Stuart Millard's Blog, page 2

The Lost Television Gold of Sky Star Search

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

Millard’s Christmas Selection Box IV

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

Paul Daniels at Christmas: From Cups and Balls to Song and Dance

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

Night Fever’s Millennium Eve Party

The final few hours of December 31st 1999 was likely television’s most consistent night of weirdness, with everyone gone mad at the satisfying rounding of some numbers, and each main channel hurling itself into full celebration. While doom-sayers huddled in their duvet forts from Y2K raining jumbo jets onto their heads, telly was going full Caligula. Perhaps the most fitting; the most real New Year’s revelry could be found on Channel 5, where an army of drunks in glittery cowboy hats endured a four hour karaoke marathon. You ‘eard — four hours. The total runtime of this rip is 3hrs 51m.

Night Fever was at the heart of Channel 5’s early original programming, its first episode airing the very week the transponder got switched on. It’s a simple premise, with two teams of celebrities belting out pop standards in a karaoke battle hosted by Suggs off Madness, and the first series wholesale pinched their captains from Robot Wars, with Craig Charles and Phillippa Forrester behind the desks. These two are gone by Millennium Eve, with an era-defining array of revolving famous faces in their stead. In tackling such a mammoth task, we have to do things differently, and the best way to approach this is in a purely linear sense; for you to ingest it just as I had to, so this will be a more freeform, stream of consciousness prose than the tightly-woven Pulitzer-worthy paragraphs you’re used to.

It’s 9pm, and the tape begins with a continuity announcement for what’ll be first on your screens at the dawn of a new thousand years; Emmanuelle — “perhaps the most celebrated erotic film ever made…” Start the millennium as you mean to go on, with a lonely, piteous wank. This is one of those classically late-90s nightmare settings, everyone rowdy and half-cut, cheering and clapping in time to the music, audience segregated like a school disco into girls and guys, in sweaty moshpits of crop tops and enormous dress shirts, gelled hair shining under the lights. Co-presentor Will Mellor’s in a vest, big crucifix hanging round his neck; Sarah Cawood with a half-shirt tied around her boobs. Suggs will be holding it all together, thankfully recovered enough from his clinical insanity to be anchoring television.

Suggs has a silent assistant named the Pop Monkey, a little person in a Fez-wearing monkey suit, who cues the songs with a card. Though nobody actually, literally says the words, thus escaping a Trades Description breech, the show’s played as a live broadcast, with a countdown clock in the corner telling us how much of the wretched century that gave us Michael Barrymore’s My Kind of Music and the wedge haircut remains. But if it’s live, how can they trail upcoming guests with clips which haven’t happened yet? Did Suggs spend all that Baggy Trousers money building a working Chronovisor? The whole thing was probably filmed next door to the Hootenanny with cast and crew exchanging Easter Eggs between takes.

Song number one is fittingly Robbie Williams’ Millennium, sung by Lenny Beige, as a giant caption orders us SING UP AT HOME. I will not. Not even as the lyrics come up onscreen. I once got told off by a clown for not clapping along at the circus, so Suggs has got no chance. The cameras cut to everyone swaying; Tony Blackburn in a sequinned Union Jack vest like Ginger Spice’s grandad; Lionel Blair, having a ball. I’ve compared things to a hen/stag do before, but here it’s never been more true. The whole thing’s predicated on Girls v. Boys tribalism, and should the two groups get within ten yards of each other, it’s going to get unbroadcastable very fast.

Suggs and Pop Monkey step hand-in-hand through dry ice into a time machine, taking us back to pop’s glory days of 1959. Suggs dressed like a teddy boy. Audience in Beatle wigs. Blackburn in leather vest and cap like the daddy of a gay biker gang, Rebel Flag patch across the back suggesting his crew are specifically white supremacist. Celebrity figureheads captain the Lads vs. Lasses battle, bellowing scripted panto banter at each other across the studio. “The girls are promising singers,” says Blackburn, “they should promise not to sing any more!” His team consists of Lionel, Barry off EastEnders, Bruce Jones off Corrie, and Pete Conway; saving me a Google by identifying him as Robbie Williams’ dad. Opposing them is a team of Nell McAndrew, Heartbeat‘s Tricia Penrose, impressionist Francine Lewis (a good 14 years before she went on BGT and anyone knew who she was) who’s dressed as a playgirl bunny, stand-up Jackie Clune, and “crazy crazy Cleo Rocos.” If anything can drag me through a four-hour runtime, it’s the presence of Cleo.

‘Elvis’ doles out points to the teams for who karaoked Millennium the best, with Blackburn and Blair rushing to assault him after a low score. I’m already getting motion-sick from the constant cuts to audience members losing their damn-fool minds, camera not lingering on anything for more than a second, everyone in off-the-rack-at-Tesco fancy dress. A mere 8 minutes in, I’m confronted with, what Suggs informs us is “the official tribute to the Blues Brothers.” Can you guess what song they’re doing? CAN YOU (You! You!)?! If I’d have been watching live on NY Eve, this would’ve been my Ian Curtis Stroszek moment. Life’s hardest dilemma is, given a time machine, a bullet and access to baby Dan Ackroyd, would you rid the world of Everybody Needs Somebody, knowing there’d be no Ghostbusters? Regardless, the crowd go mad, Blair, Blackburn and Barry on the desk can-canning, Robbie’s dad (in a 1966 England kit) looking unsteady up there.

Cawood picks blokes out of the crowd to go onstage for Born to be Wild, in the kind of performance you’d let go on behind you while you carried on a conversation in the pub. Here though, front and centre on our fifth terrestrial channel on the biggest night of the last thousand years. One man is deemed the best by Robbie’s dad, adorned with a cardboard crown by Pop Monkey. Will Mellor in a mod jacket making moped noises with his mouth pretends to headbutt Cawood, as he is playing ‘a cockney’. The pace feels like those Japanese shows Clive James took the piss out of. I feel confused and old. Though I know it didn’t, I’m praying Y2K kicks in and puts an end to it, monitors fizzing, Barry off EastEnders flattened to liquid by an Airbus A330. I’d feel sad, but at least this would be over.

Sarah talks to a man dressed as Austin Powers, who insists Tricia Penrose “looks just like a fembot. Do you have machine gun jubblies? Go on, let me see!” Onscreen captions in giant font are overly matey; NICE ONE, PARTY ON, WICKED, GO GO DADDYO. During a deranged Delilah, Lionel, Tony and Barry’s faces are contorted in rage; Lionel between Francine Lewis’s thighs as though he’s being crushed to death. Returning from a break, he’s dance-wrestled her onto her back, serenading from side mount. Live in the studio, the Supremes do a turn of Baby Love, one of half a dozen songs on the cassette my childhood neighbours would play relentlessly, inciting flashbacks to the sound of “OLAY, OLAY OLAY OLAY!” coming through the floor in the three years following Italia 90, and of finding a used condom filled with cold spunk in our garden, slung from their bedroom window.

