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!
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!
Today’s UWTV memory comes from one of our blog followers, Stephanie Owens, who is looking on behalf of a friend for a strange short film or sketch, thought to have been shown on Channel 4, about a man trapped in a river.
This one may be slightly outside of our usual 1970s-90s range as the person who saw this thinks it was around 2002-2005 that they saw this. But it is certainly weird and seems to echo of classic Hauntology-era TV weirdness, so it is definitely worth an entry on UWTV.
So over to Stephanie, to relay the memory from her friend:
“Some time in the early 2000s – probably around 2002 – 2005 is a good time frame – there was a TV sketch (I think it was a Channel 4 thing) that revolved around a man that needed to be rescued from drowning.
It is daytime and this man stands with water above his waist in a still river or canal, and is unable to move. Two men approach, walking along the towpath, wearing what seems to be Orthodox Jewish clothing. The man in the water asks for help, the two men realise that as it is the Sabbath they cannot help unless he is in danger. The man in the river considers his situation but does not think he is in immediate danger. The man in the water comes up with several suggestions including throwing the lifesaving ring, but the other men still say that as it is considered work, they can’t do that. The three enter into a dialogue to discuss the situation and to explore if there is an alternative. I believe it ended with no solution, and the man is left standing in the river.”
This piece of lost media seems to echo of the much-emulated classic La Cabina, with its themes of someone becoming trapped, and unhelpful passers-by. Though it sounds from the description as though this one may have taken a more comedic approach as opposed to horror like the latter film and its many imitators.
Does anyone else recall seeing this film/sketch/clip, or know what it was or where to find it?
If you are able to help us identify this piece of lost media, please respond below or email us!
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!
70s and 80s society was awash with Cold War paranoia, and this was reflected in much of the TV at the time; the threat of nuclear war making for particularly gripping drama across the genres – influencing sci-fi, horror and general drama of the time.
One of this blog’s readers recalls a particularly unusual drama, seemingly a one-off, aired on UK TV in the late 80s or early 90s, done in the style of a documentary, on the subject of a war between the USA and the EU (EEC at the time of course).
The details we have are as follows:
“I seem to remember it being caused by the US using battlefield nukes against the East Germans which the West Germans considered an attack on themselves and off it all went.I think it was in a format that used fake news reports, I remember a mention of a combined French and German infantry division called “The Charlemagne Division” going into action against the US army that was stationed in Germany and possibly a segment on a French aircraft carrier being sunk.“
Does this ring a bell for any of our readers? We’d be very keen to find this piece of UWTV, so feel free to share this post as wide as you can, and if you recall this yourself or have any further details, please contact us or post a response here!
Update (28/11/20)
Thanks to Twitter user @Araminta_Kane we have managed to identify this show – it was a BBC-produced film aired in 1993 titled Europe on the Brink:
“A drama set in the year 2013 which postulates that Europe has become rich and unified with Berlin Wall-style fortifications around it to keep out immigrants. It is also on the brink of war with the United States. The projected scenario is based on the work of strategic thinker Jonathan Eyal.”
The film does not seem to have been screened again since its airing on the BBC in 1993, and has never been released on DVD – so far we have only managed to locate a version of it on YouTube dubbed into Italian, which can be viewed on the above link.
Huge thanks to @Araminta_Kane (nice Moondial reference in that username) for identifying this elusive production for us – and if you can help us out further by hooking us up with the original English language version, please do not hesitate to comment here or send us an email!
Unidentified Weird TV 