Dreamland

There's nothing quite so dull as hearing about someone else's dreams, wouldn't you agree?  You would?  Well, I respectfully suggest that you bugger off now then.  I feel like talking dreamland today.

One of the reasons I write here (apart from my craving for adulation, as clearly fame and valuable prizes will inevitably come my way) is to explore the psychology of television, albeit in a lame, made up and ethically dubious manner.  Reason being; I used to have TV dreams.  All the time.  They divide neatly into two categories:

1) The Wonderful World of Colour

Good dreams were astonishingly fun, yet oddly abstract.  They usually involved some well known London landmark, generally the GPO Tower, as it was in those days.  If you don't understand why this is a television reference, you are clearly TOO YOUNG.  However, I will take pity, attend the following image:

Look, just next to Big Ben.  Exactly where it is in 'real' life.

Imagine my disappointment when arriving in London for the first time and discovering that the (a) the skyline didn't look like this and (b) the whole city didn't do this at sunrise every day.  Happily, London Weekend Television had a huge tower block on the river with their logo on the roof and mental harmony was restored. 

So my dreamscape was filled with a kind of imaginary London, a mental landscape made up of shadowy images, and not-quite-realness.  My memories are naturally vague; there was one where I was journeying through television as though it were a place.  I stopped for a cup of tea in Adverts, which was a nice quiet bit where nothing much happened. 

Recently though, I dreamed that my set was suddenly old, teak varnished, like my grandmother's model.  Dark green geometric patterns on the screen, forming football results tables, but the team names were strange, from another world.  Then there was a brightly drawn map of England on a black background, a comforting voice-over describing weather and signal strengths, a sudden sense of Saturday tea-time in the Winter, long ago.  It was only a dream.  I woke up and really wished it wasn't, just for a moment or so.


2) They're Here!

And then, of course, we come to the bad stuff.

As any of my family will wearily tell you, my broadcast nightmares were regular, intense, detailed and hideous, quite frankly.  I'm sure you can imagine the kind of thing; children's programme puppets demanding human flesh.  Ghosts escaping from the screen (Spielberg and Tobe Hooper never answered my calls).  The phrase "they peel them with their metal knives."

Since I can't tell you about the ultimate horror (we have an in-house policy at Ghost Transmissions that we don't talk about the Rainbow Incident), here's a little blast that might cast light on both my state of mind as a child and my unhealthy televisual fixations.  I'm in a room.  Brightly lit.  A front room, with one armchair and a television set.  And the set comes on by itself.  Something awful is on the screen; some monster or ghost?  Not sure.  I turn it off, but the button doesn't work.  I pull the plug, but no difference.  I run to the door, but there's no door here.  Like a magnet and steel, the chair pulls me back.  I have to sit down.  Paralysis.  Can't help but watch.  I close my eyes.

But I no longer have any eyelids.




Well, now that everyone feels a bit uncomfortable around me, share the pain; who had bad TV dreams?  Did you hear the step of Hartley Hare on the staircase?  The Witch from Pogles Wood (who is still immeasurably disturbing to this day)?  Evil Edna, perhaps?  Or the evil of Servalan in your wardrobe? 

Tragically, I NEVER dreamed about Servalan in my wardrobe.  Truly, the unconscious mind has no justice.

Oh go on then, take over the universe and kill everyone.  Seeing as it's you.

A trawl of my files (yes, I've filed this stuff, got a problem with that?) give some peculiar examples. Ghosts.org has a view interesting examples; granted, most of them are presented as being true-life experiences, but would seem to very likely be waking dreams, or 'Night-Hag' style episodes.  'Muppet Dream' is a good one; essentially, kid sees the TV turn on by itself late at night, watches a strange version of the Muppet Show which seems to imply that the cast want the kid to get reeeeeaaaallllly close to the screen...and they don't look so much like Muppets any more...


And then, of course, Fortean Times recently republished their It Happened To Me collection.  A small boy wakes to see a TV set in his wall; a newsreader announces 'The Penguin' and lo!  One appears, leaves the screen walks to the bed and threatens to eat the lad.  It may still be on the site, otherwise, it's quoted in full in one of the three volumes, and no, I can't be arsed to go and look up which one. 



In dreams, I watch with you...let me leave you with this little snapshot of the human psyche.  In the 1990s, the 625 site invited some discussion on the subject of TV presentation (technical term for the bits of TV that aren't programmes or adverts).   An odd trend appeared.  It seemed that a lot of readers had been terrified by strange childhood visions.  A dreadful dream of a symbol that left the screen and followed them, sometimes attacking, sometimes just floating ominously in space.  Too many to be coincidence, there must be a linking theme, a source of this terror, a point of origin for the unearthly horror of -

It knows.  It watches. It's the YTV Ident.

