Category: 1980s

Three Dead Souls Trapped in an Apartment – Mystery 80s Drama (IDENTIFIED – WE THINK!)

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 5 Comments

Today’s UWTV entry comes from a member of the Weird British TV Memories group on Facebook, James Fish, who recalls a strange production on TV back in the 80s about three people trapped in an apartment, possibly in purgatory.

Over to James…

“I have a vivid memory from something fairly unnerving I saw some time during the 80’s in the UK with my family.

It starts off with a guy alone in an apartment. He is soon joined by 2 women and all 3 have no memory of how they got there. As they try and work it out, they get flashbacks of horrible deaths. The insinuation is that they are all dead.

I recall my mum explaining this next part to me because I was too young to understand. One of the women and the guy are gay. The other woman is straight. The gay woman takes a shine to the straight woman and the straight woman takes a shine to the gay man.

It’s obvious that none of them can be happy together because of this dynamic. Moving closer into despair, they all decide to leave the apartment but they emerge into what seems like an endless expanse of pitch dark corridors. They speculate that if they leave, they may wander round for ever and never find their way back. That’s where it ends.

So, does this ring any bells for anyone? I’m erring on the side of it being an episode of Tales of the Unexpected or Play for Today but I’ve looked through episode guides for them and cannot find anything even close. Thanks.”

Does anyone else recall this, or can anyone help James identify and locate this production? If so, please leave a comment below or email us!

07/11/23 – An update to this entry; it seems like this UWTV memory may have been identified!

It seems likely to be the TV movie Vicious Circle from 1985, which was adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos, known in most English-speaking countries under the title No Exit.

Vicious Circle – IMDb entry
No Exit – Wikipedia entry

As of the present moment, the film seems elusive, but we at UWTV are on the search for a copy; if you can help us locate it, please get in touch with us via email, Twitter or the comments below!

James is satisfied that this is the production he recalls; so big thanks to Twitter users The Earlham Review and Ian Winterton, and our followers Kevin Lyons and A Smith who commented below, for suggesting Vicious Circle!

In the meantime, we’d like to say a huge thank you to Feedspot, who have featured this blog in their list of Top 25 British TV Blogs on the web! Huge thanks to all at Feedspot, and to all our followers and contributors – we couldn’t have got this far without you!

Top 25 British TV Blogs

The Head of a Man in a Peat Bog – Unidentified 80s Kids’ Show (IDENTIFIED – BUT STILL UNFOUND!)

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Today’s UWTV entry takes on the task of searching for an unidentified piece of kids’ TV from the 80s that a follower of Scarred For Life contacted them about back in 2018. Five years on, this TV memory remains unidentified – so can any of our followers solve the mystery?

This weird TV memory was apparently a kids’ show, although it sounds terrifying… yet as we all know, kids’ TV of the 70s and 80s really pushed the boundaries as far as ‘terrifying’ was concerned, so it wouldn’t surprise us at all if this recollection is accurate!

The person’s recollection is of a children’s TV show about the mummified head of a man found in a peat bog, which is placed in the garden of a house – and lo and behold, paranormal events occur culminating in the mysterious peat bog man appearing in his entirety. The recollection of the person who saw this show is as follows:

“Here are the things I remember –

  • I think it was a rainy day at school and this programme was put on the tv for us. I seem to remember it was unplanned.
  • There was the discovery of the head of a man in a peat bog.
  • The head was put in somebody’s garden.
  • The child who lived in the house attached to that garden was wary of it. I think maybe the child was seeing it appearing in other places.
  • The child is alone in the woods and turns to see the full peat bog man.

That’s it. It’s not much to go on. I was born in 1981 and I watched this a primary school so it would have been the late 80s, likely.”

Does anyone have any recollection of this? Any idea what show it might have been? Any idea where it can be found…? If you can solve this mystery for us, please comment below or send us an email!

UPDATE, 10/09/23

Well, thanks to two of our followers on Twitter/X – Tom Kiehl and Tom Kitten – it seems this UWTV memory has been identified, as a 2-part episode of Picture Box from 1988, titled “The Man In The Moss“.

IMDb contains the following information about the episode(s):

“Unusually for Picture Box, this episode did not feature any on-screen presenter. The Man in the Moss had its own short title sequence, shown after the standard Picture Box opening titles, and the track Suspended Thoughts by James Clarke played over the film opening and closing credits. This is one of the few 1970s or 1980s episodes of Picture Box that was not presented by Alan Rothwell.”

As with other episodes of Picture Box, the 2-parter was screened in schools – and other viewer recollections have told us that the head of the bog man was apparently found while burying a recently deceased dog, presumably the pet of the child character, and (somewhat disappointingly) the story ends by revealing the supernatural events to have been a misunderstanding or the product of the child’s imagination, and a moral about not jumping to conclusions. Twitter/X user Folk Horror Revival tells us “it was a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions, which is a good message but judging by people’s recollections it doesn’t seem to have got through, everyone just seems to remember the terror of the 1st episode”.

While the ending does sound like a let-down, we’re all still very intrigued to see the 2-parter in full – so if anyone has access to a copy or knows where we may be able to find one, please comment below, email us or drop us a message on Twitter/X!

Thanks to everyone who contacted us with their suggestions and recollections about this UWTV memory and helped identify it for us! And thanks also to those who suggested and linked us to the Welsh film O’r Ddaear Hen (From the Old Earth) – while this may not have been the production we were looking for, it’s definitely well worth seeing!

