Ghostwatch (1992)

I can’t believe I didn’t do this at Halloween. Really, though, New Years might be just as appropriate. I am about to inform you, dear reader, of a gem that possesses amazing awesomeness. That gem would be the little known BBC original, Ghostwatch.

I was chatting a little on twitter with @gizmoalex and happened to bring up this show that my buddy @spikester (of the Paul & Spike Show podcast) turned me on to years ago. Ghostwatch has all the brilliance of a well done faux documentary that gets a little out of hand and becomes a bit like Orsen Welles’ War of the Worlds infamous radio play.

From its wiki (major spoilers at the link; sanitized below):

Ghostwatch is a British horror-mockumentary television movie broadcast on BBC One on 31 October (Halloween) 1992. Despite having been recorded weeks in advance, the narrative was presented as ‘live’ television. Due to the furore that followed its first and only UK television broadcast, the film is now widely regarded as being one of the most controversial British television events in recent years.

The film was produced for the BBC’s Screen One anthology film series by Richard Broke, Ruth Baumgarten and Derek Nelson. It was written by Stephen Volk, and directed by Lesley Manning.

As yet, Ghostwatch has only ever been repeated on television outside of the UK – on stations such as the Canadian digital channel SCREAM for Halloween 2004, and the Belgian channel Canvas in 2008.

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The 90-minute film was a horror story shot in a documentary style and appeared as part of BBC Drama’s Screen One series. It involved BBC reporters performing a live, on-air investigation of a house in Northolt, Greater London at which poltergeist activity was believed to be taking place. Through revealing footage and interviews with neighbours and the family living there, they discovered the existence of a malevolent ghost nicknamed Pipes from his habit of knocking on the house’s plumbing…. <redacted to avoid spoilers>.

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Much of the British public believed the events to be true and some controversy ensued after its airing. This was all in spite of the fact that Screen One was a drama slot, the programme aired with a “Written by…” credit at the start, and a cast list was published in the BBC’s Radio Times listings magazine. There is a long running rumour that Sarah Greene had advertised the programme on her Saturday morning children’s show Going Live, including a ‘visit’ to the location of the ‘haunting’ and gave the impression that she was taking part in a ‘reality show’ and not a drama. However, the Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtain blog (which gathers information for a long mooted documentary about the show) acquired the three most likely episodes (the week before, the day Ghostwatch was shown, and the week after) and found no reference to the show [2]. The BBC was besieged with phone calls from irate and frightened viewers, and British tabloids and other newspapers criticised the BBC the next day for the disturbing nature of some scenes, such as <redacted to avoid spoilers>.

The reaction to the programme led the BBC to place a decade-long ban on the programme being repeated after its initial broadcast and, although this has now been lifted, it remains unlikely that it will ever be shown again on British terrestrial television. The British Film Institute released it on Region 2 DVD in November 2002.

This was before Paranominal Activity and The Blair Witch Project and is probably more scary that both combined and on Barry Bonds-roids.

Gloriously, this thing is not as hard to get as it was when I watched Spike’s third-hand copy of a copy of a copy on VHS several years ago. In fact, you can watch it on Google Video. And you will want to. Enjoy.

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