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Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms
- GenresNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
Published November 19, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 13, 2025
I can't be doing with this codswallop. Full of meaningless jargon, signifying nothing. Avoid!
I meant to include a few illustrative sentences so you can get feel for the tone, so here we go:
"A folk politics of the ancient insufflates the radicalism and counter-cultural social expression of 1974"
"The Green Man mysticism of British culture is a metonym of the spirit of place, but is re-written as a collective historicism hand in hand with Tudorbethan nostalgia"
"Damp is a validation of squalid yet sacred materiality as a rhetoric of corruption (a contagion that will be a modality later of the Essex marshes themselves)"
It goes on and on like this....
I meant to include a few illustrative sentences so you can get feel for the tone, so here we go:
"A folk politics of the ancient insufflates the radicalism and counter-cultural social expression of 1974"
"The Green Man mysticism of British culture is a metonym of the spirit of place, but is re-written as a collective historicism hand in hand with Tudorbethan nostalgia"
"Damp is a validation of squalid yet sacred materiality as a rhetoric of corruption (a contagion that will be a modality later of the Essex marshes themselves)"
It goes on and on like this....
October 21, 2024
I don't ordinarily do 'magick', 'sigils' and the like but I could believe in Leonard Rossiter as 1970s psychopomp, smearing misery and brilliance across the decades, defining a moment of change and transformation and the residues left before and after it. As prose, Code:Damp is a blast of excitingly fetid air - every sentence taking you somewhere other than where you were at the start of it, packed full of hallucinatory energy and weirdness, and so so so refreshing given the 2020s' default settings of 'polite' and 'scolding'. This would be a 5/5 from me if trimmed by 50 pages or so, because I still don't really understand why so much of it is about a) Essex and b) cuneiform, and though it seems mean to argue something so deliberately untrammelled could be better if more coherent, Code:Damp is so superb when it loops back to Leonard, VHS static and 1970s carpets that I wanted it to stay right there. Strongly recommended in any case!
Read
January 21, 2025Utterly preposterous, impossible to rate or recommend, but often delightful and even inspiring, tailored to me in ways that became increasingly uncanny as it went on. (Grot!) Made me want to watch Reginald Perrin and read The Bog People by P.V. Glob. Perhaps I'm a bore but at times found myself wishing it'd been edited a little more firmly (pace the legendary Tariq Goddard), not to rein it in so much as to channel its unholy madness in a slightly more precise way - typos, grammatical errors and little factual mistakes abound, and though that might be in the spirit of the booze-soaked, damp-ridden, slapdash aesthetic of '70s naffness to which the book as a whole is a pagan hymn, I still think it would be even more potent without them. (Grom!) Petition for Sleigh-Johnson to write an entire book on pubs; in the meantime, get her to the Vic.
February 20, 2025
A cautionary hermeneutical tale about not leafing through a book and reading a sample before purchasing. Semantics. Retroactive. Detourned.
What started out as an esoteric deracinated contemplation of 1970s British sitcoms hauntological soon becomes finessed into a hegemony of futility, leaving only a sense of chaos and the liminal new dawn of understatement and unwanted Christmas presents.
As temporal phenomena situationist distorted through emergent and critical practice, the exhausted-recursive reader is left with no hymn to the outposts of our condition….and a big old plate of salad. Word salad.
With no dressing.
I hope Ms. Sleigh-Johnson talks like this in real life.
Temporal drift.
Mnemotechnical.
Ur.
What started out as an esoteric deracinated contemplation of 1970s British sitcoms hauntological soon becomes finessed into a hegemony of futility, leaving only a sense of chaos and the liminal new dawn of understatement and unwanted Christmas presents.
As temporal phenomena situationist distorted through emergent and critical practice, the exhausted-recursive reader is left with no hymn to the outposts of our condition….and a big old plate of salad. Word salad.
With no dressing.
I hope Ms. Sleigh-Johnson talks like this in real life.
Temporal drift.
Mnemotechnical.
Ur.
September 29, 2024
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Repeater Books for an advance copy of a book that looks at the state of world through the works of the past, the hidden messages and passive thoughts that were broadcast to the people of Britain during the airing of two television shows in the 1970's.
Television was used by myself, my parents as both a minder, a friend an educator, and an indoctrinator. Looking back on the fluff that I would watch, television did have a bit of control over what I wanted from life, and what I expected life to be. Everyone had nice houses, good careers, lots of friends, and even the worst among them were kind of loveable. Television could not be dangerous, at least in those times of three major broadcasters, as advertisers would not pay for show, and money made the world go around. At least in America. British television was was something I knew little about, Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and Dempsey and Makepeace excepted. Their shows were more creator controlled, with few writers, less episodes and it seems maybe a deeper message buried in its shorter seasons and episodes. This book goes deep into the heart of this idea, and if one can follow one is in for a real trip into the damp and the dank, Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson looks at two television shows, and probes the deeper knowledge and inner messages that were maybe at the heart of the show in a book that touches on lots of different ideas, and esoteric meanings.