Will Mellor picks some ladies out of the audience to sing, all a bit giddy to be talking to Jambo off Hollyoaks, and Mellor giving it lots of “g’wan, girl!” In archive Night Fever clips, Reg Presley’s doing Wild Thing, and sadly not talking about crop circles; Desmond Dekker Israelites, Love Affair Everlasting Love. I say ‘do’, but they get one verse each at most, the show unable to cling to any scene for longer than thirty seconds, even with four hours to fill, and I’m staring at the countdown like I used to the old classroom clock, trying to Uri Geller the numbers round with my mind. Barry’s dressed as a “peace man!” hippie, looking exactly like Sid James at the end of Carry on Camping when they’re chasing off The Flowerbuds, and does a raucous I Feel Good. These days, he runs his own, very successful Barry-oke nights.

Daydream Believer has everyone on the desks like Dead Poet’s Society, alongside pre-taped footage from a sea of people at a nightclub and church choir joining in to sell that it’s live. Marmalade do Ob-La-Di, dangerously clad in kilts on a stage where a camera roves underneath, risking us seeing out the century with a glimpse of 60-year-old knackers. Every time it cuts to Lionel, he’s having the time of his life. Lipstick on Your Collar from the girls team doing annoying Grease voices, Blackburn’s Boys pointedly turning their backs on them and sat theatrically yawning, before their turn with Great Balls of Fire. CRAZZZY declares an onscreen caption. Do you know how much runtime’s left? Three hours, motherfucker.

I wonder who’s inside that monkey? I bet it’s him off Pigsty. I’ve looked it up, it’s a chap called Kevin Hudson who played WAGBO in all those skits on TV Burp. The Supremes are back for Can’t Hurry Love, with onscreen lyrics which aren’t in time and have spelling mistakes. We cut back to a man in an Elvis wig as scrolling text informs us ‘FILL YOUR GLASSES, S CLUB 7 ARE IN THE BUILDING‘. I’ll have what he’s* having! (*that Bosnian war criminal who drank poison at his trial) This is the worst thing Bruce Jones has ever been a part of, and I’m including finding the horribly mutilated body of one of Peter Sutcliffe’s victims.

We’re told Lionel was the first ever person in Britain to do The Twist, as the intro to him performing that very song, with the kind of aggression not usually seen outside of somebody murdering their captor. Alright, I’ll twist, I’ll twist! Just don’t hurt me! No doubt afraid of the consequences should he fail to do so, Blackburn twists so violently, it’s like he’s trying to start a fire with his legs. The camera visits, in short order, bouncing boobs, a woman holding a chihuahua, a Blues Brother. Lisa Rogers’ co-host gobs down himself in a trailer for their C5 movie show.

Finally, a change in time periods, putting us into the 80s. As going for the whole show would result in deaths from exhaustion, there’s been substitutions, a new ladies team made up of Josie d’Arby, Lucy Alexander dressed as a gender-swapped Boy George, Bernadette Foley from Brookside, CBBC’s Ana Boulter as Madonna, and Sarah Maltravers (who Mellor helpfully informs us is from Mad About Pets) as famously-80’s figure Ginger Spice. The fellas are Junior Simpson as a Run DMC style rapper, Neighbours’ Philip Martin (Ian Rawlins) as Crocodile Dundee, the bloke who played Bernadette Foley’s husband in Brookie as an Oasis, Steve Wilson from grave-era Live and Kicking as Adam Ant, and Paul Hendy as Rod Stewart. Hendy takes the banter too far by immediately announcing Josie’s nickname is Radio Luxemburg — “easy to pick up, but you stand a better chance late at night,” which she looks a bit shocked by. Will Mellor is dressed as a cowboy.

Sugg’s slip of the tongue “pop monkey, what’s tonight’s first number” suggests each time period was filmed on a different day, and I cling to the logistics of television production like that kid in IT who recites the names of birds when Pennywise is giving chase. They are pretty laissez-faire with the decades, in the 80’s but straight in with Wake Up Boo, which is so inherently 90’s, it’s basically the soundtrack to Chris Evans shouting “wahey!” as he pushes his flaccid penis into a rolled up FHM while the Tango Man watches. A Michael Jackson impersonator gives out scores, saying nothing but “oww!” (a direct quote from Michael roasting in Hell’s cauldron)

S Club are here, all seven of them, still full of youthful exuberance and life, giving the maudlin quality of finding a photo from a family birthday twenty years ago and pointing out the ones who’ve since died or been really racist on Big Brother. I’ve just realised Will’s not a cowboy, he’s Indiana Jones. The neckerchief threw me. He slaps the thigh of a woman in leather trousers — “cracker!” She’s a bit tipsy, and he wafts the air to infer she stinks of booze. Will patronisingly tells the ladies they’ve no excuse, “as this woman, she’s 60, and she’s been giving it the large ones,” as an intro to Tina Turner. Clips from old episodes show Buster Bloodvessel, and Chaka Demus all by himself. Only joking; of course Pliers is there! Ah, the 90s, when a bra was a top. Mr. Boombastic by famous funny comedian Junior Simpson is captioned GETTIN’ JIGGY WID IT. A Britney impersonator gives him 10, then all the celebs are up to do a Vic Reeves style Dizzy. I miss Cleo and Lionel. And the period before I was born when it was just darkness and nothing.

An ad for Blockbuster makes me check the remaining time and realise I could leave to go watch Megalopolis and still be back before Suggs says goodnight. Girls doing Lauper. Boys doing Wham. Beige with a lounge version of Madness. Who’d win if him and Bob Downe had a wrestling match? Is Sarah Cawood dressed as Princess Leia? She pulls out a man with a deflated blow-up saxophone and shoves him onstage with another Boy George (an unenthused bloke called Gary) and a Beastie Boy, and their conversation goes like this:

CAWOOD: Ad-Rock!

BEASTIE BOY (confused, has no idea who Ad-Rock is): Lee.

They do Wonderwall, and I glance away for a moment to hear yer man from Neighbours declare a contestant the winner because “his blow-up saxophone went down, and I’d hate that to happen to my cock.” Furiously running it back, I am distraught to learn I misheard, as he waves around a green inflatable crocodile. But then there’s a split second cameo by Scorpio off Gladiators dancing in an archive clip of Alexander O’Neal. Life is balance. Then Cheggers doing the Tragedy dance to Steps. Balance.

Josie gets a solo number, with a surprisingly awful voice, like biting into a beautiful perfect ripe peach to discover someone’s done a shit inside. She sits on Brookside Man’s lap but quickly jumps off as all you can hear are his loud sex moans of excitement. Rambo gives her full marks, and the studio’s women react as if they just won the FA Cup. I’m not even halfway through. Nowhere close. A big group Come On Eileen and I’m sat here counting off the minutes like someone 15 years into a 40 year stretch for stepping on a policeman’s foot, Will Mellor shouting over the top “come on, boys, have it large!”

