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BBC Ghostwatch (1992 Television Pseudo-Documentary)

CuriousIdent said:
The Beeb have a Ghostwatch article up on their own site today...

Ghostwatch: The BBC spoof which duped a Nation
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I had no idea about the young lad who was alleged to have been so affected by the show that he subsequently killed himself. I incline towards the belief that he was already troubled mentally, or that whatever latent condition he did have could well have been triggered by any intense experience. All the same, its damned sad--and, knowing what suicide does to parents, it remains sad.
 
Yithian said:
I had no idea about the young lad who was alleged to have been so affected by the show that he subsequently killed himself. I incline towards the belief that he was already troubled mentally, or that whatever latent condition he did have could well have been triggered by any intense experience. All the same, its damned sad--and, knowing what suicide does to parents, it remains sad.
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Orson Welles did this cruel prank first with his War Of The Worlds broadcast over the radio .. suicides were also recorded back then across America with citizens fearing we were being invaded by aliens .. Ghostwatch was excellent for its time and sadly had the same effect on this lad. I own it on DVD just to make you all well jell .. I still want to own 'The Last Broadcast' on DVD ... the best way to describe it is all the best early bits from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, with the kid crawling through the cat flap and all the electrics going crazy as well as the shafts of light adding drama .. 'The Last Broadcast' was also a found video footage presentation .. find it if you can ..
 
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Well I saw it when it was first aired. I thought it quite funny see to Sarah and Mike doing ‘drama’ but the general response in our house was ‘Well that was just daft’.

I have since wondered whether people who can get upset about this sort of thing are the same ones who get a little too involved in soap operas and think the characters are real.

Incidently, I watched a new trailer for Coronation Street. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find, in a few year’s time, it all goes Fred West.
 
I haven't seen Ghostwatch since the original broadcast....but....isn't Craig Charles in it? Or have I made that up?
 
Yithian said:
I had no idea about the young lad who was alleged to have been so affected by the show that he subsequently killed himself. I incline towards the belief that he was already troubled mentally, or that whatever latent condition he did have could well have been triggered by any intense experience. All the same, its damned sad--and, knowing what suicide does to parents, it remains sad.
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Yes, I'd agree. Undiagnosed, but I definitely do not believe that the programme can be blamed for his taking his own life. It clearly triggered something in him. But it definitely wasn't to blame.

Between that, and the swarm of complaints to the on-screen phone number (which was the BBC's 1990s number for Saturday morning Kids Show 'Going Live, for Crimewatch and I'm pretty sure for both Children in Need and Comic Relief, too), the Beeb dropped it like a rock. A great shame. It was a big deal at the time.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
I haven't seen Ghostwatch since the original broadcast....but....isn't Craig Charles in it? Or have I made that up?
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He was. And that was intentional. In Parkinson, Green & Smith and then Charles they had a good solid cross-section of presenters known to different generations of viewers. And that lent a good amount of credibility to the show. As presenters they interviewed and responded comfortably as presenters do.

You could tell relatively easily that the actors WERE actors. In the way they responded to questions and in their body language. But using recognised and perfectly competent 'real' presenters allowed Ghostwatch to cover and distract from those other performances as best they could.

Craig Charles mostly covered the outside broadcast scenes, where his energy and enthusiasm while talking to the locals was invaluable to the pacing of the show.
 
Craig Charles was and is a regular attendee of conventions owing to Red Dwarf. Does he ever discuss his involvement in Ghostwatch, I wonder?
 
CuriousIdent said:
You could tell relatively easily that the actors WERE actors. In the way they responded to questions and in their body language. But using recognised and perfectly competent 'real' presenters allowed Ghostwatch to cover and distract from those other performances as best they could.

Craig Charles mostly covered the outside broadcast scenes, where his energy and enthusiasm while talking to the locals was invaluable to the pacing of the show.
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I remember watching it and thinking "Okay... this is mildly interesting, where are they going with this" Then they cut to Charles talking to the "locals" (fairly near the start of the show?) and it was pretty obvious they were acting. Couldn't take the rest of the show seriously at all once those cracks in the facade had appeared.
 
It was perfectly clear Ghostwatch was fiction because it was announced at the start as being a Screen One presentation, the successor to Play for Today on BBC1. Well, that and the fact that poltergeists don't take over TV stations.
 
