Discovering Scarfolk: a wonderfully witty and subversively dark parody of life growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s

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Although there are some parallels to other fictional towns draped in the Weird, Scarfolk is very much its own thing. Comparisons to the Welcome To Night Vale podcast are commonly made, especially when trying to explain Scarfolk to Americans: but whereas Night Vale has a folksy cute-weird inclusive charm that might tempt the fan to consider living there if it existed, nobody in their right minds would want to visit Scarfolk, let alone live there… it makes Royston Vasey seem positively inviting by comparison. Discovering Scarfolk is a visitor's guide to a small town in the UK, a real tourist trap (entirely literally). Full of helpful advice, such as "Don't go with strange children", "Stop" and "Don't", this is an indispensable guide to getting out alive. If this sounds too grotesque to be true, don’t worry—it is! There were never any smiling, appendage-finding kidsin Scarfolk, because Scarfolk never existed. But the town’s online presence is meticulously detailedand impressively creepy.For three years, graphic designer Richard Littler has been using his design skills and bone-dry wit to write a whole history of Scarfolk, a fictional, supernatural-tinged town that finds humor in dystopia, and is closer to today’s world than we might like to think.

Review: ‘Discovering Scarfolk’ by Richard Littler - The Daily Review: ‘Discovering Scarfolk’ by Richard Littler - The Daily

Littler currently resides in Germany, but he grew up in the North West of England. He lived in Radcliffe near Bury until 1976 (when he was six) whereupon his family moved to Timperley, a small suburb south of Manchester. At various times Timperley has been home to Caroline Aherne, Chris Sievey (of Frank Sidebottom fame), and Ian Brown and John Squire of The Stone Roses. Littler admits that growing up there, as well as in Radcliffe, has made a direct impact on his work. I haven’t satirised the Yewtree child abuse cases of the 1970s and Savile et al, though I have referenced the general subject indirectly in dark, surreal ways, such as the post about a demonic spider TV presenter called Charlie Barn. I’ve also avoided some of the more overtly sleazy, sexual aspects of the 1970s. Not because of prudery, I hasten to add, I’ve wanted to maintain a child’s perspective to some extent and young kids aren’t really aware of any of that. The nearest I’ve come to this area is a post about pornography for fans of Brutalist architecture and town planning.”Some observers have detected a kinship between Scarfolk and the musical genre of ‘hauntology’, as exemplified by the Ghost Box record label. It’s a link that Littler himself can understand. Indeed, he describes the unmade screenplay that he cannibalised for the blog as ‘hauntology-themed’. Scarfolk University, for example, was given four million pounds to develop a computer that could record the brainwaves of hundreds of Real English Wine drinkers and then convert those brainwaves into sounds and images. Beverley Turner (25 April 2013). "It's time to toughen up kids. Start terrifying them 'Scarfolk' style – The Telegraph". The Telegraph . Retrieved 14 October 2014.

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An ordinary town with electrified water and after-school activities for the kiddies like Thump-Chums. (The first rule of Thump-Chums is you can talk about Thump-Chums to whoever you like as long as you thump them.) But that doesn’t mean you are entirely blameless for your irresponsible birth. Lazing around the house all day looking after infants and cleaning your husband's home is all well and good for a few years. But what happens after that, when you have become redundant? Richard Littler had a frightening childhood, too, but as a designer and screenwriter, he turned his memories of life in suburban Britain during the 1970s into a haunting and hilarious blog and book about the fictional dystopian town of Scarfolk. Littler mined the dark side of his childhood to create pamphlets, posters, book covers, album art, audio clips, and television shorts—remnants of life in a paranoid, totalitarian 1970s community, where even babies are not to be trusted. I primarily study the ancient world. I only live in the modern one! Ancient rulers were heavily into “sacred” roles and patterns. These took the form of rituals, at first to help remember, but later because the underlying science/knowledge associated with those patterns/roles was for the most part forgotten. However, even the rote repetition of traditional roles and patterns produced predictable results. This must be why we are so reluctant to discover the origins of our belief systems. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got. Superstition is preferred to chaos, and those that rule the world exploit it to the max. Enlightenment of the masses is not the policy of the upper classes! Peace in the 3rd World is not the “foreign policy” of the 1st World. In January 2014, the London Evening Standard published an article [7] by Charles Saatchi, which accidentally included the cover of a Scarfolk book called Eating Children: Population Control & The Food Crisis instead of the intended Jonathan Swift publication A Modest Proposal ( 1729).Part-comedy, part-horror, part-satire, Discovering Scarfolk is the surreal account of a family trapped in the town. Through public information posters, news reports, books, tourist brochures and other ephermera, we learn about the darker side of childhood, school and society in Scarfolk. Scientists (and advertising agency executives who planned to exploit the results) predicted the result would produce “a wide variety of positive images, including majestic British landscapes accompanied by the sounds of waves and music as beautiful as anything written by maestros such Sir Edward Elgar or Cliff Richard”.

Discovering Scarfolk : Richard Littler : 9780091958480 Discovering Scarfolk : Richard Littler : 9780091958480

Mark Sinclair (27 March 2013). "Creative Review – Have you been to Scarfolk?". Creative Review. Archived from the original on 27 April 2015 . Retrieved 14 October 2014. A follow-up book to Discovering Scarfolk entitled Scarfolk Annual was published by HarperCollins on 17 October 2019. It satirises the British comic annual format and the cover resembles the BBC Publications annual based on the children's TV show Play School. [5] Scarfolk & Environs: Road & Leisure Map For Uninvited Tourists [ edit ] Scarfolk & Environs: Road & Leisure Map For Uninvited Tourists Country The card had proved so effective that, not only could it effortlessly beat every other card, it also killed the losing player within moments of the game ending. Worried citizens gathered in secret to discuss the poster campaign. Knowing that most homes contained surveillance devices, they debated the poster non-verbally, using hand gestures. Unbeknownst to the clandestine groups, however, specially-trained police mime experts had infiltrated the meetings and reported everything they saw to Scarfolk's police commissioner who, keen to outdo his predecessor's record, had created the public information campaign to boost arrest numbers.The conceit is that Scarfolk can never leave the 1970s, even though the rest of the world passes by normally. Perhaps this happens in a neighboring parallel universe, who knows. In practical terms, it means the present day can occasionally leak into the 1970s and vice versa, which is a way to contrast changes in social attitudes and ideas of the past 40 or 50 years. Collectors Weekly: Do you think of Scarfolk as an alternate version of your childhood? Well crap, maybe I’m too old to notice it by now, but IMO the renaissance is rather absent in today’s music :-/ A Scarfolk television series, co-written by English writer and comedian Will Smith, was described as "in the works" in 2018, [9] but ultimately did not enter production. [27] See also [ edit ] In actual fact, all the subjects’ brains produced exactly the same image: An electrified cage containing a baby monkey whose mind had been destroyed by medical experiments, systematic torture and the jarring sound of a toy mechanical bear mercilessly beating a drum 24 hours a day. Parents and teachers assumed that the booklet was based on psychological research but it had no scientific basis whatsoever. The booklet's medically untrained author was one of the dinner ladies from the council canteen before she was fired for attempting to slip strychnine into bowls of blancmange.