More S Club. For every crowd shot, they’ve definitely borrowed those special Boob Detector cameras from TFI Friday. SORTED says a caption, as the girls do It’s Raining Men. It’s really hitting me here the sheer number of songs I never want to hear again, none of which I’ve ever consciously chosen to sit down and listen to. Culture really grinds everything half decent into the dirt until there’s nothing left. There’s not a song in this whole show I wouldn’t wish death on someone for if they put it on a jukebox. Sick of it. Suggs is bullied into performing It Must Be Love, before a trailer for The Worst Air Crashes of All Time. I wish I was in one, as we return mid-Disco 2000, where nobody knows the words even though they’re onscreen. Hope the time machine takes us back to the Dark Ages, before they invented tinsel wigs.

Sadly, it’s the 1970s, full of both great music, and songs you’ve heard a billion fucking times. Guess which ones they’ll be doing, to the audience now in giant afros. At least I’ve finally crossed the half-way point. The teams have changed again. Chegwin, dressed in 70’s gear but accidentally looking exactly like Peter Stringfellow. Jonathan Morris off Bread and many Childrens Royals with spiky hair and black lipstick as a punk. Having cut off those beautiful locks and put the eyeliner on, Morris is in his Metallica Load era. Alvin Stardust as… himself? Danny John Jules and Trevor and Simon. Business is picking up! Especially with London’s Burning era Heather Peace sending me all faint. With her are Mellor’s fellow Hollyoaker Natasha Symms, Charlie Maloney from Play Your Cards Right, Jocelyn Brown, and Australian musical comedy double act Supergirly (ironically, the pairing who filled Trevor and Simon’s slot during the dying days of Live and Kicking).

Points are given out by a Queen lookalike, but not Jeanette Charles, recategorising this lady as a Jeanette Charles impersonator. But I said things were picking up; Chas ‘n’ Dave are in the house! Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! They missed a huge payday not selling that for an ad with Lovehoney. “With your incessant wanking…” Mellor’s also dressed as a punk, with as good an impression of one as Keith Harris — “yeah sorted, wicked, wicked, sorted innit.” Punk twink Jonathan Morris sings Pretty Vacant, which is something I can tick off my bucket list. This is my generation’s ‘Tom Holland lip synching Umbrella.’ Morris skips around, shaking his exposed midriff and putting much more vibrato than is necessary into a Pistols song, in a performance so camp, it makes Danny La Rue look like GWAR. Still more punk than Danny Boyle’s thing though. An onscreen graphic congratulates with NICE ONE, and he’s given 9 by a Benny Hill impersonator, who a still in-character Morris pretends to headbutt before shoving the camera aside.

Save All Your Kisses For Me. I’ll put them aside in a jar, Heather. Come round and collect any time. Ad breaks where a first class train ticket is £32, and Julian Clarey’s in a shopping centre comparing women’s whites for Daz; a spokesmanship I’d completely forgotten. Everyone’s doing ABBA, with Cheggers up on the table risking another Davro in the stocks incident. Jonathan Morris is just a nuisance at this point, possessed by the (still living) spirit of Johnny Rotten, arms flailing, yelling in people’s faces, heaving Heather up on his shoulder and running her round the set. He’d have been a good The Crow. Tony and Cherie Blair lookalikes enjoyed it anyway, giving out big scores.

Cawood picks out a fellow from the audience with a fake Mod Squad tash who introduces himself as Mick Mucksbridge, his Tiger Feet leaving Cheggers headbanging (and probably making that weird hiccup noise). These archive clips are just a roll-call of celebrities I fancied as a teenager, as after Scorpio there’s Davina Taylor from Hollyoaks twirling to Disco Inferno with big Darren Boyd — God, they’d have made beautiful and very tall children. In another clip, Rose Royce performs Car Wash while Rod Hull wraps Emu around Cheggers’ leg and tries to wrestle him from atop the desk.

Jocelyn Brown shows everyone how it’s done, bringing the house down with a thunderous I Will Survive, but has to stop for a giggle break due to the antics of Jonathan Morris. A Clinton lookalike who can’t do an American accent gives her 10. Look out, Morris has got a live mic again, climbing on the girls’ desk for Cum on Feel the Noize. Cut to a depressing advert for a chatline, at twenty minutes to midnight Millennium Eve, followed by an ad for Yahoo, presumably to help you find a Geocities site with instructions for the best method to off yourself with the least mess.

Leo Sayer’s there to do When I Need You, blissfully unaware in a few short years, he’ll become so angry on Big Brother because they won’t give him clean underpants, he’ll accidentally give a thumbs up to camera instead of a middle finger, and when he finally dies, the outburst will be noted in every single obituary at the expense of albums he spent ages working on. As the girls perform a saucy Lady Marmalade, everyone seems to have forgotten the countdown; just ten minutes of the year remain, some of which will be taken up by Jonathan Morris going berserk again, to Deeper and Down, sweat flying, Danny John Jules leaping from the desk.

The only thing you’re waiting for with New Year television is the countdown. To, say, skip that bit and jump straight into next year would be like hearing the words “that was some nice sex we just had, wasn’t it?” but the last thing you remember is exiting Paul Blart 2 at the cinema together. 2hrs 54m in, with the NYE countdown clock down to five minutes, the tape suddenly cuts to a studio filled with streamers and the excitement of a fresh millennium, balloons falling from the ceiling, everyone in fancy dress like schoolgirls or Batman or burglars, all cheering and waving. NICE ONE. We’ve no idea who shared New Year kisses with who. Suggs takes a seat behind his desk, dressed like an old-timey convict.

This final act actually feels live-live; you can’t fake excitement like that! Another ‘Christ, not this one again’ as we kick off with YMCA, and New Year, new teams. Sam ‘Linda Lusardi’s husband’ Kane dressed as Louis XIV, Leo Sayer as a 1920’s gangster with little pencil tash, Handy Andy ‘no relation to Sam’ Kane the builder as a pearly king, Limahl as Limahl, and Steven Houghton from London’s Burning dressed like a toy soldier. All the fancy dress outfits remind me of the costume ball in Saved by the Bell, where they couldn’t use any trademarked characters, and the only black extras were ‘convict’ and ‘maid’. Though here there’s at least a Ghostface and Crow (sadly not Jonathan Morris). And also a couple of Arabs.

Final ladies team is Anna Ryder Richardson, CITV’s Danielle Nicholls (best remembered by me for pretending to get off with her own glamour model sister outside a nightclub to get in the papers), Kate Charman from ITV’s Record Breakers rip-off Guinness World Records, Esther McVey, former presenter now horrible Tory, who’s fittingly dressed as Marie-Antoinette, and friend of the Patreon Michaela Strachan as herself in a lovely dress. Some dancers outfitted as the full Village People run everyone through the world’s most tedious party song. Yes, I hate fun, what of it? If I want to “get myself clean” and “have a good meal,” I’ll sit in the bath eating pickled onions like Albert Steptoe.