GNC said:
It was perfectly clear Ghostwatch was fiction because it was announced at the start as being a Screen One presentation, the successor to Play for Today on BBC1. Well, that and the fact that poltergeists don't take over TV stations.
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Also the fact that the news which followed and failed to report the demise of Parky being swept into a supernatural A4 paper vortex. Or for that matter, Jimmy Savile’s nocturnal morgue or disabled kid hospital ward investigations.
 
I still love these fake shows though, I even liked The Blair Witch Project even though the characters were all very unlikable ... me and the Mrs started making one of our own for a laugh about 'The Cromer Kelpie', a mysterious sea creature on our shoreline with a back story and everything that was complete bullshit ..
 
GNC said:
It was perfectly clear Ghostwatch was fiction because it was announced at the start as being a Screen One presentation, the successor to Play for Today on BBC1. Well, that and the fact that poltergeists don't take over TV stations.
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Exactly this. Even if you had missed any of the pre-publicity, and the continuity announcer, and the Screen One logo, I think you would have to be spectacularly stupid to buy into the whole programme wholesale. It ended with Michael Parkinson being possessed, repeating the lyrics to 'Round and Round the Garden...'! It got very silly.


Having just watched those Bite Back clips these are my immediate thoughts:

1) Incredibly unbalanced breakup of audience opinion. Only one person in the whole audience willing to speak positively about it.

2) Good god, such a lot of NIMBY minded, Daily Mail readers. It's hard to believe that anybody today would feel such vitriol and outrage towards a show like this.

3) Ruth Baumgarten doesn't make a very strong case for the show, but I'm largely assuming that this may be down to English not being her first language. I don't entirely think it's down to her having no answer to their questions (stupid though some of them were) but she does have to find the words to express her response.

Watch how her eyes kind of drift to the middle distance while she carefully trues to pick her words. I do't believe that this is apathy towards being asked the questions. I just think it takes her a moment or two longer to pick her words.

4) Why not discuss the actual story they were telling, and what inspired it? I honestly think they should have had Stephen Volk in on this, as writer.

'Why did you make this a story about children?' These two can't answer that. They didn't write it.

The sensible thing would be to have somebody here to talk modern poltergeist cases which had inspired their story. Enfield is likely. Maybe the Black Monk of Pontefract. Explain that children seem to often be the focal points in a poltergeist haunting, and what theories exist as to why that's the case. Explain what informed the story.

5) 'why did you allow a story where children are being possessed by the ghost of a child molester?' - You know that's something I actually hadn't thought of. It arguably is inappropriate. The answer would always be 'what is the most horrific background we could give this spirit in this scenario?'. But again, you need a writer talking about that.

I don't think you'd even consider doing that in the current climate, mind you.

6) Granted, yes, the phonelines effectively crashed. They vastly underestimated how many calls they'd get through. I think if you're going o dress the set up as if you were an episode of Crimewatch then you probably *should* be prepared for that kind of volume of calls.

That said, the guy who is livid at getting through to be told the lines were busy? The question I'd have asked back would be 'well, what were you going to say?' Put him in on the spot. Because the show was merely asking people to share their supernatural experiences. It wasn't intended as a line to air you anger.

7) Almost at the end of the clip Baumgarter mentions that the phone lines did have people from the centre for psychic research on hand for those calling.

Why did they not LEAD with that? Or actually have a representative on to talk about things.

8) This was post-watershed. 25 minutes post-watershed. While standards certainly have relaxed since the 90s in terms of more mature content, this was not screened in a kids timeslot. From a broadcast POV young impressionable minds are not supposed to be watching after 21:00. The programme finished at 23:00. That should have been the only answer to 'this terrified my children'.

9) This could have been a great platform to discuss how the show was made, the thoughts behind it and reasons for decisions made. Instead it becomes a room of angry men and women shouting at two people from the Production who are probably least able to address questions and defend the drama. They are assumed guilty without question or debate.

That should never have happened.

I think what saddens me the most though is pretty much since Ghostwatch, and because of this reaction, the BBC have never really done proper Halloween nights of programming since. The nearest you'll get is a tediously laboured Halloween themed weekly installment of Strictly Come Dancing.
 
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Or a few years back 'Goth at the BBC' musical compilation for Halloween which amply demonstrated that unless you widened the scope of what Goth was to include Shakespear's Sister there actually wasn't any Goth at the BBC.
 
