Night on Film: An A-Z of the Dark

I'm off now in search of a denizen of darkness.

CAT MIAOWS

Being a night watchman,

it's amazing the thoughts that pass through your mind.

It is dark and gloomy out at night. It is dull and black and scary.

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town.

Upstairs and downstairs, in his night gown.

Tapping at the window, crying through the lock.

Are the children in their beds? It's 7 o'clock.

Wee Willie Winkie in this rhyme hadn't heard of our summer time,

but really thoughtful parents know, children must sleep a lot to grow.

Although there's daylight till eleven,

they should be in their beds by seven.

Sleepy eyes and dragging feet spoil the finish of a treat.

So parents kind, remember do,

your children's health depends on you.

When Wee Willie Winkie calls on you at night,

Have the children in their beds, and tucked up tight.

Every night when I go to sleep I have cheese for supper,

and then it makes me dream because it lies on my chest.

How do you know it's the cheese that does it?

Because that's the only time I get nightmares.

How do you think cheese can make you dream?

Don't know.

-Do you stop eating cheese?

-No.

Why not?

Because my mum doesn't cook anything else,

except cheese on toast at night.

It's the latest answer to insomnia,

invented by three electronics engineers at Ruislip, Middlesex.

An electronic teddy bear.

From a box of electronic tricks still on the secrets list,

air is pumped into it at the normal breathing rate of a human being,

ten to 12 breaths a minute.

The effect is to provide a cuddlesome toy

whose rhythmically rising and falling chest

helps slow your breathing rate down

to the relaxed and steady rate of sleep.

Three-year-old Russell Fairbrass, son of one of the three inventors,

finds it easier than counting sheep

after a hectic session in the playpen.

Only air is pumped in, so there's no danger of electric shocks.

In fact, members of the medical profession

predict a great future for the idea

with invalids and elderly people as well as children.

Not only sheep-counting, but drug-taking may on the way out now,

thanks to the electronic teddy bear.

BELLS RING

Our night is their day, the time when they feed and fight and mate,

and live out lives which we never see.

High in the belfry, the first night animals start to stir.

By human standards, bats are upside-down creatures.

Not only do they hang by their feet,

they are active solely during the hours of darkness.

They monitor their world with ears, not eyes.

As dusk falls, they take to the wing.

They're flying now all around my head.

This cave, this particular part of it...

make -

the ammonia is really quite choking -

makes a very perfect place for a home.

This great dune is not a dune of sand.

It's a dune of guano, of animal droppings of one kind and another.

The entire surface of it

is covered with a glistening, moving carpet of cockroaches.

It's an extraordinary example of how prolific

this part of Borneo can be,

that it can support all this enormous colony of bats,

and a huge demonstration, as impressive as I could imagine,

of what a marvellous place

some animals think a cave is in which to live.

We found a colony of a different sort of bats.

The giant fruit bat or flying fox.

And here is one of these fruit bats, and with him is Mr Dolby,

from the London Zoo, who looks after him.

Come on. How long have you had this one, Mr Dolby?

This particular one we've had for the last nine year.

-So they obviously do very well.

-Very well indeed in captivity.

Shall we just hang him up? Flop over.

That's fine!

Now we'll turn him round so that people can see his face.

Because a very foxy-looking face. So, just by a bit of... Whoops!

..television trickery, to show you how foxy he is,

we will turn him upside down.

And now you can see what he looks like

if he were the right way up, like any normal mammal.

Well, I think he's very nice, although actually,

-I wouldn't keep him as a pet.

-Why?

He's got a bit of a smell on him.

A lot of people say so, but I think that really applies to

only the animal that's really run down.

-Yes, it certainly...

-It's pretty, really.

-Well, yes, I suppose so.

Every man to his taste. I'll let you keep him, I think.

Step in and see how, for the last quarter of a century,

your coal was won.

And how it is still won

at two-thirds of the coal faces of Britain,

24 hours round the clock.

There's a comradeship there which I can't really define, you know.

But it's there, you can feel it. You know.

You feel a confidence in your fellow workers.

-Hell, what a driver.

-I bet you a dollar it's Albert.

-I bet it is.

What's it like?

Everybody's the same, down the pit.

You work with just a certain few men,

and you work with them all the while, probably, for years in my case.

You get to know these men, you talk about your home life

and your social lives and that.

And you're in a little world on your own.

