King Arthur, page 1 of 3

First broadcast in six parts from 19th September to 24th October 1976, Raven was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, the duo who also brought us Children of the Stones. And Trevor Ray has another connection to 70s kids’ telefantasy, in that he acted in an episode of Sky, playing the sinisterly avian Rex. Perhaps that gave him the seed of the idea of creating a series called Raven.

The series is named after its main character, Raven (played by Phil Daniels, best known now for Quadrophenia two years later, and Blur’s “Parklife” 17 years later), a 15 or 16 year-old orphan (found as a baby in an earthworks maze, watched over by a raven) on trial release from a borstal. He is to spend time with archeologist Professor James Young (played by Michael Aldridge, later Professor Diggory in the BBC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and his ornithologist wife (Patsy Rowlands, of Carry On fame). The Professor is currently investigating a subterranean cave system he believes to have been an ancient sacred site associated with King Arthur. (It also has a circle of standing stones above it, which he claims to be the origin of the idea of the Round Table.)

The Professor, though, only has a month to finish his work, because the government is putting plans in motion to turn the caves into a containment site for nuclear waste, and to build a reprocessing plant above it. Raven, on first hearing this from the project’s manager, Bill Telford, is all for it: “No good living in the past. Got to look after the future, right?” But the Professor is horrified. “Why are you talking like the establishment?” he demands (knowing how best to win over this rebellious young man), and gives him a pile of reading about the site, saying he should be better informed.

Raven has already had some visionary moments in which he’s seen the old professor as a bird — a merlin, in fact. Now he goes down into the caves and has a vision of himself as King Arthur, who presses his thumb to Raven’s forehead, leaving him with the astrological mark of Pluto between his eyes. From that point on, Raven is committed to saving the caves.

He falls in with local cub reporter Naomi Grant, who as well as junior reporting jobs (where she always has to follow the editorial line, however much she’s personally against it, and at the moment the paper is for the nuclear waste dump), does the paper’s horoscopes. When the professor gets her to recognise the symbols carved outside each cave as ancient versions of our modern astrological symbols (Gemini once being a giant, and Cancer a ship, apparently), she realises Bill Telford’s men are trying to tunnel between two caves whose astrological energies are in direct opposition. She’s convinced it will lead to disaster. Bill doesn’t listen — who would? — and so gets trapped in a cave when the new tunnel’s roof collapses. Naomi and Raven pick a more astrologically-harmonious route into the now-sealed cave, and though the surveyor doesn’t think it will work, it does. The rescued Bill emerges with the sign of Pluto on his forehead, converted to the anti-nuclear-waste point of view…

There’s a way of looking at Raven as a sort of reverse folk-horror. The cave site is sacred, and must be protected, and to ensure people protect it they’re forcibly initiated into its cult, usually by being trapped in the caves, leading to a vision of King Arthur pressing the mark of Pluto onto their foreheads. After this, they change their minds about the nuclear waste site. Professor Young is the head of this coven, and it seems even more folk-horror-coven-like when we learn the local vicar is one of his main allies. There’s even a night-time gathering of all the main players at the sacred stones, and a hint of ancient ritual sacrifice when a skull (of a young male of Raven’s height and age) is found in one of the inner caves.

Key to the Professor’s efforts is convincing young Raven he’s the reincarnation of King Arthur — or, at least, the latest incarnation, as “Some people believe that Arthur was the name of the office, rather than the man himself.” Raven is, at first, resistant:

[Professor Young]: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

[Raven]: “Yeah, and some thrust it right back again.”

But he comes round, not because he believes he’s King Arthur, but because he believes in the cause, and finds that other people are listening to him: “First time in my life I’ve ever felt useful.” This is the only one of these 70s’ kids’ telefantasy shows I can think of to so heavily feature the media as a necessary part of its story. Raven not only has to recruit the local newspaper to get his message across, but, through TV man Clive Castle, the general public:

[Raven]: “They’re destroying the countryside to make way for a lot of industrial garbage. They’re starting a dangerous game with no idea how it’s going to finish. And they’re dumping a lot of poisonous waste which might top us all one day…”

[Clive Castle]: “So you see yourself as the guardian of the future, as the representative of a younger generation who’s battling against the shortsightedness of your elders?”

[Raven]: “Listen, mate. We’re responsible for the kids who ain’t even born yet.”

This echoing of ancient mythic patterns in the modern world recalls The Owl Service, but in this case in mostly a benevolent way (Raven does get its replaying of the Guinevere story, though). I did find people seemed all too eager to see Raven as a new King Arthur, but for me it was the astrological stuff that was the least convincing. Perhaps if a little more effort had been made to tie modern astrology with ancient Earth-mysteries and ley line energies it might have seemed a little less ridiculous that knowing the incompatibility of two birth signs could lead to predicting a rock fall and saving someone trapped by it. Perhaps that’s just because I find one sort of nonsense (ley lines) a little less nonsensical than another (astrology), but to me it seemed Raven took the Earth-mysteries-type mysticism of Sky, Children of the Stones and The Changes just a little bit too far into the ridiculous — not because it is unbelievable, but because it was too convenient, story-wise.

