Ghosts On Normal TV Shows

Sabresonic said:
Also the last Loverjoy...nah forget it
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LOVEJOY
The Lost Colony (Christmas Special)

Lovejoy meets distant cousins from America, who are visiting England. As well as a female ghost, old Lord Wakering has treasures which once belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh, and both Lovejoy and Mary-John Lovejoy, his American cousin, want them. Some of Lord Wakering's things are stolen, and Lovejoy travels in hot pursuit to the Carolinas, where he is not made welcome. Charlotte has to fly over to get him out of trouble.
 
It's pretty well standard practice for many comedy series to throw in the occasional spooky episode.
Dad's Army did it a couple of times - where the van ran out of petrol and they had to stay at a seemingly abandoned old house and the lighthouse episode - both featured Frazer in his element telling ghost stories.
The original Blackadder had Peter Cook playing the decapitated ghost of Richard III.
The sequel to Are You Being Served - Grace and Favour had two spooky episodes, one featuring polt activity and a mummified cat bricked up behind a wall.
One Foot in the Grave has already been mentioned - I particularly liked the episode in which Victor and Patrick have to stay overnight at a creepy house (including a tarantula)
I'm sure we can all remember Only Fools and Horses famous séance episode?
Perhaps Laurel and Hardy were the first to throw ghosts (usually misinterpreted) into the comedy mix:

 
Kiwisaint said:
LOVEJOY
The Lost Colony (Christmas Special)

Lovejoy meets distant cousins from America, who are visiting England. As well as a female ghost, old Lord Wakering has treasures which once belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh, and both Lovejoy and Mary-John Lovejoy, his American cousin, want them. Some of Lord Wakering's things are stolen, and Lovejoy travels in hot pursuit to the Carolinas, where he is not made welcome. Charlotte has to fly over to get him out of trouble.
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Watched that and the Shark had well and truly jumped sadly.
 

Downton Abbey – “Christmas at Downton”​

The unexpected appearance of Lavinia Swires’ ghost in Downton Abbey's first Christmas special is all the stranger because it can’t easily be explained away as a hallucination or dream. Granted, we don’t actually see Lavinia and she isn’t firmly identified, but it seems unlikely that any other ghost would be telling Anna and Daisy via Oujia board “May they be happy,” just as her former fiancé Matthew is about to propose to Mary. Both women swear they aren’t pushing the planchette and more importantly, neither have any reason to do so.
 
Little House on the Prairie had a full on poltergeist episode centred around one of the young girls from memory .. it might be this one? .. I haven't watched it since about 1980 ..

edit: scroll down past the red pic with the show's title and start with the second paragraph underneath it to get to the point.

https://franticplanet.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/that-time-the-waltons-had-a-poltergeist/

'
What episode of The Waltons is the poltergeist?


The Changling - The Waltons (Season 7, Episode 6) - Apple TV. S7 E6: Just before her thirteenth birthday, Elizabeth becomes reluctant to grow up, and she generates a poltergeist, which causes mischief. Jason has an advice-to-the-lovelorn radio show and gets into more trouble than he can handle.'

edit: I can't seem to find the full episode yet, I'd love to watch it again. Someone's uploaded highlights from it but they've put the POLTERGEIST soundtrack over it .. anyway ..don't bother watching anymore than the first 25 seconds of this video but I remember it has some sort of whirlwind inside the house finale which isn't shown here.

 
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Swifty said:
Little House on the Prairie had a full on poltergeist episode centred around one of the young girls from memory .. it might be this one? .. I haven't watched it since about 1980 ..

edit: scroll down past the red pic with the show's title and start with the second paragraph underneath it to get to the point.

https://franticplanet.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/that-time-the-waltons-had-a-poltergeist/

'
What episode of The Waltons is the poltergeist?