It's a dirty job. We all know that.

I mean, you can't sit and eat your snap in the canteen or anything,

you've got to sit and eat it where you are with dirty hands

and all that sort of thing.

No toilets, nothing like that.

So I think myself, it's a pretty dirty job.

You've got to make a seat out of anything that's lying around.

You haven't got chairs or anything to sit on.

You just pick a piece of wood up and put it down,

you just sit there, everyone just sits around while they're eating,

having a bit of chat, and carrying on and joking.

Right, chaps, knock off!

Don McCullin is one of the world's most celebrated photographers.

For the last 20 years,

his photo essays have been a regular feature of our Sunday newspapers.

I like to shoot pictures at night times and dusk

because I think they have much more impact.

And I feel that the whole thing is much more fiery and exciting,

as opposed to sunshine, which I hate to shoot in.

I do my own printing, because I can keep control of the whole thing.

And I started off thinking my prints were like nobody else's prints.

And I waste a lot of paper, I know,

but when I'm printing in the darkroom, I just...

my hand reaches out for paper and I expect it to be there.

I'm just like a kind of glutton of a schoolboy with sweets,

I don't care until the last one is gone

and then I realise the last one is gone.

There's no more paper, I've got to stop printing.

But I think I can say that nobody can squeeze any more

from a negative than what I've done, by the time I print it.

And then sometimes I finish when it's dawn,

and my hands are numb with the freezing cold water

that you have to keep using.

I know there's no turning back,

I know there's no other occupation that I could settle down in.

If I had to stop photography, for some reason or other,

I just don't know what the hell I'd do with myself.

I'm just no good at anything else in the world but taking pictures.

Mr Edison's best-known invention is, of course, the gramophone,

but his discovery of the electric light bulb

literally revolutionised the illumination of the world.

The electrons bump the atoms, and make the filament first red hot

and then white hot.

Now let's see how these bulbs are manufactured.

This central stem is now complete and moves on to the next stage.

Here, the bulbs are introduced.

And they are placed over the filament stems.

Later on, the bulbs are sealed off and after testing,

they'll be ready for use.

Gerry Holmes prefers 40 watts.

He finds 60 is a bit too sharp for his palate.

Our cameraman in Sydney accepted his invitation to dinner,

but declined to share the meal.

The mole.

Surprisingly common, yet hardly ever seen.

In a private system of tunnels, the mole follows a secret life,

spent in total darkness under the ground.

Under this beech canopy,

there are several families of badgers

living in a complex of setts.

We sat well away from the sett in a caravan.

In the knowledge that we might see a complete family

emerging from their sett to go about their nightly business.

Or that we might see nothing at all.

What we're doing out there

is throwing infrared light onto our badger sett.

You can see the light just up there in the top left-hand corner.

Our cameras react to it and give us these pictures in the dark,

and there is a badger.

That is the first television picture, live, of a badger,

ever seen on television through this unique system.

And doing the watching and waiting with me are Phil Drabble,

who a lot of you will know, and Chris Cheeseman,

who's a zoologist with us.

-Marvellous, isn't it, Phil?

-Absolutely marvellous.

I'd rather have a night's badger watching than a week's holiday.

You can come for hours and hours and see nothing at all,

and suddenly out of the blue,

you get a badger come out like this, completely at ease.

The wild red fox. Nocturnal and elusive.

After a thousand night-long vigils,

stalking with infrared binoculars in pursuit of a quarry

of such legendary cunning, tonight, I'm in luck.

I've trapped a fox and I've got to move fast.

Hello, Jenny. Yeah, I've got one.

'My wife Jenny is used to being got out of bed at three in the morning.

'She has a touch of flu but, even so, the fox must come first.'

Come on, son.

Hold the sack open.

There we are, lovely boy.

'I have to take care for, understandably,

'the fox attaches low priority to the wellbeing of my fingers.'

Yeah, get him in.

Have you got his mouth?

-Have you got him?

-Yeah, I've got him.

'Fortunately, the rather crude but effective anaesthetic

'will blur any memory of the incident.

'Attached to this collar is a miniature radio

'weighing only a few ounces.

'It transmits continuous signals

'that I can follow around the countryside.'

There we go, son. It's all over.

There we are. Come on. There we are.

Shrews.

The young have their own particular way of ensuring they don't get lost.

