These days, when I can’t plug a gap in my memory with a quick Google, it genuinely frustrates me. A couple of these black spots in my mind have been with me for a long time.
I spent several years (admittedly not solidly) trying to remember the name of a sci-fi cartoon series I’d been obsessed with as a kid – though I did finally cross that one off the list.
I’ve never yet worked out what the show (or film?) was that featured a snowy landscape, and a terrible woman screaming, and some powerful objects, possibly including a glove… see what I mean? It’s un-Googleable. I remember it freaked me out tremendously, and I kept insisting on watching the next one and then being unable to sleep, before eventually accepting I should probably give up.
The other one, which I was put in mind of by my discovery that Young American Bodies was back on, was an independent Australian movie (I think, on both counts) about a young female college student with dark hair and glasses. I remember a scene where she lay on the grass with her friends, possibly smoking a joint, and I remember that she was sent repeatedly from one side of the uni to the other by two lecturers who kept referring her back to the other one. And I remember liking it, a lot, though as I would have been around 12 or 13 when I saw it the world it presented would have seemed impossibly exotic and exciting – so that may not be a particularly objective viewpoint.
I think it’s quite likely that it was one of the late-night films they used to show on Channel 4, back when their post-bedtime output was an absolute treasure trove of cult movies and weirdo comedies. That kind of thing is still around on the Web, but I loved that there was a weird time of night when you just tuned in to see something you’d never seen before. When the weirdness eventually died down around 3am, I’d tune the aerial on my ancient television – so ancient that I often had to wave the metal hoop around to get any kind of a signal – desperately trying to find something of a similar calibre, but by then it would just be Teletext, and news reports. Normal service had resumed.