The Changling - The Waltons (Season 7, Episode 6) - Apple TV. S7 E6: Just before her thirteenth birthday, Elizabeth becomes reluctant to grow up, and she generates a poltergeist, which causes mischief. Jason has an advice-to-the-lovelorn radio show and gets into more trouble than he can handle.'

edit: I can't seem to find the full episode yet, I'd love to watch it again. Someone's uploaded highlights from it but they've put the POLTERGEIST soundtrack over it .. anyway ..

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..there were a few Walton's episodes with an eerie/supernatural premise;

https://www.metv.com/lists/5-eerie-episodes-of-the-waltons-that-are-not-like-the-rest
 
Kiwisaint said:
..there were a few Walton's episodes with an eerie/supernatural premise;

https://www.metv.com/lists/5-eerie-episodes-of-the-waltons-that-are-not-like-the-rest
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Cool. I only remember watching 'The Changeling' episode out of all of those Kiwisaint. I'd be 6, my sister was 7 and a half but she was allowed a TV in her bedroom and I wasn't so she'd smuggle me in so we could watch weird stuff without our parents knowing. Like Zoltan- Hound of Dracula or The Planet of the Apes TV series.
 
Swifty said:
Cool. I only remember watching 'The Changeling' episode out of all of those Kiwisaint. I'd be 7, my sister was 8 but she was allowed a TV in her bedroom and I wasn't so she'd smuggle me in so we could watch weird stuff without our parents knowing. Like Zoltan- Hound of Dracula or The Planet of the Apes TV series.
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What is interesting is the 'The Changeling' episode may have been inspired by the Enfield Poltergeist.

'Airing in ’78, it’s not hard to imagine the writer was influenced by the story of the Enfield Poltergeist, which was first reported in the worldwide press 14 months earlier, and still ongoing at the time of shooting.'
 
I was reminded that in the Bones episode called The Hero In The Hold a character sees a ghost/hallucination of a dead comrade. However one that seems able to actually help him a bit physically.
 
I can vaguely remember watching something on TV in, I think, the mid to late 80's. It was a fictional drama, two men trying to catch a ghost so they could cook it and eat it. It was in some kind of underground canal, I think they were in a boat and the finished dish looked like scallops from memory but that's all I can remember. Can anyone else remember this please?.
 
Swifty said:
I can vaguely remember watching something on TV in, I think, the mid to late 80's. It was a fictional drama, two men trying to catch a ghost so they could cook it and eat it. It was in some kind of underground canal, I think they were in a boat and the finished dish looked like scallops from memory but that's all I can remember. Can anyone else remember this please?.
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It's a 1984 TV movie called The Gourmet with I do believe we have discussed before.
Available on YouTube.
 
...I always liked the supernatural themes in 'Midsomer Murders'. They often complimented the plot and didn't feel forced or unrealistic.

They generally resolved themselves rationally but there were definitely some unresolved paranormal and ghostly elements throughout the series (which often unsettled the usually stoic Barnaby).

This is particularly evident in the episode 'The Silent Land', where in the opening scene Barnaby's wife has to swerve her car to avoid a fleeting, shadowy figure on rain swept road out side an abandoned hospital (which causes her to crash into a graveyard on the other side of the road).

The episode ends with Barnaby and his wife driving home in the rain on the same stretch of road as earlier. Barnaby to sees a ghostly figure running across the road in front of his car. He slams on his brakes and gets out to look for the person and where they were running to, only to discover that the shadowy, nurse-like figure has seemingly faded into the bricked up wall where the old hospital entrance used to be.....
 
I was impressed with Coronation Street the other day. (They have had ‘ghosts’ before. Vera came back for Jack.) Billy’s husband Paul had died of MND and he wasn’t taking it very well at all. He was behind a factory drinking heavily and with a good chance of freezing to death when Paul came back to him. Now this could have been him having a vision as he was close to death. However Paul’s mother woke up from dreaming of Paul and knew exactly where to find the close to death Billy, which wasn’t somewhere you’d think to look. A little side note Paul’s mother is very hippy and into all sorts of spiritual things Billy on the other hand is a Vicar and therefore generally isn’t, but he does believe Paul visited him. So hats off to Corrie I say for not dismissing the paranormal.
 
