The Count and I

The Count and I

My Eighties Childhood with Count Dracula.

I first read Dracula when I was ten, but only because I loved the movies he was in – it was a chore to get through and not half as exciting as House of Frankenstein (1942) which had a thrilling chase sequence involving three horse-drawn coaches – one of which carries Dracula’s coffin - racing through the misty Transylvanian night, and an epic finale with the wolfman savagely attacking Frankenstein’s monster in a moonlit laboratory high up in the ramparts of a burning castle.  Stoker’s book is a series of letters and diary entries (and ship’s logs, newspaper articles, shopping lists, etc.) that gets mired in minutiae as the plot advances ever so slowly, like a lazy shadow.  The best bit is the beginning with Harker journeying to, and becoming a prisoner in, Castle Dracula.  You can skip several hundred pages until the end, where the Count is chased back to his homeland after his villainous plan has completely and utterly failed, and where he is gruesomely dispatched by Van Helsing and his motley crew of tight-arsed vampire killers.  Read today the novel is sumptuous and engrossing, with much to say about Victorian repression and irrational fear of foreigners, like a Brexit campaign leaflet.  Reading it aged ten I kept hoping for the wolfman to turn up and savagely attack Frankenstein’s monster.

In December 1979, the BBC repeated their recent adaptation of Dracula (first broadcast in ’77), and I was permitted to stay up late to see it, probably because my mum was in hospital and my dad was in the pub. This two-part serial, starring Louis Jordan as the Count, is genuinely brilliant and scary – particularly the scene with the three blood-soaked vampire brides feasting on a baby.  For Christmas, I was gifted the strange board game I Vant to Bite Your Finger (you move pieces around the board and try not to get your finger bitten by Dracula), a Dracula red-lined cloak, and a ray gun.  I don’t think Dracula ever had a ray gun, but James Bond did in Moonraker (1979), so that’s alright then. 

Christmas 1980.  My fashion sense hasn't got any better, if I'm honest.

 Back at school in January I went a bit mad, thinking I was a vampire, possibly because I had lost so many games of I Vant to Bite Your Finger.  I bit a school friend named Barry on the neck, but that was because he was a pain in the neck; I had The Dracula Myth on permanent loan from Horfield Library (where I practically lived anyway); and I decided briefly to become a master hypnotist of raw sexual power, like Dracula, but unlike Dracula I tended to mumble my words and avoid looking people in the eyes, and girls hated me because I was weird, so that didn’t go too well.  Hammer’s Dracula films (1958-1975) were regularly screened on BBC2, often in late night horror double-bills; I found Christopher Lee’s bloody Count to be scary and inhuman, like something from another world. Channel 4 screened the silent classic Nosferatu (1922), and followed it with the excellent 1979 remake, and the creaky Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931) popped up on BBC2 in 1983 in a Midnight Movie double-bill with (the superior) Frankenstein (’31).  A very daft cartoon series called The Drak Pack was shown on BBC1 in 1982, and was worth rushing home from school to watch. In English, pupils were expected to take turns standing at the blackboard and giving a brief speech to the class.  The speech I gave was a mumbling, rambling incoherent lecture on bats. It didn’t go down too well.

In 1983 my best friend Paul Symmons and I somehow charmed the headmaster of Lockleaze Comprehensive School into letting us skip lessons and instead use school equipment to star in and film our own version of Dracula.  God knows why he agreed to let us do this. Perhaps I had underestimated my hypnotic powers.  Over several weeks we set to work filming our masterpiece.  I played the Count, because I already had the cloak and the fangs, and the magnetic sexual prowess.  We had no script and no real idea of what we were doing, but we did have a director – Mr Voss.  And a coffin, made by Mr Gerrard.  We also had use of the castle set on the school stage that had been created for the school pantomime, and free reign of the local woods (where, coincidentally, scenes from Robin of Sherwood (1984-86) would be filmed a few years later).  Paul was (and is) great at coming up with ideas, framing shots, making special effects, and generally being excellent at things.  Mr Voss, we discovered, was rubbish at coming up with ideas, framing shots and everything else he did as director.  So we fired him.  Our second director was Mr Miller, ceramics teacher, who was much more on our wavelength, and not just because he bore a resemblance to David Dixon, who played Ford Prefect in the (superb) BBC television adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981). Ian Miller (cheekily, we were on first name terms) had striking ideas for our version of Dracula.  Firstly, he fired me as the Count and cast Paul in the role, since Paul is tall and good-looking (and a far better actor) – Christopher Lee to my Max Shreck.  This left me to scribble down rubbish dialogue and assist Ian Miller.  We took the coffin down into the woods, and shot moody footage of it shrouded in mist (we crumpled up pages torn from school exercise books and lit a small fire).  Our very good friend Jeremy Wall played a victim/acolyte of the Count, and he was filmed (by both directors, oddly enough) running through the woods in fear of his life, or at least in trepidation of tripping over and grazing a knee.  A later Ian Miller directed scene saw Jeremy approaching through a stone tunnel deep in the woods, drinking blood (red paint purloined from the art department) from a chalice (with hokey dialogue using the phrase “I do anoint thee”), and gingerly stepping over someone’s pet rat.  Miller decided to sex things up a bit and persuaded one of the more gorgeous schoolgirls to dress up as a Victorian lady, sit at the school piano and pretend to play it (presumably setting the scene for Paul’s vampire Count to prey on her later), whilst another teacher – Miss Gardener, English – strapped on a bonnet and played her tone-death mother.  God knows what any of this nonsense had to do with Bram Stoker, but it got us out of tedious lessons so we were prepared to do just about anything.  Unfortunately, we carelessly left the coffin to rot in the woods over the summer holidays, and on our return the furious teaching staff shut the project down, so Dracula went unfinished.  And sadly, no footage survives.

