Digital Events Archive - Page 12 of 85 - The Last Tuesday Society

My Dad Made a Monster: Family, Film & Fandom—a Zoom talk with Richard Hand

‘My father, Peter Hand, who passed away in 2024, was Head of Modelling at MGM in Borehamwood during the 1950s and ’60s,’ says Richard Hand. ‘He worked on a number of movies and built the various scale models – and the “man-in-suit” versions – for Gorgo (1961), Britain’s B-movie answer to Godzilla, after which he left the film industry. Before he died, he published his memoirs, A Spear Carrier in Search of a Role (2021), and they offer a fascinating, first-hand glimpse into a neglected corner of film history: the model studio.

‘Remarkably, I didn’t even know about my father’s work on Gorgo until years later. He was never interested in horror or pop culture, so while my older brother and I were obsessively building glow-in-the-dark Aurora monster kits, collecting issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and making our own scare attractions and Super-8 horror epics, I had no idea about my father’s dark cinematic secret… One day, my brother turned to me and said, “Did you know our dad actually made a monster?” I didn’t believe him, but it was completely true – and it changed the way I thought about our family and about the culture we grew up loving.

‘This talk reflects on my father’s story and the unexpected intersections of family memory, horror fandom, and lost film craftsmanship.Drawing on his memoirs and my own memories, I’ll explore how model work like his has been largely written out of official film histories, even as the monster he helped design and build – and others like it – have gone on to become cult icons. I’ll also consider how this story connects to wider patterns of horror fandom and culture: from model kit mania and magazines to the music of Frank Zappa, who in songs such as ‘Cheepnis’ famously celebrated low-budget monster movies.’

Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Head of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has a particular interest in historical forms of popular culture, especially horror, and is the author of two books on horror radio drama; the co-author (with Michael Wilson) of four books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre; the co-editor (with Jay McRoy) of two volumes on gothic/horror cinema; and the co-editor (with Mark O’Thomas) of a collection of essays on American Horror Story. As well as an academic, he is a theatre director and award-winning radio writer, including as lead dramatist for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air podcast drama which, in 2020, was archived by the Library of Congress for its ‘historical and cultural significance’.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: an adapted film promo poster for the 1961 British sci-fi movie Gorgo.]

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love – a Zoom talk with Philip Hoare

Visionary. Poet. Revolutionary. Mystic.

William Blake, much misunderstood in his own time, has been the inspiration for generations of artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians drawn to his radical vision of absolute freedom. Blake’s work spans the worldly and the spiritual, merging humanity, nature, and the divine in fantastical ways.

Award-winning author Philip Hoare’s powerful new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (pub. April 2025), shines the spotlight back onto Blake, reminding us that art still possesses the power to inspire and transform. Philip finds echoes of Blake’s visionary genius in artists including Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, in the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood, and in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

So, throw off your “mind-forg’d manacles” and join us to learn about one of England’s most remarkable and revolutionary 18th-/19th-century artists, in this illustrated online Zoom lecture (which will be followed by an audience Q&A session) from one of our finest contemporary writers.

Philip Hoare is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including biographies of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, and England’s Lost Eden (2005), about religious mania in the late-Victorian New Forest. Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and was followed by: The Sea Inside (2013); RisingTideFallingStar (2017), a literary love letter to David Bowie; and Albert and the Whale (2021), about the artist Albrecht Dürer. An experienced broadcaster and curator, Philip wrote and presented the BBC Arena programme The Hunt for Moby-Dick, directed three films for the BBC’s Whale Night, and organised The Moby-Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Big Reads.

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: a fragment of Behemoth and Leviathan from Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, 1826.]

Lucifer’s Firestarter – a Zoom talk with Fraser Grace

Join us to hear the true story of a devilish, nineteenth-century arsonist and national cause célèbre.