Heckler said:
Or a few years back 'Goth at the BBC' musical compilation for Halloween which amply demonstrated that unless you widened the scope of what Goth was to include Shakespear's Sister there actually wasn't any Goth at the BBC.
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We've been seeing some Goth in the Top of the Pops repeats. No Sisters of Mercy yet, though.

Funnily enough, Ghostwatch had a precedent on the BBC, Paul Daniels' iron maiden trick of five years before which he staged to make it look as if it had gone wrong one Halloween and that he had died. That got a lot of complaints, and Daniels not only took full responsibility, but said he was glad he'd done it. Glad, do you hear me? GLAD!!!
 
GNC said:
We've been seeing some Goth in the Top of the Pops repeats. No Sisters of Mercy yet, though.

Funnily enough, Ghostwatch had a precedent on the BBC, Paul Daniels' iron maiden trick of five years before which he staged to make it look as if it had gone wrong one Halloween and that he had died. That got a lot of complaints, and Daniels not only took full responsibility, but said he was glad he'd done it. Glad, do you hear me? GLAD!!!
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I usually use Paul Daniels and other magicians to explain why I enjoy doing make up F/X ... "You think what I'm doing is wrong but you never get this uptight when a magician saws a woman in half .. you know that's also bullshit but somehow that's OK because no one's glueing rubber on each other?" ...
 
GNC said:
Funnily enough, Ghostwatch had a precedent on the BBC, Paul Daniels' iron maiden trick of five years before which he staged to make it look as if it had gone wrong one Halloween and that he had died. That got a lot of complaints, and Daniels not only took full responsibility, but said he was glad he'd done it. Glad, do you hear me? GLAD!!!
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Oh man. I had forgotten about that one. Yes. A little bit dark for family viewing. Though entirely justified in terms of Halloween.

There is still this very weird attitude in the more conservative sections of Britain that Halloween is a 'foreign import' and that we should have no part of this 'depraved' activity. :)

Neatly forgetting, of course, that Halloween's origins go right back to the Celts. If anything Britain exported Halloween to the world.

But the notion of any kind of macabre trick seems to offend that part of our society on such a fundamental level. Like you've disturbed something they hold so dear to them and personally insulted everything they believe in.

It's very odd.
 
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Daniels was an incredibly talented magician who don't forget came up with new material, week in week out for years, there are few magicians who could do that.

I got to see him live a few years back and his control of the crowd and off the cuff banter was sublime. I wonder what he really thought of the silent street magician types.
 
Respect to the late Paul Daniels. It was proper talking point television. He was always a class act, and I personally think that was perfect for a Halloween show.
 
Heckler said:
Daniels was an incredibly talented magician who don't forget came up with new material, week in week out for years, there are few magicians who could do that.

I got to see him live a few years back and his control of the crowd and off the cuff banter was sublime. I wonder what he really thought of the silent street magician types.
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Not all of the tricks were his own. Like many top magicians, he bought some off other people in the profession. Nothing wrong with that.
26 years ago, I had a boss who was a 'mentalist and conjurer' in his spare time. He sold a few tricks to Paul Daniels. One of them he demonstrated to me a few years before I saw Paul do it on TV.
 
CuriousIdent said:
Oh man. I had forgotten about that one. Yes. A little bit dark for family viewing. Though entirely justified in terms of Halloween.

There is still this very weird attitude in the more conservative sections of Britain that Halloween is a 'foreign import' and that we should have no part of this 'depraved' activity. :)

Neatly forgetting, of course, that Halloween's origins go right back to the Celts. If anything Britain exported Halloween to the world.

But the notion of any kind of macabre trick seems to offend that part of our society on such a fundamental level. Like you've disturbed something they hold so dear to them and personally insulted everything they believe in.

It's very odd.
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It's not the All Hallows' Eve as a celebration that's the bother, it's the "trick or treat" which is regarded as an Americanism too far. Before about the 90s it had never caught on, though there was dressing up like guising in Scotland, but once the whiff of commercialism was detected, the grumps piped up. Not to mention the Christians complaining that it was all Devil worship, but I remember them from my (non-t.o.t.) childhood, so presumably they were always with us.

And just like you'll be sick of hearing Slade and Mariah at Christmas, now we get sick of hearing Bobby "Boris" Pickett and Whacko Jacko (though to be fair, he is pretty disturbing).
 
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