Animated short: Anthropomorphic Dog on the London Underground

Today we continue our exploration into the dark recesses of televisual and psychological do-they-or-don’t-they-exist mysteries, with this UWTV memory submitted by one of our followers, Kirsty Asher, of a strange animated claymation short film about an anthropomorphic dog, seen on TV around the turn of the millennium.

Over to Kirsty!

“I have searched and searched for evidence this animated short exists because I definitely remember watching it, but haven’t managed to locate any stills or IMDb clues. It would have been late 90s, possibly early 00s. No idea what channel it was on I was probably about 7 or 8 when I watched it.

It was a claymation short about an anthropomorphic dog (I think he was a black labrador?), living in London and he gets on the Underground with his CD Walkman. All the other background characters were some form of anthropomorphic animal, at least as best as I can remember. Puts his headphones on when he gets on the tube and falls asleep, has weird, trippy nightmares that he thinks are really happening, then when he wakes up he realises the tube’s reached the end of the line and he’s locked in the carriage. I remember it ending with him all stressed and banging on the doors of the carriage.

I realise this is such a vague synopsis to go on but I’m hoping someone might remember!”

As this sounds like a particularly intriguing, and possibly disturbing production, it would be well worth identifying and locating this animated short.

Does anyone else recall seeing this? Or does anyone know the title or have access to a copy?

If you can help us out, please respond below or send us an email!

Image Credit:Metal Dog” by oliva732000 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The Head of a Man in a Peat Bog – Unidentified 80s Kids’ Show (IDENTIFIED – BUT STILL UNFOUND!)

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

Advert with a finger-wagging old lady and magic confectionery…

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!

Strange Clip Featuring a Mother and Boy at a Swimming Pool (As Seen on TV-AM…)

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.

Still of the TV-AM Studio from a broadcast c.1987. L-R: Mike Morris, Anne Diamond, Richard Keys. The television monitor between them was used to show clips and I seem to recall this particular clip showing on this screen.

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:

A mock-up of the pool clip with Zoe Ball in place of the mother – does the above ring any bells for you?

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!

The Doll on the Escalator: The Elusive PIF…

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!