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Scariest Programme When You Were A Kid (Or Indeed A Nipper)?

Funnily enough it was Barlow appearing at the end of the bed that was the talk of the playground the next day after it had been on TV where I was.
 
Guess what's out on DVD next Monday? The Mad Death! An 80s TV thriller so scary I couldn't watch it! Very intrigued to find out what it's like, or if stands up to modern scrutiny. It's about a rabies outbreak and was filmed not a million miles away from where I live.
 
Swifty said:
The TV series of Planet of the Apes shit me up as a nipper, not so much because of the storylines or directing skills but because the Apes themselves scared me silly. I still couldn't stop watching it though. I remember being in a pram/push chair in Sutton Park in Birmingham a few years earlier, there was a taped off display of horse riding to promote one of the then new films and the riders were all in costume and gorilla masks and I screamed my head off. I was probably about 2 ..
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The Mounted Apes or whoever they were appeared at our local town carnival way back when, they were stunning! Basically gorillas on horseback. Like devils on horseback but not kidneys.
 
escargot said:
The Mounted Apes or whoever they were appeared at our local town carnival way back when, they were stunning! Basically gorillas on horseback. Like devils on horseback but not kidneys.
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It happened in other places ! .. I'm not going mad ! .. good, wasn't it ? (kidneys is a sore subject for me at the moment)
 
Swifty said:
It happened in other places ! .. I'm not going mad ! .. good, wasn't it ? (kidneys is a sore subject for me at the moment)
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Sorry about the kidneys! :D

Yup, the gorillas were a HUGE success. All the kids were terrified. It was like they'd ridden straight out of t'fillums.
 
escargot said:
Sorry about the kidneys! :D

Yup, the gorillas were a HUGE success. All the kids were terrified. It was like they'd ridden straight out of t'fillums.
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I was one of those kids so I know how they felt ! .. you're in Sutton Park, you're two, a sunny area with nothing scary then there's f*****g gorillas riding around on horses ! (I think the publicity stunt we're talking about was to promote the sequel to Planet Of The Apes) .. I'm well into those films now and immediately afterwards so it worked ! :)
 
Swifty said:
I was one of those kids so I know how they felt ! .. you're in Sutton Park, you're two, a sunny area with nothing scary then there's f*****g gorillas riding around on horses ! (I think the publicity stunt we're talking about was to promote the sequel to Planet Of The Apes) .. I'm well into those films now and immediately afterwards so it worked ! :)
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All they did was ride past. No interaction, nothing, just clop clop clop. Still terrifying.
 
escargot said:
All they did was ride past. No interaction, nothing, just clop clop clop. Still terrifying.
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That moment in my childhood hit me so hard that I eventually got into John Chambers etc to work out how they (F/X artists) tricked me so I could do the same thing to other people .. that photo of a little kid in his pants on a swing wearing a plastic mass produced 60's Cornelius mask is me ..

 
I'm sure I've told this before under my previous name, but here goes:

I was in my parents' house and must have been very young, under 4, I think. I was watching some short film about a woman watching an orchestra on TV. She was wearing a stripey top and denim dungarees (this bit is important). The concert abruptly stopped and the TV was just broadcasting the word 'FEED' . She did all the usual things, changed channel, turned the set off, unplugged it to no avail. Camera pans round the room and comes back to rest on the floor where the stripey top and dungarees are spread out flat on the floor. Back up to the TV which is now showing the word 'FED' :bored:

This, whatever the hell it was, because I cannot find anything about it, scared me to death. It still does. WTF?!
 
onetwothree said:
I'm sure I've told this before under my previous name, but here goes:

I was in my parents' house and must have been very young, under 4, I think. I was watching some short film about a woman watching an orchestra on TV. She was wearing a stripey top and denim dungarees (this bit is important). The concert abruptly stopped and the TV was just broadcasting the word 'FEED' . She did all the usual things, changed channel, turned the set off, unplugged it to no avail. Camera pans round the room and comes back to rest on the floor where the stripey top and dungarees are spread out flat on the floor. Back up to the TV which is now showing the word 'FED' :bored:

This, whatever the hell it was, because I cannot find anything about it, scared me to death. It still does. WTF?!
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Do you remember the original thread? It sounds familiar.
 
I don't. But it was literally years ago when I used to post here as xynisteri.

I wish I could find out what the TV programme was! I'd assumed something like 'Play for Today' but I can't find anything about it anywhere.
 
onetwothree said:
I'm sure I've told this before under my previous name, but here goes:

I was in my parents' house and must have been very young, under 4, I think. I was watching some short film about a woman watching an orchestra on TV. She was wearing a stripey top and denim dungarees (this bit is important). The concert abruptly stopped and the TV was just broadcasting the word 'FEED' . She did all the usual things, changed channel, turned the set off, unplugged it to no avail. Camera pans round the room and comes back to rest on the floor where the stripey top and dungarees are spread out flat on the floor. Back up to the TV which is now showing the word 'FED' :bored:

This, whatever the hell it was, because I cannot find anything about it, scared me to death. It still does. WTF?!
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Well... that's creepy as hell. When you say 'short film' are you certain it was a one and done short film? Or do you think that you came in at a moment in a longer piece. It's very difficult to interpret time at that kind of age.

I can remember when I was a kid, aged 4, Eric Morcambe died. In my mind and memory I can recall the end slides after news bulletins of 'Eric Morcambe 1926-1984' being on the TV for what my memory interprets as like huge all afternoon. But in reality it would have only been up to a minute in real screen time.
 
onetwothree said:
I don't. But it was literally years ago when I used to post here as xynisteri. ...
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Are you sure about that former username?