There are still 2,000 gas lamps in the London area

but the 102 here in the Temple are the only ones

turned on by the paraffin torch of a lamplighter.

It adds a touch of old world elegance

to an area already full of tradition.

# He made the night a little brighter

# Wherever he would go

# The old lamplighter

# Of long, long ago

# His snowy hair was so much whiter

# Beneath the candle glow

# The old lamplighter

# Of long, long ago. #

'But the traditional image of the lamplighter -

'a little old man with snowy hair -

'doesn't exactly fit Ivan Ramnoth.

'He was an insurance underwriter in Guyana

'and had never seen a gas lamp until he emigrated to England.'

-And how long have you been doing it?

-16 years now.

-Every day for 16 years?

Every day of the year, yes, unless I'm ill.

-How do you manage holidays?

-Someone else has to do it then.

Are you going to do this until you're old enough to retire?

Yes, I'm accustomed to the job, I like the job

and I shall continue until it's time to retire.

# The old lamplighter

-# Of long, long ago.

-#

Halloween, the bewitching eve,

when any hobgoblin worth his salt

is up to all sorts of magical mischief.

When people a long time dead, they say, return to their old haunts.

She's a Halloween witch.

I wonder if you can guess what she's made out of.

Her face is, in fact, a plastic lemon

and this very witch-like looking hair is the top of a mop.

You need a plastic lemon.

Make a small hole big enough to push through the end of a dish mop.

Tiny little bits of sticky-backed plastic.

Yes, I've just about got them in the right place.

Draw the shape of the arms and the skirt.

And the hands are made with felt again.

Put a little bit of glue round here and just inside the dress.

And there you are, you've got your witch.

And you can make a wizard as well. You make it exactly the same way.

Instead of a broomstick, you've got a wand. There you are.

"Hello, cast a spell again. Ha-ha! I won! I won!"

-Tell us how long you sleep every day.

-An average of an hour a night.

What do you do with your spare time?

I'm always writing or reading or painting or sewing

or knitting or crocheting.

-Do you not feel tired?

-No, I never feel tired.

I have been sleeping for 15 minutes a night maximum

since I was about 16 years old.

Over 30 years now.

I don't need sleep. I don't like sleeping.

And even the 15 minutes I sleep now I rather begrudge.

If you take into account my inability to sleep,

and most people would call that a horrifying thought,

to me it's a wonderful thought.

It means I get two whole lives to everybody's one.

This has had a tremendous affect on my life, this non-sleeping.

I mean, I was operating during the war. I was flying.

I was always able to wake the crews up in my squadron,

any time they needed to be woken up.

Two, three, four in the morning, it didn't matter.

Would you like to sleep like other people for eight hours a day?

Well, it would...

..it would be cheaper because I have to burn electricity during the night.

That's the only reason. No, I don't see any reason to want to sleep.

I think it's a frightful waste of time.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

London's rhythm enthusiasts of all ages put on their zoot suits

and go to town.

To be precise, Oxford Street.

A normally sedate restaurant surrenders its dignity

to the excitement of the dancers and the music of Humphrey Lyttelton.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

It's good fun and good exercise.

Rhythm is the only stimulus as drinks are strictly non-alcoholic.

Mid evening, and the known world of the youth club and the pub

and the cafe and the cinema is in full swing.

# Me and my brother was going to town

# Sing away ladies, sing away

# Riding a billy goat and leading a hound

# Sing away ladies, sing away

# Hound dog bark, billy goat jump... #

# Don't you rock me, daddy-o, don't you rock me, daddy-o

# Don't you rock me, daddy-o, don't you rock me, daddy-o. #

LOUD KNOCKS

DOG BARKS

Nearly morning. It's gone colder.

Already the knocker-up is moving briskly down the streets,

rattling on the windows of his sleeping customers.

I asked him why the knocker-up still flourished.

After all, I said, there are plenty of alarm clocks.

Oh, there's plenty of alarm clocks,

but they don't trust them, that's all.

An alarm clock is not a human being. An alarm clock can break down.

-But you can break down too.

-Ah, but if I break down, I have my brother.

The night of the harvest moon.

The fat silver moon that shines on the golden fields of September

and illuminates the mysterious activities

of people who move in the night.

People like this, setting out on some dark business

which has led them to the banks of a West Country chalk stream.

We're keeping up an old country tradition

by going out on the night of the harvest moon

in search of fresh water crayfish.

