Category: horror

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

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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!

The Girl Who Could Fast-Forward Time – Disturbing 80s TV Drama (IDENTIFIED!)

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 9 Comments

In the various forums on which weird TV of the Haunted Generation is discussed, many obscure and long-forgotten gems of British kids’ TV’s disturbing past come up. While many long-lost shows have been rediscovered this way, there is one that’s been enquired about on several occasions that has yet to be identified. And it’s got many of us curious to find it, because it sounds outright disturbing, if not frankly terrifying…

From the recollections of the people who’ve posted about it, this was a children’s TV drama, broadcast some time around the late 80s or early 90s. The description of this TV show is as follows:

A young girl comes into possession of a TV remote control device, that she can use to control the world around her, and fast-forward or rewind time. She uses this to her advantage, fast-forwarding through boring bits in life, putting life on pause etc. Then one day she gets tickets to see her favourite band in concert (some viewers remember this being Howard Jones, others claim it was Wham!), and can’t wait for the day of the concert to arrive. So she uses the device to fast forward to the day of the concert. But, while life is on fast forward, the girl falls asleep, and eventually wakes up as a decrepit old woman, looking into the mirror and seeing herself ancient and decrepit. She quickly reaches for the remote and tries to rewind back to her youth, but accidentally hits fast forward and crumbles into a skeleton. The last shot is of her looking in the mirror as she becomes a skeleton.

Quite a few people remember this TV show, but no one seems to remember what it was called, and whether it was part of an anthology show or a one-off in its own right. One viewer recalls it having Alison Bettles, who played Fay Lucas in Grange Hill, in a supporting role. And several of the people who remember it recall watching it in school, raising the question of whether it was targeted at school pupils, like the legendary Interference.

Whatever it was, it seems to have been a moral tale warning against wishing one’s life away – but what exactly was this show, and is it still out there anywhere?

UPDATE, 10/09/24

Thanks to John Mawdsley, a member of the Facebook group Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s), we have a lead and a potential title for this!

John recalls this program as being titled “Cold Feet” and that it aired on BBC2 some time in the morning:

“I remember watching this when it aired and checking the tv guide for the name. It was aired on BBC Two during the morning and I recall it was called “Cold Feet”. Any searches I’ve done have always resulted in the other TV show. I could be wrong but I always remembered it as Cold Feet.”

Thanks to John for this information! As yet, predictably, searches online have only shown up results for the far more well-known 90s series also called Cold Feet – but now we have a possible title for this long-elusive piece of lost media, this should greatly help our search.

UPDATE, 25/11/24

VERY PROMISING LEAD!

Thanks to our reader SimonT in the comments to this article, we now have what looks like a very promising lead for this elusive drama. Simon has done some digging, and it seems very possible this was an episode of the Thames TV schools programme Middle English titled “Fast Forward”.

Simon’s recollection is as follows:

“I’m almost certain that it starred Roger McGough doing a Peter Sellars routine in multiple roles (including as a metal-head biker whose favourite bands included ‘Lead Balloon’ and ‘Spiky Sausage’).

Imdb sadly hasn’t thrown up much info, but Roger McGough was involved with a Thames TV programme called ‘Middle English’, which ran throughout the 80s, providing a mix of documentaries and dramas. This feels like a really likely candidate, for two reasons: firstly, we definitely watched at least one other episode from the same series in school (an animated adaptation of ‘The Shrinking of Treehorn’ and secondly, there’s an episode from series 11 (1986, which totally fits the time-line for when I saw this) called . . . ‘Fast Froward’. There’s no other info out there at the moment, sadly, but this feels like a very definite maybe.”

This looks like a very likely candidate. The Broadcast For Schools website has a list of Middle English episodes that features a brief snippet of information on the episode “Fast Forward”:

“Kurt, Mungo, B.P. and Me (spring 1984), Fast Forward (autumn 1986) and Mistaken Identity (autumn 1990), 3 separate plays about the experiences of a poet, written by and featuring Roger McGough”

This would corroborate Simon’s memory of Roger McGough starring in this production as well as the date, so this looks to be our most promising lead yet. It would certainly make sense that this production came from the same series that brought us the classic and terrifying Interference (1985), but as yet there is no further information online about “Fast Forward” and a YouTube search yields no results.

UPDATE 07/12/24 – IDENTIFIED!!!

With special thanks to Paul Rhodes, a member of the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) group, we have now identified this piece of lost media for sure – we know now for certain that as SimonT suggested, it was an episode of Middle English titled “Fast Forward”, which aired on September 23 1986 and was repeated on September 25. Below is the proof, from a Times Educational Supplement from back in the day:

TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE:

“David Self Looks at Thames Television’s ‘Middle English’

This term has seen a justified repeat of Jan Mark’s Izzy. Next term (September 23 and 25) there is a new play by Roger McGough, Fast Forward. Both sophisticated and accessible, it is also very funny. The central character, a 13-year-old girl, is played mainly by the camera. She idolizes the pop star Howard Jones and, finding the rest of life boring, she conjures up a remote-control unit that allows her to “fast forward” through those bits she finds especially tedious, for example, PE lessons and being told off by the head. Both the head and the PE mistress (and other characters) are played by McGough himself. He is especially good as the head, offering visitors paperclips to fidget with as if they were sweets.”

So going from the sound of it, Fast Forward was a mostly comedic children’s play with a particularly dark and twisted ending, which no doubt shocked a lot of children who viewed it at the time.

Huge thanks to Simon and Paul for identifying this piece of lost media that we and many other enthusiasts of the Haunted Generation have been seeking for a long time. Now we just need to find if any recordings of it still exist – and if so, does anyone have a copy they can upload, or know where we can find one? If so, please comment below or email us!

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!