Updated May 22, 2017 15:17:59 <\/p>\n
One Thursday evening in 1990, 13-year-old Andy Hazel sat down to watch Twin Peaks as it was broadcast on Tasmanian television. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Instead, he said, there was \"sexual abuse, grief, incest, and small town people being nasty to each other\". <\/p>\n
\"It sideswipes you with these really long scenes of people crying, there's drug taking, there's all this debauchery going on,\" he said. <\/p>\n
\"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.\" <\/p>\n
Mr Hazel said Agent Cooper's balancing of reductive rationalism and spiritual intuition made him \"the epitome of the perfect human being\". <\/p>\n
\"For the rest of my adolescence I would ask, 'what would Dale Cooper do' as a way of solving problems.\" <\/p>\n
Mr Hazel estimates he has since watched the show's first two seasons 20 to 30 times, first on VHS and then DVD. <\/p>\n
While working in Edinburgh as an entertainment coordinator, he filled downtime in his venue's calendar with Twin Peaks marathons. <\/p>\n
In 2016 Mr Hazel travelled to North Bend, Washington where much of the series was filmed for the annual three-day Twin Peaks Festival. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\"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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
He will be joined for the series by Twin Peaks newcomer Hayley Inch, who has just finished watching the first two seasons. <\/p>\n
\"There's been lots of tweeting from her being constantly surprised, as I remember being in 1990,\" Mr Hazel said. <\/p>\n
He said he was looking forward to seeing the reaction of others drawn fresh to the series by the recent hype surrounding the show. <\/p>\n
\"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.\" <\/p>\n
Topics: television, carnivals-and-festivals, internet-culture, people, melbourne-3000 <\/p>\n
First posted May 22, 2017 14:37:34 <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Read more from the original source:<\/p>\n
Twin Peaks: Is Andy Hazel Australia's biggest fan? - ABC Online<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 Continue reading