Earlier today I watched a truly obscure yet engrossing if unseasonal televisual oddity entitled The Ghosts of Oxford Street.
If I say that this peculiar production is a made-for-TV musical fantasy-cum-historical documentary set at Christmas and featuring several pop/rock/rap chart performers, you'll understand that what I'm really saying is that it is one of those totally unclassifiable crossover creations that come along every so often to intrigue or irritate, depending upon your tastes. Tantalising or twee, erudite or eerie, whimsical or just plain weird? A confection of curiosity for the imagination and for enquiring minds, or nothing more than a small-screen Jack of all genres and Master of none?
Produced by the British TV station Channel 4, which first screened it during Christmas 1991 (but has it ever been screened again?), The Ghosts of Oxford Street has a very novel theme – the shady past of what is today one of central London's most upmarket, iconic shopping experiences, Oxford Street. It is presented by Malcolm McLaren, he who launched the Sex Pistols, Buffalo Gals, Duck Rock, and Double Dutch upon an unsuspecting world, and who plays in this hour-long (including adverts) TV Yuletide special a mysterious, initially-masked figure carrying a big red sack of presents on his back. And no, it's not Santa Claus.
The Ghosts of Oxford Street opens with a suitably spellbinding, sepulchral, Beethoven-sampled and beatifically-sumptuous musical mash-up entitled 'Magic's Back', in which McLaren's softly-spoken wish during these shadow-ensheathed final hours of Christmas Eve to restore the magic and mystery of this historical street of bygone wonder and mayhem is accompanied by an exhilarating singing performance from Stepney-born vocalist Alison Limerick. It proved sufficiently popular to be released as a single, which entered the lower reaches of the UK chart.
During his journey along Oxford Street, McLaren flits back and forth in time via a series of self-contained scenes showcasing various real persons who were and in some cases still are intimately associated with this very special, specific location in London. And at each particular spot where he pauses in his reflections and recollections, he hides a present that he considers would be appropriate for and appreciated by the ghost of the erstwhile Oxford Street inhabitant whose life he has been recalling. A gift-wrapped revolver, for example, is left by him for proficient criminal and prevalent prison escapee Jack Sheppard, who was finally captured and hung from the Tyburn Tree where Marble Arch now stands, with so many others (around 50,000 in total) back in the bawdy, bad old Oxford Street of the early 1700s. (Incidentally, Sheppard is believed to have at least partly inspired the creation by John Gay of the robber leader Macheath in his 1728 ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, which was revamped exactly two centuries later by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht as The Threepenny Opera (1928), in which villainous Macheath is introduced to the audience via the now-classic swing song 'Mack the Knife'.)
Also linked to each such scene is a musical performance by a famous chart act. In the case of the Tyburn hangings, the act in question is the English rock band The Happy Mondays, an apt choice inasmuch as these hangings normally took place on Mondays (though they were happy ones only to those attending to watch, not to those poor wretches actively participating in these grisly public spectacles).
Later in this strange and sometimes quite unsettling extravaganza we meet former Oxford Street inhabitant Thomas de Quincey (played by John Altman, best known as Nasty Nick Cotton from the London-based soap Eastenders). Today, de Quincey is remembered almost exclusively as the author of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), recording his real-life descent into a drug-fuelled phantasmagorical world of delusion, delirium, and decadence. Here he hallucinates a vision of a pretty young prostitute named Ann, only ever encountered by him once in reality but frequently haunting his fevered dreams and fantasies, who is played by a very ethereal Sinead O'Connor singing 'Silent Night' in the purest of voices as he chases vainly after her phantom form until she vanishes before him like the insubstantial illusion that she is (click here to view and listen to this evocative scene).
We also see McLaren's never-named character (though I suspect it is meant to be McLaren himself) chasing after a vagabond boy (played by John Pickard) who has stolen one of his presents. McLaren pursues him relentlessly through alleys and down a flight of metal stairs into an underground tunnel, as the boy sings a decidedly spooky version of 'Pick a Pocket or Two' from Lionel Bart's smash-hit London-based musical Oliver! Finally, McLaren draws near and calls out despairingly to the boy, asking him who he is – to which the boy grins at him, shouts "You!", then gives a maniacal laugh before disappearing. Deep, man, very deep - yes indeed, The Ghosts of Oxford Street is that kind of production…
Another scene focuses upon the infamously expensive Oxford Street courtesan Kitty Fisher (played by Kirsty MacColl) and the infatuated but financially embarrassed Duke of York (Shane MacGowan from The Pogues – I'm sure that you can guess where this particular scene is heading musically…). The upshot is that the two argue on the doorstep of her palatial residence, singing, as if you hadn't already guessed, 'Fairytale of New York' – the fact that they are in London, not the Big Apple, seems to have somehow escaped their attention. Ah well, it's Christmas!
Another scene features rap group Rebel MC, but perhaps my favourite one documents the arrival on Oxford Street during the 20th Century's opening years of Selfridges, the colossal department store that would dramatically transform forever the face not only of Oxford Street but also of the shopping experience as a whole throughout Britain. Its founder, the larger-than-life American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge, is played by none other than Welsh singing mega-star Tom Jones, whose upbeat rendition of Barrett Strong's classic 'Money (That's What I Want)' very effectively embodies Selfridge's exuberant, exorbitant, and totally execrable attitude to money and especially to spending it, until eventually he is forced to retire, having lost his fortune and ultimately the monumental London store that continued without him but retained his name.
Encapsulating this very different set of circumstances to which Selfridge is now reduced, abandoned by his former friends and colleagues, a social pariah, one of the disaffected and ostracized (to quote McLaren's on-screen description of him), Tom Jones now sings very expressively and with great pathos the jazz standard 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out', which was originated by Scrapper Blackwell and subsequently immortalized by the likes of Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, and Eric Clapton (in Derek and the Dominos).
I found The Ghosts of Oxford Street to be both an entertaining and an educational watch, although the two components often sit quite awkwardly and uncomfortably alongside one another. What was presumably intended to be screwball sometimes comes across as oddball, and McLaren's lecturing is hectoring in places. Moreover, following a grand masked ball in Oxford Street's grandiose Pantheon, once a glittering venue for concerts and dancing, now long since demolished and replaced by Marks and Spencers, the whole production basically fizzles out, its anti-climactic ending very much a damp squib in my opinion. Indeed, for me the one saving grace of this otherwise underperforming finale is the masked ball's rendition of Ponchielli's glorious 'Dance of the Hours' – which originated in his ballet La Giaconda but is best known nowadays as that delightfully playful piece of classical music featuring hilarious dancing ostriches, hippos, elephants, and alligators in Disney's wondrous animated feature film Fantasia.
Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the absurd, a connoisseur of the curious, a devotee of the droll and the dream-like, overall I enjoyed The Ghosts of Oxford Street. Certainly I am glad to have discovered and watched it, especially in view of how ostensibly difficult this production is to find, bearing in mind that it has never been released in any home media format as far as I am aware, and according to some sources has never even been reshown on mainstream television.
So where did I locate it? On Channel 4's very own free-to-register (and watch) on-demand catch-up service, All4 – so click here if you'd like to view The Ghosts of Oxford Street while it is still available. And click here to view its very atmospheric, stage-setting opening scene, featuring the afore-mentioned song 'Magic's Back'.
Almost forgot: just in case you're wondering, the classical composition by Beethoven that is sampled in this latter song is the Allegretto from the 2nd Movement in A Minor of his Symphony No. 7. You can thank me later.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film/TV reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
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