Boo! Why things that go bump in the night terrify TV bigwigs
Telly execs don’t like anything to do with the paranormal. They fear their dinner party friends will sneer if they start making programmes that take the supernatural seriously.
In the media world, it is heresy to doubt the three great pillars of wisdom: science, atheism and Professor Brian Cox. That’s why church services have been reduced to a token slot, and all ghost-hunting shows are played for laughs, like real-life episodes of Scooby-Doo.
An investigation of a well-documented haunting at a remote cottage in the Brecon Beacons had to be dressed up like a Hollywood poltergeist movie, in True Horror (C4). Strip away the pantomime moments, though — the kamikaze barn owl dive-bombing a Baptist minister’s car, for example — and there was the raw material of a fascinating psychological documentary here.
liz Sanders and her husband Dave, an artist, moved to the dilapidated house with its creaking boards and draughty windows about 15 years ago, taking their three children. Dave had an interest in the occult, and the atmosphere of the house affected him badly. The constant sense of being watched drove him to spend all his time in his studio, painting obsessively.
Stressed by her lonely life in this eerie house, and struggling to look after three children plus a barn-yard of animals while David painted long into the night, liz took to religion with a fervent intensity.
This one-off episode, which relied heavily on dramatic reconstructions, was mostly interested in the artist’s dark visions and hallucinations. It ignored an obvious alternative explanation, that Dave was in the grip of a serious psychotic condition — not possessed, but ill.
If less attention had been paid to wacky exorcists and their creepy book-burnings, and more to Dave’s psychiatric problems, we might have learned much more — such as, can one man’s delusions somehow infect a whole family?
The show deserves praise, though, for taking other phenomena at full value. There were no sceptical attempts to explain away the things that went bump, groan and shriek in the night.
In particular, one piece of evidence was allowed to stand: daughter Becca told how she and her brother used to see an old lady, silently watching them in their playroom. It seemed so ordinary to them at the time that they didn’t think to be scared.
How many children could tell of similar encounters, not ‘true horror’, but accepted as plain normal? Until they grow up to have dinner parties, of course.
More innocuous children’s entertainment was provided by Nature’s Biggest Beasts (BBC2), with Miles Jupp from Radio 4’s News Quiz doing his best nursery voice, like an irritable Mary Poppins.
On this evidence, I’d love to hear Miles reading childhood classics such as Just William. He wrapped his tonsils around some ludicrous snippets of animal information: the komodo dragon, for instance, is ‘big enough to hog a kingsize bed and then some’. I’d have thought the trick with dragons is to teach them, straight out of the egg, that they aren’t allowed upstairs, and certainly never on the furniture.
The sound effects department got into the spirit, too, adding boings and twangs to graphics that showed just how hefty some of these animals are. Snails as big as your fist, giraffes as tall as three basketball players stand-ing on each other’s shoulders — statistics the way children can understand them.
With cute shots of parrots and polar bears, as well as gruesome monster insects squirting streams of their own blood, this was per-fect telly to thrill a young family.