They Live In Your TV

As I proved last week, with facts and my mind, the big fear of adverts or PIFs was their unpredictability.  Now, if you know that you have a marked aversion to, say, The Nightmare Man, you don't watch BBC1 on a Friday evening in 1981 or whenever.  If, just as a random example you understand, you have an issue with a certain Thames childrens' programme featuring a lot of horrifying puppetry, we avoid CITV at around 4:00 every day.  BUT WE DO NOT SPEAK OF THAT.

So you couldn't avoid the ads.  You never knew what was coming next.  

No matter how much you wanted to.  No matter how much you dreaded hearing that voice.  You know the one.  The one that sounds like a Dalek that's had too much blue pop and is feeling all...stabby.

Metal knives not pictured

So, you're trying to sell your instant mashed potato product.  You've got a sci-fi hook for the campaign, tying in to the futuristic wonder of not having to do any work in the kitchen, mums (under British law, Dads were only allowed in kitchens after 1982, and then only to make corned beef hash).  You have some entertaining characters.  Bit of puppetry, like everything else in that decade.  But you need a catch-phrase.  Oh, hang on a minute.  Here's one I thought of earlier.

Words have power.  Words have meaning.  Words carry connotation and define our reality.  And children, the younger they are, lack the power to properly process language.  Therefore, they might well miss the large concept that a sentence is trying to convey and just focus on the meaning or associations of one or two key words.  Advertising companies must know this.  And therefore, they must be a bunch of bastards.  

Smash catchphrase?

THEY PEEL THEM WITH THEIR METAL KNIVES

Or, as I heard it:

We eat them with their metal knives.

Gosh, thanks for that, Smash.  Still, at least they aren't watching me constantly.

The House That Jack Burnt (They Live In Your TV Summer Special)

Saturday mornings!  Oh, how we loved them. At which point, this edition grounds itself on the rocks of cliched writing and, as this tortured mixed metaphor sets slowly in the west, I fear I am taking on retro-water.  Fucking hell, this is harder than it looks, innit?

How does one write about Saturday morning children's television without raising the ghosts of Chris Tarrant, Noel Edmonds and Sally James in an inappropriate skirt*?   One doesn't, is the answer.  Today's little skullfilled jaunt (in the Tomorrow Person sense, writes GhostTransmissions, losing everyone under 35 in one fell swoop) takes us into the realm of the un-programme.  The other side to the Other Side, if you will.  No, I don't know where I'm going with this either, but let's see what happens.

BBC has no adverts.  The Other Side (i.e. ITV, and I still know people who weren't allowed to watch it as kids) did have.  Lots of them.  Mainly for Ronco products, imitation low-fat cream, terrifying Smash potatoes (hint at forthcoming attractions: THEY EAT THEM WITH THEIR METAL KNIVES) and Shackletons High Seat Chair, which is, against all odds, lovely.  This was how it was.  Such is the eternal balance of Yin and Yang, Dark and Light, Dempsey and Makepiece, and the buttons labelled 1 and 3 on that teak veneer Ferguson set in the corner of the front room.

Except that there were holes.  Holes, ladies and gentlemen, in the very structure of television as we know it (Quatermass-style worried look to camera).  Sometimes...there were adverts on BBC1.

And what strange adverts they were.  Were they selling us something?  In a way, yes.  They were selling us our lives.  "If you want to have fun and stay alive..." Brian Wilde whispered in one notable example.   Welcome to the shadowy world of the Central Office of Information, a government body set up to carefully explain the best ways not to die.  These short films would often appear on BBC 1, usually before the Wombles came on.  Harmless, on the BBC.  They showed the soft ones.  The ones about just being sensible round parked cars.  Or, laudably enough, not going off with strangers.  Keith Chegwin did the voiceover on that one.  Bless.  It was in the days of Cheggers Plays Pop and you need to click that link, brothers and sisters.

However.

The Other Side seemed to lack the scruples of the BBC.  Three times of the week we stood a good chance of seeing the un-programming.  The first was out of our reach as kids; just before closedown, a world which we will be investigating very soon.  Secondly, round lunch time, clearly targeting that home-from-school sandwich and soup audience.  And lastly, as I mentioned above, the most frequent home of the COI collection, Saturday morning between 8:30ish and 12:00 when World Of Sport came on.


Perhaps they had more space to fill in.  Perhaps they liked to vary things to keep us interested.  Perhaps they really, really enjoying scaring the living fucking marrow out of small children.  One moment, whilst I don my smoking jacket:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm so glad you were able to join me tonight.  Allow me to take you on a strange journey.  A cook's tour, if you will, a little voyage of discovery through the darker corners of the COI's output.  So stay close to me, hold hands (with yourself) and enjoy our wander through the corridors of...

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BURNT


Who's this chap up ahead?  He looks a bit like Donald Pleasence; well, he sounds like him anyway.  Let's start with the easy ones.  The unwary ones are always easy.   The fools are easier still.   Only a fool would have read this far...but there's one born every minute.  I present for your delectation, exhibit A in our very own personal Night Gallery:  The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water.