Why?  Why could this be?  After all, what was the most popular YTV show of the early 80s?

I suppose it will just have to remain a mystery.

They Live In Your TV 3

Television sets have changed.  In other news, sky sometimes blue, Titanic sunk and I didn't go running today.  Stay with me here, people.

It's 1980.  Upstairs, watching TV on the second set, in me mum and dad's bedroom.  Forget your fancy 14" flatscreen HD, wall-mounted, IKEA friendly viewing experiences of today.  This was, of course, the old telly from downstairs.  It was black and white, mono sound (they all were back then, fools) and, best of all, you had to change channels by turning a big silver dial.   Every time you switched frequency the set went CHANK in a tremendously exciting way.  That TV is responsible for a lot of this blog, to be quite honest; I used to wonder, what if you kept it halfway between signals?  What would you see?  What freaky alien ghost channel could you tune in to?

The answer, sadly, was Tyne Tees Television, and then only if the aerial was halfway out of the window and it wasn't cloudy.  Hey, David Cronenberg thought the same as me when he was a kid.  He made Videodrome based on the memory.  He may be more successful, but which of us is truly happier?*

In all honesty, I didn't have to mess around to find freak signals because that set was used by me for one purpose alone.  That was the set we watched Sapphire and Steel on. 

I'm not going to rant on about Sapphire and Steel.  If you were there at the time, it was unforgettable.  If you watch it now, you will be immediately put off by the shot-on-video, oddly lit, cheap sets and special effects that often consist of shaking a camera about a lot.  And that's a shame, because the script and performances were sublime.  David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, for god's sake, with David Collins turning up every now and again.  I loved it because it was brutal, both to the characters and the viewers.  We never knew who this eponymous couple were; we never knew what they were either.  Annoyingly, the writer (the awesome PJ Hammond) clearly does, but refuses to comment to this day.  There are lots of odd bits of dialogue designed to suggest a whole world and lifestyle we never get to see.  It's as if Doctor Who never explained the TARDIS or showed us inside it.  The main difference between the two series being that the Doctor never killed the people he was trying to save, listened to their agonised dying screams and then did a little happy dance.  No, really.  Second story on Sapphire and Steel? That's how it finishes.

There's tons of material for horrid childhood bad dreams in this show.  Nursery rhymes that kill you if you say them.  Zombie Roundheads coming up the stairs to hang you.  Evil mum and dad.  A monster that was made (both in the storyline and in special effects terms) out of a big pile of animal guts.  The house with no doors.  The time Joanna Lumley's face turned into a mass of rotting meat at 7:15 on a weeknight.  And the last episode, which is downright inexplicable, even by this show's standards.  It involves a motorway cafe that doesn't exist, a chess set, a travelling carny called "Johnny Jack" and the most depressingly unsettling conclusion since Blake's 7. 

There was, however, one special moment.  Allow me to unleash some mild spoilers for this thirty year-old masterpiece.

Storyline: S&S have arrived, for reasons which, as usual, are utterly unexplained, in a junk shop, a grim, depressing, tatty, underlit piece of genius set design.  Upstairs is the empty flat where the landlord lived, until he vanished one dark day.  Across the hallway, we meet his lodger who's getting ready to go to work (at night), wearing loads of makeup and a wig, in a 'club' - yep, like I said, 7:00 on a weeknight, but those were innocent times.  I thought she must work behind the bar or something.  There's also lots of Victorian child ghosts who we only catch glimpses of, playing games, running quickly between dark shelves and whispering "Can we hurt them?  Oh, let's hurt them!"

Lord, it's a depressing place.  There's no cutesy antiquary here.  It's all so dirty and grim and drab and boring.  And lonely.  That's the big theme.  All these lonely broken people, except that they've all been vanishing here one by one.  Oh, and there's a new landlord.  He's just taken over, but no-one knows where he is or what is name is.  He's waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, eavesdropping on our 'heroes'.  The camera slowly pans up his neat suit and we see -
 

                                                 
That's right, beasts.  It's episode 2 of the people with NO FACE collection!  Meet...The Shape.


Remember, I was watching this in a dark Victorian terrace, which, despite the best attentions of my mum and dad, was falling to bits.  It was winter time.  You had to turn the lights off to see the black and white screen properly.  My parents' bedroom was at the top of the stairs.  The long, dark, winding staircase.  I was seven.  Now, try and calculate; how much do you think I believed I was going to see Mr Shape at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me with his big wide…skin?