Chic do Le Freak (which is how Yvette would describe Rene Artois in bed), with a distressing cut to the audience where a woman in her forties dressed like a baby is drinking from a baby’s bottle. A few minutes later, she’s seen behind Suggs sucking a dummy, when he has to shout over the sound of ‘merry’ ladies yell-singing the theme to Banana Splits. The screen demands GO MAD, LADS, as Sam Kane in his big powdered wig does the world’s billionth performance of New York, New York. “If I can make it there (by being married to Linda Lusardi), I’ll make it anywhere…” Plus-size Batman high kicks with a pirate, an Anglican priest, and Austin Powers

Mellor’s dressed as a cowboy (for real this time), shirtless under a fringed waistcoat, as Danielle Nicholls’ (sexy cavewoman) Like a Virgin sees her doing her very best to be raunchy and get that big Gail Porter money as Suggs wipes his brow. Then some Lenny Beige Chumbawumba, with lyrics changed to the more polite “kissing the night away” even though it’s past midnight. Cowards! We all urinate! Ads by this time of night are a relentless string of £1 a minute chatlines; “the gay bar is open for business right now!” and Mr. Bean shilling Fujifilm for still cameras, which feel like they must be from day one of the very first millennium instead. What next, an ad for the wheel? In a commercial for the Samaritans, Max off EastEnders is stared at by workmates for sobbing at the office. “Society ridicules a man who shows his emotions. Well it’s about time society grew up. A man who cries is still a man.” What if they’re crying because it’s 2024 and you have to sit through Night Fever‘s Millennium Eve special?

I’ve half a mind to call the number when Black Lace show up for Agadoo (miming, which isn’t really in the spirit of things), but there’s just 35 minutes left. I can do it, especially with Michaela’s Stand by Your Man, the man in question almost certainly the Stamp Bug. She ends the song on Mellor’s lap, holding the kind of note which wilts flowers and planting one on him. MMMMM, reacts a large, lusty caption. I’m not particularly patriotic, but sometimes one sees an image and knows they would happily die to defend any foul word said against glorious Mother England.

God Save the King! ‘Handy’ Andy from Changing Rooms‘ rendition of Tie a Yellow Ribbon is crippled by his need to stick to the character and always do the most Essex voice possible — “rahnd the old oak tree…” Close-up on a Joker as the whole studio breaks into Three Lions. It’s mental they didn’t do this when Robbie’s dad was there in the full kit. Suggs suggests Knowing Me, Knowing You as the next ABBA song. Sam Kane shouts “aha!” and doesn’t get much of a laugh. Covers band FABBA do Dancing Queen, their words mocking me, as I now sit three and a half hours in — “having the time of your life…”

“Celebrate good times, come on!” Disconcerting close-up of a man in a quite realistic Queen Amidala costume. Leo Sayer stood stock still on the desk like a Golem. “That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it!” Women in the audience make sex-thrust motions. A dancing man dressed as a vicar waves a bible at the camera. Limahl has a union jack sticking out of his pirate headband, singing at McVey who’s probably thinking about how much she loves poverty. Black Lace make everyone do the conga, a terrible risk with all the booze and pent up sexual tension, now men and women are finally allowed to touch. The studio fills with a writhing flesh-snake, hundreds of feet long, Batman and schoolgirls and nuns and nurses and sheiks and policewomen and Handy Andy, all daisy-chaining across the floor

Sure enough, the erotic touch paper has been lit, and there’s no turning back. The boys are up on the desk, thrusting away to You Sexy Thing; Esther McVey and all the girls, gyrating as they sing Horny Horny Horny; quite a sight for Really Wild Show viewers. Will peeks up over Michaela’s shoulder, devil horns on his head, suggestively waving a little plastic trident. How many children were conceived there that night? Only when they’re tracked down and put to an end with The Seven Sacred Daggers of Tel Megiddo will we be safe. But out of nowhere, very suddenly, it’s over. Lenny Beige playing us out with Hi Ho Silver Lining. I feel like I ran twenty marathons. Thank Christ this only happens once every thousand years.

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This piece first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could read it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my videos, my podcast, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s a ton of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

One Loon a-Leaping: Noel LIVE at Christmas

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

Roll Out the Carols: A Song for Christmas

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

The Comedy Backrooms of Three of a Kind

The BBC’s Three of a Kind hails from that enormous pantheon of shows from the eighties — an era packed to the gills with sketch shows and sitcoms — which had a huge audience, but vanished further into the mist with each passing year. Historically, it’s an early showcase of two people who went onto far greater success, and David Copperfield. At the end of its three-year run in ’84, the careers of Lenny Henry and Tracy Ullman would explode, and when the series began, Lenny was only 23, and Ullman 22 — while Copperfield’s a decade their senior. The sheer youthfulness to a viewer now twice their age gives said decrepit-commentator the feel of watching an end of term talent show, like that saying: ‘when the sketch comics start looking young, that’s when you know you’re old’.

With a title which satirises the series’ diversity (one white fella, a woman and a black man), Three of a Kind left no mark outside of a footnote in the biographies of two thirds of its players, a Silver Rose of Montreux winner in its day, but with none of its sketches showing up on clip shows alongside all the Don’t Tell Him Pikes, Four Candles and “Wild? I was absolutely livid!”s. Unlike most of the tat on here, it did get a full release, but I can’t watch something on DVD quality, it’ll hurt my eyes! No, much better to fire up a pair of terrible quality rips, starting with the 1984 VHS, which is a compilation of the first four episodes.

Right away it becomes clear that something’s wrong. Not with the show, but with me. Yet, I must push on, as Lenny’s character tries to pay for petrol while asked for increasing amounts of ID; fingerprints, a marriage licence, a chest x-ray. There’s the Star Trek sketch every show had to do — stacks of them. Cut to Copperfield dressed as a hunchback. “I hate people calling me Quasimodo, it really gets my back up!” I’ve seen this before. Every punchline, every costume. All that’s different are the faces. This is it. I’m here. I’ve finally reached the point there are no new old sketches left. No gags untold. No wigs unseen. I’ve clipped through the screen into television’s equivalent of The Backrooms, left eternally wandering in search of an exit, but around every corner, a doctor’s surgery or travel agents or restaurant; someone dressed as Superman or a punk rocker. A purple mohawk that’s been sat on a dozen snarling heads. These are the liminal spaces of light entertainment, and whichever direction you run, there’s always the muffled “walla walla walla ooh!” of a nearby Grease parody, lurking, waiting. All I can do is vainly search for a way out; for something new.