Now, imagine you have a dressing gown on the back of your bedroom door and it's 3:30AM.

Quite the sardonic charmer, this chap.  Impeccably dressed, for a dead monk.  We should introduce him to the Nun With No Face sometime.  Anyway, the Spirit is not a nice chap.  Every Saturday morning, he would turn up in the middle of Star Fleet and explain his weekly work to us.  His job, fellow travellers, was to ensure that children met a miserable death by drowning.  It's very much a niche market.  We watched, as can you right now, as the Spirit hung out waiting for kids to play football near a big pond, go fishing for tiddlers or, heaven forbid, take too much exercise by having a nice swim.  In a flooded car crushing yard.

As far as I can make out, the Spirit was really just a PE teacher made of anti-matter, reminding us that the outside world was pretty much fatal and that too much physical activity would cause you to end up starring in the Childrens' Film Foundation version of Drag Me To Hell.  And for this, I thank him, as to this day I have never gone swimming in a pit full of rusty Morris Travellers.  Clearly, I am a Sensible Child and he has no power over me.


Was it scary?  Depends on the context. Here's a quick cameo appearance for one of my loyal audience:  the young Ghost Transmissions gets home from school.  The back door is open.  He enters the house, feeling burglar-nervous.  The kettle is on.  He turns it off and enters the front room.  The gas fire is on.  There is an undrunk cup of coffee, Flannan Isle-like on the table, a plate next to it.  The television set is on.  The house is completely empty, on checking carefully.  Young GT looks at the screen...and guess who's explaining a horrid death by drowning? 

(As for the abandoned house mystery: it isn't such a puzzle to anyone who has spent any time with my sister, a woman with a slightly random approach to household security).


Let us leave the Spirit for now and continue our travels.  The House That Jack Burnt has many rooms; our last one contained a derelict rural/urban crossover wasteland, so perhaps we should try something a little less wilderness.  A trip to the shops, you say?  How relaxing, how peaceful.  What could possibly happen to us at the shops?  It's not as if, for example, a painting by Munch is going to come to life in vivid highlighter green and screech at us is it?  Our next case, boys and girls.  Allow me to introduce you to a very lovely lady...I always call her THE SCREAM.

Munch used to like to turn over after Pebble Mill At One.

Swear to you, this scared all colours of madness out of me.  Click for your own sample, my cringing cohorts, but beware, it just bloody well made me jump and I'm the one sodding well writing about it. The image was grim enough, but the terrifying screeeeeaaaaaam  that accompanied the opening sequence...too much, man, too much for a sensitive child who just wanted to be left alone to build huge robot spiders.  The message here, by the way, is that you shouldn't hang loads of shopping bags on your pram or it will flip over and send your baby into the stratosphere, as if from a Roman Ballista.  My mother used to laugh hysterically at this one, which could explain a few things. 

What's that you say?  Tired of our wanderings?  Feeling under the weather now?  Oh, is the night air in my strangely inside out mansion a little cold for you?  What's that?  You want to leave?  To go home?  Oh, but didn't you ever start to wonder why this is The House That Jack Burnt?  You won't be cold soon.  In fact, you could say that they whole place is going to warm up in a moment.  You could say that things are hotting up considerably.  As well you might, it's on fucking fire.  That's why it was funny.

For once, I am bereft.  I have no YouTube link, no handy screen shot; the words of your humble guide must suffice to, heh, ignite your imagination.

Our last exhibit is very simple.  A point of view animated tour (much like our little jaunt tonight) around a scorched and derelict house, whilst a sinister narrator reads a subtly altered children's poem to us.  And we slowly but surely get a little shudder down the spine, especially if we are about eight. 


Cut to burnt out room, rendered in charcoal and pencil, the lines of which were suggestive of horrifyingly torched bodies, in a Rorschach test kinda way.  And then the whole image folds inward and we see it's just a book...with a ghostly looking woman's face on the back cover. Not that I ever saw this far on purpose.  I was turned over and watching Open University within picoseconds of the first syllables, and I didn't turn back for a full count of two hundred, but still, somehow, always managed to turn back to ITV too early, just in time to catch the grim fate of anyone daft enough to share a house with a bloke called Jack.  I swear, the damn thing was just waiting for me.

Well, as the flames lick merrily around my ankles, and I try to remember if this smoking jacket is polyester or not, I see you've made your exit.  But don't worry.  The House might burn tonight, but it's there again first thing tomorrow morning.  Just waiting.  Waiting for a gap in transmissions, an under-running programme, an unsold adbreak.  You may have got away this time, sensible children, but never forget:

I'll be back...backbackbackback...





Pleasant screams.  Hey, why am I so small still? 








*Sally James.  There's nothing I can say here that wouldn't be unnecessarily sleazy.  So I'll pull a face like Les Dawson.  There, that's better.