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?