The show’s chosen aesthetic is Teletext, with the title sequence and captioning done in-house at Ceefax for proper authenticity. The pixelated cast portraits resemble a very poor ZX Spectrum licence, while episodes are peppered with onscreen text gags the quality of Nigel Rees anthologies of humorous graffiti. “I WONDERED WHAT LETHARGIC MEANT, BUT I COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO LOOK IT UP” and “THE MEEK WILL INHERIT THE EARTH, IF THAT’S O.K. WITH YOU CHAPS.” I’ve compared other shows to televised joke books, but here they’ve actually put one onscreen. “A PERSON SUFFERING WITH KLEPTOMANIA SHOULD TAKE SOMETHING” and “IF IT WASN’T FOR THE PRICE OF PETROL, I’D BE DRIVEN TO DRINK.” Plus, it’s me who’s having to read these. I’m doing all the work! Four of a Kind, they should call it. Budge over, Lenny Henry! “NEW FILM BEING MADE ENTIRELY ON CREDIT… A NIGHTINGALE SANG IN BARCLAYCARD” and “EARS PIERCED WHILE YOU WAIT, IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY?” Having all captions rendered in the same blocky font inadvertently gives everything the look of a funny tape some mates put together in their garage with a camcorder, cut on a home movie suite from Argos.

The most interesting figure here is David Copperfield, carrying himself with the grim resignation of a man who, while famous, shares a name with two much better known David Copperfields; one a fictional character. Stubbornly refusing to change it, he’s cursed to forever hear the words “no, not that one,” and had no choice but to lean into it, actually working the cruise line circuit under the billing ‘David Copperfield — Not The Magician’. The angriest man I ever knew was called Tommy Cooper; a life comprised of blowing his top at people going “just like that!” on the daily, and there was even a boy at my school who underwent unimaginable suffering, having lived through the 80s and 90s with the given name Timmy Mallett. Poor Sod. If Copperfield and Ian ‘H’ Hopkins off Steps ever met, they’d need not exchange a word, acknowledging all that shared pain in a simple nod. As a performer, Copperfield fits in that rough-seeming group of comedians, along with Cannon and De Courcey; a boxer’s face and demeanour; squat little physique against the much taller, leaner Lenny Henry. Arms folded like someone shook him awake from a kip on the sofa and pushed him onstage, he seems to gain no joy from his vocation, as though finally acquiescing, albeit with the caveat “Fine, but I’m not doing any voices…”

While I’m riding him for his post-3oaK career, Copperfield did have an episode of a solo vehicle — The Copperfield Company Show — on the BBC in ’84, most notable for one of its writers being a young (though almost-certainly already bald) Lee Hurst, and a nine episode run of kids show Lift Off! With Coppers And Co!, followed by a sitcom styled revamp as Coppers and Co! in ’87. The bio of his after dinner booking site claims he once won BBC’s Television Personality of the Year, but the actual list of winners is impossible to find, so we’ll have to take his word for it. It was probably the magician.

As one of those shows with loads of writers, there’s no unifying voice, and if there is a house style, it’s to make unrelated puns out of absolutely fucking everything. The Alien parody, Nailian, is set onboard the SS Minestromo where “in space, nobody eats ice cream,” and Sooty bursts out of Copperfield’s chest. Half its bits are against a plain white background like Who Do You Do?, and the childlike material kinda makes sense in the 8:30pm ‘you can watch this, but then it’s straight off to bed’ slot. There aren’t a lot of recurring characters, though Lenny’s Delbert Wilkins did get its start here, and as we’ve encountered time and again, it moves at a real clip, with some skits lasting a literal five seconds, maniacally tearing their way through time-and-budget consuming set-ups and costumes. The days when series like this would casually be commissioned for multiple years now seem further away and more fanciful than Manchester Square’s Pig-Faced Lady, or the Dancing Plague. Shall we ever see such times again?

It is that classic blend of both puerile and packed with 80’s socio-political observations; taxi drivers are rude, Sun readers are thick, British Leyland workers are lazy; back in a time when not only did bare breasts appear in newspapers, but a man named David Copperfield could hold one up to the camera while speaking the words “big knockers!” In another moment, Lenny gets mad at cinema usher Ullman for ripping his ticket in half, tearing off her clothes in revenge, and leaving her in bra, knickers and suspenders. You’d get no real indication from watching that either Ullman or Lenny would go on and become massive, though she’s clearly the most adept at characters and accents (with the lads unable to hold onto an accent for an entire sketch), and the only one given long character monologues, entrusted with complicated sections of dialogue which showcase her verbal dexterity, at one point pronouncing that really long town in Wales. It feels like Ullman’s playing characters, while Copperfield particularly is just reciting lines. His bullish aura makes every character sinister; everything played flat and gruff, as though still rehearsing and saving the proper voice for the night, but weirdly it’s a good balance with the youthful chirpiness of the other two.

Aside from the puns, if they have a trademark, it’s the comic strip style reveal; Ullman demanding a waiter serve the fish first, and pan to reveal she’s sat across from a gigantic, hungry fish. The costume returns to aid the single worst pun I have ever seen, fish now wearing a woolly hat and talking in a Benny from Crossroads voice about “Miss Alison,” as the title CODS ROES comes onscreen. Whoever wrote that should be singled out on the credits. Name and shame! For balance, I watched 1983’s final episode, preceded by its trailer for Penelope Keith cougar sitcom Sweet Sixteen. The whole ‘get a pun on it!’ philosophy’s really laid bare in Alan Bleasdale parody THE BOYS FROM THAT HORRIBLE BLACK STICKY STUFF THEY PUT ON ROADS, playing like someone trying to discuss a film they’re only pretending to have seen. Lenny’s in a Michael Angelis beard, while Ullman scouses it up about poverty. “All we’ve had to eat is black stuff, we’ve had boiled black stuff, grilled black stuff, black stuff pudding...” The entire sketch is clearly based off that one clip they always show where he kills the chickens, whoever wrote it doing the equivalent of “Seen Blade Runner last night?” “Yeah it was well skill, my favourite bit was when he ran across the blades!”

Surprisingly, compared to other black performers in ensembles of the same era — say, Gary Wilmot in Copy Cats — Lenny’s race is never used where his being black is the joke; a reference to be called upon for a cheap laugh. None of the set-ups where he’s part of a couple with Ullman make mention to it, and though he’ll break out a Jamaican accent and dreadlocked wig as, say, community policeman PC Ganja, it’s never pejorative, and Three of a Kind is unusually colour-blind. Ditto the shocking lack of impressions, aside from Lenny’s David Bellamy and Trevor McDonut making their way over from Tiswas, and one sketch where Copperfield’s painter runs through his Tommy Cooper, Hitler (or Freddie Starr as Hitler), and Norman Wisdom (who I initially typoed as Normal Wisdom; a bloke in a perfectly-fitting suit who doesn’t keep laughing and never falls over). It’s all building to the punchline of “what kind of painter is he?” “He’s a Cubist…” with a Ceefax caption, as they don’t trust the audience: “HE’S REALLY AN IMPRESSIONIST — GEDDIT!”