The book is, in the broad sense, a look at the two television shows, both sitcoms broadcast in the 1970's in Britain, Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Rising Damp deals with the inhabitants of a Victorian townhouse, and their landlord Rupert Rigsby. The second features a character the eponymous Reginald Perrin, as a man who grows tired of his life, and fakes his death, later returning to it. Both shows feature the same actor in lead roles Leonard Rossiter, a stage actor who found fame on these shows. From here the book gets quite deep looking at the meaning of the shows, the signs of failure in the system that is Britain, and the deeper messages, the returning to life of a character, the damp that these people live with in the slowly turning squalid townhouse. Sleigh-Johnson looks at occult understanding, deeper messages, and the words and the actions of the characters, to prove these shows were showing something much deeper than the usual sitcom laughs
One of the most different books I have read in a long time. Again I know some British shows, mostly science fiction, but I was a huge fan of The Young Ones when it aired on MTV, so I can follow along on some of the thoughts that Sleigh-Johnson gets into. However even when things are beyond me, I still keep reading as Sleigh-Johnson's writing is that good. I might not get the references, but I loved to read about it. Also as one reads one uses one's own culture references to follow along. Was this in a show I watched, was this show trying to give me a deeper understanding of the wide weird world around more. Or was it just played for laughs. Again I know most of the references were not hitting with me, but the narrative, the sheer propulsion of the text carried me along, and did not ease up until I was finished. I might have been a bit confused, and spent a lot of time looking things up, but I was never bored. In fact it made me more interested in the works of Sophie Sleigh-Johnson who is an artist and musician in addition to being a writer. Not a book for everyone, but for certain people this will be a blast, and a bit mind blowing.
Television was used by myself, my parents as both a minder, a friend an educator, and an indoctrinator. Looking back on the fluff that I would watch, television did have a bit of control over what I wanted from life, and what I expected life to be. Everyone had nice houses, good careers, lots of friends, and even the worst among them were kind of loveable. Television could not be dangerous, at least in those times of three major broadcasters, as advertisers would not pay for show, and money made the world go around. At least in America. British television was was something I knew little about, Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and Dempsey and Makepeace excepted. Their shows were more creator controlled, with few writers, less episodes and it seems maybe a deeper message buried in its shorter seasons and episodes. This book goes deep into the heart of this idea, and if one can follow one is in for a real trip into the damp and the dank, Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson looks at two television shows, and probes the deeper knowledge and inner messages that were maybe at the heart of the show in a book that touches on lots of different ideas, and esoteric meanings.
The book is, in the broad sense, a look at the two television shows, both sitcoms broadcast in the 1970's in Britain, Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Rising Damp deals with the inhabitants of a Victorian townhouse, and their landlord Rupert Rigsby. The second features a character the eponymous Reginald Perrin, as a man who grows tired of his life, and fakes his death, later returning to it. Both shows feature the same actor in lead roles Leonard Rossiter, a stage actor who found fame on these shows. From here the book gets quite deep looking at the meaning of the shows, the signs of failure in the system that is Britain, and the deeper messages, the returning to life of a character, the damp that these people live with in the slowly turning squalid townhouse. Sleigh-Johnson looks at occult understanding, deeper messages, and the words and the actions of the characters, to prove these shows were showing something much deeper than the usual sitcom laughs
One of the most different books I have read in a long time. Again I know some British shows, mostly science fiction, but I was a huge fan of The Young Ones when it aired on MTV, so I can follow along on some of the thoughts that Sleigh-Johnson gets into. However even when things are beyond me, I still keep reading as Sleigh-Johnson's writing is that good. I might not get the references, but I loved to read about it. Also as one reads one uses one's own culture references to follow along. Was this in a show I watched, was this show trying to give me a deeper understanding of the wide weird world around more. Or was it just played for laughs. Again I know most of the references were not hitting with me, but the narrative, the sheer propulsion of the text carried me along, and did not ease up until I was finished. I might have been a bit confused, and spent a lot of time looking things up, but I was never bored. In fact it made me more interested in the works of Sophie Sleigh-Johnson who is an artist and musician in addition to being a writer. Not a book for everyone, but for certain people this will be a blast, and a bit mind blowing.
