“Tell me everything.”
“Have you watched it?” Ruthven countered.
“When would I have had time?”
“If it screened live while you were there…”
“Nah, I scanned it off a VHS tape I found lying around. Does it really use footage from the unaired pilot?”
“Fragments,” Ruthven admitted. “Cobbled together with a bunch of clips of a dying Lady Cradoc reminiscing with Bones the Butler about the good old days. Never mind that he wasn’t even in the pilot episode…”
Oxford cheered. “Screening party, yes? Tonight!”
“I haven’t checked the whole thing for grading errors,” Ruthven protested.
Oxford leaned in. His eyes really were exceptionally blue. “Screening party. Tonight.”
As if Ruthven could say no to that face.
1 For sheer entertainment value, Ruthven had learned to watch Monterey and Lovelace first. If for no other reason than to mentally prepare himself for the truly astonishing anecdotes they were likely to be relaying in the pub all week.
2 Note for those born later than the 1990s: a clip show is an artefact of twentieth century television production in the pre-internet era, when TV was largely assumed to be ephemeral. This budget-friendly episode format traditionally involved a small number of cast members reminiscing about past events, as illustrated by repeated film clips from previous episodes. The tradition died out thanks to easy access media, when viewers were assumed to be binge-watching their favourite shows on a constant digital loop, and very much up-to-date on that one time someone did something amusing with a stuffed turkey, or a cream bun.
Six
Cramberleigh
In the twenty-fourth century, if you happened to be residing at Chronos College (one of three universities featuring an active time travel operation, built on space stations orbiting the Earth), the one thing you could be certain of was everyone you met was likely to be obsessed with a twentieth century TV show called Cramberleigh.
All episodes had been wiped from television archives in 1989, in a terrorist attack by a group calling themselves the Anachronauts. For many fans who were not born until centuries later, this was the seed of their obsession. No one would care as much if the episodes were easy to find.
Cramberleigh began as a period piece: an Edwardian drawing room family drama airing between 1965-1971. It followed the family of Sir Victor Wildegreen, a cranky patriarch and serial widower with an assortment of creepy children, doomed wives, charming step-children, and interfering elderly aunts.
Once every possible drop of melodrama had been wrung out of the suffragettes, the sinking of the Titanic, the War Years and the Spanish flu, Cramberleigh was reinvented as a quirky Roaring Twenties sci-fi show from 1972-1975, which included the Season With The Carnivorous Plants, the Season with the Invasion From Mars, the Season With the Vampires, and (most beloved of twenty-fourth century operatives) the Season with the Time Travellers.
The 1975 (Time Travellers) season featured such wonders as a baking Boudicca and a rakish Rasputin. It concluded with an explosion which rocked the Wildegreen household, apparently killing everyone. When Cramberleigh returned in 1976, a drastic reboot saw four survivors of the explosion thrown forward in time to the present day. They set themselves to solving murders, battling foreign spies and disarming killer robots until the show was finally cancelled in 1978.
The show was briefly revived in the 1980s gothic melodrama Tales from Cramberleigh (1982), a single anthology season of tele-movies featuring many of the original cast, set across a variety of time periods and cramming in every supernatural and historical drama trope you might imagine: demonic possession, ghost smugglers, werewolf suffragettes, portal travel through the multiverse, and a cyborg Queen Victoria.
Finally, between 1984-1986, there was the cheaply made and critically reviled (later reclaimed and ironically adored) final reboot: Return to Cramberleigh. In this version of the show, the most popular fan favourite characters were all alive again, trapped alongside their own modern-day descendants (each actor playing multiple roles), in the original manor, now submerged beneath the earth’s surface thanks to a freak timequake.
The budget was halved, the plots were impenetrable, and the 80s fashions were eye-watering. The whole thing came across as harshly over-lit experimental theatre done on the cheap in someone’s living room. The dialogue was arch and sarcastic enough to entertain a small core fandom… who themselves were also this version of the show’s worst critics.
Collecting and restoring lost episodes of Cramberleigh was a favourite hobby of time travellers, if their work should happen to take them to the relevant decades. (1969, 1978 and 1989 were sadly inaccessible thanks to Anachronaut-caused Events, but most of the Cramberleigh broadcast window of 1964-1977 and 1982-1986 were fair game.)1
There were still quite a few gaps left in the Chronos College collection of episodes. Every now and then, a traveller was able to smuggle a new piece of lost media back on to campus, where they found a hungry audience ready to consume the missing episode like the Ancient Romans hanging out for one more lion-eats-centurion water cooler moment.
Ruthven was a little taken aback when he first learned that nearly the entire student body at Chronos College was obsessed with the same obscure, centuries-old piece of dodgy costume drama that he had been fanboying over since he was a kid. He was used to Cramberleigh being his thing, shared only with the occasional fellow enthusiast on a vintage media forum.
He had not been prepared for the handsome and popular Oxford to befriend him on their first day by showering Ruthven in compliments about his Cousin Henry’s Terrible Fate enamel pin like that was a normal thing to display on your jumpsuit. He had not been prepared for every other student of their intake class to nod like they knew what Oxford was talking about.
Ruthven did not know how to like things that other people also liked. The whole concept was bewildering. But he didn’t know how to abandon Cramberleigh. So he fell into… being friends with the most popular student in his year, and having something in common with the entire student body.
Then, three years ago, Ruthven lost his cat and his ability to time travel in one terrible day. He was transferred to the Media Archives, which meant being unofficially in charge of the repository of lost-and-found episodes. It rebranded him as the resident Cramberleigh expert.
Without Cramberleigh, Ruthven might have become completely untethered from campus life, wrapping himself up in his misery while everyone else was off having adventures. But it was hard to be a complete loner when your sad little cave was constantly being interrupted by randoms who wanted to remind you how many episodes were left, to chat about whether more would ever be found, and to rant about how suspicious it was that no one had ever reclaimed even a single frame of Season 3.2
Once you’d watched the Season with the Carnivorous Plants for the fourteenth time, you had to embrace your identity as a true fan. A diehard Cramberry.3 Ruthven couldn’t roll his eyes in judgement at the obsessive tendencies of everyone around him, not with the number of facts he had personally memorised about long-dead British actors just because they had non-speaking roles in The Season with the Vampires.
He could, on occasion, roll his eyes in judgement at himself.
He was doing it right now.
Settle down, it’s just an old TV show.
Unaired footage of your favourite old TV show.
Which Oxford just presented to you like he’s a cat dropping a delicious dead mouse on your doorstep.
Maybe it’s OK to get a little excited.
1 It was generally assumed by experts that the Event in 1969 was due to the terrorists attempting to prevent the Moon Landing, or at least attempting to hide all actual evidence that there was a Moon Landing. Others theorised that it was because the Anachronauts wanted free rein to attend Woodstock without interruption.
2 Monterey’s conspiracy theory about the Mysteriously Missing Season 3 was thirty pages long in a double-spaced document. He had attempted to submit it as a chapter of his graduating thesis. At which point, the Board of Chronos College achieved their first ever unanimous vote in committee by banning Cramberleigh as an academic topic. When challenged by students, Professor Harpo of the Chronological History department threatened to put all classic British television under the same ban, and the protest was dropped. Pressure from the local chapter of the Blake’s 7 Appreciation Society was never proven.
3 Various alternative names for the Cramberleigh fandom had been mooted, adopted and discarded by fans over the years, including Cramberbitches, Cramberpeeps and Cramberlumberjacks. Ruthven would have quite liked Crambutlers, but it never caught on.