It’s the acting that makes Raven work. Phil Daniels is properly both annoying and charismatic as a spiky, street-wise rebel, a ne’er-do-well with his head on straight, and you never doubt he might actually become the sort of public leader he does become. It can almost make you ignore the fact that the story culminates not in the sort of exciting confrontation with dark mystical forces you find in Sky, Children of the Stones and The Changes, but in a public hearing in a local government hall — and that the tactics our heroes use basically involve the sort of mind-control most often associated with the villains in this kind of story.

Was Raven starting to show the limits of this brief cycle of Earth-mystery-inspired kids’ telefantasy? I think The Moon Stallion, which came two years later, showed there was more to be mined from this particular subterranean strata, though perhaps that show’s being set in the past helped. Still, Raven’s an interesting entry in this little sub-genre.

Mary Butts’s second novel (published in 1928, and so before her first novel had its UK first edition), went under a number of working titles, including “In the Wood”, “People Among Trees”, “The Egg and the Cup”, “Landscape with Birds”, “Bees Under the Roof”, and even “The Waste Land”, before settling on Armed With Madness — which comes from a quote, “Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage”, though the quote seems to be from Butts herself. Of these titles, “The Waste Land” is the most intriguing, because like Eliot’s poem (already out by the time Butts began her novel, so she probably wasn’t serious about using it), Armed With Madness combines Modernistic concerns about the spiritual wasteland of the post-First World War 20th century with a powerful symbol of redemption and healing, the Holy Grail.

The story begins in the country house (“in which they could not afford to live”) of the Taverner siblings in Cornwall. Drusilla, known to everyone as Scylla, “ash-fair and tree-tall”, “sometimes a witch, and sometimes a bitch”, is the older, and Felix (to whom, we’re told, “love and death were one”, though entirely unconvincingly) is the younger. With them is a painter called Ross (who is mostly ignored throughout the rest of the narrative), and, soon, an American, Dudley Carston, who comes for the weekend. As he arrives, Felix is out visiting a local pair of similarly artistic souls living, like the Taverners, “in a chaos of elegant poverty”, the painter and sculptor Clarence Lake, and his companion Picus Tracy. (Whose name, meaning “woodpecker”, apparently has all sorts of mythological connections, tying him to “Zeus the Woodpecker”, though they are lost on me.) While there, Picus gets Felix to help him clear out the well at his cottage property, as it has run dry and hedgehogs have a tendency to fall into it in their search for water. Hauling the dead creatures out with a fishing spear, Felix finds a jade cup with “Keltic twiddles… round the rim”. He, Picus, and Clarence come to the Taverners and everyone gathers round the dining table to look at the cup.

Their modern defences are up. This “Keltic” cup, fished out of a well with a spear — “Good old Freud”, someone says — of course can’t be the Holy Grail. They talk about Tennyson, Wagner, and the “Keltic Twilight”, of which these proto-Modernists are all highly disapproving (“those awful pre-Raphaelite pictures”, “I hate the Keltic Twilight… Responsible for the world’s worst art”). But they can’t help feeling something — or perhaps trying not to long for something.

The next day, the cup is gone. After a long search, Carston finds it in his room, where he knows it wasn’t, and accuses everyone of playing a trick on him. He leaves in a huff, and in a nearby village bumps into Picus’s father, a disapproving patriarch who’s come in search of his son for stealing an item from his collection of antiquities, a jade cup he claims to have been a “poison-cup” from India (jade having the power to reveal poison), and after that a “spitting-cup” for a tubercular lady. (Both, notably, images of unhealthiness.) Carston begins to feel that the cup turning up in his room wasn’t the only trick played on him.

But there’s no doubt this is a world desperately in need of the Holy Grail:

“There was something wrong with all of them, or with their world. A moment missed, a moment to come. Or not coming. Or either or both. Shove it off on the war; but that did not help.”

Scylla, Felix, and friends, are distinctly jaded: “We know between us pretty well all there is to know.” And Scylla at one point lays out the age’s malaise:

“If the materialists’ universe is true… we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity… They are just little tricks of the machine… If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult.”

They have the feeling, these no-longer-bright young things, of having run through the gamut:

“…we tried the bad to see if it might be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.”

And Carston, tricked though he has been, feels this, at least, to be genuine:

“They strike me as people who have loved and suffered a great deal. That purifies.”