We're watching Wolf Hall from the start as we missed it first time round. There are a couple of supernatural scenes.

When Thomas Cromwell's wife is seriously ill and abed he sees her watching him walking down the stairs to leave on an errand.
He is surprised and tells her to go back to bed, but when he glances away and back she has vanished. Techy said 'Crisis apparition!'

At that point she is not dead but has succumbed by the time of her husband's return.
 
MorningAngel said:
I was impressed with Coronation Street the other day. (They have had ‘ghosts’ before. Vera came back for Jack.) Billy’s husband Paul had died of MND and he wasn’t taking it very well at all. He was behind a factory drinking heavily and with a good chance of freezing to death when Paul came back to him. Now this could have been him having a vision as he was close to death. However Paul’s mother woke up from dreaming of Paul and knew exactly where to find the close to death Billy, which wasn’t somewhere you’d think to look. A little side note Paul’s mother is very hippy and into all sorts of spiritual things Billy on the other hand is a Vicar and therefore generally isn’t, but he does believe Paul visited him. So hats off to Corrie I say for not dismissing the paranormal.
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The FT has other ghostly Corrie visitors.
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escargot said:
We're watching Wolf Hall from the start as we missed it first time round. There are a couple of supernatural scenes.

When Thomas Cromwell's wife is seriously ill and abed he sees her watching him walking down the stairs to leave on an errand.
He is surprised and tells her to go back to bed, but when he glances away and back she has vanished. Techy said 'Crisis apparition!'

At that point she is not dead but has succumbed by the time of her husband's return.
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It's one thing that I particularly liked about the series of books - the way Hilary mined Britain's mythical history. We readers got to see how these ancient, deep-rooted myths and legends and stories still cast a spell over the people and even Cromwell himself (to an extent), even as he tried to do away with what he routinely dismissed as simple-minded superstition that held back progress and enlightenment.

More specifically: the writing of the deaths of his loved ones and the lingering, ever-present aftermath of the loss, was so touching.
 
escargot said:
We're watching Wolf Hall from the start as we missed it first time round. There are a couple of supernatural scenes.

When Thomas Cromwell's wife is seriously ill and abed he sees her watching him walking down the stairs to leave on an errand.
He is surprised and tells her to go back to bed, but when he glances away and back she has vanished. Techy said 'Crisis apparition!'

At that point she is not dead but has succumbed by the time of her husband's return.
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Not TV but in the British movie About a Boy a crisis apparition of his mother appears at the duck pond at the time she is trying to overdose at home.
 
We've just watched the final series of "The Crown", with the episode where both the Queen and Prince Charles talk to Diana after the crash, and al-Fayed has a similar chat to Dodi. Despite the media's chuntering when it was first released, we thought that the ghostly visitations were well done - it was more about the living expressing their thoughts than the dead actually haunting them.
 
bugmum said:
We've just watched the final series of "The Crown", with the episode where both the Queen and Prince Charles talk to Diana after the crash, and al-Fayed has a similar chat to Dodi. Despite the media's chuntering when it was first released, we thought that the ghostly visitations were well done - it was more about the living expressing their thoughts than the dead actually haunting them.
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Reminded me of early episodes of Six Feet Under where the undertakers are working on corpses whose ghosts appear and start conversations.
It's really an embodiment of the undertakers' trains of thought while they are working.
 
In case anyone is keeping score, the "ghost of Seb" appeared again tonight in Corrie. This time, far from being the supportive and friendly spirit we saw last time (unless I have missed an appearance), he was lurking outside the kitchen window, with a cut and battered face like Mr Pipes, and an angry, menacing expression. I'm assuming this means Abi is now feeling guilt over his death and the recent death of wossisname, and is heading for some kind of Episode.
 
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