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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Ghostwatch

Brigade du jour

17:38 / 25.12.03

You know, I've got a feeling somebody else mentioned this show on Barbelith but I can't remember for sure, so here goes.

This was a programme shown on the BBC on Hallowe'en 1992. It had 'popular' TV presenters doing a live broadcast from a haunted house in suburban London. I watched it on my own, in my bedroom on a little telly set, and I was seventeen, and it scared the living shit out of me.

Anybody else remember it? If so, please share your reminiscences because TV history seems to have entirely forgotten it.

21:56 / 25.12.03

It got a DVD release earlier this year, as part of the BFI's trawl through the BBC's archives. I think I might have posted a link on the '100 Scariest Moments' thread.

Brigade du jour

08:29 / 26.12.03

Yeah, I picked up the DVD meelf a few weeks ago, and it doth rock. The commentary is particularly illuminating.

Will check out the Scariest Moments thread, cheers Randy.

20:14 / 26.12.03

I remember it, I was twelve and so scared afterwards I had to sleep in my mum and dad's room!

Brigade du jour

22:37 / 26.12.03

Aah bless! Well I won't be lending you the DVD then, youngster!

Christ, I'm turning into my mum ...

So what was everyone's scariest bit? I reckon the moment near the end when the ghost literally gets into the machine and invades the studio. I honestly thought I might die.

23:17 / 26.12.03

i think the best bit was when they realized that the images from inside the kids room were being manipulated by the ghost (i could be wrong - i haven't seen that for 10+ years...) then all hell breaking lose...

A fall of geckos

08:37 / 27.12.03

Hi there, this is my first post here - I saw Ghostwatch just before christmas, and I couldn't resist commenting on it.

For me the scene that really registered as creepy was the short, almost flash-frame shot of Pipes in the curtains in the background of the kid's room. Later in the show they analyse the shot (claiming that viewers had called in) and conclude that it's just shadows - substituting an innocuous picture for the shot that had the appearance in it. I remember seeing the figure when watching the show back when it was first broadcast, but I'd forgotten the double bluff. For me it was touches like this that made the show fun and interesting despite some fairly hammy performances from characters such as the psychic expert etc...

09:03 / 27.12.03

As I was only 12 and have a terrible memory I can't remember any particular moments, but the reason I found it so scary was I thought the entire thing was real. Did everyone else, or how long did you take it to realise it wasn't?

11:18 / 27.12.03

I saw a cinema screening of 'Ghostwatch' on Halloween the year before last and it was *awesome*. It was packed out, with every single person whispering "remember seeing this on TV? wow, I didn't sleep for a week!"

Ordered a copy of the video the next day.

The way it fucks with the adonyne nature of regular TV is absolutely beautiful.. aside from the terrifying finale, my choice moment has to be where Craig Charles is interviewing the locals, doing his regular cheeky chappy routine and people start telling him stories about dead dog foetuses and child murderers and his "ooh, creepy!" halloween persona just collapses..

The people behind the programme are almost as ruthless as Chris Morris in the way they break the TV (and specifically BBC) 'comfort barrier' and concoct a genuinely hysterically frightening set-up in which minor celebrities are likely to get dragged screaming to their death at any minute. Amazing stuff.

12:16 / 29.12.03

The genius stroke, for me, was the casting -- Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles are exactly the sort of people one would expect the BBC to put behind a Hallowe'en night ghost investigation in the early 1990s. The fact that they all do such a good job of acting as their regular TV personalities is almost as scary as the ghost story.

Brigade du jour

17:44 / 29.12.03

And that, my dear friends, was exactly why I thought the whole thing was real! Although, on a minor aside, I distinctly remember reading in the Radio Times days before the broadcast that it was entirely fictional and, indeed, part of a BBC drama season.

But by the time Saturday night rolled around, somehow I'd forgotten this ...

Ah bollocks, I just blame it on hormones. Anyway, thanks to Icicle for breaking this thread's 'comfort barrier' by being the first to explicitly point out that Ghostwatch wasn't real. I was deliberately ambiguous about it first, obviously for the benefit(?) of people who might read this thread not having seen or heard of it. But now, I can be just exactly as specific as I want without being so careful!

Mind you, would have been fun if we could have kept it going a while longer, then, like, roped some poor novice into believing it was a real TV programme. Then maybe Pipes would have got into Barbelith ...

Shit. I should have started this thread at Hallowe'en!

20:33 / 29.12.03

God, that takes me back. Sarah Greene and Craig Charles, wasn't it? Great show, although I can remember being thoroughly disappointed that such a wonderful - and if my childhood memory serves correctly, fucking scary - program had been made, only to be utterly ruined by the end when 'Pipes' gets into the cameras back in the BBC studio. An anticlimax which - for me - devalued pretty much all the work that had gone into making the rest of the program.

10:12 / 30.12.03

Apparently the makers of the show originally planned to present it as if it was entirely real, but after they'd seen the finished product the BBC copped out a bit, classifying it as 'drama' and putting a credits sequence on the end.

13:32 / 30.12.03

...and that's precisely my gripe, Rizla. That's just plain wrong, especially as the interview with Ghostwatch's writer has him talking about wanting to see how effectively you can lie to the public if you present details the correct way. Putting credits at the end and classifying it as a drama is like the Cohen brothers admitting in interview that they invented the story of Fargo, it utterly destroys the entire point to the project.

08:16 / 05.01.04

The reaction to the show at the time was that many people phoned the police and warned them that the forces of darkness had been unleashed upon the nation. Some women reportedly were so scared that they went into labour, and rumors circulated later that a few teenagers had committed suicide.

It bloody scared the crap out of me and I thought it was a hoax! I ran to the bathroom that night expecting Pipes to pop up! It didn't help that my house was similar to the one in the show!