2008 is slipping through our fingers, and we’re in nostalgic mood. Well actually, I’m supposed to be writing copy for the Flatpack brochure and will hungrily grab at any distraction that comes along. This is unlikely to be in human form as it seems that I’m the only bugger in the Custard Factory today, so I thought I would shuffle through the last 12 months from a 7inch point-of-view…
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At the last 7inch event we showed a brief clip from 1981 Indonesian horror flick Mystics in Bali, by way of a taster for a full screening at Flatpack in March. The response since has been so striking – ie, numerous people saying ‘what the hell was that?’, ‘you’ve infected my dreams’, etc – that we felt that we should spread the joy a little further. If you like the look of it, the dvd is available from Mondo Macabro. And this Thai advert for Sylvania lightbulbs is a handy primer on East Asian bogeymen:

We moaned at them for not having a website, so it’s only fair that we toast the arrival of Birmingham International Film Society online. Looks nice too. Their last show before the Christmas break is Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon, about a Kurdish musician attempting to play a gig in Iraq after 35 years in exile. [spanish trailer]

Oliver Postgate died yesterday, aged 83, leaving behind an amazing body of work and a hell of a life. There are plenty of old kids TV programme which we nostalge over but which bore us rigid after 10 minutes on dvd. Thanks to the artistry and story-telling and fun that went into them, Clangers and Bagpuss and Ivor will always be a class apart. We look forward to foisting them on future generations for many years to come, and the marvels which he and Peter Firmin achieved in a converted pig-sty should be compulsory viewing for any filmmaker bemoaning their lack of funding.

Less familiar and equally of note (in a more grown-up, messy way) was Postgate’s own story; his crackpot inventions, his conscientious objection during the war, his tumultuous family life, and an abiding sense of inadequacy which he used as a motor for his work and talked about with candour on Desert Island Discs last year. It’s a bugger to track down, but do read his memoirs Seeing Things if you get a chance. Here’s a brief snippet, from a revelation that visited him during a hospital stay in 1978:

“What hit me then was a realisation that this joy in life that drives through all things is the life that drives all things. I felt the huge engine, the driving, rolling river of life and death, of happiness and sadness, a river of which my dark fumbling life was only a tiny part, a leaf on the rapids, yet, in my realisation of it, I was part of the river itself, both a part of it and it a part of me.”

We’re not generally in the habit of handing out techy tips on this site, but thought this was useful. Youtube have decided in their wisdom to add a big ugly search box to embedded video. Happily someone has already worked out a way of getting rid of this by adding &showsearch=0 so that your embed text goes from this:

embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HgSRiJjmnYY&hl” type etc…

to this:

embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HgSRiJjmnYY&hl&showsearch=0″ type etc…

And your video reverts from fixed to not-broken:

Oh joy, now we just have to go back through all our old youtube clips and add this code.
With thanks to Troy Schneider.

**Update**: They’ve ditched it already. Hooray.