1833. After four years, twelve fires and the best efforts of London’s finest detectives, still no one had discovered the identity of the ‘devil’ with the gift of fire who was terrorizing the English countryside. With land reform sweeping through South Cambridgeshire, the unsolved scandal choked the columns of the nation’s newspapers, wrecking the reputation of the ‘ill-fated village’ of Shelford. Something had to give…

Come along – appropriately on the night before Bonfire Night – to find out how tensions were finally extinguished, and to discover the fiery fate of the notorious John Stallon…

‘It will always be like this, John thinks, this new power of mine. Like having a firework in your head.’

Your speaker this evening is the award-winning playwright Fraser Grace. During Covid he found himself without a theatre to write for, so turned to a long-held passion project – a local story from the village of Great Shelford in South Cambridgeshire, where he has lived for the past 28 years. Published by Galileo in May 2025, Firestarter is a form-busting piece of creative non-fiction based on the true story of John Stallon.

Previously, Fraser’s debut play Perpetua, won the Verity Bathgate Award and his Breakfast with Mugabe was the recipient of the Arts Council’s John Whiting Award for Best Play; it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Antony Sher, and later broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and The World Service. Fraser is the author of a further eight plays, and currently also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: detail taken from the cover of Firestarter.]

Decadent London – a Zoom talk with Antony Clayton

As the nineteenth century came to its end and the dawn of the twentieth century loomed, London was undergoing tremendous changes, establishing itself as the heart of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen. However, in the same decade that witnessed the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a diverse group of writers, artists and poets sought to subvert the oppressive cultural and moral atmosphere of the period. This was the city of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Frank Harris and Ernest Dowson, together with their less well-known compatriots Lionel Johnson, John Gray, John Davidson and the mysterious Count Stenbock.

Antony Clayton’s talk will investigate the artistic milieu of this turbulent time, when, despite their often louche lifestyles, many of the key players produced their finest work and helped contribute to the decade’s most innovative periodicals, The Yellow Book and The Savoy.

Join us as we stagger, metaphorically, down the streets and alleyways of Decadent London – from the Cheshire Cheese and Crown pubs, to the Cafe Royal and beyond…

About the Speaker

Antony Clayton is the author of Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London (2000), London’s Coffee Houses, a Stimulating Story (2003), Decadent London (2005), The Folklore of London (2008) and Secret Tunnels of England, Folklore & Fact (2015). He also co-edited (with Phil Baker) and contributed to Lord of Strange Deaths: the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (2015) and wrote Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (2012), which also featured contributions from David Tibet, Gary Lachman and Andy Sharp. His latest book is Mansion of Gloom: the Unsettling Legacy of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Accumulator Press, 2024).

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: ’The Cafe Royal’ by Adrian Allinson.]

WTFpots: putting the anal into artisanal – Sarah Sharp – Zoom

WTFpots: putting the anal into artisanal

Join me, Sarah Sharp AKA “prolapse lady” from WTFpots for a hilariously irreverent and uncensored deep dive into the world of bizarre, grotesque, and uncomfortably funny sculpture.

Known for crafting everything from stomas to custom dick pics, my lecture will take you on a journey from how I started Sculpting, funny & surprising stories and how I ended up being commissioned to work on a popular BBC show. Expect the absurd, crazy stories and a whole lot of clay anatomy.

WTFpots: putting the anal into artisanal: is a different talk that definitely will put a smile on your face.

Hosted & Curated by

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Drugs and Intelligence – Dr Maria Balaet – Zoom

Drugs and Intelligence: Associations between recreational drug use and cognitive ability in the general population

The Great British Intelligence Test recruited over 500,000 individuals between late 2019 and 2020, then longitudinally monitored 135,000 participants. The study involved comprehensive cognitive assessments alongside detailed surveys of lifestyle choices, including recreational drug use. Previous population studies indicated associations between prolonged or heavy use of certain illicit drugs, such as stimulants and cannabis, and impaired cognitive performance. In contrast, emerging evidence suggests that specific substances, like psychedelics, may be associated with enhanced performance in particular cognitive domains, including creativity, cognitive flexibility, and emotional processing. The current presentation focuses on the results from the large-scale analysis from the Great British Intelligence Test designed to address a decades-long debate about the associations between recreational drug use and cognitive function. It describes a distinctive cognitive profile—or “fingerprint”—that characterise recreational drug users, remaining consistent despite potential influences from alcohol or tobacco consumption, psychiatric, or neurological conditions. Particular attention is given to discussing nuanced associations between distinct drug classes, notably psychedelics, and specific cognitive abilities.

