Discovering Scarfolk: a wonderfully witty and subversively dark parody of life growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s

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It had not been my intention at the outset to toy with the boundary between the 1970s and present day,” says Littler. “I thought it might be interesting to mirror/juxtapose modern day events using ephemera of the 1970s—a decade the values of which we are supposed to have transcended.” “Foreigner Identification Badges” also resonate in the real world.

Scarfolk Council Scarfolk Council

The Scarfolk blog draws on a particularly late 20 th Century aesthetic, one which Littler has grown to increasingly like during the time he’s been using it.When this poster was distributed by Scarfolk Council in 1977, many people were concerned that they did not understand the poster's message correctly and were thus at risk of unintentionally breaking the law by either talking or not talking about it. so when it was announced that the supernatural/totalitarian community would be committed to print, I was very anxious to see the result. Apocalyptic toys were all the rage in the late 1970s, not that they were thought of as apocalyptic at the time. Citizens didn't fear their annihilation; they quite looked forward to demonstrating their 'Dunkirk spirit' with the misguided belief that it would somehow bring the country together. It didn't occur to them that their dogmatic nationalism might instead bring about the demise of the nation.

Discovering Scarfolk - Richard Littler - Google Books

Scarfolk University, for example, was given four million pounds to develop a computer that could record the brainwaves of hundreds of Real English Wine drinkers and then convert those brainwaves into sounds and images. Britain in the 1970s was a very strange time and place. Caught in the brutal come-down after the Sixties yet still retaining more than a hint of pagan mysticism in the air, Britain had a distinctive otherworldliness underlying the economic woes, ever-present threat of nuclear war and public service films warning children that horrific death lurked in every field, every street. Both grubby and garish, represented equally by Abigail’s Party and Children of the Stones, Albion seemed caught in an awful liminality. There was nothing quite like living through that strange time, in that weird place.

Scar Toys exploited this expanding market opportunity and created a range of toys aimed at the many children in the process of being orphaned. One such toy, the Breath Mirror Set, aimed at young girls, was designed to accompany their more traditional beauty/vanity toys. The deluxe set (see picture above) included one mirror for each parent, colour-coded as per gender convention: pink for girls, blue for boys.

Discovering Scarfolk: a wonderfully witty and subversively

What started as a handful of faux-vintage images for friends’ birthday cards grew into this universe of fake memorabilia, so complete that the Scarfolk concept was recently optioned for a British TV series. Littler borrows liberally from authentic designs of the era to craft his artfully decaying images, which are so familiar at first glance that many have been mistaken for authentic found objects rather than re-creations.Scarfolk was initially presented as a fake blog which purportedly releases artefacts from archive of the fictional town council, Scarfolk Council. Artefacts include public information literature, out-of-print books, record and cassette sleeves, advertisements, television programme screenshots, household products, and audio and video, many of which suggest brands and imagery recognisable from the period. Additionally, artefacts are usually accompanied by short fictional vignettes that are also presented as factual and that introduce the town's residents. The public information literature often ends with the strapline: "For more information please reread." Cory Doctorow (16 October 2014). "Scarfolk: creepy blog is now an amazing book - Boing Boing". Boing Boing . Retrieved 2 November 2014. Paranormal subjects were treated as fact by the media,” he says. “There were unsettling reports of violent poltergeist haunts in suburban homes… as a child, there seemed to be—to me at least—scant difference between the natural and the supernatural.” A Scarfolk Council-issued card to remind you you’re always being followed. While the illustrations achieve that Orwellian body with Kafkaesque aftertaste, it's the written accompaniment that brings the Monty Python flavor notes, and this is not nearly as successful. The tragic conspiracy/horror of Daniel Bush and his children is slathered Pythonesque absurdity, and this absurdity spreads to the narrator's asides as well, outside of Scarfolk. It mars the presentation and makes the work like those extra-rich desserts that you can never finish.