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It Came From The Cathode Ray Tube (Weird TV Incidents)

Strange, I don't know that one. Was it a fault, do you think, or was it someone deliberately publicising the incident through TV piracy?
 
Judging by the way the audio started at the beginning of the comment, it was definitely deliberate, presumably with political motivation. If it was local to my area, that would be quite odd, as I'm nowhere near Peterborough.

The episode in question was "General Hospital" (the spy episode) and the interruption was during the scene where Nurse Mary is impressed that Blackadder is a spycatcher.
 
im posting this question on behalf of a friend of mine.

there was a show back in the, er, late 80's maybe called Mr. Wizard. it was a kid oriented science show with some oldish balding guy (Mr. Wizard) who would have some kids on the show and guide them through various, generally not very complicated experiments, whilst explaining the scientific principles behind them. this was in the states, by the way, i dont know if the show had any existence elsewhere.

anyway, my friend claims to remember seeing an episode where mr. wizard was discussing electricity and the effect it has on muscle tissue and nervous tissue, etc. the big demonstration was a dog laid out on his metal table with its brain exposed. mr wizard would proceed to deliver little shocks to various parts of the brain, causing the dog to bark, or jerk a limb, and so forth. did this happen? i highly doubt it, myself, as i cant see that being allowed on television, especially not a kids show. i dont remember the episode myself, though i watched the show often as a kid, and no one else hes mentioned it to remembers seeing it, but my friend swears it happened.

so my question is just that - did anyone else watch this show and, if so, did this happen? or did he maybe have a vivid dream or something?
 
It sounds like a cartoon, but I presume it was live action? I don't think it was shown in Britain.
 
I just googled on Mr Wizard for a while to see what I can find. However he seemed to be just so "bloody nice" [voice of Vivian from the Young Ones].
Mr nicey nice guy. Darn. Would have been a good one.
Who knows, maybe there was such an episode where he tortured a dog but it was straight away beamed out of kiddies brains...apart from that nephew's... 8)
 
A few years ago I read of a couple who were watching TV when the normal broadcast was interrupted and replaced by a grainy picture and, as they watched in horror, their daughter appeared on screen and was then attacked and murdered by an assailant, after which the picture reverted to the normal programme. I cannot remember too much but think that it was supposed to have happened somewhere in the UK. Possibly the source was "Encounters with the Unknown" by Colin Parsons. Perhaps if someone has a copy they could look it up? The same source also claimed that a well-known family of british entertainers who regularly appeared on TV always had an extra member on TV than there really existed. The names of the group was not specified if I recall correctly.
 
Richard_Cheese said:
That evil muppets story sounds just like an episode of "Angel" .
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Yes, it does - so much so that at the time of its broadcast, I said: "I know where the writers have been surfing!"

There have been "evil kid show" stories, both consciously fictional and urban legend, as long as there have been kid shows, I expect, and it'd take a true media detective to trace which appeared first, the rumor or the fiction. Or, for that matter, the true weird experience ala the Evil Muppets. The most parsimonious explanation is that this is a dream/false memory, but I don't think the experiencer would accept that. A number of possibilities exist - a parody he didn't grasp, a horror show using (as horror shows often do) the contrast between the innocent trappings of childhood and the sinister adult content, a confabulation based on a mixture of real and imagined experience (how many of us, when rewatching a well-remembered program, are shocked at the difference between our memory and what we must have seen?), a broadcast made by technosavvy demons or fairies...
 
Someone's going to have to jog my memory here, but wasn't there a story in the FT about an American couple getting mysterious text messages over the cable TV? Some of them were quite threatening and the author apparently had access to information about the couple.

A poltergeist explanation was proposed, but did anyone hear of any follow up to this? Is it still going on, even?!
 
fnordish said:
there was a show back in the, er, late 80's maybe called Mr. Wizard. it was a kid oriented science show with some oldish balding guy (Mr. Wizard) who would have some kids on the show and guide them through various, generally not very complicated experiments, whilst explaining the scientific principles behind them. this was in the states, by the way, i dont know if the show had any existence elsewhere.
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MR. WIZARD was Don Herbert, an American high school science teacher turned popular network television star.

The program was originally broadcast live on Saturday mornings during the early-to-mid 1950s on (I think) the NBC network, when I became addicted to it. My guess is that Herbert was then in his late thirties.