We tried audio comedy instead, pitting Sherlock Holmes (me) and Dr Watson (Paul) against Doctor Fu Manchu and Dracula (us again) with a supporting cast of, err, Jeremy Wall.  We recorded directly onto tape, speaking into the microphone built-in to my cassette recorder, with spooky music playing in the background, and special effects courtesy of the BBC Special Effects Library which released collections of sound effects as records (there was a great Doctor Who one, with tracks titled ‘Dalek Hatching Chamber’ or ‘Time Lord Vortex’). Aged fourteen I collaborated with a lad who lived a few doors away on a comic book sequel to Dracula, but we produced only five or six sketchy pages before artistic differences split us apart.  He was bigger than me, and I took his threats of violence seriously.

Aged sixteen I painted a wall-sized portrait of Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula holding in his arms Melissa Stribling’s unconscious Mina Harker for the sixth form common room, but the prudish headmaster deemed it too ‘racy’ and rejected it.  I cursed him and hoped that he was attacked by a flock of angry bats on his way home, but that didn’t happen (to my knowledge), and that seemed to slam down the coffin lid of my eighties childhood with Count Dracula.

CODA:

I’ve returned to the Count in recent years – he pops up often in the silly things I write these days.  I can’t seem to escape his power, though I mock him mercilessly.  Here are a few Dracula things I’ve done that might raise a (fanged) smile.

2 Sides 2 Every Story: Professor Van Helsing and Count Dracula
Leeeeeesten to them, the cheeeldren ov the night!

A re-telling of Dracula in two short comedy monologues, this reinterprets the characters as, respectively, a Dr Strangelove -esque Dutch lunatic, and a whiny self-pitying Euro bore, and boasts superb performances from Elie Hirschman and Paeter Frandsen.

At Whitby Mental Asylum Van Helsing (Elie Hirschman) talks candidly--if not altogether lucidly--of his epic war against the armies of the undead and his pathological fear of bats; whilst in Transylvania the reclusive Count Dracula (Paeter Frandsen) moans about the property market and the exploitation of his image.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Devil’s Whisper
I say, Holmes!

Sherlock Holmes vs The Devil! 
Dr Watson vs Count Dracula!

A thrilling and hilarious two part Halloween Special! With terrifying excerpts from the good bits in Bram Stoker's Dracula!  Starring Jeff Niles, Elie Hirschman, Valina Cutler, Wayne Heyward, Lisanne Heyward, and Kae Woo.

Believing himself to be under a powerful demonic spell, Mr Bram Stoker consults the world's greatest detective... just as Dr Watson is about to tuck into a hearty breakfast.  As London is battered by tremendous thunder storms, Mr Sherlock Holmes pits all his powers of logic, deductive reasoning, and pedantry against a secret esoteric cult with exacting standards of cleanliness.

This was later re-written and staged as a one-act comedy play, directed by Stephanie Kempson, and starring Peter Baker, Naomi Carter, Dan Adams, Billy Quain, and Joanna Smith.

Alan Smithee Theatre: Never Likely to Bother Oscar

I am Count dracula, I beeeeed you velcum! 

Comedy sketch series! Two comedy Skits with a Funny Commercial in the middle! A Comedy Sandwich! And on the side? A huge helping of more funny bits! 

In this exceptionally silly sketch, an actor (the wonderful Jeff Niles) auditions for Dracula.  Overseeing everything, and playing Setchfield, is the brilliant Viktor Aurelius.

Happy Halloween!