Code: Damp

An alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom.

Code: Damp is a sometimes-comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly.

Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted.

Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom.

Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."
– David Tibet, founder of Current 93

“A most welcome ludibrium, Code: Damp is a tour de force of close-riveted situationist, alchemical and surrealist dives into an imagined unconscious in search of lost insight."
– Tobias Churton, author of Aleister Crowley

"A quite unparalleled work by a quite remarkable person. The fabric under the surface; the fragments under the whole."
– Irving Finkel, author of First Ghosts

"Brought here to the surface, to rise and fall again, is a submerged and subverted world of British sitcom, forced to disclose, on its mucky collar, the psychic (in all its senses) residues and stains of military trauma, colonial guilt, musty Rachmanism, fetid marsh air, and an excess of more."
– Esther Leslie, author of Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical theory and the Avant-Garde

"Variously brilliant and thoroughly bonkers, Code: Damp is definitely on to something: the dank, mildewy, cobwebby, miasmic atmosphere permeating our classic sitcoms, which in retrospect seem more alarming than funny, seedy rather than hilarious."
– Roger Lewis, author of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

"A surveyor of historic buildings recently exposed the idea of ‘rising damp’ as a fraudulent fiction. This splendidly weird book now emerges to insist, with the help of flickering TV memories and a wealth of other unexpected sources, that the ‘myth’ of rising damp was real enough to enter and perhaps take over the English soul."
– Patrick Wright, author of The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Jonhson in Sheerness

"This is a singular affair - a true one-off of a book - free of accepted takes and received wisdom."
– Fortean TimesSophie Sleigh-Johnson, born 1988, is a Southend-on-Sea based writer. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, where she now teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her performance work, comprising sound collage and spoken word with printmaking props, occasions numerous performances both nationally and internationally. She writes for publications including The Darkside, The Leigh Times, and The London Drinker. https://www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.uk