I used to watch TV-AM regularly as a small toddler – just about every morning I’d be up early before my parents had got up, and would be sat in front of the TV enjoying TV-AM. Being so young of course I rarely actually understood what I was watching, but something about the bright colours and the cheery atmosphere appealed to me, along with the wide array of presenters I quickly became familiar with. It seemed like a nice bright start to each day, and I must have watched nearly every broadcast for a good few years as a kid. But amidst all the cheery brightness, there was one particularly bizarre and disturbing clip I saw on a TV-AM broadcast in the mid-80s (detective work suggests 1986, but I wouldn’t rule out it could have been ’85 – my memories start to become clearer around that time…) which still disturbs me to this day. I have been trying to find this thing online for years but to this date it remains unidentified. But it is the perfect example of twisted, disturbing TV of the Haunted Generation – and of just how damned surreal 80s TV could be. So it most certainly deserves a post here, in the hope of finally solving the mystery…

I can’t remember the exact feature on TV-AM that it was part of – it was part of some feature on Good Morning Britain, I think an interview but can’t be sure. Anyway, the clip was as follows:

The clip featured a bird’s-eye view of a busy outdoor swimming pool on a hot summer’s day. My memory for detail must have been pretty sharp as a kid because I remember random minute details, such as there being a step ladder on the bottom left corner of the pool. Anyway, on the far left of the screen there was a mother sat on one of the chairs surrounding the pool, and a little boy was stood in front of her, whose shirt buttons she was unfastening. From memory, the mother had short black hair and was wearing a black top and black trousers. The boy was a typical-looking toddler with short light brown or blond hair, wearing a shirt and shorts. As mentioned, the mother was unfastening the boy’s shirt buttons, and she was talking to him as she did so (the boy didn’t say a word – it was just a long monologue by the mother). Seemed normal enough at first.

However, after a moment or so, the mother suddenly changed her voice mid-speech to a funny, comical voice. It was a proper silly, daft cartoon voice – a sharp voice right in the back of the throat. The change seemed undramatic – she just changed to the funny voice mid-sentence, and the boy didn’t react to this. She kept on unfastening (possibly buttoning back up?) the boy’s shirt, while talking to him in the funny voice, albeit with serious tones. Then after another moment or so the mother was lifted by nothing out of her chair, rose diagonally forward into mid-air, hung suspended in mid-air for a few seconds still in a sitting position – then fell into the pool with an enormous splash, while emitting a bizarre scream, still in the funny voice but sounding terrified. Absolutely no-one reacted to this – the camera hung on the scene a few seconds after the mother had fallen in, and the many swimmers in the pool didn’t react at all, while even the boy didn’t react – just kept staring straight ahead at the empty chair as if the mother was still there.

Cut back to the TV-AM studio. I’m pretty sure the late Mike Morris was among the presenters, possibly Anne Diamond as well, but childhood memories can never be 100% reliable. I seem to recall Mike Morris saying “Well that was…” and an air of bewilderment among the presenters, but no more specific details, much as I didn’t take in anything the mother had actually said in the monologue (well other than her bizarre funny-voiced scream of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA–A!”) despite registering numerous other details.

Naturally, being just about 4 at the time, this clip disturbed me massively. It was presented in such a matter-of-fact manner as if it was a mundane everyday situation – it got me thinking, could anything like that happen to my mum, and if it did, other people would react wouldn’t they? Possibly the thing that disturbed me most about it was the fact the little boy didn’t react, you’d think it’d be the most traumatic thing ever for a small child to see something like that happening to their mother, but this sadistic little sicko didn’t seem to care at all. You see now that even as a kid I probably looked way too deep into this, but show something like that to an autistic 4-year-old and it’s bound to freak them out… and got me thinking well into adulthood, what the hell was that thing, and what was it doing being screened on TV-AM of all shows???

So cometh the age of the internet, I have enquired in multiple places about this clip for just over a decade now… I’ve tried the BFI but they weren’t familiar with it, tried the AP Archive which houses the TV-AM archive as well, but they can only search the archive for business purposes. But while these enquiries haven’t led anywhere, I have not met with complete zero luck… for I have had a few responses on the various forums I’ve asked about it on, from people who are pretty sure they remember it; only problem is their memories are vague and they can’t clearly recall what it was. The one consistency is that most of them seem to recall it being an advert, i.e. shown during commercial breaks, and most think it was a Public Information Film (PIF). One person said she seemed to remember it being a PIF about sunburn and the dangers of skin cancer, and something about the shirt being buttoned back up, i.e. stay safe/keep covered up in the sun. Another also said they were sure it was a PIF of some sort, something about taking care when swimming or looking after kids at the beach. Another person who said she vaguely remembered this thing said she seemed to recollect it being part of a series of adverts – apparently “several silly adverts with different things happening” and she recalled them being rather silly and comedic. If this is the case I haven’t come across any more from the same series, but again she was pretty sure they were about safety and were PIFs of some sort.

