Alan Garner’s The Owl Service on TV
Alan Garner’s The Owl Service on TV As a child I loved Alan Garner’s books – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath made a lasting impression on me. Yet somehow I never encountered his prize-winning story The Owl Service until, decades later, I chanced upon the television adaptation. I was hooked by this compelling – and sometimes unsettling – tale of three teenagers who are possessed by the power of a legend that reawakens in a Welsh valley. Garner was interviewed by the Observer Magazine (25 January 1970, with a photograph by the peerless Jane Bown, see below) about The Owl Service and his other works. He expounded on his writing philosophy: “Fantasy taken out of context of the known and mundane becomes a gratuitous form of escapism. Whereas fantasy used properly is a clarification of reality, not an escape from it.” The man who created 'The Owl Service': Alan Garner interviewed in the Observer Magazine (25 January 1970). The Observer Magazine piece deta...