The nets are swung into the water on a forked stick

and left there lying on the bottom, long enough, so it's said,

for a man to drink a pint of beer in comfort.

Then it's only a matter of filling the bucket.

Having caught your crayfish,

the country custom on the night of the harvest moon is to have a feast.

Crayfish with the traditional accompaniments of hot parsley sauce,

home-made bread, farmed butter and kegs of cider

are followed by creamy Cheddar cheese.

And that's the proper way to cook them -

in an iron fish kettle of salted water over a camp fire in the open.

I believe that this nation should commit itself

to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,

of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

I think that each one of us carries his own impression

of what he's seen today.

I know my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely,

forbidding expanse of nothing.

-Well, Patrick Moore, what did you think of that?

-Quite incredible.

One thing we've got to bear in mind, they were magnificent pictures.

I'm not going to say they show more detail than the orbiters,

but people were seeing them direct for the first time,

this was bound to add to our knowledge.

-'OK, engines stopped. We've had shut down.

-We copy you down, Eagle.

'Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.'

THEY CHEER

# I was strolling on the moon one day

# In the merry, merry month of December. #

-No, May.

-May, that's right.

This is perfect with the rover and you and the old flag.

Oh, this is going to be some kind of different ride.

# Night clubbing, night clubbing

# We're what's happening. #

-There's a tiny one around here somewhere.

-A tiny one?

-Is that an official name?

-A micro.

-Oh, a micro. I've heard of them.

-They're unidentifiable.

-That's right, yes.

-Troublesome one.

-That's a Powdered Quaker.

A Powdered Quaker, get that for a name.

A lot of these names, Victorian clergy named these moths

and, of course, some of the names are absolutely gorgeous.

-Lots of Quakers.

-Lots of Quakers.

And things like the Hebrew Character.

-There's even a True Lover's Knot.

-True Lover's Knot?

Was that a vicar's? I don't think a vicar named that one. Surely not.

-Ooh, what's this?

-This is one called a Great Prominent. It's very worn.

-You see the edges of the wings?

-Yes, I do.

-Does that mean it's old or what?

-Been out quite a long time, yeah.

-And what would be old for a moth?

-One of these, a matter of weeks.

Not more than five weeks.

-Some overwinter, as adults, they actually hibernate.

-Yeah.

So they last several months,

but the majority of them it's just a matter of a few weeks.

Really? That's sad, that, isn't it?

For more than two million people in this country,

night work is a matter of necessity.

In steel towns like Sheffield and Rotherham,

there is a century-old tradition of working round the clock.

Men and their families have accepted for generations

that this is the way wages are earned here.

That it's night work that pays the rent

and leaves a bit over for the HP on the television.

Now more and more industries demand continuous working,

need round-the-clock production.

Machinery is too expensive to lie idle while men lie in bed.

The answer - more night people.

The problem - how to turn your life upside down without ill effect.

I start at ten o'clock at night and finish at seven in the morning.

Seven days on and seven off. There's floor polishing,

damp dusting, mopping, vaccing, sinks.

Besides cleaning vomit and blood and whatever else falls there

on the floor!

A woollen mill,

and these men working through the night are rat-catchers.

He's here. Skiddle-up!

Grab him, grab him. That's it. Finish him off, you lot.

Aye, she's done him.

I don't think I am supposed to really, in my contract, mop it up.

I think nursing staff's supposed to clean it,

but the simple reason, a domestic's on there to clean,

so, if I aren't there to clean blood up,

it's a waste of time me being there anyway.

So we all work as a team on there.

Nothing goes without one another so I automatically do it.

You've got to do all your shunting on a night time,

when your long haul's on a night time with the flight times,

to get them through, you see.

On its own, 12.

You know, being a night watchman,

it's amazing the thoughts that pass through your mind

here alone in the factory at night.

Sometimes I think the factory is like a huge ship.

A great golden ship rushing through the night,

and I, inside in safety.

I like coming. I like nights. It's quieter, for me.

I see more of the kids than what I did when I worked days.

You're your own boss. You've got to work on your own initiative.

I like that.

OWL HOOTS

CHILD: The wind is whistling through the tree tops.

I hear the hooting of an owl high up in the tree tops.

It is dark and gloomy out at night.

It is dull and black and scary.

A very ordinary-looking council house, but don't be deceived.

