Jazzy D's Soul Notes

In the sixties and seventies British televison really came out with some of the most baffling and experimental TV shows such as The Prisoner. Sapphire and Steel was a gem from the 70s, and I loved it.

They were out of Time, Agents Of... Something temporal but never explained.

"There is no time here, not any more."
That line, whispered by Sapphire in the first ever assignment, is the whole show. I was instantly hooked.

The Brief

If you missed it between 1979 and 1982, or caught it at 7pm on ITV when you were far too young, here is all you were ever told:

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned."

That's it. No origin story. No TARDIS manual. Nada!

P J Hammond didn't want time travel. He wanted time as a thing that breaks. Time is a corridor, and like any old house in Britain, it has weak points where the plaster cracks and something else bleeds through.

Two operatives arrive — Sapphire (Joanna Lumley), who can take time back and read emotions off objects, and Steel (David McCallum), who can freeze himself to absolute zero and is about as warm as that sounds. They are described as a special force of interdimensional operatives whose task is to protect the universe from evil forces trying to gain a foothold by disrupting the timeline.

They look human. They are not.

Agents Of... Whom?

This is where Sapphire & Steel becomes pure hauntology before we had a word for it.

They are not agents of the government, or of Earth, or even of good. They are assigned by unseen higher powers. Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Silver — 115 elements who have taken human form and been given special powers over reality.
( And for the scientic minds amongst us here, I do know that Sapphire, Jet, and Diamond are not elements, except for the fact that diamond is a form of carbon.)

We only ever meet a handful. Lead, who sings to children to keep them safe. Silver, the techie. The rest remain offstage, like management in a 1970s public sector office block.

They have no lives. No flat. No downtime. They appear where time has gone wrong — a railway station where the ghosts of 1940s soldiers never left, a faceless man in old photographs who traps you inside them, a motorway service station that is actually a trap from the future — they fix it, and they leave. Or they fail to leave.

And that ending. Assignment 6. No spoilers, but after six serials they are abandoned in space, in a void with no time at all, forever. For a teatime adventure show, it was chillingly bleak. "Once seen, none were easily forgotten" as one retrospective put it.

Out of Time: Why It Is Hauntology Now

Philosopher Jacques Derrida coined hauntology — the presence of a future that never arrived, or a past that won't die. Mark Fisher ran with it in Ghosts of My Life, and he kept coming back to Sapphire & Steel as his perfect example.
"All we knew about Sapphire and Steel was that they were ‘detectives’ of a peculiar kind, probably not human, sent from a mysterious ‘agency’ to repair these breaks in time."
Mark Fisher argued that is exactly what growing up in late-70s/early-80s Britain felt like. The show never explains itself. It thrives on atmosphere, ambiguity, and a creeping sense of dread. The fear is not the monster. The fear is confusion itself.

Think about how it looked:

Empty houses that keep replaying the same day
Nursery rhymes that become incantations and tear a hole in a child's bedroom
Brutalist service stations, abandoned railway platforms, new-build estates where the wallpaper is too new to have ghosts — but does. Walls that bleed spirits of the past.

Analogue effects, howl-round feedback, a Stockhausen-like electronic score that never resolves. I wou;d love to have that soundtrack.

It's the BBC Radiophonic Workshop world without the BBC. It's public information films, Schools and Colleges programming, the Test Card girl who won't stop staring. It is, as Mark Fisher said, a future that was promised — chrome, space, progress — that instead got stuck, looped, and started haunting itself. Or to put it another way, it is pop eating itself.

Sapphire and Steel aren't heroes. They are maintenance workers for a decaying continuum. Council workers for the cosmos. They don't save the world, they board it up. Steel literally boards up a door to stop the creatures inside breaking loose in Assignment 1. That's not Doctor Who. That's being a caretaker.

Why It Still Gets Under Your Skin

Time as place, not line. Most time travel shows go when to a time , back or forward. Sapphire & Steel go where time is thin. That idea — that your hallway could be June 3rd, 1948 if you hum the wrong tune — is more unsettling than any Dalek.

No comfort. No Doctor-companion banter, no Starfleet. Sapphire is empathetic but alien, Steel is logical to the point of cruelty. They will sacrifice a child to seal a breach if they have to. You were never quite sure they liked us.

Lost futures.

Watched now in 2026, it feels like a memo from a Britain that thought the future would be all white corridors and time agents. Instead we got something else. The show itself is a ghost — shot on harsh video, on sets that wobble, on location in half-built towns. The very cheapness is the hauntology. It looks like a memory that has been taped over.

