In the past 20 years since I started my first tentative steps as a freelancer, I have written things that I have completely forgotten about.
Newsletters, adverts, promo copy for DUI courses, even full articles on topics I know well; they’ve all fallen out of my conscious brain. But certain things stick with me. Some articles – in my view, excellent, or certainly significant enough to revisit – have been lost not to my cerebellum, but to the web.
It was in searching for these missing articles recently that I discovered an old project, saved for posterity on archive.org. Cult Britannia was the non-Doctor Who alternative to the old Kasterborous, and I was shocked to see how stylish it really was, and full of really quite interesting articles and reviews.
If memory serves, becoming a new father made managing more than one website difficult to run, and while some of the CB material was incorporated into Kasterborous-as-was, most was not.
Kasterborous, redefined
When Doctor Who fans hear or read “Kasterborous,” they know. When people hear “Kasterborous” they might think “spacey” or maybe “sciencey.” It doesn’t mean anything to most people… so I’m thinking: let’s make it mean something.
Kasterborous can mean classic TV, movies, discussed, dissected, with respect and appreciation.
Over the past few years, the podcast (still sometimes with a K) has evolved away from a purely Doctor Who angle. But this is something we put in place years ago, with satellite podcast projects such as BeyondKasterborous and CultKast.
My aim with Kasterborous moving forward is to begin fully unifying these projects. Turning back time, if you like… but without the body stocking.
I would really like to republish many of the articles from Cult Britannia on Kasterborous. However, I don’t want to do that without speaking to the people behind them, the writers who may not want old material popping up online.
Fingers crossed we can work something out… if I can even find them all.
But that isn’t all.
Lost in time?
I believe I have a backup of Cult Britannia, made before it was shuttered. The problem is, I don’t know where it is. However, during my attempts to track it down, I have found a collection of audio recordings, mostly interviews. Some of these were intended for podcasts, some were not, but they all date from 2005 to 2010.
Keep an eye out for them, they’re quite interesting…