But whereas King Arthur’s knights split up to search for the Grail, it’s when this “Grail” appears that these “knights” split up. After Carston’s exit, Felix goes to Paris — and this is an interesting sequence, as we move from the tatty poverty of a run-down country house in Cornwall (dead hedgehogs and all) to the vibrancy of roaring 20s Paris, where, overwhelmed by his return to glitz and glamour, parties and young folk, Felix at first struggles to connect. Scylla goes to visit an old girlfriend in London, only to find her married and exceptionally conventional. (Butts gets playful here, presenting part of their conversation as an opera libretto.) Picus goes to weep on his mother’s grave. She, we learn, killed herself after discovering her husband, Picus’s father, was having an affair, with the “tubercular lady” to whom Picus’s father gave the jade cup, giving that “Holy Grail” even more of a Freudian significance for this young man. Clarence, meanwhile, goes back to the dry-welled cottage to try to forget about his longing for Picus, but soon descends into dangerous madness.

And this, I think, is the key to the book’s title. The actual Grail knights — those who succeeded, anyway — were armed with righteousness and purity, but Butts’s “knights”, Scylla & co., have madness as their only resort. They have a self-conscious inability to relate to the Grail (real or not) as a symbol of transcendence and healing, but only as a symbol of reductive Freudian unconscious processes. They just don’t exist in a world where they can handle the Holy Grail’s holiness. So, it doesn’t matter if the cup (which is later revealed to actually be a “Keltic cup”, not the poison-cup and spitting-cup Picus’s father pretends it is) is the real Grail or not, or whether even if not real it still might offer some symbolic connection to a transcendent reality. To these jaded young things, there’s no possibility of transcendence except (perhaps) through art, (temporarily) through the disorientation of drink and drugs, or through fruitless and dangerous madness.

And so, they go through the pangs of loneliness, jealousy, longing, and so on, which ought to be the start of their healing journeys, only they have no way to go on from there, no transcendent state to aspire to.

The Grail myth becomes less important in the second half of the novel. Instead, the presiding image is of arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, which is something Ted Hughes identified as a key figure throughout T S Eliot’s work, too (in his essay, “The Poetic Self”, in Winter Pollen).

Butts’ style, which I found driven by a sort of impatience with language in her first novel, is now clipped, dismissive, languid, broken — again, jaded — meaning the whole thing is quite laconic, exactly the sort of language her decadent, over-experienced, no-longer-bright young things use with one another. The result is that Armed With Madness really feels like it’s presenting something of the reality of its times. The heady, overwhelming glamour of Paris, and the too-sudden descents into sordid poverty and petty jealousy that run alongside it, all feel authentic. At the same time, Butts is aware of the malaise of her age:

“But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. Any little boy in a Paris bar, who never heard of physics knows. Everyone gets the age’s temper.”

To me, the characters are, as with her first novel, unequal to their self-dramatising pronouncements, but the novel itself feels like a far more on-the-ground and authentic document of its age than, say, Eliot’s highly intellectualised Waste Land, even though both draw from the same sources (Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, to which Butts adds A E Waite, Arthur Machen, and Jane Harrison). But both books share a theme of how the modern age doesn’t know how to deal with sacredness, and so loses out on awe, transcendence, and the deeper sort of healing it so desperately needs.

Butts’s next novel was a sequel of sorts to this one — or it features some of the same characters, anyway — though it doesn’t seem to have continued with the Grail theme. The Death of Felicity Taverner (1932) seems to be about land-developers seeking to despoil the Cornish countryside, and doesn’t tempt me quite as much as this novel did.

It’s also harder to get hold of. Armed With Madness seems to have been the only one of Butts’s novels to have had a paperback edition (in 2001 from Penguin Classics). I would like to try some of her short stories, if I can find them in a cheap enough edition. But Armed With Madness seems to be generally considered her best novel, and I suspect it might be more rewarding on a second go.

I remember this series feeling really special when it came out in the early 1980s. But it was meant to feel special. Camelot 3000 was DC Comics’ first “maxi-series”, a 12-issue story printed on higher-than-normal quality “Baxter” paper (which also resulted in stronger colours, I seem to recall), intended to be sold solely through specialist comic shops. This last point meant it wasn’t subject to the Comics Code Authority’s stamp of approval, so could contain, as writer Mike W Barr says in his introduction to the Deluxe Edition, “a transsexual knight, lesbianism, incest and various other Code-breaking plot points” — though nothing as graphic as that might make it sound to modern ears.