Read
September 28, 2024An even more wilfully niche project than its title suggests; there are supporting roles for Frankie Howard, Alan Partridge and especially Bottom, but really this is a book about Leonard Rossiter's imperial phase, the distinctly post-Imperial Englishness of Rising Damp and Reginald Perrin (only one of which I've seen). From these, Sleigh-Johnson traces connections to the likes of Artaud, Bataille and Machen (also Mark Fisher, but I suppose that's pretty much a legal requirement nowadays, especially if you're published by Repeater). Suffusing it all, the notion of damp, hardly exclusive to Britain but somehow still distinctive, time made grottily, persistently manifest in space.
If the marshy atmosphere of the project feels like a psychic reaction to Sleigh-Johnson's time as a reporter on the Leigh Times, the prose has a regrettable stamp of theory, sentences mired in their own needlessly opaque verbiage, saying less than they want to suggest and sometimes nothing that I can extract at all. On occasion, when you can tell what's being said, it's flat wrong: there's mention of "David Peace's historical fiction trilogy called, appropriately, Nineteen Seventy-Four", "John Pertwee", "Machen's short stories and novels, all of which detail a late decadent atmosphere of mysticism seeping into the twentieth century". And don't even get me started on the apostrophes, or the massive overuse of the unlovely neologism "de(sur)face". But the fevered atmosphere of the project left me much more forgiving of this stuff than I'd usually be. After all, didn't the alchemists do something similar, hiding the great secrets in obscurity and error for safety's sake? They're very much the models here. And there are just enough brilliant insights to make the thickets of academic waffle worthwhile. "Media studies has a drab inability to come to terms with the very idea that pleasure might in itself be important, and not just a tool of satiation"! The comparison between The Stone Tape and the classic UK sitcom of confinement! Hell, I couldn't quite tell you why she felt the need to translate an old Holsten Pils slogan into cuneiform, but it feels like a marker of the sort of project I wish to encourage. It's a pity, granted, that there's no mention of Rossiter having been mooted to play the Devil opposite Tom Baker's Doctor, but maybe that would have short-circuited the whole thing. And apparently he did play Giordano Bruno. This is an absolutely infuriating book at times, and very possibly cursed, but it was still well worth reading.
(Netgalley ARC)
If the marshy atmosphere of the project feels like a psychic reaction to Sleigh-Johnson's time as a reporter on the Leigh Times, the prose has a regrettable stamp of theory, sentences mired in their own needlessly opaque verbiage, saying less than they want to suggest and sometimes nothing that I can extract at all. On occasion, when you can tell what's being said, it's flat wrong: there's mention of "David Peace's historical fiction trilogy called, appropriately, Nineteen Seventy-Four", "John Pertwee", "Machen's short stories and novels, all of which detail a late decadent atmosphere of mysticism seeping into the twentieth century". And don't even get me started on the apostrophes, or the massive overuse of the unlovely neologism "de(sur)face". But the fevered atmosphere of the project left me much more forgiving of this stuff than I'd usually be. After all, didn't the alchemists do something similar, hiding the great secrets in obscurity and error for safety's sake? They're very much the models here. And there are just enough brilliant insights to make the thickets of academic waffle worthwhile. "Media studies has a drab inability to come to terms with the very idea that pleasure might in itself be important, and not just a tool of satiation"! The comparison between The Stone Tape and the classic UK sitcom of confinement! Hell, I couldn't quite tell you why she felt the need to translate an old Holsten Pils slogan into cuneiform, but it feels like a marker of the sort of project I wish to encourage. It's a pity, granted, that there's no mention of Rossiter having been mooted to play the Devil opposite Tom Baker's Doctor, but maybe that would have short-circuited the whole thing. And apparently he did play Giordano Bruno. This is an absolutely infuriating book at times, and very possibly cursed, but it was still well worth reading.
(Netgalley ARC)
April 20, 2025
Prises out the mystical potential of the Leonard Rossiter sitcoms, taking the damp on the walls as a key symbol and following the streaks out and back. Out to things like Mark E Smith, Holsten Pils, TV darts, Paul and Barry Chuckle. I read it while abroad and it provided a kind of comforting reminder of the things about the UK that are quirky, brave and interesting. The author lightly injects bits of her own experience in a cool way I was intrigued by, drawing a personal connection between the sitcoms and the damp of her own Essex marshlands setting. It would be great to see more left-field and arcane slants on popular culture like this book, instead of efforts in non-fiction to be cheerfully accessible or broad.
July 9, 2025
book of the year for me, an esoteric, rhizomatic, palimpsestic, psychogeographic, damp archaeology of culture through the lens of Leonard Rossiter sitcoms.
emphatically not a book about British sitcoms.
no book is like this
emphatically not a book about British sitcoms.
no book is like this
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews