TELEVISION

FT’s very own couch potato, STU NEVILLE, casts an eye over the small screen’s current fortean offerings

Having established its shop window with lots of Star Trek and Mission Impossible, Paramount+ has now started producing original content. Hauntings is promoted as a premium series which “unpacks paranormal activities that have captured the imagination and defied explanation for years, including a possessive poltergeist in London, hostile hauntings in Scotland, demonic drownings...” (no mention of crimes against alliteration, however). It has a distinctly British documentary style: think “24 Hours in Police Custody” or similar, with sober, real-life participant narration and low-key music, plus a refreshing lack of hysteria.

Episode one, “The Enfield Poltergeist”, starts with former Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris, today still beavering away in his darkroom, recounting the reports the paper received in September 1977 about the now notorious goings-on at the Hodgeson house on Green Street, along with a clip from BBC Nationwide from the same time in which a well-spoken WPC explains how she saw a levitating

He describes meeting Janet and an encounter with a flying Lego brick

armchair. The programme has straightforward reenactments of events along with present-day testimony: Morris leaves his lab and returns to the house, retracing his steps into the kitchen, where we see his 1970s self as he describes his first meeting with Janet and his encounter with a flying Lego brick. The BBC’s Roz Morris, of The World This Weekend, takes up the baton, or rather reel-to-reel tape recorder, as she stalks around the house after dark trying to capture odd noises, then listens back 45 years later to her report, in which she declares herself convinced. Enter the Society for Psychical Research in the form of Melvyn Willin, the SPR’s archivist, who shows us the very Lego brick that struck Morris; which event in turn prompted the involvement of Maurice Grosse – cue his bright red E-Type Jag drawing up. He chats with Mrs Hodgeson over the formica table (it’s the Seventies). He and Ros are downstairs (sporting flares and sideboards) when thumps and bangs kick off. They rush upstairs to find a trashed room with an overturned bedstead and Starsky and Hutch posters and Sindy dolls in disarray. Janet does the weird voice thing, and the rest we know. Maurice Grosse’s son Richard contextualises his father’s enthusiasm. Much has been implied about Grosse’s need to believe, owing to his recent bereavement. However, Richard believes he was genuinely scientifically curious above all else.

What distinguishes Hauntings is that it eschews a narrator or interviewer, instead relying on the level-headed accounts of journalists, researchers and sincere, calm witnesses; all far more convincing than the lowlight, hysterical shriek-fests of recent years. Well-made, level-headed and engaging.