If you want to revisit, start anywhere:

Assignment 1 - The house that steals parents through nursery rhymes.
Assignment 2 - The haunted railway station. Still the scariest ghost story ITV ever did.
Assignment 4 - The faceless man in the photographs. Pure analogue horror.
Assignment 5 - The industrialist who is trapped in a mansion that repeats the 1930s. Evocatively weird.
Assignment 6 - The cafeteria at the end of the universe. The final trap.

Time broke. They were sent. They never really left. It was a series that never met the audiece halfway. Like The Prisoner, it never kowtowed to what audiences expected.

It's all back on ITVX now, in all its flickery, otherworldly glory.

We thought we were watching sci-fi. We were actually watching the 20th century learn how to haunt itself and how the 21st century cannot shake off these ghosts.

Every day life was sped up but culture has slowed down.
Simon Reynolds

I initially wrote an analytical essay on postmodern culture for a course at UCL in London. back in early 2010. I passed of course having done Open University back in the late seventies. Here is my update, and considerably truncated from its roughly 5000 word thesis

We used to imagine the future for a living. Now we remember it.

That strange feeling that contemporary culture is stuck on loop — that every new film is a reboot, every new fashion is a revival, every new song sounds like a better-mastered version of something from 1985 — has a name. Philosophers call it hauntology.

1. What is Hauntology?

The term was coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993 in Spectres of Marx. It was a pun: hauntology sounds like ontology, the study of what is. Hauntology is the study of what haunts.

Derrida argued that the present is never fully present. It is stalked by lost futures — futures that were promised but never arrived — and by pasts that refuse to die.

It was the late cultural critic Mark Fisher who made it useful for pop culture. In his books Ghosts of My Life and Capitalist Realism, Fisher said hauntology in the 21st century is not about being spooked by ghosts. It is about mourning.

We are not haunted by what happened. We are haunted by what didn't happen. The jetpacks, the moon colonies, the fully automated leisure society, the radical new sounds that were supposed to come after jungle and post-punk. The future we were told was just around the corner.

Listen to an old Tomorrow's World clip. The confidence is almost heartbreaking.

2. The Slow Cancellation of the Future

Fisher called it "the slow cancellation of the future."

Think about it. If you hear a pop record from 1968 and one from 1978, they sound like they come from different planets. Ten years was an eternity of innovation. Now play a record from 2005 and one from 2025. The production is cleaner, louder, but is it new?

This is most obvious in music, my home territory. In the 20th century, popular music reinvented its own DNA every few years: jazz to rock and roll to psychedelia to punk to disco to hip-hop to rave. Since the early 2000s, that chain of mutations has stalled.

Hauntological music makes this explicit. Labels like Ghost Box, artists like Burial, The Caretaker, Boards of Canada — they don't hide their nostalgia. They sample crackle, public information films, half-remembered rave tapes, the utopian hum of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It's beautiful, but it's the sound of looking backwards because forwards feels blocked.

And it is not just music. Film, fashion, architecture — we live in an age of pastiche.

Why Innovation Slowed: The Logic of Culture Capitalism.

So why did we stop inventing?

The old romantic idea was that capitalism drives innovation. In culture, late-stage capitalism does the opposite. It drives iteration.

1. Risk became too expensive to tolerate. To make something genuinely new is to risk failure. A global entertainment corporation, spending $200 million on a film, cannot afford failure. So it invests in intellectual property that already has an audience: sequels, universes, remakes. Novelty is a liability.

2. The archive ate the new. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix gave us every piece of culture ever made, instantly accessible. That is wonderful, and it is paralysing. When the entire past is present at all times, why imagine something new? The algorithm knows you liked 70s soul-jazz, so it will give you 70s soul-jazz forever. It feeds you more of what you already are, not what you could become.

3. We shifted from making culture to managing culture. The most valuable skills are no longer composition, writing, or filming. They are curation, branding, marketing, and content management. We are incentivised to repackage, not to create. Innovation is work. Curation is cheap and scalable.

4. Precarity kills experimentation. True innovation needs time, failure, and subsidy. The post-war arts labs, the BBC, art schools, cheap rents, dole culture that allowed bands to rehearse for a year — that ecosystem has been stripped out. When musicians, writers and filmmakers have to be content creators and self-marketers to survive, there is no room for the long, useless, unprofitable experiments from which new forms emerge.

Fisher put it perfectly: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, and it is easier to imagine a new filter for an old photo than a new kind of culture altogether.

4. Can We Exorcise the Ghost?

Hauntology is not about giving up. Naming the ghost is the first step to getting rid of it.

