Category: Children’s TV

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 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!

The Green-Eyed Monster – One-off CITV Drama

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There were a lot of paranormal and sci-fi dramas on children’s TV throughout the 70s-90s. Many of these have strong cult followings all these decades on. But one that I rarely ever see anyone else mention – perhaps because it was a one-off as opposed to a series – is The Green-Eyed Monster, shown on Children’s ITV in 1989.

Technically this isn’t an ‘unidentified’ show, but it’s obscure and unknown enough to justify a post here. From my recollection, this one-off drama was shown around September 1989 – I may be wrong about the month but I seem to recall it being around that time of year. It was advertized a lot in trailers on CITV in the weeks leading up to its airing, so never one to miss a good paranormal show, I watched it…

The plot was about a young girl, who an internet search reveals was called Cora and was played by Joanne Leigh-Palmer. Cora possessed a strange psychic ability that caused her eyes to literally light up green whenever she became jealous – and whenever her eyes lit up, something bad would happen to the person she was jealous of. The main plot was about Cora’s mother having a baby, and this triggered Cora’s jealousy as up until then, she had been an only child and had always been the centre of attention.

Cue lots of strange and frightening things happening whenever her jealousy was aroused. I remember very few details so recollections from here are only vague… but I think there was one scene at a friend’s birthday party. According to one person I’ve found who recalls it, Cora made glass crack with her mind. And there was another scene where Cora was stood in line with a load of kids by a swimming pool, I think during a lesson of some sort (for some reason I seem to remember all the kids singing “Why are we waiting”) and Cora’s eyes lit up, and this caused the teacher to fall into the pool. The teacher then yelled at the girl stood behind her, accusing her of pushing her in – but she hadn’t, it was Cora’s psychic powers that did it. The show culminated in Cora’s house being set on fire, presumably due to her jealousy of the baby, and as the family stood outside the house as the fire brigade arrived, the camera closed in on the baby’s eyes turning green, indicating the baby had the same powers. That’s where it ended…

Although my memories are pretty vague, I seem to recall it being quite dark and freaky for a Children’s ITV show; or at least it struck my 7-year-old mind as being so. Surprisingly there seems to be next to nothing about it online – just this short article on the BFI website. The most detailed info I’ve found is this extract from Look-In, posted by someone on the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) group on Facebook:

The Green-Eyed Monster – excerpt from Look-In, 1989

Apparently it was scripted by Paula Milne, one of the UK’s most accomplished screenwriters – but other than the limited information online The Green-Eyed Monster seems to have completely vanished into obscurity.

On the subject of recurring tropes in sci-fi fiction, it’s probably worth me noting that this one-off drama seemed to have striking similarities with a very disturbing story I read as a child in a book of children’s sci-fi stories in the primary school I went to. It was a story about a boy called Simon who had strange psychic powers that meant he could cause things to happen just by thinking about them. Simon had just moved to a new neighbourhood, where he befriended the boy who was narrating the story – and at first the kids found Simon fun to have around, using his powers to help them get free ice creams, and get out of a scrape with the local bully. But later on, things turned nastier as Simon used his powers to do outright evil things, going as far as killing his teacher by causing him to have a car crash, while at home he used his powers to terrorize his parents, who lived in fear of him. Simon’s mother had just had a baby girl, and Simon was jealous of her and tried to use his powers to kill her – but the baby turned out to have the same powers and used them on Simon, causing him to levitate and hurl around the room, smashing into walls until he was dead. The story ended with Simon’s mother leaning over the baby’s cot, whispering “Oh no, not her as well…” (UPDATE: This story has now been identified and found – it’s “Sinful Simon” by John Wagner of 2000AD fame, published in the 1982 book Exciting Stories of Fantasy and the Future)

II’m digressing a bit by mentioning the above story here, but it’s worth noting the striking similarity to The Green-Eyed Monster, and I wonder if this story may have been its inspiration, or perhaps more likely, they may share a common inspiration.

Either way, I’ve found a small number of people who remember The Green-Eyed Monster and were freaked out by it as kids, and so naturally, would love to see it again… can we rescue this lost curiosity of 80s kids’ sci-fi from complete obscurity?

If you remember The Green-Eyed Monster or have any more detailed recollections… or better still, have a copy of it anywhere… then please drop us an email! And if not, feel free to share this blog post in the hope of reaching someone who can help!

UPDATE – 25/05/25 – It has been a pleasure to hear from Joanne Savory, who appeared as an extra in The Green-Eyed Monster as a child. Joanne tells us:

“The Swimming Pool Scene was filmed at Burntwood School, London, SW17 where I was a pupil.

My friends and I were lucky enough to appear a few times and I’m one of the girls swimming in the pool scene.

My friend and I were given strict instructions to swim really slowly (almost in slow motion) as the girl who played Cora wasn’t a confident swimmer.”

Joanne thinks she may have a copy of the show taped from the TV somewhere, so let’s hope she can reunite us with this long-lost TV obscurity – thanks Joanne for getting in touch!

Another weird circus clown memory…

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 1 Comment

A while back we featured a UWTV memory from one of our readers, David McCarthy, about a stop-motion film about a circus clown who hangs himself after finding he’s unable to remove his make-up:

The Clown Whose Make-Up Wouldn’t Wash Off

As of yet this memory remains unidentified, but David has another memory from around the same time involving a circus clown. So we’re featuring it here on the off-chance anyone recalls it…

Says David:

“A children’s tv series from circa early 80s, maybe vaguely like the Famous Five but I don’t think that was it. I remember a scene where a circus clown is watching the kids from behind trees. The clown I think was wearing a hat, was young ish and had curly hair, not a wig. He turned out later to help the kids. Think he was in a circus camping locally. Just that early scene he was watching the kids from behind a tree, it came across as kind of sinister like he a villain. He takes an apple out of his pocket and bites into it as he watches the kids.

I’m pretty sure the clown turned out to be good and helped the kids later in the episode but in that scene where he’s watching them you don’t know that. I remember being quite creeped out by it.”

Does this sound familiar to you at all?

If so, please feel free to comment here or drop us an email!

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!