Tag: 1980s

Broadcast From the Future, c.1991

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ Leave a comment

We have a new UWTV memory here, sent in by Gluben, one of our readers.

So over to Gluben…

“Okay, this one is pretty obscure, but this was similar to an unsettling ad break from 1989.

“To give people some background, in 1989, First Direct bank launched with a strange advert that literally “interrupted” an ad for Audi (all pre-arranged with Audi) and aired on all ITV regions and Channel 4 at the same time. The ad by advertising agency HHCL claimed to be a broadcast from the future in the year 2010 and was celebrating the 21st anniversary of the launch of First Direct before it returned viewers to their regular programming. It was only ever shown once:

“It was very daring and it was followed by a second pair of adverts that aired during the week, introduced by actress Charlotte Rampling, with different viewpoints of First Direct, a bank that had no branches. The “positive” ad (starring Jeremy Swift in a white suit miming a gospel song) aired on ITV, while the “negative” ad (starring Steve Punt in a black suit miming a blues song) aired on Channel 4:

“Anyway, when the first ad was reposted on YouTube, it brought about a comment relating to something similar. [The commenter] claimed that there was another interruption of a commercial break during a showing of Romancing the Stone on ITV (Central in their region). It occurred in 1991, but was nothing like that one and definitely wasn’t made by a company selling a product.

“For anyone familiar with the book Bringers of the Dawn and the subsequent Pleiadians videos that have been posted online, it was similar in content but abridged and compressed into about 60 seconds. On screen, there appeared a spinning galaxy and possible fleeting images of our planet (their memory was rusty on some details), while the message was spoken by an unseen soft-voiced woman. The gist of what she said is as follows: ‘We have come from your future to let you know that Earth will soon be entering a special phase in its evolution, whereby there will be an opportunity to raise the planetary frequency.’ He definitely remembers a period of 20 years being mentioned, along with the recommendation that we work on increasing our positive vibes, or words to that effect. At the end, she said something like ‘You will now be returned to your regular viewing’ and then it finished.

“He only heard of one other person who’d apparently mentioned it (a friend of a friend, his name is Richard Forbes and he lived in Dudley), although he never got to ask them in person, and was surprised to not find anything reported in the media about it. He’s certain of the year, because he remembers talking to a couple of mates the next day when he met them on his dinner break, and he was only in that particular job throughout 1991.

“I’ve tried my best to locate the ad on the History of Advertising Trust (HAT) website but couldn’t find anything close to matching, and they also emailed back saying they had nothing in their records matching. I’ve also looked through the British Newspaper archive for regional TV listings and there’s absolutely none for Romancing the Stone for ITV or Channel 4 in 1991 in the whole of the UK, let alone the Central region; only in Ireland, but the person is adamant of both the year and the film. He reckons it aired on a Sunday between about 7pm and 10pm and was definitely not in the summer months, so possibly February to April or September to November.

“That’s all we’ve got to narrow it down, so any help finding the ‘advert’ in question, or what it was about, would be greatly appreciated.”

Does anyone else recall seeing this? If so, please respond below or drop us an email and let us know!

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!

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!

The Doll on the Escalator: The Elusive PIF…

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 5 Comments

We’re all familiar with the infamous ‘Escalator Safety’ Public Information Film from 1970, from which the image of the child’s welly boot being crushed down the sides of the escalator haunted the minds of just about every child subjected to it.

Here it is, to relive the trauma…

But there was another.

While the above PIF has been showcased many times online and led to much discussion and nostalgia among kids of the 70s and 80s, many times I have seen members of the Haunted Generation recall another Escalator PIF that they say scared them much more than the above infamous one.

And this one featured a doll.

It’s a well-known fact that the guaranteed way to make a PIF terrifying is to feature a doll in it. (Click for a case in point) But this particular Escalator PIF, in which a doll rather than a wellington boot is crushed by an escalator, has somehow remained elusive, even though many seem to recall it.

From the recollections of members of the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) Facebook group:

The PIF featured a little girl on an escalator, holding a rag doll. She dropped the doll and tried to pick it up, but the doll was hideously mangled and scalped underneath the bottom step, and the PIF ended with a shot of a man standing holding the doll’s hair.

It doesn’t seem to have run for as long as the ‘welly-boot’ PIF did, and the escalator might have been one of the old wooden escalators that were banned after the Kings’ Cross fire.

I’ve seen many people talk about their recollections of this PIF across various nostalgia sites and YouTube. But somehow, despite having scarred the minds of many, it remains elusive and has yet to show up online.

Either way, it seems to have inspired a more contemporary Canadian PSA…

The Canadian one above definitely seems to follow the same formula. But the original British PIF with the doll on the escalator seems to allude us.

Can you find this PIF for us?

If you have any more detailed recollections of this PIF, or better still, have a copy of it – comment here or drop us an email to let us know!