I’m aware I’m doing everything I can to avoid really getting in the weeds of the sketches, which should speak of their quality. Longer ones are generally wordy back-and-forths leading to a stinking pun, the shorter ones outright rubbish, but so brief it doesn’t matter. Lenny’s boxing trainer slaps Copperfield back into consciousness as he groggily asks what happened — “ya tripped over the ropes getting in!” That’s the whole sketch. In another, Lenny bounces a boiled sweet on the floor before eating it, caption THE HARLEM GOBSTOPPERS. Copperfield with a bin on his head speaking with an American accent about movies, caption DUSTBIN HOFFMAN.

But we’ve (or rather, I’ve) seen it all before, travelling this multiverse of dating agencies and football managers and newsreaders and cat food commercials and pub after pub after pub, fully aware the costumes probably have pit-stains leftover from Bobby Davro; wigs with a few thin strands of Russ Abbot’s hair stuck to the inside. This was the decade of music, and weekly guests like Phil Collins, Thin Lizzy and the Boomtown Rats played alongside musical parodies. These parodies are odd in that they neither mimic the style of the performer, nor add any funny lines. Copperfield’s Cliff — “still around after all these years, no wrinkles on my brow” — is so jokeless, it’s almost a straight song, though Ullman does better with Toyah Wilcox take-off Annoyah (“Marti Caine meets Frankenstein”), and Wilcox would later appear as one of the musical guests. David Bellamy closes the VHS with a rap, a Rapper’s Delight soundalike fully winning me over with lines like “to the wythm of the Bellamy wap” and “I’m six feet four with baggy pants and I talk to wunner beans…”

And it’s not like there are no laughs to be had. One particular highlight is a snooker broadcast which has lost its colour, leaving commentator Lenny to describe Cyclone Syd “going for the… light black ball on the left.” Then the colour returns, revealing all the balls are in degradations of grey, “and as I was saying before…” Even one of the Ceefax jokes really made me chuckle – “JUST RELEASED A HORROR FILM AIMED AT PEOPLE WITH BAD GRAMMAR. I WERE A TEENAGE WAS-WOLF.” Though perhaps I liked it because it reminds me of a joke I once wrote which only works when said out loud. ‘Do Scottish wolfmen were under their kilts?’

But for every funny bit, there’s gags we’ve all heard a million times before — “I’ve got a Chinese doctor. Half an hour after my operation, I felt like another one.” Regardless, the audience, who’ve not spent the last six years plumbing the depths of sketch comedy, seem to be enjoying it, with Copperfield’s zombie, who’s been playing “warts and crosses” at the cemetery, having to pause while they regain their composure when his rubber hand falls off. Not a smartphone in sight. Just people enjoying the moment; and making audible noises of disgust at cat food or fake blood, unscarred by genocide videos during their morning social media scroll on the toilet, and still capable of feelings. When we get a brief look at the audience, it’s the era when middle-aged men went to tapings in suits and ties, with not a single t-shirt in the whole studio.

Other concepts here would baffle Gen Z viewers, like Lenny as a door-to-door breadman who starts posting it through the letterbox, slice by slice. There’s no credited director, perhaps ashamed of the no-effort, flatly shot style, as though they’re afraid any camera movement might set off an alarm. A rare and sudden overhead shot during the Cliff song has me rearing back out of my seat like those early cinema-goers who thought they were about to get hit by a train. One odd stylistic choice sees every sketch end on a freeze frame, almost always with Lenny pulling a face; that lips pursed, chin-jutting gurn which graced many a cover of the Radio Times.

But it’s more things I’m avoiding talking about, because just as I’ve seen it all before, you have heard it. Grown-arse men in bonnets sucking their thumbs as babies. An Australian Blue Peter parody. Copperfield in a hospital bed. Copperfield busking, as he’s asked to accompany Lenny’s policeman — “a one, two, a one two three…” We saw Russ Abbot do that one. We’ve seen all of these in some fashion. One time, they plagiarise two famous sketches simultaneously, with Copperfield as a wrestler wrestling himself — like Graham Chapman — flipping and flailing and putting himself in various holds, while dressed as two people split down the centre depending on which way he’s facing — like Tommy Cooper.

Three of a Kind‘s credited list of writers is extensive, including names like Ben Elton, Ruby Wax, Kim Fuller, Red Dwarf‘s Grant Naylor, Guy Jenkin off Drop the Dead Donkey, Hale and Pace, Nicks Revell and Wilton, satire’s gnome king Ian Hislop, and someone who must’ve had a terrible time at school, Rob Groocock. But this show wasn’t written as much as its ideas were plucked from the cultural ether, from that big cloud where all the eternal sketch show gags bubble away, like if AI consisted of men thrusting their hands into the air and saying to another man who’s sat at a typewriter “What about a doctor’s surgery? Has that been done?”

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This piece first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could read it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my videos, my podcast, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s a ton of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

Millard’s Halloween Fright Bag III

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

When Discussion Shows Went Spooky

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This video first appeared on my Patreon, where subscribers could watch it a month before it landed here. If you’d like to support me for as little as £1 a month, then click here to help provide the world with regular deep dives about weird-bad pop culture, early access to my podcast and videos, and all kinds of other stuff.

There’s over 775,000 words of content, including exclusives that’ll never appear here on the free blog, such as 1970’s British variety-set horror novella, Jangle, and my latest novel, Men of the Loch. Please give my existing books a look too, or if you’re so inclined, sling me a Ko-fi or some PayPal cash.

The After School Hauntology of Dramarama

Beasts, Hammer House of Horror, Tales of the Unexpected, Supernatural, Dead of Night; at one point, our nation’s televisions were so packed with sinister, twist-in-the-tale anthology shows that even children had some of their own. ITV’s Dramarama ran for 91 episodes between 1983 and ’89, and while these weren’t strictly genre pieces, often featuring more regular fare, two of which span off into full series (Children’s Ward and Dodger, Bonzo And The Rest), the focus tended to lean heavily on the Fortean, and outright horror. The usual theme for these Halloween essays is “when show x went spooky!” but spookiness was Dramarama‘s raison d’être, as the follow-up to a series literally titled Spooky, which had episodes like The Restless Ghost, The Ghostly Earl, and The Exorcism of Amy. But let’s keep with tradition, and take in some half-hours from the regular run.

I can’t do this and not talk about Death Angel, even though it’s one of the episodes originally produced for another youth anthology series, 1981’s Theatre Box, and later repurposed as a Dramarama, getting thrown into that show’s repeats. Set in the world of wrestling, Death Angel was written by Brian Glover, himself an ex-wrestler under the name Leon Arris ‘The Man from Paris’, but best known as Kes’s loudmouth PE teacher, or the vest-wearing neighbour Richie and Eddie pinch gas from in Bottom.