When night falls and the moon is bright, it takes on an evil air.

It's inhabited by a lady in white, a nun,

and a tall man in a black cape with a gold choker.

The householder, Mrs Joyce Bowles,

gets so nervy that she sleeps with her friend Bridget

when her husband is away working nights on the railway.

Bridget's willingly demonstrated some of the ghosts' antics.

This thing starts creaking.

I didn't know what it was in the beginning, but I worked out

it's the door trying to open, which it eventually does, like this.

And then it starts moving like this,

and these things fly out.

It must be very frightening?

Well, it was in the beginning but I got used to it.

After a while, they take off.

I mean, I can be laying in bed and I'm touched.

Something just comes up and touches me with their hands.

-Touches you?

-It touches me as though they're trying to wake me up.

So then one night, or several nights running it happened,

that Joyce says, "Bridget!"

And I look across and this mattress lifts itself up

and tilts Joyce towards me which is rather alarming.

I have slung my leg and one arm across trying to hold it down,

which is quite a job.

After that, we hear seven knocks.

SHE KNOCKS

-Seven knocks?

-Always seven, which means it's the end of it.

One night I got out of bed and got back in, and all of a sudden

this heavy breathing started and it sort of went...

SHE BREATHES HEAVILY

You see?

And the next thing I noticed was a rustling,

something settling on my head.

And Joyce must have looked up and she said, "Oh, my dolly!"

And this one had flown from here and settled on my head.

Does it frighten you?

How do you feel about all these guests in your house?

Well, I'm not going to say I'm never afraid, because I am.

But I have been told that wherever I move, it can move with me.

-So there's no point getting out of the house?

-No.

Where the nun fits into the picture nobody seems to know.

And why the ghost should wish to interfere with

Mrs Bowles' bedside cabinet in her 1919 council house

is anybody's guess.

I'm off now in search of a denizen of darkness.

Somewhere underneath the bushes,

the old slug hunter is lurking.

'The hedgehog is still very much a creature of the night

'but it's too big to hide in the leaf litter.

'That makes it vulnerable to attack from animals like foxes.

'To make up for this, its hairs have become a cloak of prickles.'

And if it thinks it's in real danger, it's got a special trick.

'The hedgehog will stay an impregnable spiny ball like this

'until it decides that danger has passed.'

How many prickles does a hedgehog have?

That's not a riddle. I mean it. How many?

6,000. I mean, not exactly, but about 6,000.

And they change them over a period of 18 months. Not all at once of course.

You can't have bald hedgehogs running around, can you?

'But one thing is guaranteed to make a male hedgehog drop his guard.

'The promise of an amorous liaison.

'If you're outside on a spring evening,

'you may be lucky enough to witness an extraordinary sight.'

You might think that having a coat of spines on your back

would be something of a handicap

when it comes to the intimacies of courtship, and indeed,

classical naturalists thought that hedgehogs actually mated

belly to belly.

'But it does seem that the old joke that asks,

'"How do hedgehogs mate?" was right all along.

'The answer is, of course, with great care.'

Something we see almost every day yet rarely notice until it's dark.

So small, we pass over it without a thought.

Percy Shaw invented the cat's eye.

Who'd have thought of putting glass in the road to run over,

-40 years ago? Eh?

-Well, you did, didn't you?

Well, I gave them plenty of protection.

One night, driving back in the dark and fog,

after he'd had a few, let's be honest,

he noticed two little points of light in the road

and he stopped to see what they were.

He quickly realised it must have just been a cat,

but he also realised that, if he hadn't stopped,

he'd have driven off the edge and into a valley.

That was his eureka moment.

And this was the result.

And it's genius, frankly.

Not only does it light the road ahead, it also maintains itself.

This base bit, that's a piece of cast iron,

that will essentially last forever.

The eyes themselves are fitted into this easily replaced rubber bit

and every time a vehicle drives over it,

the cat's eyes get a little wipe.

It's brilliant.

The starling, probably not most people's favourite bird.

A bit of a bully on the bird table,

and yet I reckon starlings are responsible

for one of the most mesmerising spectacles in the whole of nature.

I'd say there's at least 4,000 birds up there at the moment.

And still they keep coming.

I feel like I ought to be conducting them.

All together...

It's the shapes though.

I know it's the obvious thing to say,

but just watch how these shapes change.

And down they go. Cascading down.

