‘Callan’: Television’s First Anti-Establishment Spy Series

By Joseph Oldham

He was a working-class loner, with roots in the social realist British New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s—plays, novels, and films associated with the “angry young men” exploring the very class tensions that Wilson’s “New Britain” had ostensibly smoothed over. Callan occupied a violent and grubby world, with one foot in the sinister bureaucracy of a professional intelligence service, and another in the criminal underworld of London…

Squaring the Circle: An American Becomes One of the ‘Children of the Stones’

By Michael Grasso

I’m not likely to add much to the thousands upon thousands of words penned over the past decade or so on how formative an experience watching Children of the Stones (1977) as a kid was. Now considered one of the signal works forming the foundation of the British folk horror and hauntological aesthetics, the series is a brilliant melding of folk memory and technological aspiration, of magic and science, of tradition and progress, done in that ineffable way that only the British seem able to express satisfactorily…