It’s set in a technologically advanced future which has recovered from nuclear war to, somehow, return to pretty much the 1980s’ version of world political power-balance, with a communist China and Russia in uneasy relations with a caricature cowboy President of the USA, and a psychopath dictator in charge of the African country of Rakmaburg. Aliens from the tenth planet are invading Earth, and have taken over England, while the rest of the world struggles to work out what to do. Tom Prentice, an archaeological student working at Glastonbury, accidentally reawakens the Once and Future King whilst fleeing aliens, and Arthur immediately grasps the situation: England, and the world, need him once more.

His first step is to free a grumpy Merlin (the series’ best character) from Stonehenge, then recover Excalibur (whose lake resting place is currently inside a nuclear power plant). Merlin then awakens six of Arthur’s knights from their current reincarnations: Sir Lancelot is Jules Futrelle, the world’s richest man (who has a handy castle-like home in orbit round Earth, all ready to become this future’s new Camelot); Guinevere is Commander Joan Acton, head of the Earth’s defence forces; Sir Kay is a minor criminal; Sir Galahad a dishonoured samurai; Sir Gawain a black South African family man; Sir Tristan, meanwhile, has been reincarnated as a woman, Amber March, and is awakened to her/his true identity just before she’s about to be married; finally, Sir Percival is reawakened the moment before he’s turned into a “Neo-Man”, a super-strong, near-invincible dumb giant, used by this future’s governments for law enforcement, created from criminals as a punishment for their crimes.

When it’s revealed, later in the series, that one of the crimes that can get you turned into a Neo-Man is “dissent”, it underlines how generic this book’s vision of the year 3000 is. It’s presented as a future version of the 1980s, but it’s also post-nuclear, technologically advanced, and overpopulated, and it’s also, evidently, from this need to punish “dissenters”, dystopian, though it’s never made clear how or why it is dystopian, aside from the selfishness of its leaders. The future, in Camelot 3000, has laser guns and flying cars, a hint of dystopia, a hint of post-nuclear holocaust, a hint of looming population crisis, a hint of satire, as well as a lack of the sort of technology that would actually help the characters (Tom Prentice’s laser burns can only be healed by the Holy Grail, Sir Tristan’s desire to be turned into a man can only be achieved through sorcery, not surgery). All in all, this future feels a little bit like the sort you’d find in 2000A.D., though more Mega-City Lite than the full Dredd.

The setting, though, isn’t the point. This generic future is there to be a background against which we see a sword-wielding King Arthur and his reincarnated knights fight insectoid aliens and a vengeful Morgan Le Fay. One of the things I remember liking most about the series was the knights’ individual struggles between their current incarnations and their mythic “real” identities. (In this way it could be said to tie in, though very lightly, with Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.) Writer Mike W Barr updates some aspects of the original Arthurian myths with modern, or futuristic, equivalents. For instance, Tristan and Isolde’s love in the original is frustrated by the fact that Isolde is promised to another man and Tristan has been charged on his knightly honour to bring her to him; in Camelot 3000 that frustration comes from Tristan’s being a woman. (And many modern reviews pat the series condescendingly on the head in a “nice try” manner for addressing such outside-the-gender-norm issues without today’s nuances, but I remember this being a really surprising and original-feeling plotline at the time.) Meanwhile, Sir Percival was, in the original myths, the most perfect and innocent of Arthur’s knights; in Camelot 3000, he’s perfect and innocent because he’s been turned into a dumb, giant Neo-Man.

Some things, though, don’t change, and everyone has a doomed acceptance of the inevitable adultery between Lancelot and Guinevere, though it nearly tears New Camelot apart before it can face the alien threat. But ultimately, Camelot 3000 isn’t about the constrictive patterns of myth (as with The Owl Service), it’s about King Arthur and his knights being a symbol of hope in a future very much in need of it. So, the reliving of past mistakes provides interesting storylines, but ultimately the series is about our heroes’ triumphs despite their flaws, not the dark undertow of a bleak mythic destiny.

Camelot 3000 was intended to come out monthly, and did, for the first nine issues, after which it slowed down. In his introduction, Mike Barr says he warned DC they should stockpile issues before launching the series, knowing penciller Brian Bolland wouldn’t be able to stick to a monthly schedule, but they ignored him. As a result, although the first issue came out in December 1982, the last (with almost a year between it and issue 11) came out in April 1985.

It’s a fun series, feeling a little 2000AD-ish in places with its touches of anarchic satire, but no way near as dark as 1980s comics would become. Brian Bolland’s art remains one of the main selling points, though he’s not inking his own work, and it looks a little cruder than we tend to get from him now (particularly in the last issue, making me wonder if it was perhaps a little squeezed in between other projects). And I like the idea of how King Arthur’s return is handled. According to Barr, this was the first story to address the actual return of the Once and Future King — though Merlin pops up all the time in 1970s and 1980s UK kids’ TV; and one series at least, Raven (1977), is about a reincarnation of King Arthur, though not of the swords-versus-aliens type.