Scarred (Never After Series)

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The book begins by looking at children’s television dramas, starting with the ITV serial Noah’s Castle, which dealt with food shortages and society breaking down in the face of civil unrest. Though adapted from a 70s novel, this was broadcast in the 80s, as if to mark the idea – at the start of the decade – that the discord in the world was here and not going away. Serials like The Tripods and The Knights of God dealt with young heroes fighting against controlling totalitarian regimes, showing that this has been a theme in young adult fiction for longer than commonly assumed.

The fact that she was responsible for bringing in hundreds of members and hundreds of thousands of dollars makes her seem even less easy to relate to. She knew exactly what she was doing, and somehow thought nothing of taking money from people for unintelligent courses that she questioned the value of. None of it makes any sense. A normal person with thinking skills would have seen the organization's fraud from the start. It was merely a money-making scheme that she benefited from as she work her way up. Like Amway or Mary Kay, only without the products. As an aside I recently introduced my daughter to 1970's Worzel Gummidge and she LOVED it, but it was strange viewing the show through a modern lens. Worzel's awakening is more akin to a Fulci zombie film, Aunt Sally, the Crowman and other scarecrows are remarkably cruel and barbaric, the children are abandoned by an alcoholic largely absent father, Babs Windsor as Saucy Nancy is remarkably cheeky 70's smut, Worzel's head removing is terrifying and of course Worzel's kindly threatening of Aunt Sally plays domestic abuse for laughs - all this in a hilarious daytime TV show for kids)

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TV takes up nearly half the book, such is the rich vein of brilliance to be mined. Because it wasn’t only kid’s TV that put the willies up the nation, adults were treated to such downbeat fare as Callan, Play For Today, Gangsters and all those peculiarly British dystopias such as Doomwatch, Survivors and Quatermass. No wonder it was a troubled decade. We were basically being told the future was rubbish! But in amongst all this there was some gloriously low budget, but highly imaginative, prime time Sci-Fi to be had as well. UFO, Space 1999 and Blake’s 7 to name but a few. Plus there’s a whole section devoted to Doctor Who (of course!)

Then there were comics. Oh yes, there were comics. From Action! To 2000AD and all points inbetween, the authors lovingly recall their favourites and how much they were scared by them. There’s also a very good section on girl’s comics, which if anything were far more strange and disturbing than boys stuff (Misty anyone?). They then move on to books and the cornucopia of goodness that fed the imagination of those kids who were into horror (The Pan Book of Horror Stories); lurid pulp fiction; Dracula (you think vampires are big news now - Dracula was huge in the 70s); even down to the somewhat deranged art in kids comics by the likes of Ken Reid. Oh and also the trippier side of Marvel Comics who, under the editorship of Roy Thomas, produced some very strange stories indeed. Don’t Call It A Cult by Sarah Berman (journalist’s reports of various women who have escaped NXIVM and their experiences in the cult) Nostalgia seems to define and dictate our present culture, perhaps as it never has before, in ways undreamt-of as recently as a decade ago. Ever since our ability to record, edit and re-share the visual and sonic textures of our common (and sometimes uncommon) cultural experience became a viable option to those outside the entertainment industry, people (largely, it has to be said, bespectacled introverts with testicles and optional BO) have been doing so. First by exchanging physical objects with one another in the playground: physical objects like last night’s John Peel Show or that (“Honest to God it IS!”) snuff movie we got a loan of off our dodgy cousin in the next school along. Recorded onto magnetic tape and somehow both comically bulky to the eyes of today’s Netflix-and-Spotify-reared generation and simultaneously fragile, flimsy, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. As digital files and the internet gradually came to replace pretty much every aspect of our day-to-day entertainment and social requirements the exchange now happens invisibly, across thousands of miles of fibre-optic cabling and through the phantom miracle of wi-fi.La forma tan intima y respetuosa que tiene Sarah de contar su historia hace que este libro no se vuelva tan pesado, si bien el tema es delicado, Sarah lo sabe llevar muy bien sin caer en el morbo, lo único que deseas es justicia. In the tradition of Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman, Escape by Carolyn Jessop, and Troublemaker by Leah Remini

As we get older, the things that scared us originally begin to lose some of their power. Often they get replaced by other, more logical fears as we learn more about how the world works and understand how unlikely it is that Dracula will crawl out from under our bed and exsanguinate us while we're asleep. But the point is, there were dozens, potentially hundreds, of things that scared us, creeped us out, and gave us nightmares. And no matter how mature we think we are, no matter how grown up we get and how many years we put between us and those nightmares, they still linger down there in the depths of our subconscious, waiting to be recalled. Imagínate que un día tu vida es tan miserable que sientes que no hay nada que llene tu vacío, que sientes que eres un fracaso entonces te encuentras con un grupo de gente que te dice que el problema está en ti y sólo en ti, que debes dejar ciertos patrones que llevas cargando desde pequeño para poder vivir la vida que quieres y entonces ¡boom! crees haber encontrado la respuesta al existo, pero de repente esa misma gente te dice que hay ciertas limitaciones y que debes obedecer a cierto líder, comienza a controlar tu vida y a usar todos tus secretos en tu contra, imagínate que tienes taaan normalizado ese control que terminas marcada por las iniciales de un narcisista psicópata y tú ni siquiera te puedes dar cuenta... Pues eso fue lo que pasó Sarah en nxivm y muchas otras chicas que fueron engañadas y adoctrinadas por una secta que les prometió existo pero lo único que logró fue arruinarles las vida. Captive by Catherine Oxenburg (a mother’s account of rescuing her daughter from sex slavery in NXIVM) What started off as hopeful, inspiring, motivating, and life-changing turned into a dark, dominating and gross abuse of power over people, but more specifically over a smaller group of women and their bodies.

Overview

As with everything in culture that hangs around long enough (The Beatles, the Star Wars saga, the concept of the superhero) 1970s nostalgia has darkened and complicated itself as its shelf-life has extended beyond its own meagre ambitions. Because it wasn’t just Bagpuss and Dad’s Army was it? It was the IRA and Pol Pot and the Ayatollah. It was panic about rabies and despair about the Cold War, summers that were too hot and winters that were too cold, and strikes and power-cuts. Margaret Thatcher smashing the glass ceiling and lacerating everyone below her. Open racism, open sexism and people of forty who looked nearer seventy because no one dared tell them how many fags they could smoke or gins they could sink at lunchtime. It certainly wasn’t enough to dampen my enjoyment. For much of the last few weeks my face has been plastered with the same silly grin it wore in the late 80s/early 90s when ‘Sapphire & Steel’ was released on VHS and I was able to revisit one of the best TV shows ever made. And ‘Scarred for Life’ has assured me that I am not alone in that opinion: not for nothing are theirs the first eyes gazing enigmatically from the cover.