Now the PIF theory is the one that makes the most sense to me – for one, that explains why they allowed something so disturbing to be shown on TV-AM, as they did occasionally screen PIFs on TV-AM – it was considered quite acceptable to traumatize kids and the general public if it involved some kind of safety warning and was supposedly for the greater good! And the PIF theory seems to explain all the bizarre oddities about this clip – most prominently, the whole idea of no-one reacting to the mother’s bizarre fate; i.e. take care at swimming pools because if you get into danger it’s likely no-one will notice. We see newspaper stories all the time about kids drowning in pools while no-one notices, even their own parents – indeed, here is a PSA from the US about this very subject:

Could the clip on TV-AM have been a PIF on the same subject, warning parents to look after their kids at a swimming pool, by reversing the parent/child role? These news stories about such situations have always been so common that I’m amazed I haven’t seen any other British PIFs on the subject – so it makes sense that this clip could have been a PIF covering that exact subject. Even the mother’s funny voice could be explained by the PIF theory – one person suggested to me that it could have been some sort of gargling water effect, to simulate the sound of a person drowning or a child hearing their mother’s voice from above the pool or something. Put the various factors together and you seem to have the perfect PIF on the subject – keep children covered up in the sun to avoid sunburn, and keep your eye on them at the pool and don’t be one of the careless parents who fails to notice when their child drowns. The PIF theory just seems to make too much sense to be wrong.

Then again, I may be way off and it might have been a clip from a TV show or something, there were definitely a lot of weird TV shows in the 80s with some outright bizarre scenarios… one person who remembered it vaguely said they think it was an ad for Irn-Bru or Tizer or something, though I find this less plausible and having viewed plenty of ads for those products on YouTube, I really can’t see this fitting alongside them. And of course, childhood memories are notoriously unreliable, so it may well be there is something I am misremembering, or the clip may well have been less disturbing than my memory recalls.

Either way, while certain details may be off, there’s no questioning that this bizarre recollection from my childhood, which one person suggested might have been a “mumps fever dream” was real, so somewhere in the country a public swimming pool was hired out to film this thing, with camera crew, directors, extras playing the swimmers, and of course an actress playing the mother herself (very curious as to who she was and if she might have been known for anything else) and a kid playing her static little boy – and the kid must be about my age now and must surely remember taking part in this thing. Someone is out there who knows for sure what this clip was, and someone is out there who starred in it or was involved in some way. And that broadcast of TV-AM went out to thousands, possibly millions of households across the country, to countless viewers, many of who must have remembered it, and many kids who may well have been traumatized by it. Let’s hope this blog post manages to reach some of these people!

So here is an appeal to identify this bizarre clip once and for all – feel free to share this blog post far and wide, share it across social media, ask people you know, and hopefully eventually it will reach someone who can solve the mystery.

And if you know the answer yourself – please get in touch by commenting here or sending us an email. You’ll be laying a 35-year-old mystery to rest!

UPDATE, 09/04/22 – There has been a lot of interest to find this clip, and lots of very helpful people on Reddit and Discord who have taken the time to search for this thing – I’m very grateful indeed for all your help! While we’re still nowhere nearer identifying it, we do have a possible lead in this advert for Smiths Square Crisps from 1982, which features Lenny Henry putting on a funny voice and walking on a swimming pool before falling in:

While the clip I remember could still be something completely different, it’s interesting to note the parallels – particularly the way that no one else really reacts to Lenny’s walking on water and falling into the pool. So while I don’t personally think there’s any connection, we can’t completely rule out that the clip I remember may be an advert in the same series, or at least something very similar. We also have a recollection of a commercial featuring a boy being scolded by a finger-wagging granny who, after taking a bite of some confectionery the boy had, had her voice speeded up and was lifted into the air and carried off into the blue yonder while still finger-wagging – possibly an advert in the same series? We have a separate post about this advert in its own right.

Also, on the suggestion of another member of the Discord server discussing this, I have put together a rough mock-up of the scene to show what it looked like, using an image of Faversham Swimming Pool with TV presenter Zoe Ball in the role of the mother, and a stock image of a generic little boy for the boy. (Note that the mother in the clip looked nothing like Zoe Ball – as stated above the mother had short black hair and was wearing all black, I’ve just been unable to find an image of anyone who looks like the mother in a sitting position, so I’ve used the still of Zoe instead!) While not 100% accurate (in the actual clip the mother and boy were a few more metres from the side of the pool, so the mother fell in at the far left side rather than in the middle) – this gives a fairly close depiction of what the clip looked like:

Of course, until we get a more solid lead we can only speculate, and many people still think the clip was more likely from a film or TV show than an advert or PIF… either way, there are a whole load of us searching for this piece of lost media, so if you have any more solid recollections, please feel free to respond here or email us to help us solve the mystery!