Unlike Quiet as a Nun, there's no easy way out, no masks, no solutions.  The monster does horrible things in this story; there's a sequence involving a burning photograph that will haunt you for a while afterwards (it screams horrifically for  a very long time, and then you work out where the vanishing people have been going).  There's that overall aura of endless, depressing, unbearable dark lives; these characters don't need to be tormented by metaphysical horrors, the script seems to say.  Their own everyday existences are much, much worse.  Oh, they get the bad Shape eventually.  All dealt with.  Oh, by the way, says, McCallum, to the only survivor, our broken down bar girl.  If you you don't find and burn every photo of yourself that was ever taken, The Shape will come back and kill you horribly.  Nice. Bye, now.  Enjoy your evening.


So, there he isn't.  The appalling Mr Shape, subject of childhood nightmares everywhere.  Get in touch, if you had those bad dreams.  I bet he didn't do much in them, did he?  Just stood there looking at you, without any eyes.  I'd love to know how many of you were traumatised by this, but what I'm really keen to find out is this; how many people have freaked out in a Magritte exhibition since then? 

By the way, Mr Shape's power was that he's in every photo ever taken. 

Including the ones of you. 

Hang on, though.  Isn't TV a succession of still images, effectively?  What…what did we let loose?  MY GOD, WHAT HAVE WE WROUGHT?

If you want to get anywhere with 'er mate, you want to try making eyes at her.  Or a mouth.

Pleasant screams.



*Mr Cronenberg's legal team have asked me to point out that he is happier than me.

They Live In Your TV 2

Another day, another horrific childhood nightmare.  Ah, such fun.

Way back, when the universe was half its present size and KP Skips were the stuff of a madman's dream, there was a legend.  A story that kids would mutter to each other.  The WORST THING EVER.  The most terrifying thing on TV.  Something so scary that it seemed to distort the very rules of our existence; we were old enough to know it wasn't real, but frightened enough to believe that it could, in some way, escape from the screen and follow us to our bedroom, there to wait until the small hours and then...oh Lord, then...

Jesus, I just unnerved myself slightly.  And that's never pretty.

Yes, it was horrible.  But we didn't know what it was.  We didn't really know where it came from or what it wanted, though it was bound to be something hideous.  No-one could remember the plot.  Why the hell was that woman climbing a tower at night anyway?  Who cares?

We remembered it.

It haunted our dreams.

It was horror incarnate.

D'ya wanna see?

Sure?

Well, if you insist.  But I must warn you...

Look out!  Here it comes!  Here it comes!

                                             Yes, beasts, it's the NUN WITH NO FACE!

Once you've made a cup of tea and locked all the doors, allow me to continue.  So, all anyone can remember is Our Hero (actually heroine, but I mislike the word) creeps up some dark old spooky stairs.  Turns the corner.  And there, in the chair, right there, is the NUN WITH NO FACE, who turns to STARE AT US WITH NO FACE.  And, united as one, Britain shat itself.

What made this the stuff of nightmares?  For one, it was on ITV.  You didn't expect the Commercial Channel to pull stunts like that.   Unexpectedly horrific ITV moments worked (for me) because it seemed at that time like a very real and Coronation Street-y kind of mediasphere.  So to suddenly see the NUN WITH NO FACE on a slightly overcoloured Ferguson set on a Friday night (I think) before nine o'clock was a bit of a shocker, to be honest.  We were used to nine being the safety point, when all the nasty things came out (Sapphire and Steel aside, we'll come to them next time).  This snuck in before the watershed.  Cruel planners, though one suspects they hadn't actually watched the thing beforehand to check what went on.

But there's a sad end to all this.  Time went by.  We grew up and found out two devastating facts.  Firstly, it wasn't some ghastly supernatural horror; this came from a detective/murder/mystery anthology series Armchair Thriller.  The serial was called Quiet as a Nun; with that information, it wasn't long before I had a copy of the original novel.  Now the truth would be revealed!  What was going on?  Why was that woman climbing the stairs?  What was the bewimpled horror?

And then you learn the truth.

It's someone in a nun outfit with a fucking mask on.

That's right, generation 1970s.  We fouled ourselves over an overlong live action episode of Scooby Doo.  But think not of this.  Remember her as she was.  Sitting in the chair at the end of your bed, when you woke up in the night.  Sitting there.  Watching you.

WITH NO FACE.

Click here, though I confess, it did just creep me out all over again.

Post script: Lest you forget, Armchair Thriller had one more nasty little treat in store; its title board (the picture you see when it's announced on TV) is the most unpleasant one I've ever seen.  And they used it to advertise the show right before afternoon kids' stuff started.

Before we join Dangermouse for another mission there's just time to tell you about the endless night of the soul.

 


Pleasant screams.