Twin Peaks: Is Andy Hazel Australia’s biggest fan? – ABC Online

Updated May 22, 2017 15:17:59

One Thursday evening in 1990, 13-year-old Andy Hazel sat down to watch Twin Peaks as it was broadcast on Tasmanian television.

He had seen advertisements for the show promoting it as a detective series, and he thought it might be a bit like Murder, She Wrote.

Instead, he said, there was "sexual abuse, grief, incest, and small town people being nasty to each other".

"It sideswipes you with these really long scenes of people crying, there's drug taking, there's all this debauchery going on," he said.

"Right in the middle of it you've got Agent Dale Cooper, who is one of the most inspiring and amazing characters in television history, I think."

Mr Hazel said Agent Cooper's balancing of reductive rationalism and spiritual intuition made him "the epitome of the perfect human being".

"For the rest of my adolescence I would ask, 'what would Dale Cooper do' as a way of solving problems."

Mr Hazel estimates he has since watched the show's first two seasons 20 to 30 times, first on VHS and then DVD.

While working in Edinburgh as an entertainment coordinator, he filled downtime in his venue's calendar with Twin Peaks marathons.

In 2016 Mr Hazel travelled to North Bend, Washington where much of the series was filmed for the annual three-day Twin Peaks Festival.

The event, which usually sells out in less than an hour, allows 300 fans to visit locations from the series and meet some of the stars of the show.

He said some fans had attended the festival for 10 years running, and a few people had moved to the area because of their love of the show.

"Some people were really obsessed with the female characters, others were obsessed with the style of the time, some people came to it through being obsessed with [director] David Lynch's other projects," Mr Hazel said.

For the long-awaited third season Mr Hazel has begun a podcast where he will analyse each episode alongside guest experts from fields such as film noir, feminism, music and sound design.

He will be joined for the series by Twin Peaks newcomer Hayley Inch, who has just finished watching the first two seasons.

"There's been lots of tweeting from her being constantly surprised, as I remember being in 1990," Mr Hazel said.

He said he was looking forward to seeing the reaction of others drawn fresh to the series by the recent hype surrounding the show.

"To see this huge mainstream attention given to something that is going to be so dark and weird, and is going to alienate and annoy a huge amount of people, is fascinating."

Topics: television, carnivals-and-festivals, internet-culture, people, melbourne-3000

First posted May 22, 2017 14:37:34

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Twin Peaks: Is Andy Hazel Australia's biggest fan? - ABC Online