The set-up is three children sneaking into the backstage of a theatre, via a knotted rope dropped through a skylight, to get a free view of the show, stood on milk crates and peering through the air vents. Our rascals are Bud (your classic urchin), Toy (a punk girl with a pink fringe), and Fergus (a young Gary Beadle), while one of the wrestlers is Ray Winstone, his match stopping early due to a cut. Just the sight of such a realistically bloodied face on children’s television is surprising, though the kids wrongly believe it must be ketchup.

Appropriately for an episode set in such a secretive world, almost the entire story is voyeuristically witnessed through vents, and which side of the fence this sits on television portrayals of wrestling being either fake or a genuine contest is unclear. Winstone’s wording to another performer of “who are you wrestling with tomorrow night” suggests it’s meant to be phony — with rather than against. There’s even a lengthy exchange about “shooters,” an insider term that would’ve been understood by about a hundred people in 1981. A shooter, as explained by Bill Maynard in the Vince McMahon role, is a “hard man, top man. You don’t mess with shooters. They can kill you as soon as look at you.”

The brief wrestling scenes add to the unsettling vibe, action under a chorus of boos and cheers, but aside from half a dozen front row punters visible only from the behind, the budget allows nothing beyond the ring but blackness, like we’re watching Chris Benoit suplexing Savile onto his head over and over again for an audience of goblins down in the underworld. That said, it is the comically unspectacular British wrestling of the time; dramatised by actors and all; like the pratfalls of the Two Ronnies in a skit set at Mr. Me-Naggy’s Kung Pu dojo. But anything would feel unnerving under its discordant soundtrack of horns and off-beat drums, with distant jeering from the auditorium heard under the children’s dialogue — “shut it, you wally!”

Another vent gives a direct view into the dressing room, though thankfully nobody’s got their william out or are defecating in a co-worker’s bag as a funny jape, instead, the sight of Death Angel preparing for his match. A raspy-breathed heel in a featureless black mask and bodysuit, his vague Eastern European accent is unable to pronounce Birmingham, which is where he’s off to tomorrow, to face the exotically named opponent Kawasaki 850. But Fergus warns against his chums spying, afraid they’ll see the Angel without his mask, which the poster promises will result in death! It’s all soaked in that fuzzy, approaching dread of the grown-up anthologies, and Chekov’s Unmasking is the inevitable, unavoidable monster on the final page, creeping ever closer. The kids speculate he wears a mask because he’s burned, and that “he’s got maggots crawlin’ out of his eyeballs and mouth…”

Death Angel’s entrance gear is horrifying enough, with a white-on-black skull design and accompanying angel wings, like an even worse Mothman. As Maynard orders him to take the mask off if he loses, it seems wrestling is real here. “Only Death itself takes off the mask,” says the Angel, and told he’ll be in the main event, he asserts “the Angel of Death always comes at the end.” It’s incredible how many plot strands they cram into a 26-minute piece. Fergus is specifically afraid of seeing the Angel’s face because he’s hoping to get signed by Arsenal talent scouts, and you can’t play football if you’re dead. In some very 1981 dialogue, Toy tells him “You don’t ‘alf pong. Reckon your mum should give you a bath!” which reveals his mum’s banged up in the nick, and Fergus plans on visiting tomorrow, racing up to Birmingham on his brother’s Kawasaki 850. Hold on…

Death Angel keeps the mask in his bout against Lucky Day (pre-dating Steve Martin’s Three Amigos character by some years), and in a final act twist, the kids are actually there to rob Bill Maynard, snatching the bag of takings, plus a home-made pork pie from Winstone’s missus, leaving Maynard to scale a set of bleachers as he gives chase, in the show’s tensest scene (if he keels over, there’s no Claude Greengrass!). Fergus doesn’t join them, limping with an ankle injury, which goes away when he sneaks back to the vent to spy on Death Angel removing the hood. We don’t see see what he sees, only his reaction, scarpering in terror, too panicked to clamber back up the rope — “I saw his face! I saw it! I’m going to die!”

Maynard tells Death Angel what happened, bemoaning the loss of a half-eaten pork pie whilst in the midst of a heart attack. At that moment, Fergus makes it onto the roof, with some very comical Arn Anderson style “Whoaaa! I’m off-balance!” acting atop a girder, knees a-knocking, arms a-flailing. As Maynard pleads with Death Angel to call an ambulance, it’s then he turns and shows his real face. As often in these things, there’s one image that sticks with us forever. In viewers’ online reminiscences of the episode, they often misremember the logistics; who was in the dressing room and what led to this moment. But never the image. It’s a single second of screen-time, but anyone who witnessed it as a child will carry that second with them forever; horrible melted face like Rice Krispies poured into concrete. And up on the roof, the girder is empty, Fergus having fallen to his death. Wonder what came right after? Tommy Boyd and his perm cheerily introducing the next cartoon?

If Death Angel feels like a Tales from the Unexpected, 1987’s Snap is A Ghost Story for Christmas; or even Hammer House of Horror, from which it semi-borrows the premise of The Two Faces of Evil. We open on rain-soaked marshes, lorry thundering past containing the world’s worst dad, berating depressed son Peter about his fecklessness, and a school project to hike round Romney Marshes for a day — “that son of mine can just about string five words together.” They pass the classic creepy hitch-hiker, a figure in a cloak-like black mac that dad doesn’t even see, and anyway, “I’ve got one layabout on board, let’s leave it at that, shall we?” As dad drops him off, under one of many horror music stings, we see the hiker — somehow — stood just down the road.

As someone Elon Musk would describe as psychotically childless, (weirdly, no woman has yet seen fit to procreate with a man whose job is effectively ‘making references to Syd Little’) I’m not particularly au fait with modern children’s television, but any bits I’ve caught on the screens of young relatives, it all seems very brightly coloured and joyful, a world away from the stuff Scarred For Life have gotten three (excellent) volumes out of. I’m aware of Creeped Out, an anthology in the vein of what we’re discussing, but when I was a lad, kids on telly were always turning into dogs or battling hypnotic headmasters and whatnot. Which traumatising images will today’s youngest generation be discussing in their adult years? Probably some TikTok thing about singing toilets. But viewers of Snap were treated to particularly bleak scenes with Peter’s trip; yellow mac, pissy rain; a handwritten, mud splattered sign on a gate reading ‘loose dogs will be shot.’ Tom Baker’s uncredited narrator bookends the tale with lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — “Like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread…”

The folk horror vibes are pristine, with shots of desolate fields, moss-covered follies, and tatty scarecrows with empty eye sockets, all seen as Peter’s Polaroids. Most disconcerting visual is a shot of half a dozen dead birds hanging from a cross by their ankles. And through all this, the man in the mac, always nearby, unseen. A bird seems to call Peter’s name. A photo of some bushes, into which we crash zoom again and again, until landing on half a face, peering out in a legitimate jump scare. CITV Lake Mungo. Even in the marshes, the unlucky blighter finds himself unwelcome, tramping into a church being renovated by sour men, with a bad actor up a scaffold admonishing “Can’t you see we’re working. Why don’t you just get lost?” As he storms out, tools seem to invisibly fly from a workman’s hands, while a headstone outside has been desecrated by a tin of white paint. Did Peter do that, or was it something else?