Herbert came up with a new incarnation of the program in the late 1980s, obviously as a much older man.

anyway, my friend claims to remember seeing an episode where mr. wizard was discussing electricity and the effect it has on muscle tissue and nervous tissue, etc. the big demonstration was a dog laid out on his metal table with its brain exposed. mr wizard would proceed to deliver little shocks to various parts of the brain, causing the dog to bark, or jerk a limb, and so forth. did this happen? i highly doubt it, myself, as i cant see that being allowed on television, especially not a kids show. i dont remember the episode myself, though i watched the show often as a kid, and no one else hes mentioned it to remembers seeing it, but my friend swears it happened.
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That certainly was NOT the Don Herbert I knew, and I doubt that it was the later one either.
 
I don't think there's any question of the dog show having been a Mr. Wizard program. It is not unlikely, however, that the kid stumbled onto some other program and confused it with Mr. Wizard - either because it was aping Mr. Wizard for effect (if, for instance, the scene was part of a larger story about a mad scientist training an apprentice) or because in his mind science programs were always Mr. Wizard, the same way all facial tissue is Kleenex. It would be easy to construct a false memory, in either case, in which the real Mr. Wizard's face and voice are grafted onto the actor giving the demonstration.

A familiar figure like Mr. Wizard is also subject to parodic and satiric use, which might confuse the very young, and I have seen Mr. Wizard parodies that are over-the-top ridiculously violent, but this doesn't sound like that. (The Jim Henson show Dinosaurs, for instance, featured the Sinclair family watching a "Mr. Lizard" show that involved guiding a young "Timmy" through dangerous experiments; when he blew up, the punchline was "We're gonna need another Timmy!" called into the wings.)

Although it is unlikely that a vivesected dog would be featured in a program for Mr. Wizard's target audience, I myself remember seeing footage of live animal experimentation in class when I was in junior high and high school, in the 70s. The animals in question were either of an order so far removed from humanity (nemotodes) as to excite no particular sympathy, or drugged to insensibility, and the teachers were visibly uncomfortable with the material in some cases, emphasizing both the importance of animal experimentation and the necessity of conducting it as humanely as possible. I was in ranching country at the time, so the point was taken. TV being what it is, it's not outside the realm of possibility for him to have caught a similar educational program, either accidentally broadcast in the wrong timeslot, or during an hour when young children were not expected to be watching.

He could also, I suppose, be pulling legs in the manner of the FOAF who insists with a straight face that two of Snow White's dwarfs are named Sleazy and Leather.
 
Fnordish, I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate as to what your friend saw, or at least the type of thing.

Being a television performer, Don Herbert liked very visual experiments.

Based on my memories of Herbert from the 1950s it's likely that he would have prepared an illustration of a dog's brain, complete with electrical contact points. So when he touched a metal probe to the sight portion of the "brain," completing the circuit, two battery-operated electric lightbulb "eyes" would light up.

And so on.

This might have even been demonstrated with a living dog on the set.
 
i havent checked this thread in a while (my internet use is spotty at best), so forgive my lacj of comments on your replies so far.

i looked up the show myself a little while back and a careful examination of an episode guide seems tp indicate that the whole dog show thing never happened - or at least it wasnt an episode of mr wizard. my friend, despite saying he clearly remembers it and was reallt disturbed by it, admits that it was probably just a vivid dream or something. in support of this he did (and does) have a very active imagination, and does often have very vivid dreams. so i assume this was likely the case. either that or maybe he did see the show and is mistaken in remembering it being mr wizard. i know ive seen footage similar to what he described, but it was old russian experimental footage i found online. so perhaps it was something similar. i know mr wizard (yes, im too lazy to scroll down a bit and get his real name from previous posts) made several educational films and shows, so maybe it was something he had done outside of that particular show. i dont know enough about his other work to say.

thanks everyone for your replies. personally, im just glad im not the only one who remembers the show.
 
From BBC 2's TV Hell Night from the nineties, here's an extract which is suitably bizarre, right at the start of the clip, it's those laugh a minute jokers the Albion Free State crew:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPmkFKRWgtA

Anyone know what happened to these guys? And why didn't they get a Saturday night series out of this?
 
Seems like the Albion Free State weren't the only ones to benefit from BBC2's Open Door programme. There was a jokey clip show on BBC Four last night that had various odd and embarrassing stuff on it, and there was the Aetherius Society on there, not just the George King interview where he puts on sunglasses and "talks" to Venusians, but bits of a whole programme devoted to them from about 1973.

If anyone was left watching that episode by the end, those Aetherians must have royally freaked them out, it was incredibly creepy stuff in spite of Sean Lock's sarcastic commentary.