The waterfall.

Who'd have thought it, eh?

If somebody said to me,

"What are the most memorable creatures you've seen?

"Is it lions, or sharks, or elephants...?"

And I'd say...starlings.

Just one little mushroom left.

Like a parachute, nearly all down.

The paraffin vaporises, goes up through into the burner head,

and comes out at the mantle as a vapour.

You simply light the vapour, and...

up the light comes, one big white ball of light.

I think to myself, hundreds of years ago,

all ship's masters saw that very same light,

from that very same lens, from those very same oil burners.

-Roger, time to get up.

-I don't mind.

-I'm still searching for fog.

-Yeah.

Bring up some testing charges when you come up, all right?

-OK, mate. On my way.

-Cheers.

Occasionally, when it's a wet and dirty, foggy night

and you're operating the fog signal,

this I do not like doing.

You're up on the lantern, all the watch,

especially of a middle watch.

As I said, it's thick fog, or misty rain,

you have to go round the gallery every ten minutes

and hang up your charges,

the rain running off the glazing, down the back of your neck,

you're feeling thoroughly wet through, cold,

this I do not enjoy doing.

CLOCK DINGS

LOUD BANG

But it's got to be done.

There again, I feel a slight sense of achievement.

I think to myself,

"Well, if I hadn't done this, a ship might come in pretty close,

"and hit the rocks

"if it hadn't been for me operating that signal and warning him

-"that we're here."

-CLOCK DINGS

LOUD BANG

My wife has often asked me what it's like at Bishop.

I try to explain to her

but somehow, she says, "I don't understand."

I try to tell her that it's like home to me,

but she says, "Your home is here, not on the Bishop."

But it isn't really.

My home is on the Bishop.

After all, I spend two-thirds of the year here,

so obviously the Bishop is my home. It's got to be.

Some of the big gang boys. Look at 'em!

All done no good on last week's pools,

so they're back to heaving dirty big rails about in the tunnels.

Yes, while you're pressing the mattress

there's me and 1,119 others like me

hard at it, down the hole.

There's a lot of that in London's underground.

130 miles of hole.

And this is me in it.

Jack Bedwell. Section ganger on routine inspection.

Rails, cables, foreign bodies,

lights, brackets... the last nut and bolt.

-NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:

-'They are the fluffers.

'The charladies of the underground.

'Into the cavernous blackness of the twisting tunnels,

'between the rails which link station to station,

'office to home, the fluffers march each midnight.

'While London dreams, knives and brush clean the lines

'that will carry tomorrow's traffic.

'Like glow worms,

'night by night the fluffers wash behind the ears of

'the 90 miles of London's tube track.

'Yes, these are the fluffers.

'People of another world

'who see the sunshine only for a fleeting hour each day.

Highgate Cemetery, officially opened in 1839,

was once described as the most beautiful resting place in London.

In the last few years,

vandals stalking around the overgrown tombs

have done over £9,000 worth of damage.

But to general foreman of the gravediggers,

William Law, who has worked here 23 years,

it's worsened an already harrowing job.

Down this part here,

there's two tombs broken into.

One on the left hand side here,

the doors were broken open,

the coffin was half pulled over, and a big iron stake

was stuck through, into the coffin.

These indications of a black ritualism at work

aroused the curiosity of Sean Manchester,

26-year-old president of the British Occult Society,

an organisation that practises the art of white magic,

the combat of evil.

Our first report indicated that there may be a vampire

in Highgate Cemetery.

A spectre was seen at that gate there,

appearing to come from here,

which leads to the catacombs.

A former associate of Mr Manchester,

Alan Farront, who used to own this tobacconist's shop in Highgate,

decided to pay a midnight visit to the cemetery

to combat the vampire once and for all.

He armed himself with a cross and stake

and crouched between the tombstones, waiting.

Have you ever seen this vampire?

I have seen it, yes.

I saw it last February, and I saw it on two occasions.

What was it like?

It took the form of a tall, grey figure,

about eight feet tall,

and it seemed to glide off the path without making any noise.

The only certain way of destroying an undead...

..is by driving a wooden stake, like the one I have here,

straight through the heart with one blow.

I think they're nutcases, actually. That's my opinion.

I've worked here all night long.

All day long, all night long - I've never seen nothing,

so I don't see why they should.

