to run out subject matter very quickly,there being only so many good clearly defined areas in the paranormal,and once you ran out of those you're in twilight zone territory where anything goes.They interspersd the dearth of good material with the 'conspiracy plot' in which they repetitively used the thriller technique of keeping you guessing.But they did this without bothering to keep a coherent plot.And although it worked at first,even that began to get a bit tiresome,the truth always around the next corner but always out of reach. When the teenagers who are fans of the X Files grow up they will look back and laugh,just like we do at the old 60's Star Trek series.I mean why was everywhere so dark? Doesn't anybody use lights? What about the utterly contrived relationship between Scully and Moulder.And the conspiracy stories that didn't make much sense,Imean in one episode they're running away from some shadowy organisation determined to kill them and in the next they seemed to have forgotten all about them.These teenagers will tear it apart and have a good leugh, until even the earlier,better episodes gradually lose their shine.Mind you given the way things are endlessly repeated on a rapidly increasing amount of channels,that point will come much sooner than it did for our generation. However putting my own personal opinions aside,the Z Files will have convinced more people (rightly I believe) of the reality of serious government conspiracies than all the writers on this subject combined. |
| The X Files |
| The Modern Paranormalist |