{"id":3204,"date":"2024-02-16T07:55:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T07:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=3204"},"modified":"2024-02-16T06:48:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T06:48:25","slug":"liberator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2024\/02\/16\/liberator\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberator"},"content":{"rendered":"

It tickles me that not only am I obsessed with time, but I know that I was 8 years, 1 month and 11 days old when I first became so. It helps that I know that a drama prompted me and now there is an online archive<\/a> of BBC television listings to show me when it was on. And once I had looked up the first airdate of Tom’s Midnight Garden in 1974, there was also Wolfram Alpha<\/a> to tell me how many days I’d been alive then.<\/p>\n

What neither source can tell you is that this January 1974 version of Philippa Pearce’s wonderful novel<\/a> was peculiar. Dramatised by John Tully, it appears that the BBC took his scripts from his 1969 version, edited them a bit, and filmed them all over again. There are now many dramatisations of this story and I think the received wisdom from those who care is that this 1974 one that besotted me is the poorest. It isn’t. The 1999 film version is simply bizarrely poor. My one was just cheap.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

I know you want to go look up something. A long time ago I found a complete collection of Radio Times issues in the BBC Pebble Mill library and while I can’t even remember where that library can have been now, I do remember people wanting to see it and wanting to look up what was on TV when they were born. I can only remember showing one person, but there must’ve been others.<\/p>\n

Now I look back at that and while I can see the very shelves the bound copies were on, what I really see is how peculiar it feels to know that I would go on to write for Radio Times. <\/p>\n

None of that was in my mind when you and I started talking now. I had nothing in my head about RT and how those back issues would become like familiar old friends later when I spent some years writing the magazine’s On This Day television history column. But I was thinking about this business of knowing or at least being able to find out a particular moment in my life.<\/p>\n

Specifically, 19:40 GMT on Monday, January 16, 1978, when I was 12 years, 1 month and 20 days old. The third episode of Blake’s 7 started twenty minutes before and this was the moment when the world, or at least that part of the UK not watching Coronation Street, saw the starship Liberator’s teleport special effect for the first time. If you know the show, you know the effect: when Roj Blake beams down, the edge of the TV frame has a white Quantel-style line which becomes a shrinking circle that ends up forming the outline of the character. When he teleports back up, a white outline forms around him, he fades to nothing, and the outline balloons out to the edge of the screen before vanishing.<\/p>\n

It is seriously, seriously cheap. And yet I wanted to be able to do that. I even managed to get a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet which is still on my desk today.<\/p>\n

Only a little while later, incidentally, I would also want a house that was as full of bookshelves as Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein’s was, and I eventually got exactly that. Presumably one book at a time.<\/p>\n

And this week I was minded of how I also got to teleport. Ish. Enough.<\/p>\n

For this week marks the 200th edition of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers who use Macs, iPhones and iPads. To celebrate 200 episodes or four years of new episodes every Wednesday without fail, I made a collection of the silliest bits<\/a>. So not the best, I think, and not the worst, I hope, but the daftest.<\/p>\n

And at 5 minutes and 29 seconds into the video there is the last bit in my first-ever clip show, which sees me teleporting out of my office in precisely the way I had wanted to all those years before.<\/p>\n

If you want something badly enough, and if you wait more years than I dare ask Wolfram Alpha about, you can get it.<\/p>\n

I find that a freeing kind of thought. Liberating, in fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It tickles me that not only am I obsessed with time, but I know that I was 8 years, 1 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3203,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-selfdistract","has-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2024\/02\/SD-B7-small.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-PG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3204"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3206,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204\/revisions\/3206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}