Speaker Bio

Dr Maria Balaet holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine and Computational Neuroscience from Imperial College London, which was funded by a prestigious award she received from the UK Medical Research Council. She is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. With over a decade of research experience, her work focuses on human intelligence and altered states of consciousness. Most notably, she has developed precision cognitive testing technology as part of the Cognitron Team and has led one of the largest longitudinal study arms in the world studying how naturalistic drug use including use of psychedelics associates with cognitive ability and mental health as part of the Great British Intelligence Test (which recruited over 500,000 participants). Outside of academic work, Maria has a passion for science communication and is a regular public speaker, podcast guest and panelist at a wide range of events. https://mariabalaet.com/

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Terror in the Dark: The Chilling Story of Live Horror Radio – Zoom talk with Richard Hand

Everyone has heard of The War of the Worlds, the (in)famous 1938 broadcast that supposedly sent America into a panic. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This talk will lure you into the weird, wild world of horror radio from the 1920s to the 1950s, the golden age of live broadcasting. Long before podcasts and streaming, radio ruled the airwaves, bringing thrilling, terrifying stories directly into the intimacy of people’s homes. Live, unfiltered, and often shockingly and gruesomely extreme (even to our modern ears), horror radio shows like The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave, Lights Out, Suspense, and Quiet, Please pushed the boundaries of storytelling with superb scriptwriting, ingenious sound effects, spine-chilling performances, and unforgettable hosts. These weren’t just spooky tales, they were immersive experiences that haunted the imaginations of millions.

This vivid talk will explore how horror found a perfect home in the invisible world of sound, how brilliant personalities were drawn to the genre, how stations competed to outdo each other in shock value and artistry, and how this era shaped modern audio storytelling. Expect moments of gore, ghostly sounds, and grisly secrets behind the microphone – plus a few surprises that may still give you goosebumps.

This talk is a love letter to a lost era of live horror radio – and a celebration of its enduring power to scare us senseless.

Are you brave enough to listen?

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: Boris Karloff performing in a radio play.]

The Mermaids of Staithes – a Zoom talk with Professor Sarah Peverley

The Mermaids of Staithes: Sea, Superstition, Egg-Broth and Loss in a Yorkshire Legend

Join mermaid expert Sarah Peverley for an illustrated talk about the vengeful tale of the mermaids of Staithes. Well-known locally along the north-east coast of Yorkshire, England, the legend concerns the capture and escape of two mermaids, who speak enigmatically about egg-broth and curse the community that hurts them. The tale has notable parallels with other mermaid stories from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, all of which were recorded in print from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, except the Staithes story.

Through deductive source analysis, this talk identifies the oldest verbal and published versions of the legend on record and explores analogues to the egg-broth superstition, which attest to the story’s emergence much earlier in the eighteenth century and connect it to popular superstitions about the sea. By situating the tale’s publication in context, it is also possible to connect its first occurrence in print to recurrent losses from inundations, coastal erosion and the economic decline of Staithes’s fishing industry in the early twentieth century. Featuring the sea, superstitions, mermaids, witches and folklore, there is something for everyone in the history of this charming tale.