If we want new futures again, we have to create the material conditions for them. That means funding the unprofitable, tolerating failure, building spaces — physical and digital — that are not instantly measured by engagement metrics. It means deliberately turning off the archive and making something that does not know what decade it is supposed to be from.

The future is not dead. It is just lost. We need to go and find it, instead of waiting for the algorithm to recommend it to us.

Yann Martel "Life of Pi" (Mariner Books)




This is the tie-in version to the film that I did not see when It came out and still haven't watched. in fact, it is the first time I have read this book. Better late than never.

Piscine Molitor Patel, son of a zookeeper from Pondicherry, India, moves with his family by boat to Canada in search of a better life. The boat sinks and Piscine (aka Pi) finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals and limited provisions. Among the most noteworthy of the animals is Richard Parker, a ferocious Bengal tiger. Pi sees no human survivors, spies no land, and is aware of only limited provisions on the lifeboat.

Absent any religious dogma, this is a book about religion. It’s about what individuals believe and how those beliefs make for a fuller, richer existence. It captures wonderful insight into animal psychology, particularly of large cats. Well written, this novel does not have its full effect until after the book ends. Then is the time to reflect on what was presented, ask more questions, think about the subject matter, decide one’s own personal theology, and provoke others into discussion. Don’t miss the chapter about the skies, seas, and winds. Outstanding! One caution: there are some very graphic descriptions of animal and human cruelty. Brace yourselves.

Sebastian Junger "The Perfect Storm" (Harper Perennial)




This excellent book tells the tale of a marine disaster in the Atlantic. It was gripping, intense, and informative. It is certainly one of the finest adventure stories I've ever read.

A perfect storm is a meteorological term meaning (according to Wikipedia) a unusually severe storm that comes about because of a rare combination of meteorological phenomena. It is a disaster if you are far out at sea, and it caused the end of a fishing boat and its crew in the fall of 1991. The Andrea Gail, a fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts was longline fishing for swordfish 575 miles offshore.

It's a harrowing tale. It also taught me a lot of things, including the fact that the fish that lands on our table at home or at the Red Lobster has been caught by men and women in the face of danger, far from home, and subject to accidents in a manner few jobs have. Captaining a commercial fishing boat requires so much knowledge, about navigation, weather, equipment, managing people. knowing how and when to call for help, and how to respect the sea that you're floating on. Never before have I read a book that stated so clearly how much can go wrong on an ocean-going vessel.

The book also made me look at extraordinary people who risk their lives daily to help others. The Coast Guard swimmers, people whom you drop from a helicopter to help open-sea rescues were the individuals who impressed me most. To volunteer to go into icy water, to rescue people who aren't even conscious, and to get them to safety is a job for which I have the utmost respect.

A Perfect Storm also looked closely at the families of the fishermen. This part broke my heart. I had to read about wives, girlfriends, parents and children of men who were never going to come home. This was hard reading for me.

A particular rescue off the coast of Nova Scotia's Sable island was particularly intense, and I had to ignore my body's cries for sleep in order to read to the end of the chapter.

Paul Brannigan "This Is A Call: The Life And Times Of Dave Grohl" (Harper)





This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl, is an in-depth, definitive biography that delves into the remarkable career of Dave Grohl, renowned for his involvement in Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures.

The material is drawn from ten years of original, exclusive interviews with Dave Grohl himself and industry people, including Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age frontman), Ian MacKaye (DC punk legend), and Butch Vig (producer of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”). It’s a candid conversation about Kurt Cobain, the internal conflicts within Nirvana, the challenges faced by Foo Fighters, and the moments that nearly led Grohl to quit music altogether.

He’s a brilliant musician and a man of great character, both of which have brought about his being one of the most recognizable and respected musicians globally. I believe this makes him a true hero of the American underground music scene and an excellent role model for young people pursuing music today.

Stillness

by Jazzy D





I have no edges,
yet you enter me.

I am louder
when you take something away.

The thief leaves me behind
when he takes everything.

A clock keeps me
by failing.

Between the second hand and the second hand,
I live.

Answer me without moving your mouth.
Your stillness speaks volumes.


(I wrote this short one back in the summer of 2006 at the back of a moleskin notebook, dated 12/08/06. I was in a fervid period of writing or trying at to write haikus and other short forms or cryptic verse.)

Benjamin Wood "Seascraper" (Penguin)




This is a novel of atmosphere and intelligence, one that rewards careful reading and invites rereading. At its heart, it considers ideas of obsession and compulsion along with grief, loss and emotional repression. Wood focuses on what happens when grief and loss are deferred rather than confronted. Tom Flett, the protagonist, wonders about his missing father, who he is told died in the war, and his deceased loving grandfather (Pop), who raised him and taught him a trade. With them, Wood explores how repression can resurface in distorted or obsessive forms. He admirably captures a mood of physical and emotional isolation while suggesting that isolation can intensify inner conflict.