This time, when it started - this vampire business -

in the evening time, there's 100-odd people outside the gates

and they was all trying to climb over the walls

and one person said they saw a horrible grey thing

wriggling down the road. All this bloody nonsense.

The best thing to do,

if we could catch one of these people, to stop this nonsense, is to

put him in one of these tombs and leave him there all night.

See if in fact he can find a vampire.

Satan, get ye behind me and be gone from this place forever.

AIR RAID SIREN

EXPLOSIONS

Royal Air Force observers

tell us that the blackout in Britain at night is pretty good,

but in the morning it's not so good,

although it's every bit as important.

Take this house in the suburbs, the house of a well-known Mr Twerp.

He switches on a lamp when he wakes up,

forgetting that he removed the blackout before he went to sleep.

When he gets up, he wanders from room to room, reading the paper

and waking the butler

and one thing and another, and the result outside is simply appalling.

Mr and Mrs Twerp are particularly liable

to forget the back of the house.

A light from the kitchen can be seen in the sky

just as easily as one in the front.

Another point in the blackout occurs on the way to the office.

Mr Twerp decides to have a blackout on the old bike.

He forgets that because he can see,

he may not be visible to others until the last moment.

It's a good job we're not all Twerps, isn't it?

The lights blaze and dance. A city with her make-up on,

and in the side streets that criss-cross their devious ways

behind the arteries of light, and in the alleys

where the lamps are low, the clubs and the easy-money joints,

the fashionable nightspots, as proud of their respectability

as a girl of her first mink.

The all-night cafes and the nude shows.

Soho.

Life after dark with an enamelled gloss and the cracks showing,

garish, gay, avaricious and a little sleazy at the edges.

Don't copy this technique, girls,

unless you've got central heating in your bedroom.

-Are you ever nude when you're stripped? Completely nude?

-No, no.

-Never?

-No.

-Would you ever be?

-No, I don't think so, no.

Midnight.

Annette Wilson is 20 and a trained dancer,

but at 20, dancing doesn't pay as much as stripping.

She's married, works four clubs at once, does up to 50 shows a shift.

To keep her schedule, she runs from club to club in Soho,

dresses and undresses with the expediency

of a fireman answering an alarm.

2:00am and home to husband Colin,

a poet, painter and designer of Aztec jewellery.

-So why does she work, and why as a stripper?

-Um...

The money. You know?

Colin and I were broke and we were talking about it,

and since I can dance and I have a bit of ballet,

I just decided, well, you know, why not?

-Do you enjoy it?

-No.

It's a job,

and that's all. You know?

Then we cut a line to the centre.

And then bend it round, and that has to be stuck, then,

and covered in material.

Having done that, now we have an almost finished one.

All that's left to do is to make it stick to me.

Now, the way I usually do my tassels

is to start with them both going to the right,

so that way,

and then one at a time,

and then the other,

outside,

and then in reverse, with them both together.

It's the initial shoulder movement that starts them off, I find,

but it's rather difficult to explain. It just seems to happen.

That way.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hi!

# Come on, come on!

# Come on, come on!

# Come on, come on, come on... #

It's no good starting off too crude,

because women certainly don't like it crude.

CHEERING

If you didn't do the strip at the end of the evening, there's no way

you'd get out the door alive, and it's as easy as that.

# Do you wanna touch? Yeah! #

-SHE SQUEALS

-# Yeah, yeah... #

# Do you wanna touch? Yeah!

# Do you wanna touch? Yeah!

# Do you wanna touch... #

-CHANTING:

-Off! Off! Off! Off!

POLICE SIREN

Good morning, sir. Just a routine check.

-Can you tell me where you're going?

-The bakery. I'm going to work.

The first one comes in, puts the lights on, of course,

and puts the ovens on.

And then he puts the first mixing on,

which takes about 20 minutes to mix.

And then puts it through the machine,

in one-pound loaves and two-pound loaves.

And then by the time he's done that, the oven is up to its temperature

and then we can start baking.

Most of our customers, now, are used to...

When they buy it, it's still warm and fresh,

and still steaming a little bit.

People aren't so daft today, in that when they do buy things,

they like to feel them, and if they're not fresh,

they will complain about it,

so that's why we make ours fresh every day.

DOG BARKING

CAT MIAOWING

DOG BARKING

CRICKETS CHIRRUPING

FOOTSTEPS

OWL HOOTING

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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