Taking rest in a concrete shelter to scoff paste sandwiches, a dark figure watches from the dunes, shown in dizzying, back and forth zooms. But after briefly leaving the bunker, he returns to find his sandwiches torn to pieces and scattered on the ground, which feels very poltergeisty. Outside, the stranger’s pegging it away, now wearing Peter’s yellow raincoat, tossing aside the black one, which Peter dons as he gives chase; an impossible chase; like running after your own shadow. Scrambling up pebbles, it brings to mind A Warning to the Curious; which at times Snap feels like a (very good) cover version of, and in the scariest moment, Peter walks alongside some groynes, not noticing he’s passing his nemesis, stood immobile on the other side, again and again. Finally catching up, he means to clout the hitcher with a big log, but he disappears, leaving a cache of defaced Polaroids.

After nightfall, a final chase — stranger now armed with a machete — takes them back to the church, full of light and life and the sounds of a choir, until Peter opens the door to find it empty. The figure stands in an open doorway, and for the first time we see his face. It’s Peter, or at least a doppelgänger. His reflection taunts him from a mirror — “Don’t look for him, Peter, he’s done with,” and then begs “please, let me in. You know that you like me, the secret of me, the darkness of me. Just close your eyes and let me be you.” I swear there’s more running than the whole series of Interceptor as he scarpers again, finally making it to the road where dad’s arrived to pick him up.

Except, dad drives straight past, and gazing out of the passenger window is yellow mac Peter. Dad apologises for his behaviour this morning, to which ‘Peter’ tells him “it’s alright. I’m gonna be different now, you’ll see.” As the original Peter recedes in the rear view mirror, you get the sense dad’s gonna get strangled in his sleep, and viewers are left to wonder, did Peter go out to find himself and come back a new boy, leaving that meek little victim out on the marshes? Or did he hate his life so much he willed up a violent tupla to take his place, free to no longer be ‘Peter’? You didn’t get this with Jossy’s Giants.

1989’s Back to Front ploughs a similar furrow. This one’s written by Anthony Horowitz, creator of Foyle’s War and later hand-picked by the Fleming estate to author a new series of Bond novels. Though most importantly, he created Crime Traveller, which was required mid-90’s viewing for David Wicks off EastEnders aficionados and nerds who fancied the new Kochanski. We open on a close-up of Ross Kemp in an antique shop, where a dad’s haggling for a full-length mirror with a mysteriously accented owner Mr Rolyat, who seems to speak in quasi-palindromes “Accent the place? Place the accent!” He even offers the wrong hand when sealing the deal with a handshake. The series is filled with neat little clues like that, before there were subreddits to pick them all apart.

There’s a sense Dramarama writers cherry-picked inspiration from their favourite horrors, and Horowitz undoubtedly drew from Beyond the Grave, where Cushing’s antique dealer flogs David Warner a cursed mirror — “it’s séance time!” Hanging the mirror in his son’s (also called David) bedroom, it’s hats off to the set designers, with Wolverine, Terminator, and Kiss posters, and a Def Leppard scarf pinned to the wall above the bed. David deems the mirror weird. “David, you like weird things. Weird comics, weird posters. You’re weird,” says dad, ruffling his hair. Cheers, Rick Allen’s crying, as if he didn’t have enough on his plate. The first scare comes early when David walks off but the reflection remains, with a smirk on its face, and you can immediately tell where it’s going, but it doesn’t matter. Just brace yourself and prepare for the inevitable impact.

The school-set scenes are the most perturbing, with the forgotten visuals of my own school days rendered so vividly, from the architecture and blazers to the clack of moulded studs on damp changing room tiles. However, a head-on-hand-boring history lesson about the Bayeux Tapestry is less realistic than haunted mirrors, as the teacher doesn’t get a massive laugh every time he says “Tostig.” Christ, my class couldn’t get through a reading of Our Day Out once some wag pointed out the author’s name was Willy Russell — “it’s written by Russell’s willy!!” Anyway, David gets in trouble for furtively looking at himself in a hand mirror secreted in his desk. “Admiring yourself?” “Yes, sir.” He then lets in a goal during PE after getting distracted by his reflection in a puddle, and I had to rewind a couple of times to confirm, yes, he was called a wanker by an annoyed team-mate.

At home, the boy and his reflection do the old Groucho routine from Duck Soup, with a dramatic zoom on mirror-him’s sweatshirt, which is missing a patch. Of course, when he tries to show mum, she sees nothing untoward. David convinces pal Greg to accompany him to the antiques store to get to the bottom of things, where Rolyat does more weird backwards talk, and more or less lays out his evil plan — “The mirror came from me, I came from the mirror! And now the mirror comes for you!” David postulates there’s another dimension, into which mirrors are a window, with a theory that brings a little of Jordan Peele’s Us into the conversation. “The people in the other world are like our slaves, they have to do everything we do.” His mirror, he reckons, is half-open, so the reflection can do what it likes, and sure enough, he walks into the bedroom to see it lounging on the bed, reading a comic.

Exposition is delivered by Greg’s nan, who informs her grandson she used to do accounts at the antique store, until the owner, Mr. Taylor, suddenly disappeared. Like Cushing figuring out what Alucard is backwards in Dracula A.D. 1972, Greg twigs that Roylat in a mirror is Taylor, and bombs round to David’s, to stop him from smashing the mirror and letting its reflection loose. As David swings for it with a hammer, we cut before the moment of impact. Outside, Greg’s frantically ringing the door bell, but backs away when David opens it, his KISS jersey now reversed, and talking in backwards gibberish. Then we get another of those images which are hung in your mind-gallery until it’s time for the grave, as David watches Greg run away, and we see his eyeballs are entirely made of mirrors. As the credits run, the real David bangs against the inside of the mirror, silently screaming for help, before doing a strange backwards walk; not super consistent with mirrors, which aren’t in reverse. To cap it off, a lovely moment where the Yorkshire Television Productions logo is itself mirrored.

In rewatching forty years after the fact, where shows like this rarely exist outside the random pick and mix of YouTube, my main concern is that kids of today won’t grow up disturbed enough. They’ll have no shared traumas to discuss as they sit huddled in evacuation boats when the floods come, having to fill the hours with chat like “Remember Take Me Out? Whatever happened to Paddy McGuinness?” Poor deprived sods.

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