Jerry Cornelius | Karavansara

And having spent the cold afternoon reading one of the English Assassin’s latest exploits, I curled up under a thick blanket, with a steaming cup of tea and an aspirin, and re-watched Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme, the 1973 movie loosely based on Michael Moorcock’s novel of the same title.

And this seems to be Fuest’s week here in my house – after the two Dr Phibes (from 1971 and 1972), now The Final Programme (1973) – and it becomes easy to spot the common themes in Fuest’s work: the surreal set design (Fuest was not only the director, but also the screenwriter and the set designer for Programme), the use of music-hall style music on the soundtrack, certain repeated camera angles.
So, what’s this all about?

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I had to spend one day on the town attending various things, and I got a copy of Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0, a book that includes a Jerry Cornelius story, an essay by Moorcock on the London in which he grew up, and a lengthy interview with the author.

It was almost forty years ago (1981? Probably) as, on a Saturday afternoon, some state TV guy, forced to sit in office on the weekend to decide what was going to play, decided to pass Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme – and I was rather baffled in seeing that the weird movie that was starting on the telly was based on a work by Michael Moorcock… quite obviously the same Moorcock that had written the Elric stories and The Land That Time Forgot screenplay.
I watched the movie, I was confused, and I first met Jerry Cornelius.

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