Category: Foreign TV

Two mystery TV horror films from the 80s…

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 1 Comment

Today’s UWTV memory is a guest blog post by one of our readers, named Pat. If anyone can help Pat identify or find these elusive TV horror films from the 80s, please comment here or drop us an email!

Over to Pat…:

The first was screened in the scheduling dead zone after Christmas, definitely on ITV, during a weekday afternoon in early January 1985 or 1986, while the schools were off. I think it was called Fraidy Cats, and it was an American or Canadian production. It was a one-off, shown at maybe 1pm-2pm, on the STV regional channel.

I remember watching this with my brother on an old black and white TV screen, and this would have added to the atmosphere, but there was little doubt that this show was weird, creepy and probably wouldn’t be broadcast now.

It showed this young boy and some of his friends being involved in scary, odd incidents. One of these involved an old man taking the boy out on his boat, and then going mad in the middle of the trip. There are other scenes which show the boy walking around the house at night in the pitch dark, and we “see” what he fears. There are claws rasping against the walls, ghosts and demons following him around. It really lodged in my brain. It’s doubly odd in that I am fairly sure of the name of the show (there is a possibility it was “Scaredy Cats”, but I am sure it was “Fraidy Cats”), but there is no mention of it online, it doesn’t appear on any archived listings, and no-one I know remembers seeing it.

The second one is even more bizarre – a slasher movie, complete with dead bodies and blood, totally serious in tone… that was screened on a Sunday morning on BBC1 at about 10am, 1984 or 1985.

It was shown, again, in that odd dead zone you used to get on Sunday mornings, usually when loads of niche/minority interest or religious shows are scheduled to fulfil quotas. This was an education show (not part of Open University), which proudly showed the winning entries of a national student film contest.

One of these was a slasher movie – and, to seven- or eight-year-old me, it was utterly horrifying.

It followed a school bus trip out into the woods. It was British. Like the American slasher movies of the time, it followed teenagers and presented a list of victims/suspects. They are picked off, one by one, by a hidden figure who is wearing a gauntlet of some kind. I can remember blood; I can remember one of the teenagers ending up garrotted and strapped to a tree by the neck, while another character wanders past on the other side, oblivious.

The final shot of the video reveals the unexpected killer, one of the quieter kids on the coach, wearing the gauntlet.

In my mind’s eye it was quite well shot, but whoever decided this was fit to broadcast on a Sunday morning must have been either out of their mind, or simply not checking the content of the films.

Does anyone remember these?

If you recall either of these films or know where to find them, please comment here or send us an email!

**UPDATE** Thanks to Twitter user Adrian Bott, the first of these two productions has been identified! It is a short Canadian TV film titled Fraidy Cats: The World According to Nicholas , shown on UK TV as a Short Story Theatre feature – and here it is for your viewing pleasure!

Big thanks to Adrian for identifying and finding this for us. Thanks also to @ScarredForLife2 for sharing this post!

Adrian also thinks he may know the second feature remembered by Pat above – the slasher film he thinks may be Breakdown, a Young Film Makers Competition entry that was shown on Screen Test on December 6th, 1984.

If you are able to confirm this for us or shed any further light, please comment or email us!

Mystery 80s TV Show About an Evil Stepfather

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 1 Comment

This entry is about a show one of our readers, Bex Shacklock, has asked us about. A foreign TV mini-series dubbed into English, about an evil stepfather and his daughter, which Bex thinks might have been called “The Miser” but Google searches are yielding no results. Perhaps another reader recalls this show???

These are the details that Bex recalls:

  1. The program was a 3 part – maybe more – mini-series aired on children’s television sometime during the 1980s.
  2. It was a foreign language program, with overdubbed narration. It was NOT ‘Heidi’ or similar.
  3. The premise was an evil stepfather-type figure being generally evil to his stepdaughter.
  4. I am almost positive it was called ‘The Miser’, but no Google search or other research can find it.
  5. The opening credits were of an old house in some woods.
  6. It was on around teatime.
  7. It was a very sinister show – the girl was made to drink a drink that made her go to sleep.

Can anyone help Bex (and us) out??? If you have any recollection of this show, please comment here or email us and let us know – and of course, feel free to share this blog post across social media and other sites and ask anyone you know who might recall this show!

Under The Same Sky: Elusive 80s Kids’ TV Show

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So this memory isn’t exactly unidentified, since we know the name of the show. But Under The Same Sky is so frustratingly elusive that it most surely deserves an entry here.

Under The Same Sky screened on Children’s ITV in the mid-80s, and was a regular feature on there, it seemed to be on quite a lot. Indeed, according to Wikipedia‘s brief mention of it, it ran from 1984-87 on CITV. And that’s not a bad run at all, three years. So it’s somewhat bizarre that almost no one seems to remember this show, and there’s pretty much absolute zero about it online – the above Wikipedia mention is the only evidence of its existence revealed by a Google search.

So what was it about…?

From the recollection of the few of us who do remember it, Under The Same Sky was a series of children’s stories from around the world, each episode featuring a separate story set in a different country, hence the title. And going from our recollections, it was no light affair – the stories tended to be on the challenging side; deathly serious and hard-hitting stories involving danger of some kind.