The current listing of registered members doesn't include any 'xynisteri". :dunno:
 
EnolaGaia said:
Are you sure about that former username?

The current listing of registered members doesn't include any 'xynisteri". :dunno:
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Yes. I am absolutely sure what my old name was; It was over 10 years ago and as I didn't reregister when the board was going through a big change, I assume I was deleted and became 'anonymous'. I've been looking at pages via The Wayback Machine but can't find any trace of myself so far. Annoyingly!
 
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CuriousIdent said:
Well... that's creepy as hell. When you say 'short film' are you certain it was a one and done short film? Or do you think that you came in at a moment in a longer piece. It's very difficult to interpret time at that kind of age.
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I am fairly sure, because I can remember the whole thing, but who knows! It's SUCH a clear memory, but, I suppose it could have been part of a longer piece.
 
Tales of the Unexpected used to unnerve me, I can't remember any of the plots, I just wondered why the grown ups were all being so horrible to each other.
 
Good call. The short stories they're based on are excellent and well worth a read.
 
onetwothree said:
I'm sure I've told this before under my previous name, but here goes:

I was in my parents' house and must have been very young, under 4, I think. I was watching some short film about a woman watching an orchestra on TV. She was wearing a stripey top and denim dungarees (this bit is important). The concert abruptly stopped and the TV was just broadcasting the word 'FEED' . She did all the usual things, changed channel, turned the set off, unplugged it to no avail. Camera pans round the room and comes back to rest on the floor where the stripey top and dungarees are spread out flat on the floor. Back up to the TV which is now showing the word 'FED' :bored:

This, whatever the hell it was, because I cannot find anything about it, scared me to death. It still does. WTF?!
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The thing that came to my mind as I read this, but I think it would be too recent, was an episode of Dr Who (I think the David Tennant era) where they went back to the time of the Coronation and many people were buying/renting TV sets so they could watch it, but there was an 'entity' (played by Maureen Lipman) who was inside the television/transmitter as it were, and would appear on the screen saying something like "hungry" in a very ominous voice and then bad stuff would happen to the person watching the television on which she'd appeared.


Fascinating thread by the way, but as I read through it I was surprised by how many programmes I didn't recognise! The only ones I am familiar with are:

Words and Pictures (don't think it scared me, there was just a big pencil that wrote out words?)

Sapphire and Steel (never saw it as a child but we bought the DVD box set a couple of years ago, it is excellent)

Jigsaw (I saw the comments about the scary big-nose chap, and I thought, yeah, I think he was a bit scary, can't quite remember but it's late so I shan't google him."
Then I saw a comment mentioning Adrian Hedley and I thought I wonder what he's doing now so I googled him, so of course up came pictures of him, and of course up came related pictures, including a picture of Mr Big-Nose Chap.

Who I'd been trying to avoid.

Thanks google.
 
There was a bizarre tribute to Noseybonk in a recent X-Files episode. Must admit, he never bothered me. Wasn't bothered by the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang either. But the Doris in Why Don't You? Don't get me started...
 
GNC said:
There was a bizarre tribute to Noseybonk in a recent X-Files episode. Must admit, he never bothered me. Wasn't bothered by the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang either. But the Doris in Why Don't You? Don't get me started...
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Ohhh nooooo not that X-Files thing.!.. when Mr Zebra and I watched that episode I spent pretty much the entire time with my hand over my eyes trying not to see that... that.... hideous, frightening thing.

Noseybonk wasn't as scary as that.
 
Well, Noseybonk wasn't supposed to be scary, it's just that some kids found him frightening. You can't control these things!
 
Schrodingers-zebra: sounds like the makers of Dr Who saw the same thing I did!

I watched a bit of Why Don't You this morning and now have an earworm. Wahhhhhhh!
 
GNC said:
Guess what's out on DVD next Monday? The Mad Death! An 80s TV thriller so scary I couldn't watch it! Very intrigued to find out what it's like, or if stands up to modern scrutiny. It's about a rabies outbreak and was filmed not a million miles away from where I live.
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Crikey. I'd forgotten all about that one. And just a year before Threads. No wonder I started going to the pub underage.

A couple of years earlier it would have been The Nightmare Man that scared the living daylights out of me.

There was also a conspiracy themed British TV drama series, the only detail of which I can remember now is the blowing up of a car (a Citroen 2CV, I think) on a beach (somewhere in the NE...I think). I can't remember many details, but I do remember that dark sense of hopelessness at being inextricably trapped inside a circle of intrigue. It would probably seem terribly dated now.
 
I used to listen to a lot of radio as a kid. There was one Radio 4 drama series -I'd guess in the early 80's - which scared the daylights out of me, the plot of which was based around military experiments with apes high on some desolate moorland compound. I thought it might have been based on a John Wyndham story - but can't find a source now.

Really spooky and threatening atmosphere. And it was on at lunchtime!
 
It actually came to me in a flash while I was doing something entirely unconnected.

Chimera, by Steve Gallagher.

Following through on Genome, I got everything else wrong. It was actually 1985, and was a Saturday Night Theatre production, not a series. I think my memory of listening to it at lunchtime is probably correct though - I used to tape a lot of stuff and listen later, and have a very vivid image of myself listening to this in my mum's kitchen.

It was apparently later adapted into a TV series - which I never watched.
 
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