Welcome to UWTV

Any child who grew up in the UK between the 70s-90s will likely agree on one particular thing: the TV of the era was often downright weird. (The three terrifying characters above being a case in point.)

From spooky paranormal, folk horror and sci-fi dramas, to kids’ shows so creepy it’s amazing they were ever approved for children’s TV, nightmarish Public Information Films (PIFs) and TV adverts that were downright surreal or unintentionally creepy (despite often advertizing the most mundane products!), the TV of the era has left three generations of kids traumatized – albeit fondly – who have come to be known as ‘The Haunted Generation’ following Bob Fischer’s Fortean Times article of that name in 2017. Since then, the Scarred For Life Twitter channel and its accompanying books have been doing an amazing job of chronicling and preserving for posterity the weird and disturbing TV of the era.

But while The Haunted Generation have been having endless fun reliving the memories of the TV that scarred us for life, and discovering the terrifying TV we (perhaps fortunately!) missed the first time round, there are those memories that remain elusive… strange scenes, adverts, clips, PIFs, TV episodes etc that disturbed the bejeezus out of us, yet despite our searching, we just have not been able to find… and thus we remain haunted by these unidentified memories, our adult minds plagued by the question of, Just what the heck was that exactly?

Cue the reason for this blog. Inspired by a whole host of unidentified weird TV memories on the Facebook group Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s), this blog exists to chronicle these mysterious and elusive memories still haunting the minds of the Haunted Generation decades on… and serve as an appeal to identify them! After all, these things were physically produced, by actors, writers, directors, camera crew etc., some of who must still be out there and must remember these things… so if you are still plagued by an unidentified weird TV (UWTV) memory from that era, drop us an email or comment and we will post a blog entry about it! And if you happen to be familiar with any of the UWTV posted here (or perhaps luckily worked on them) then please let us know and we will make an updated blog post – you’ll have set at least one traumatized child of the 70s-90s’ minds at rest!

Enjoy browsing and feel free to share or comment on any of the entries – The Haunted Generation stay haunted, but we wouldn’t have it any other way…

“Maybe the future of it is the fact that childhood itself is a bit weird, and there’s stuff lodged in people’s memories that troubles them, that they can’t quite explain… even in an era when they can look stuff up. Hopefully not all of the answers are there, and there’s still some mystery and a sense of wonder.” – Jim Jupp

Header image credit: “TV SET” by Infopablo00 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.