GHOSTWATCH – “There are no creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows,” – so said Parky at the beginning of ‘Ghostwatch’, a live-on-air journey to the supernatural underside of the UK TV heartland, where you’re more likely to get freaked out in the bedroom of a pebbledashed cul-de-sac than in the corridor of a deserted mansion. Infamous now as the hoax that spawned a tabloid furore and a BBC ban, it’s hard to imagine anyone sitting down with their mug of Horlicks these days seeing ‘Ghostwatch’ as anything other than a put-on from the start. To moan about that would be to miss the point by a country mile, though. Its genius lay in its ability to blindside - casual viewers and channel hoppers likely asked themselves “what the f@ck” when flipping from a 1992 KitKat ad to wonky vid cam footage of a terrified Sarah Greene and screaming children, for which there was very little real precedent at the time. Callow young Frankie watched it when it first aired, expecting the usual twee spectres, maybe a bit of poltergeist stuff – dead wrong. Even if you’re viewing it as a dramatic construct, there’s an inexplicable strain in the air from the start, a tension that darkens to outright menace after the chaos kicks in midway. Incidentals and little details accumulate unease as they filter through via studio phone-ins and tales from passers-by on the ground – I can remember realising something was fundamentally off about it during the bit where someone in a really bleak looking playground tells Craig Charles a story about a mutilated pregnant dog. It seldom hits the wrong note, but there are a few little missteps to break the spell here and there; the girl with the grafted-on “mr evil voice” doesn’t play quite as well these days and maybe didn’t at the time. But all that’s overshadowed by what director Lesley Manning and writer Stephen Volk sustain on the back of surprisingly dark creative choices, and I always forget that the haunting’s backstory is mired in an account of awful abuse and nasty shit. More interesting still is the conceptual ambition signalled after it broadens out and takes on almost Nigel Kneale-esque type proportions – “we’ve created a broadcast séance!” – and you get this very potent sense of a UK made of little grey houses and depressing estates sitting atop a terrain of vast and unknowable forces, some of which might have erupted in the studio that night. Never disappoints as a rewatch, and genuinely a pivotal moment in UK TV history. Even if the moment’s gone, I’d somehow love a remake directed by Ben Wheatley, with Alan Partridge standing in for Parkinson.
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