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

The one for me, after any Dr Who episode involving Cybermen, was The Tomorrow People. Rivetingly scary and thought-provoking
 
I didn't get scared at tv until I watched The Greatest Story Ever Told, or whichever that jesus film is with the blue-eyed christ. I couldn't believe those bullies killed him. I was sincerely traumatised. Cried for an hour, apparently. I remember the emotion clearly even though I must have been but 9 years of age. It burned the concept of injustice into me but good and set my direction-o-ometer to compassion for life.

After that, I think it was the shock of Taxi Driver at 17 and high on the weed. Deep impact. I tend to fear far more mundane real life absurdities than the shite TV offers up for the vicarious at heart.
 
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 ..
 
The one for me, after any Dr Who episode involving Cybermen, was The Tomorrow People. Rivetingly scary and thought-provoking
Yes, cyberman scared the bejaybus out of me whereas the daleks I just found cute. Which is very odd as when you look back now at the early cybermen, they were laughable not at all scary.

I used to love anything that scared the carp out of me - but the most sinister stuff ever were them Polish (Eastern European generally) cartoons which British kids' TV seemed to import by the bucketload, in the late 60s and early 70s. I can't even remember specific ones just that they were always eerie and so creepy and weird, I really loved them. I do remember an Eastern European version of The Snow Queen which was just petrifying.

Oh, also a 1970s' series of horror one-offs. The Dickens story 'The Signalman' and M.R. James 'The Lost Hearts' - those creepy kiddies! Enjoyably terrifying programmes. Have re-watched them on YouTube and I thought although of the era, they stand up.
 
One of the characters on Rupert the Bear had an elephants head.

Edward Trunk! But then, Rupert had a bear's head, so I suppose they were the sort of kids who would hang out together.

The Rupert Annuals were a curious Christmas ritual. I saw a stack of them in a charity shop the other day; they were of a slightly later period but seemed to be stuck in their own surreal universe.

I didn't check but now I wonder if the quaint technique of telling the story twice over, once in prose and also in rhyming couplets, has survived. Wikipedia adds the images and page headers to suggest a four-fold method of story-telling!

The same page reminds me that a lot of the tales had an Oriental slant. I remember the Pekingese-headed creature - it's name was Pong-Ping. There seems, also, to have been a dragon called Ming.

I'm sure that prepared me for life in a multi-cultural world! :D
 
Edward Trunk! But then, Rupert had a bear's head, so I suppose they were the sort of kids who would hang out together.

Edward Trunk sounds like the name of a Jack the Ripper suspect to me. I can deal with Rupert's bear head, but to have a trunk makes Edward look like Ganesh and no, I never liked the look of him either.
 
I thought Raggety was supposed to be the scary Rupert Bear character?

Anyway, The Moomins was quite eerie, but it was the Hattifatteners that were really scary. Some say The Groke, but I don't recall that storyline offhand.
 
This episode of Hammer House Of Horror scared the bejesuz out of me when I first watched it .. it was the talk of the playground after it was aired .. yellow rain coats still creep me out ..

 
That's the best episode, definitely, although the Peter Cushing one has it beat for sheer bloody minded nastiness. I got the box set of HHoH a while back, and it's not half bad, a few clunkers but enough decent stories to make it worthwhile.
 
....but it was the Hattifatteners that were really scary.

^this....(as discussed in my Forecourt Fright thread).

Number 3 in my scary progs list (after Dr.Who, every Cyberman episode, and The Tomorrow People) was, oddly perhaps, Noggin the Nog. Dark, hypnotic, silly and scary...when I was a single-digit midget, the jerky movements and fiddly backgrounds all just scared me witless
 
I'll tell you what was fu- er, very scary indeed, and it wasn't a TV show, it was The Organist Entertains on Radio 2. I used to listen to the comedy hour on that station when I got my first radio, and this was on before it on Thursday nights, containing some of the creepiest music outside of The Phantom of the Opera. Really unnerving organ tunes, played for all I knew by some kind of skeleton ghoul man. I went out of my way to avoid it - and get this, I still do! It's still on after all these years!
 
@GNC that link becomes an unplayable 962 minutes 37 seconds static video, with spooky music (initially)
 
Picture quality is a bit crap-o-vision, but these titles knocked bloody Picture Box into the proverbial cocked hat:
I'd forgotten all about those disappearing white dots .. :) .. we used to sit with our legs crossed and pretend to shoot them with gun fingers ..
 
Twizzle used to give me the horrors everytime, and also Torchy, the battery boy - they both had that demented look on their faces - and then there was Twizzles ability to twist his bloody head around and around, but the greatest horror was moving to Australia and coming across Rod Hull and his flippin' emu - I've never been the same since...
 
Rubovia!

Horrid big-headed marionettes like a fever-dream!

For a long time I had forgotten the name, thinking it might be Borovia or something.

As Mungoman suggests, Torchy was also very evil - an early production of the Andersons, I think.

Four Feather Falls was another of their early horrors. I may well have been exposed to that at a time when I could hardly scream my dissent! :eek:
 
Aside from those programs that were not meant to be scary but scared me anyway (Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Saturday Night Live, etc.) there was Kolchak: The Nightstalker. This one was scary, but in a good way.
I recall my older sister watching this episode with her friends, while I hid behind the couch so they wouldn't see me and send me to bed. :D

 
That's the best episode, definitely, although the Peter Cushing one has it beat for sheer bloody minded nastiness. I got the box set of HHoH a while back, and it's not half bad, a few clunkers but enough decent stories to make it worthwhile.
That is the best episode but a notable mention should go to the one with Denholm Elliot and the biggest 'shock' of the series probably comes during the werewolf episode with Diana Dors.
 
With hindsight, it has to be Jim'll Fix It.
I do remember some journey into fear type show that had a title sequence featuring a roller coaster ride and sinister music. Some of those were good as I recall.

Edit- Found it... Journey into the Unknown.

 
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That is the best episode but a notable mention should go to the one with Denholm Elliot and the biggest 'shock' of the series probably comes during the werewolf episode with Diana Dors.

The Denholm Elliott one is pretty great, if only because it takes that hoary old cliché of waking up and it all being a dream and goes absolutely nuts with it.
 
Anyone remember Why Don't You? There was one series where they had a monster living under the studio floor called the Doris, you never saw it but they would refer to it and at the end of the series they were all eaten by it, falling into a trapdoor. I didn't like that very much, tell us more about making chocolate crispies instead.
 
Oh heck yes, that. Somehow it was worse than almost anything else ghost-y on TV at the time.


As luck would have it I rewatched the whole of Salem's Lot over Halloween. There is definitely something very messed up about that scene. It's hardly akin to what we see as modern horror, and the scene ends with a brief moment of a Naked Gun style 'freeze' which detracts a little from its impact, but it still remains creepy as all hell.
 
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