Also in the show was a Forty Minutes on what an alien might see on its first visit to Earth (a tree and a middle-aged woman taking off her bra, apparently), a Michael Aspel-hosted psychics quiz show where the experts identified Joanna Lumley as Felicity Kendall by reading her palms and Boomph with Becker, because they always show Boomph with Becker.

Worth catching when they repeat it (this Friday - the 4th April - at half past eleven), although it was two hours long.
 
Not scary, but beggars belief in this hi-tech day and age:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/also_in_the_news/7493256.stm

Porn appears on rugby programme

New Zealand rugby fans watching a regular sports programme found themselves viewing hardcore pornography instead on Sunday afternoon.

Four minutes of pornography interrupted sports coverage on the Prime Television channel, after what a spokesman described as a distribution mix up.

The pornographic footage was meant for an adult pay-per-view channel.

Instead, it found its way onto a regular free-to-air programme called "Grassroots Rugby".

Rival television channels reported that some viewers were angry about the broadcast, which may have been seen by children.
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Unless this was a prank? It just takes one jokey TV station employee on a boring Sunday afternoon...
 
Here's a TV mystery, and only Andy Kaufman knows the truth about it. Kaufman was on Fridays, a Saturday Night Live style comedy sketch show, when it all went wrong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bc1GXuNPuQ

Was it staged? A hoax? It's certainly in keeping with Kaufman's sabotaging sense of humour. Do you think it looks real?
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7864733.stm

Super Bowl porn hits US viewers

US sports fans in Arizona got a surprise when their TV coverage of American football's Super Bowl was interrupted by a pornographic film.

Tucson-based KVOA-TV said it was "dismayed and disappointed" after some cable viewers had their match coverage disrupted towards the end of the game.

The company said the material was only seen by viewers of one cable network.

"KVOA will investigate what happened and make sure our viewers get answers," company president Gary Nielsen said.

"When the NBC feed of the Super Bowl was transmitted from KVOA to local cable providers and through over-the-air antennas, there was no pornographic material," he added.

Comcast, the cable company whose viewers saw the material, said it was investigating.

Local media outlets reported that they received calls from furious viewers.

The clip showed a woman unzipping a man's trousers, followed by a graphic act between the two.

"I just figured it was another commercial until I looked up," viewer Cora King told the Arizona Daily Star.

"Then he did his little dance with everything hanging out."

The interruption happened just after the last touchdown by the Arizona Cardinals, who lost the match to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
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Why is it usually porn that mysteriously interrupts TV broadcasts? Is someone having a laugh or is there a more sinister explanation? There are clips on YouTube should you care to investigate.
 
gncxx said:
Here's a TV mystery, and only Andy Kaufman knows the truth about it. Kaufman was on Fridays, a Saturday Night Live style comedy sketch show, when it all went wrong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bc1GXuNPuQ

Was it staged? A hoax? It's certainly in keeping with Kaufman's sabotaging sense of humour. Do you think it looks real?
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According to some members of the "FRIDAYS" cast, Kaufman had it all planned in advance, while according to others, it was entirely spontaneous. Whatever the truth, it supposedly infuriated then-cast-member Michael Richards (SEINFELD's TV buddy Kramer), who refused to ever work with Kaufman again.
 
ignatiusII said:
According to some members of the "FRIDAYS" cast, Kaufman had it all planned in advance, while according to others, it was entirely spontaneous. Whatever the truth, it supposedly infuriated then-cast-member Michael Richards (SEINFELD's TV buddy Kramer), who refused to ever work with Kaufman again.
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Michael Richards is the chap handing Andy the cue cards, I think. He certainly looks pissed off.
 
In "Lost in the Funhouse", Bill Zehma's biography of Kaufman, he says that Kaufman used to pull this kind of stunt all the time, sometimes subtle, sometimes way OTT. He'd rope one other cast member in, and the director usually had an idea of what was going to happen, but the rest of the cast and crew were unaware of what he had planned: this is why so few people would work with him towards the end. So my guess is what we're seeing there is Richards genuinely, finally losing it with him after months of being upstaged and made to look like a pillock on live TV.
 
Yes, ...Funhouse is a very interesting book about a very strange person. Trouble is, I couldn't make up my mind whether Kaufman was a genius or a massive pain in the arse. I'm guessing Richards thought the latter.
 
