"Unpleasant sound on!
Faceless nuns on!
Welcome,
Welcome,
Welcome home to Ghooosssstt Trrannnnsmisssions!"
Time for a little romance, given half the chance.
My first love was the ghost story. Sadly, I suffer from horrific night terrors and always have done. Oh, I could tell terrifying stories and leave half the school traumatized, but there would still be things that would turn up around three AM and gibber horribly at me.
Get this; there still are. Sometimes every night for a week. That said, once you've been woken up by something grabbing you round the neck with a rotting hand a few times, you tend to become a bit on the badass side about such matters.
"Remove that claw from my neck," I told one grinning THING last year, "or I will rip it the fuck off."
Also, I'm a sleepwalker and have a little trouble with lacunal amnesia when woken suddenly. Effectively, as I grow older, I'm turning into an M.R. James character, or possibly Tyler Durden, albeit fatter. The biggest risk to my health isn't alcohol, it's getting smothered by a bedsheet monster and if you don't get that reference I may as well give up right now. No? Ah well, let's try anyway.
Here's a scare that I'm fairly sure none of you shared, to get us in the usual obscure mood. Halloween might be long past but I get a little...frisky at this time of year.
Being an account of how schools TV traumatised the young Ghost Transmissions
I was about five. I was ill. It was daytime. This is all I remember clearly. Gran looked after me that day, so it was a school day. And she left the TV on.
As every British child of the 1970s knows, they used to show educational programmes during the day, with massive gaps between. The theory was that these were to allow harassed teachers to herd kids into the school library (the only place with a TV in those days) and watch the countdown to Basic Maths or some junk*.
As every other British child of the 1970s also knows, it was a legal right that, providing you were off school ill, one was allowed to watch all the TV one wanted to as long as it was on BBC Schools. This wasn't a problem as there was literally nothing else on; most transmissions started in earnest round half three; with the exception of Pebble Mill At One and Bagpuss, the schedules were thin on content.
So, Gran, being a wonderful Gran, puts a blanket over me, fetches me some Lucozade and sits back with some knitting whilst I watch Scene, Thinkabout and My World. And then...well, neither of us were really paying attention to the next show. Something about drama, was it? Actually, it was Music Scene. The good people at this particular show wanted to illustrate how incidental music affects the viewer. So they really went to town and filmed a cheap and cheerful adaptation of a story by the aforementioned Montague Rhodes James. Namely, Mr Humphreys And His Inheritance.
My god, never did a show sound like it had so much potential for comedy. By rights, it should have been a sitcom spinoff with John Inman. But no, this particular story...
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| The steam train...OF DEATH! Look, it got more frightening later. |
I don't want to spoiler this too much. It's...unexpected. Remember, I was sitting on the sofa, drifting in and out of the attention zone. It seemed a peaceful little film about old men wandering around in the countryside, though I noticed Gran getting a touch uneasy. There was a definite hint of the Wrong about the film. I went back to me copy of Doctor Who Weekly. Looked up again, half distracted. At this point, BBC Schools decide it's appropriate to show a claymation screaming, rotting face hurtling out of the darkness and right at the viewer.
My gosh, just check it out. It unsettled me when I saw it again recently, in the way that only something that really scared you in childhood can. I joke around a lot with this stuff but I think this might well be the one time I was truly, truly, disturbed by TV imagery.
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| "Are you free, Mr Humphreys?" - "No, as it happens, I've just been attacked by a dead face and, as a consequence, have fouled myself, Captain Peacock. Why are you wearing a Snape costume, anyway?" |
Alas, I can't share links with you. Mysteriously, despite pretty much everything being on YouTube these days, Mr Humphreys has been removed. The only place you can see it is as an extra on the DVD Casting The Runes, a Jamesian adaptation set in 1970s Leeds which is absolutely amazing.
As the nights get darker, the BBC used to make a lot of this stuff (apart from the abovementioned Leedsfest and Mr Humphreys, both of which were made by YTV); you can look up Ghost Stories For Christmas and get a lot of responses. Once upon a time, no-one remembered them, nowadays they get constant repeats and critical kudos. Yep, too mainstream for me these days. Nah, who am I kidding? They're quiet, scratchy film, washed out colour horrors and I love them to bits. Like public information films, but even more unpleasant. Here are my three favourites...
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Lost Hearts
Take the title literally and you're pretty much there. Some horrific implications and a scary hurdy-gurdy child thing. Silly fingernails though. If you don't like the little boy ghost in Ju-On, this is not for you.
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| If you get too close to your TV, this is what you see on the other side of the screen. Go on, try it. |
Whistle and I'll Come To You
Not the cack John Hurt version. The good one, with Michael Hordern stuffing his face. Blows into a little pipe he finds. "Dirty," he mutters, staring at it. That night, his bedclothes are all messed up. Look, I may be reading too much into this.
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| Michael Hordern's character is followed by a man on the beach, whilst on holiday alone. Doesn't seem to be running as much as he does in the book. |
A Warning To The Curious
Wolfie Smith's landlord/Grouty off of Porridge is made redundant in Victorian times, finds a magic crown and gets beaten to death by a mad ghost in a top hat. Sorry, should have said 'Spoilers' back there somewhere. The ending is a bit creepy.
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| Godber didn't like the way this episode was going. |
They did a version of The Mezzotint too, read aloud by Robert Powell with some horrid illustrations accompanying. Says a lot for the power of the original (not to mention Mr Powell's reading) that I can remember watching this like it was yesterday.
So what conclusions do we draw this time? Well, Monty James was a mighty troubling author and 70s TV is a mighty troubling place, so I guess...well, like, don't dig up any crowns, or anything. Try not to cut hearts out. And, if you leave small children in front of educational television, they will be haunted for life.
Not by M.R. James though. By THESE freaky bastards.
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| Fuck's sake. More on these two and their (genuine!) link to global apocalypse soon, GT fans! |
And that is my lesson; give me the spade clawed horrors any day. If I'm locked in a school library with those two, I'm leaving through a broken window.
*My impression of that Valley girl rabbit out of Tiny Toon Adventures. In retrospect, I don't know why I'd do that, or own up to it in front of literally ten readers.
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