In the meantime, we’d like to say a huge thank you to Feedspot, who have featured this blog in their list of Top 25 British TV Blogs on the web! Huge thanks to all at Feedspot, and to all our followers and contributors – we couldn’t have got this far without you!

Top 25 British TV Blogs

The Weird TDK Adverts – and the missing one…

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So this one isn’t unidentified, but it seems worth doing a UWTV entry for anyway, since it was for a long time unidentified – and though it’s now been found, there exists at least one other advert in the same series which we’d love to get hold of.

For many years I was well and truly perplexed by a weird series of adverts I had seen on TV around the mid-80s. Being only about 4 or 5 at the time I couldn’t remember a great deal about them or what they had been for, but my recollection of them had me totally lost as to what they might have been for, and completely confused the hell out of anyone I asked about them. I spent over a decade searching for these adverts on various TV forums online, and this was my description of them:

“I remember a series of particularly dark and weird adverts that showed on TV for a while in the mid-80s (circa 85-86). Each of these commercials featured a pitch black screen and there would be the sound of mumbling, echoed voices and whispers as well as random things/people appearing on the screen and changing or transforming in some way… I remember a man in a shirt changing into a werewolf-like creature – if I remember correctly he appeared as the werewolf first then as himself, then later in the same advert there was the sound of a scared little girl’s voice and a man’s voice answering “Oh, sorry Laura”… Another of these adverts began with a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone… I haven’t the faintest clue what they were advertizing…“

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, wherever I asked about the above, I was met with responses of “Where do you buy your weed”, “Don’t eat cheese before bedtime”, “What the hell are you smoking”, etc etc… and no one ever had any idea what these commercials might have been for. After a decade of searching, I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding these, thought I may as well make a post about them here just for a laugh, but didn’t expect to ever identify or find them.

Then, one day in June 2021 I was just browsing 80s ad breaks on YouTube, and was absolutely gobsmacked to come across one featuring the very advert I’d been looking for…

Completely at random, I had stumbled across the exact advert I had looked for for so long, well after I’d given up hope of actually finding it. I was so taken aback at finding it out of the blue, that I had to lie down for about 15 minutes after watching it, to process it all! And it turned out to be for TDK Video Tapes, something I would never have suspected… and with this video having been uploaded way back in 2008, it turned out it had been online the whole time I’d been looking. I’d probably even skimmed past it on YouTube searches in the past – just goes to show, we should never give up hope of finding these weird TV memories of ours, they can pop up in the most random and unlikely places.

Watching the advert and reading my description above, it’s perhaps easy to see why my memory didn’t jog anyone else’s recollections of this advert. It wasn’t exactly an accurate description, and while the advert is definitely weird, it’s clear that my toddler mind actually twisted it to make it seem even weirder and darker than it was, into something more like some experimental short arthouse film than a light-hearted TV commercial. And this is pretty much the case with the majority of my childhood memories of weird TV; however weird or dark the actual production, it is never quite as disturbing or twisted as my young mind’s recollection – something about a child’s naivete, selective memory and lack of solid understanding of the adult world is capable of twisting things to make them seem even more messed-up and surreal than they actually are.

Nonetheless, this particular advert is definitely a solid example of 80s commercial directors getting creative with arthouse weirdness, and deserves a firm place in the archives of The Haunted Generation.

And another reason for this blog post is, that there is at least one more advert in the same series…

As you can see in my description above, I recall another advert in the series that had “a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone…“

I can still very much recall this other ad in the series. I can recall the little boy, seemingly pulsating with energy, or being bathed in white light, in a similar manner to the bloke at 0:09, and from recollection, an old lady entered the frame, said something and touched him, and she immediately turned, slowly, into a stone statue.

There may have been other ads in the series too, but there was definitely at least one more besides the main one… if you have any recollection of the aforementioned missing TDK advert in this series, or any others, please comment below or send us an email!

Advert with a finger-wagging old lady and magic confectionery…

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 1 Comment

This latest search is for an advert that several of our readers have recalled, apparently from the mid-80s, for some sort of confectionery – either sweets, chocolate or bubblegum though we’re not certain which. The advert has been described as follows:

“The advert had some finger-wagging old bat scolding some little kid… she took a bite out of this confectionery that the kid had on him, whereupon its magical powers of zaniness sped up the old bat’s voice, lifted her into the air and hauled her off, still finger-wagging and screeching, into the wild blue yonder, and the kid grinned to the camera.”

Although a UK reader first brought this ad to our attention, a US-based visitor to the blog claimed to have seen this advert as well – it was not often that commercials were screened on both sides of the Atlantic, although it’s not out of the question that similar commercials may have been made in both countries, perhaps for an international product.

It is not certain as yet what type of confectionery the advert was for – Hubba Bubba was suggested, though a YouTube search has revealed no adverts matching this description yet. Refreshers is also a candidate, given the similarities to this animated Refreshers ad from the early 80s:

While the advert our readers recall was live action rather than animated, it’s quite possible it could have been a live action ad building on the earlier animated commercial for the same product.

It has also been suggested that this elusive clip featuring a woman and boy at a swimming pool seen on TV around the same time could have been an advert from the same series.

Does anyone have any recollection of this advert, or know where we can find it? If so, please post in the comments below or email us to solve the mystery!