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_signal_intrusion

On January 3, 2007 in Australia, during a broadcast of an episode of the Canadian television series Mayday on the Seven Network, an audio loop unexpectedly started playing, clearly saying in an American accent, “Jesus Christ, help us all, Lord”. This same voice message continued to repeat itself over and over during the show for a total of six minutes. A spokesman for Seven later denied that the transmission was a prank or a security breach and claimed that the repeated line was actually part of the original broadcast and said, “Jesus Christ one of the Nazarenes”, although there is hardly any similarity between the two phrases. Subsequent investigation by independent researchers revealed that the invading transmission was actually from a video taped news broadcast of a civilian truck being ambushed in Iraq. It remains unknown whether or not this was an intentional act of television piracy or a genuine glitch of some sort.
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Here's a clip of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzwQotiDXAc&NR=1

I was looking about for info on the new Max Headroom box set and inevitably ended up seeking weird pirate TV signal intrusions. Hadn't heard this one before.

By the way, was there ever any follow up to the story of the American couple who got the threatening messages over their cable TV set up? Can't find anything online and can't recall which FT the story was in.
 
gncxx said:
By the way, was there ever any follow up to the story of the American couple who got the threatening messages over their cable TV set up? Can't find anything online and can't recall which FT the story was in.
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Found it! On the first page of this thread it was suggested FT 141, and lo and behold, here it is. The couple were called Charlotte and Judge Smith, and they lived in Michigan where after a break in which saw their alarm system tampered with after they were on holiday, their satellite TV started putting up very personal and insulting messages about them.

The couple called the police, and decided that someone in the building was using a kind of radio receiver to do it, but they couldn't work out who or how. Once the cops left, the message "Cops were here" appeared on the TV. On one occasion, Charlotte yelled at the screen to shut up and promptly got the message "Shut up Charlotte".

Still there's hardly anything about this online, and what there is has taken it from the same report the FT did. So what happened? Is it still going on? Did they move out? Charlotte and Judge, are you out there?!
 
TV The Drug Of The Nation by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (awesome lyricists).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOWTM5R2DA

"T.V. is it the reflector or the director?
Does it imitate us
or do we imitate it
Because a child watches 1500 murders before he's
twelve years old and we wonder how we've created
a Jason generation that learn to laugh
rather than abhor the horror"...

The album Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury" has some of the most intelligent thought provoking lyrics I recall.
 
Maybe Irish readers can help here, there's an article in FT 279 about the 1985 story where the Blessed Virgin Mary statues came to life, and in one paragraph it says many viewers of RTE were watching the reports of the Ballinspittle phenomenon when they saw the face of Christ appear on the screen. When engineers watched the footage back, they couldn't see anything untoward.

Anyone recall this, or even better, witness it on their TVs?
 
gncxx said:
Maybe Irish readers can help here, there's an article in FT 279 about the 1985 story where the Blessed Virgin Mary statues came to life, and in one paragraph it says many viewers of RTE were watching the reports of the Ballinspittle phenomenon when they saw the face of Christ appear on the screen. When engineers watched the footage back, they couldn't see anything untoward.

Anyone recall this, or even better, witness it on their TVs?
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Can't remember that incident. I followed the events at the time.
 
ramonmercado said:
Can't remember that incident. I followed the events at the time.
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Hmm, might be an urban myth then.
 
Another tale from FT 279, in the Strange Deaths column:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... tven-front

The Bulgarian TV show Otechestven Front – which translates loosely as The Home Front – does seem to be experiencing a cluster of bad luck. Its format is simple: through a series of on-location interviews, presenter Martin Karbovski introduces a selection of ordinary people, each of whom has an extraordinary (but not always cheerful) story. Think of a macabre That's Life, or a clothed Eurotrash, and you'll be getting warm.

Yet over the past two years, no fewer than six of the show's subjects have died shortly after taking part. The first was a particularly unpleasant former criminal known as The Rose, who collapsed a matter of days after his interview was filmed, amid rumours of black magic. An 85-year-old woman called Gena, who told Karbovski her legs had been eaten by dogs, was next, dying in her sleep.

Another victim was Ivanka Arsova, the 62-year-old owner of an icon of the Virgin Mary and Child, which was reputed to cry real tears and became a site of pilgrimage. In her case, it was an undiagnosed cancer that killed her, shortly after she claimed to have been visited by a stranger saying "God was calling".

Last month brought the strangest case of all, when Halil Baev, a herbalist, was killed in a fire that destroyed his house. Having been rescued once, Baev would have survived, had he not returned in an attempt to rescue his black cat. Nova TV, which transmits Otechestven Front, says they are aware of the supposed curse, and are "looking into it".
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Can't find anything else about this online that isn't in Bulgarian. Is it still going on? That news item was from May this year.
 
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