The novel unfolds along a remote, windswept coastline in northern Britain. This is not a picturesque seaside but a stark, elemental environment that pervades every scene. The fictitious village of Longferry is sparsely populated, stripped of comfort and distraction. The setting reinforces Tom’s physical and psychological isolation. In this environment, Nature plays a commanding role. The sea functions as more than setting; it embodies indifference, persistence, and power beyond human scale. Yet humans persist with the impulse to structure, record and master it.

The novel also probes how people define themselves through work, purpose, or personal mythology. When these constructs begin to fracture, Tom is forced to confront uncomfortable questions about himself in the absence of the structures he has been relying on too easily. Tom is a 20-year-old shanker who scrapes for shrimp along the beach to support himself and his mother. He dreams of becoming a folk singer, though he lacks the confidence to perform publicly. When a charismatic American arrives with glowing stories about the film industry, Tom is captivated. For the first time, he imagines a different life. This, along with a vision he experiences during a life-threatening moment on the fog-shrouded beach, pushes him toward self-discovery. Clearly, one of Wood’s strengths as a writer is to resist neat resolutions. Elaborating on Tom’s motivations and emotions may have been enticing for a lesser writer, but Wood leaves them unresolved. Instead, he keeps Tom’s inner life in the foreground and resists turning him into a conventional fictional hero.

This is a remarkably well-executed novel that shows Benjamin Wood to be a gifted stylist of contemporary literary fiction. He does more than tell a story—he creates a world while simultaneously listening to the inner lives of his characters. Demonstrating remarkable restraint, Wood has created a haunting novel that stayed with me long after finishing it. He achieved this not through melodrama but through patience, nuance, and moral seriousness.

On the Vagaries of Old Age

by Jazzy D





The knees have learned a different weather,
they confer before the stairs.
What was once a spring, tight-coiled,
is now a careful negotiation.

Morning arrives a little later,
not in the sky, but in the bones.
The kettle boils faster than I wake,
and the newspaper print has grown shy.

Keys hide. Names hide.
Better at hide-and-seek than ever.
Yet I remember, clear as vinyl,
the chord change in All Blues,
the smell of my father's cooking,
the exact blue of a dress from fifty years ago.
What stays, stays deep.

Friends become photographs,
photographs become friends.
We speak more gently of the body,
not as a horse to be driven,
but as an old dog walking beside us —
loyal, stiff, deserving of rest.

There is a strange freedom in it.
The frantic auction of ambition quiets.
No need to be the loudest in the room.
I can afford to listen.
To the whole solo, not just my part.

Some days the instrument plays me.
Some days I still play it.
And in between, a long, fine pause —
which, any musician will tell you,
is where the music really lives.

The Flower Girl

by Jazzy D.




In white dress, with basket in hand,
she walks so careful across the land.

A flower girl on a summer day,
scattering petals to show the way.

Each petal falls soft, pink and white,
like little lanterns of morning light.

She takes her job so seriously,
step by step, so carefully.

One for joy, one for fun,
one to catch the golden sun.

The aisle behind her, a rosy trail,
left by her small and steady pail.

All eyes smile as she goes past,
making a fleeting moment last.

James De Mille "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" (Alma Classics)





The title really tells us a lot about the book. Four English gentlemen found a copper cylinder floating in the sea. When they opened it up they found a document purporting to be from an English sailor by the name of Adam Moore. More tells of becoming separated from his ship and his little boat being carried along a current in the sea near the Antarctic Circle. Eventually he ends up in a strange land which is the antithesis in all things to the society he is used to.

The four gentlemen read the document aloud and discuss it when they take breaks. This gives the reader a chance to think about the story and about the philosophy of the society in which Moore found himself. At times the writing is heavy-handed but probably did not seem so in 1888 when this book was first published (8 years after De Mille's death).

I found myself thinking of the novels of Jules Verne while reading the book and thinking that De Mille was probably influenced by those stories. Then, when I read the introduction after finishing the book (I try never to read introductions before reading a book because they invariably spoil the story) I found that Verne's novels were not translated into English until the 1880's after De Mille's death. The other book I was reminded of was Gulliver's Travels. Here I was probably closer to the mark according to the author of the introduction:
The antecedents to which De Mille was possibly indebted...were such satirical masterworks as Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon...

This book is meant to make you think and it does that. It is also entertaining.