On Halloween night in 1992 the BBC aired a program that appeared to be an investigative journalism report taking a crew into the home of a family who reportedly were being menaced by a haunting. They used real BBC hosts and IJs, faces people knew, and went into this home with cameras and questions and into the studio with experts and phone banks. What they did
not do was a very good job of telling people it wasn't
real. This was
BBC1, after all. Now, many viewers were savvy enough to see it for what it was... but many, obviously, were not as the station received a million phone calls that night and ended up before the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
People have told me for years that this is quite effective and I should watch it and here I go.
At first it seems a little too quaint and maybe even corny, but then once you get dug in to the time-frame, it becomes credible again, like probably it was always credible and you were just being too modern and cynical. For a while I was really buying in and I thought especially the performances of the on-site reporter, Pam Greene, and the older guy in the studio, Michael Parkinson, were really top-notch too, really selling me on this. Unfortunately the first ghostly reveal is very hokey and undoes some of the tension. If people didn't realize it was theater at this point, I almost feel like that's on them.
They do a fairly good job setting up the family and a little bit of what's going on and then the movie kinda drags for a long, long while and I actually lost interest and started fidgeting around. Then a big reveal is revealed and the revelation spins things a certain way that, if you were watching in 1992 might have meant the end of it. Then the final act kicks in and it actually becomes quite tense... and then they have one more surprise for you, a pretty big one that you either buy into or you don't.
It does rather end with a bang if you're on board. I can see why that disturbed people. No resolution. If you thought you were watching a live BBC production, yikes.
I'll go ahead and say that whether it's your cup of tea or not, this is worth seeing at least once.
Post Script:
I'm sorry, I couldn't'
not say more about what I considered the big gaffe in the production, the first sighting of Pipes The Ghost.
A caller calls in after they watch some footage of the children sleeping before they are awakened by the ghost and they specifically say that somebody saw a “figure” in the background by the curtains. So I rewound it and there’s nothing but it looks like maybe there
could just the
slightest hint of someone behind the one on the right, so slight.
But when the host and doctor in the studio go back to the footage to check there’s just clearly a ******* person standing there (in double-exposure). And yet they’re all like, “Do you see anything? I don’t see anything? Huh.” And it’s as clear as if the person (which is like double-exposed or whatever) was just an actor standing there, practically in the middle of the frame. You cannot miss it. It is impossible. You can see him better than you can the kids.
And then they even zoom in on screen right in front of them and point it out on the screen with a light pen on the screen like, "Could this be it, could this be what people think they're seeing? Hmmm... No, no, I just don't see it, Doctor, do you see it? No? Well, I guess we'll just move on then..."
I was just like, what the actual? Is this the kind of thing I'm gonna have to swallow this whole time? Cuz if so then I call bullshit on this whole story of people believing it and kids being traumatized and all that stuff. That's a dude standing in front of the curtains and anyone can see it. Eye roll.
Reply to Topic