It seems that each story involved children from one country unexpectedly finding themselves in the unfamiliar surroundings of another country, and falling victim to some kind of danger there. If I’m remembering correctly, each episode began with a man sat atop a hill, who would introduce the story for that episode and the country it was set in. From the hazy recollections of the few of us who recall it, some of the stories were as follows…

The kid who fell down a hole

This one is my personal memory of the show, and I’ve no idea what country it was set in, but as I recall there was very little dialogue. From my recollection, it featured a kid running away and running into the woodland, chased after by another kid. There were shots of a deep hole in the ground that the kid was approaching, and sure enough, the kid fell in the hole, tried to hold on to the edges, but lost their grip and fell all the way down. (I can not recall for certain whether the kid was a boy or a girl – I think it was a girl and the name may have been Layla? But I can’t be sure…) So the other child went and got the parents, and I recall the father leaning above the hole, shouting down for the kid. The rest of the episode consisted of the father trying to pull the kid on a rope out of the hole. It was very slow-paced and there was almost no dialogue – I just recall tensely watching as the father above ground struggled to pull the kid all the way up on the rope, while under ground the kid held on within the hole, in near-total darkness.

The road accident in Denmark

One member of the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) Facebook Group recalls an episode where a German boy and his parents were involved in a road accident in Denmark. The boy, who escaped the wreck unscathed, was cared for by a Danish family while his parents recovered in hospital, but they couldn’t communicate with each other due to the language barrier.

Good snakes Bad snakes

One other member recalls an episode set in India about cobras, and the title was “Good Snakes Bad Snakes”. Presumably this one would have been about a child being bitten by a cobra but this is all the information we have.

Other recollections say that some of the episodes were dubbed into English, and that some were animated, either partly or wholly… from one person’s recollections “Hand drawn backgrounds. Quite slow paced.”

So how did this show fall into nothing less than total obscurity? Given that it apparently ran for three years on CITV this would suggest it was reasonably popular, yet there’s barely any evidence online that it ever existed and there seems to be absolutely nothing about it on YouTube. It seems it was a rather striking show with a very serious tone to it, and given that foreign shows are often a challenge for young viewers due to awkwardness like subtitles, dubbed dialogue etc., it could be that this show just didn’t strike a deep enough note with many kids of the 80s to stay in their minds to adulthood.

All the same you’d think there’d be more about it online. There isn’t even anything about it on IMDb, which is just mad. I suspect it may have been produced in a foreign country and probably known elsewhere under different titles – surely it follows that a show with such a prominent international theme must have been shown in numerous different countries round the world. Which makes it only all the more strange that it seems so obscure to the point even the all-knowing Internet has next to no record of it.

So do you recall this show…?

Those of us who remember Under The Same Sky and were intrigued by it as kids are very keen to see it again and find out more about it. So we would be very grateful to anyone who may be able to help us drag this long-forgotten show out of obscurity and preserve it online in some form.

If you remember anything about Under The Same Sky or indeed have any videos of it, then we want to hear from you – please post a comment here or email us via the contact form! And even if you don’t remember anything, feel free to share this post far and wide in the hope we’ll reach someone who does!

Post Update (21/10/20): New Developments!

Thanks to @ScarredForLife2 sharing this blog post on Twitter, we’ve had some responses with some very intriguing further details about this show.

It turns out one of the narrators for this show was none other than Tom Baker – who according to Tim Worthington “honestly sounded as if he didn’t care what was happening” while another was Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. I’ve been sent the following screen grabs of excerpts from the TV Times by Douglas Noble (many thanks Douglas!)

As you can see, the episode described on the above right excerpt is definitely the one about the German family’s road accident in Denmark.

Tim Worthington, in the meantime, remembers the episode about the kid falling down the hole:

“definitely European, it was two sisters, a sensible one and the arsey younger one who fell in the hole while walking backwards making fun of her. The hole was above a cave or over a cliff and it was also intercut with firemen in the cave/under the cliff trying to work out what to do. In the end her sister was lowered in on a rescue winch and pulled her out.

There were non-ominous ones too, some of them folklore-y.“

Some very useful information here – thanks Tim and Doug! – and searching Google based on this info, it seems there’s some info on the BFI website, including four episode synopses:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b77289738

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b73232600v-people/4ce2b73232600

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b707a2279

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b76c02449

From the info here, it seems the show was produced by a variety of production companies in Europe and sponsored by the European Broadcating Union. It seems to have been a multinational collaboration with different episodes produced by a company specific to the particular country the episode focused on.

So in total, we have 7 episode synopses:

STINA
Narrated by Tom Baker – a Danish family on holiday in Germany suffer a car accident in the Bavarian Alps. The daughter, Stina, goes to stay with a German family while her parents recover in hospital, and befriends a local boy named Anian.

THE BURIED TREASURE
Narrated by Terry Jones – Set in Italy, a light-hearted cops and robbers adventure set near an archaeological site where experts are digging up Etruscan remains.

(TITLE UNKNOWN)
The younger of two sisters falls down a hole in the woodland while playing games, and her family and a team of firemen work to rescue her. (Set in unidentified European country)

JOOST
Narrated by Tom Baker – Set in The Netherlands, Joost is sent away to the Sunshine Summer Camp, where he encounters all the worst aspects of communal life.

DAG
Set in Norway – Dag runs away from home, and his special school for the deaf, and takes refuge in the family’s country cabin, only to find it occupied by a fellow run-away.

SIMON & SARAH
Sarah and Simon are separated after the death of their parents. Simon seeks out Sarah in her foster home and together they run away.

GOOD SNAKES, BAD SNAKES
No synopsis details for this one – apparently set in India and presumably about a child being bitten by a cobra?

If you have any further information on Under The Same Sky, or any videos of it, please get in touch and hopefully we’ll be able to rescue this show from obscurity and see it again!