Professor Sarah Peverley is an academic, writer and broadcaster who divides her time between being immersed in the depths of mermaid history and lost in the medieval world. As professor of medieval literature and culture at the University of Liverpool she teaches across English and History and regularly speaks at festivals and heritage events. She has consulted for organisations like Guinness World Records, and has written, presented or appeared in over eighty TV, radio and press features. She is currently writing a cultural history of the mermaid. For more information see www.sarahpeverley.com.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. He recently edited Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen (2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weirdseries. For further info see:
https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

Sorcery, Possession, and Hysteria: The Loudun Scandal of 1634 – Elizabeth Harper – Zoom

Sorcery, Possession, and Hysteria: The Loudun Scandal of 1634

On August 18^th, 1634, Father Urban Grandier, a priest in Loudun, France, was tortured and burned alive for sorcery. The proof of his guilt was eleven nuns who were possessed by the devil and had begun levitating, stripping their clothes off, and vomiting demonic pacts. Grandier was charged by the first to be possessed, the young Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels. She named him sight-unseen; as a cloistered nun she had no first-hand knowledge of him.

There seems to be a limitless appetite for the history of sorcery in Loudun. The case inspired dozens of non-fiction books, a “non-fiction novel” by Aldous Huxley, a play, philosophical works by Michel Foucault, and the still-censored X-rated film by Ken Russell. At the heart of each of these lies the same question: Why did Jeanne do it? I ask a different question: Why do we tell this story? There are many nearly identical contemporaneous cases, yet the story of Jeanne and Grandier continues to speak to us about power, gender, sex, religion, and justice today.

Bio:

Elizabeth Harper is independent researcher on Catholicism and saints. Her essays and photographs have appeared in Hazlitt, Lapam’s Quarterly, the LA Review of Books, Image Journal, Death: A Graveside Companion, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalogue, The Body in Color. Her essay, “The Cult of the Beheaded” was a notable selection in Best American Essays. She has spoken at venues such as Cornell University and as part of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Lecture series at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Assistant Professor of Lighting Design at the University of Southern California.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

A still from Kawalerowicz’s film, “Mère Jeanne des Anges” (1961)

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Slacks, shoulder pads and suspenders: A deep dive into the iconic costumes of 1980s Bonkbusters – Dr Julie Ripley

Slacks, shoulder pads and suspenders: A deep dive into the iconic costumes of 1980s Bonkbusters

The final lecture in the five-part Bonkbusters series, curated by Jo Parsons.

The lavish mini-series and films based on bestselling fiction by the likes of Jackie Collins, and Shirley Conran explored themes of sex and money in a style that typified the 1980s: glossy, gaudy, and greedy. These Bonkbusters provided audiences with a glimpse into the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and horny, their grand accommodations, opulent leisure pursuits, and perhaps, more than anything else, their taste in clothing – and underclothing.Joan and Jackie Collins: https://x.com/Joancollinsdbe/status/819631064431742976/photo/1

From power dressing in tailored suits to event wear with sparkles and shoulder pads, the clutch bag and stiletto were ubiquitous accessories: these were stories where glamour reigned supreme. Stockings and suspenders, thought to be banished forever by the advent of the mini skirt, returned, along with false eyelashes, long painted nails, and enormous hair.

In a period of accelerating consumer culture, Bonkbusters presented aspirational audiences with icons of success that could be – and were – widely copied. Even today, when you consider purchasing that vintage calf length coat in faux arctic fox, the seductively superior spirit of Joan Collins is included in the price.

In this talk, costume historian Julie Ripley explores the heady mix of synthetic fabric and sharp silhouettes that brought to life badly behaved characters who shopped, ‘bonked’, and entertained a public hungry for excess.

Bio:

Dr Julie Ripley is a course leader for Costume Design for Film & TV at Falmouth University. She has presented widely on dress history, clothing cultures and screen costume. She is interested in costumes where audience pleasures in the genre are not straightforward, such as 1970s slasher movies, contemporary ‘eat the rich’ storylines, or sleazy 1980s erotica.

Copyright free image.

Don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

SERIES OVERVIEW

Join us as we enter the glamourous and ruthless world of the Bonkbuster, a phenomenon in mid-late 20th century popular women’s writing, which showed us that sex and excess really does sell, and taught women they could come out on top in both bedroom and boardroom.