An emergency fill-in stream as your usual Monday host is occupied this evening, so enjoy this mishmash of things.
17:01 – Life & Death – Confined Space Safety
“As a subdivision of our best-selling “High Impact Series”, this program has a very unique approach where it starts on the scene of an accident and works backwards. With the characters and audience playing the part of an accident investigator, they use the clues to solve the mystery of how the incident occurred. This film has proven to be a highly effective training tool through its scared-straight, graphic nature.”
17:21 – Turn-On – Episode 1&2
Turn-On is an American surreal sketch comedy series created by Digby Wolfe and George Schlatter that aired once on ABC on Wednesday, February 5, 1969. Only one episode was shown partially before being cut off and pulled from ABC’s airing schedule, leaving another episode unaired. The show has since been considered one of the most infamous flops in TV history, with significantly low initial ratings and negative critical reception.
Turn-On’s premise was that it was “the first computerized TV show”, according to its opening sequence; the show had no sets except for a clinical white backdrop, where sketches generated by an artificially intelligent computer would be acted out. Unlike the generally appealing humor of Laugh-In, Turn-On was oriented around off-color humor and “focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject”,[1] using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits. Co-creator and production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a “visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people.”[2] Sounds created with Moog synthesizers were used in lieu of a laugh track, representing the computer’s laughter. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape; in a style of presentation that was novel for the time, several sketches and jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.
18:19 – Institute Benjamenta (1995) – Brothers Quay
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life is a 1995 drama film by the brothers Quay in their directorial debut. Based on Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten, the film stars Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and Gottfried John.
When Jakob (Mark Rylance) attends the Institute Benjamenta to learn the ways of servitude, his dream quickly takes on nightmarish qualities. Lisa (Alice Krige), one of the headmasters, is an intriguing beauty whom Jakob feels attracted to, but she seems emotionally unstable. Meanwhile, Lisa’s brother (Gottfried John) is entirely distracted from the school’s operations, and no new students ever arrive. The work is tedious, and the situation worsens when Lisa falls into a catatonic state.
20:00 – Altered (2006)
Altered is a 2006 American science fiction horror film directed by Eduardo Sánchez and written by Jamie Nash. It was Sánchez’s first solo effort as director, following his co-directing of The Blair Witch Project in 1999.
The plot is an inversion of the standard alien abduction formula, as four men abduct a lone alien, planning to wreak revenge on the invading species. In its early stages, the film was entitled Probed, and was intended as a comic homage to the work of Sam Raimi and Troma Entertainment.[1]
21:28 – VÄLVĒ – Live performance on Facebook, July 2023
22:18 – BBC Proms: Scott Walker Revisited (2017)
23:39 – Closedown