For Schools, Colleges and the darkest recesses of the human mind

I often feel like I'm going over old ground with Ghost Transmissions.  There are a lot of people writing about this same material out there, with a lot more facts, funnier opinions and a lot less swearing.  I raise this issue because TV Cream makes an excellent point in its Schools section; schools' TV is much, much weirder than regular TV. 

At this point, I should go into a long ramble about sitting in the library c.1981 watching the countdown clock, but I did that bit the other week and anyway, they don't actually do School TV anymore.  Instead, here are the scary bits, as usual.  Remember, a puppet looks good if you spend money on it; if you knock it together out of old foam rubber and Chromakey at the last minute, it's going to scare the shit out of someone before morning playtime.


Look And Read

She smiles too much.  Wordy is the one on the left.

Gad sir, I loved this.  Every week, a weird orange thing called Wordy would teach us basic spelling rules and introduce a bit of a filmed insert adventure story.  They made these about thirty five years back and they still occasionally get a repeat on CBBC, minus the educational bits.

The Boy From Space is everyone's favourite.  Try and guess what it's about.

It's possible the cover may be something of a spoiler.

You'll often hear people happily recalling how scared they were when it looked like the evil alien dude was climbing the stairs towards our stereotype kid heroes, but that's not what scared me.  No, I was scared of the educational bits.  See, they were done for about ten pence using a lot of chalk.  Every so often, there'd be a song about adding 'ly' to the end of a verb or summat.  To liven this up, the producers decided to add a cartoon monster/ghost thing that moved TOO FUCKING FAST for my liking.  In retrospect, this was to cut down on the number of animation frames, but believe it or not, I wasn't savvy about .25 of a second shot lengths at age six.   I was when I was seven, though.

In the last episode, all the happy cartoon characters fly off in a rocket, their work done.  And the monsterghost eats the bloody lot of them and grins into the camera.  Shiver.  Cheers Wordy.  Perhaps Dog Detective can find the word 'traumatised' for me.


Near and Far

Listen to that music.  Just listen to it.  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?  "Boys and girls come out to play" on a haunted music box. Also, there's a bit that looks like a scary Mr Punch on the world map.

Sadly, TV Cream were once again way in front of me on this one.  Published bastards.


Words and Pictures

Last time, I shared a particularly disturbing image from this show.  Here it is again:

I told you two last time.  FUCK OFF.

...and that's the sound of me deleting it from my laptop again.  Ewwwwwwwww.  Cheap animation and a slightly psycho looking actor reading Brothers Grimm style stories, very, very slowly, with flashing subtitles to help us slow readers (I was the slowest reader of all back then) follow the action.

I hated this as a kid.  There was one where a pumpkin comes to life and wanders around scaring the shit out of everyone.  A stop motion pumpkin at that.  I may be mistaken (like Uncle Nathan-Turner used to say, the memory cheats) but I could swear the thing looked at the camera and said "I SHALL EAT YOOOOOUUUU!" in a croaky, high pitched voice. 

There was only one place to go from there, and that was straight to the end of the world.  No, really.  Words and Pictures is perhaps best remembered for its starring role in the legendary BBC nuclearthon, Threads.  We should really cover this Sheffield-centric nightmare in detail one day soon, but suffice to say, there's a war and it doesn't end well for the residents of the People's Republic of South Yorkshire (brief pause whilst I sing the 'Yorkshire' song, the only lyric of which being the word 'Yorkshire') and everyone gets all burnt and radiationified and everything.  Years pass and they try to educate survivors with an old VHS of this thing.  Presumably so they'd immediately feel better about life when it finished.  Words and Pictures, that is, not life.

Only click that link if you really like depression and cartoon skeletons.

My hometown bites the big one.  I may have whimpered slightly.

Tradition demands that I conclude with a mention of Blockaboots, but they were on ITV and not scary.  Blockaboots were a fictional type of shoe that was horribly bad for your feet and appeared on a weird made-for-kids-by-kids show called Good Health and the name acted as a kind of nostalgic proof-of-age password amongst thirty/forty somethings ever since.  It's a near masonic secret that I can't possibly share, but it involves these:

...and I trust this has all been an education for you.  Ha ha, did you hear what I said?

A Pleasing Terror (unless you don't like being scared, that is)

(Mike Samms Singers vocal)

"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...

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.

"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...

This is pretty much every episode of A Ghost Story For Christmas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.