30 years on, Ghostwatch is still as haunting as… | Little White Lies

Home Ents

30 years on, Ghost­watch is still as haunt­ing as ever

31 Oct 2022

Words by Anton Bitel

Three people, two men and one woman, standing in front of a TV studio backdrop with 'Ghost Watch' written on it.
Three people, two men and one woman, standing in front of a TV studio backdrop with 'Ghost Watch' written on it.
The BBC pulled off an inge­nious prank with their 1992 para­nor­mal inves­ti­ga­tion, which has proven an inspi­ra­tion for the found footage boom.

Viewed in its orig­i­nal set­ting and con­text, Les­ley Manning’s Ghost­watch was an extra­or­di­nary, ground-break­ing exper­i­ment. Aired by the BBC from 9.25pm on the 31 Octo­ber, 1992, it pro­fessed to be a live para­nor­mal inves­ti­ga­tion of the most haunt­ed house in Britain”.

Sarah Greene and Craig Charles are in situ with an out­side broad­cast­ing unit to doc­u­ment any­thing that might occur at the prop­er­ty in West London’s Northolt belong­ing to Pamela Ear­ly (Brid Bren­nan) and her young daugh­ters Suzanne and Kim (played by actu­al sis­ters Michelle and Cherise Wes­son). Mean­while a wry­ly scep­ti­cal Michael Parkin­son anchors the show from a cen­tral stu­dio, and Mike Smith han­dles calls from viewers.

That all of these peo­ple were real BBC pre­sen­ters at the time only added to the show’s air of verisimil­i­tude – even if brief open­ing titles (added short­ly before the broad­cast at the insis­tence of a ner­vous exec­u­tive pro­duc­er) clear­ly marked the show as part of the BBC’s dra­ma series Screen One, and in fact cred­it­ed what pur­ports to be live, unscript­ed reportage to the writer Stephen Volk. Oth­er guests on the show, like the para­psy­chol­o­gist Dr Lin Pas­coe (Gillian Bevan), were played by actors, but it is to the immense cred­it of their per­for­mances, Volk’s writ­ing and Manning’s faux-glitchy tele­vi­su­al direc­tion, that every­thing here comes steeped in authenticity.

Ghost­watch is a fake, and an elab­o­rate prank per­pe­trat­ed upon the British pop­u­lace – much like the moment when a mon­ster leaps out of a clos­et at Sarah Greene only to unmask and reveal him­self to be the grin­ning Craig Charles. Greene is bare­ly tak­en in by this pre-arranged gag, but many BBC view­ers were both con­vinced that what they were see­ing was real, and became increas­ing­ly unset­tled as the house’s unwel­come res­i­dent, nick­named Pipes’, began increas­ing­ly to reveal his malign pres­ence seem­ing­ly live on air, beamed right into their homes.

That is pre­cise­ly the source of the film’s hor­ror. For in riff­ing off the sto­ry of the Enfield pol­ter­geist, Ghost­watch sug­gests that even the most appar­ent­ly ordi­nary of sub­ur­ban hous­es in Britain comes with a long his­to­ry of neg­a­tive ener­gy and vio­lence that might at any point man­i­fest itself in the present, and so every view­er, typ­i­cal­ly watch­ing at night in their own home, is made to feel dis­com­fit­ed in what should be their safest space.

While watch­ing his actu­al wife Greene at the Northolt house, Mike Smith com­ments, To be hon­est, I could nev­er have sat at home tonight on my own and watched this pro­gramme, I’m safer here,” and Greene will lat­er say, I get sent out here to the front line and you stay all cosy and safe and sound in the stu­dio, isn’t it?” Yet even the the sanc­ti­ty of the BBC stu­dio – that great bul­wark of British author­i­ty and estab­lish­ment – will in the end prove unsafe, invad­ed, along with view­ers’ homes, by the mali­cious Pipes who, as Kim puts it, wants to hurt every­body”, and who, through this very broad­cast, has found a way to get both out and in.

While ghosts are tra­di­tion­al­ly raised by a spir­i­tu­al­ist at séance, here tele­vi­sion itself is, in more than one sense, the medi­um for Pipes’ con­jur­ing. The Fox­hill Dri­ve house may be filled with tem­per­a­ture sen­sors, mini­cams and even infrared cam­eras, but Pipes, with his lay­er­ings of dis­tur­bance and dys­func­tion, both mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine, accu­mu­lat­ed over cen­turies, is only too hap­py to exploit technology’s cut­ting edge for his own pur­pos­es: to see and be seen, and so to be realised and spread through the col­lec­tive uncon­scious. The fic­tive Pipes’ pow­er to enter the pub­lic imag­i­nary was per­haps best demon­strat­ed by the all-too-real response to the programme.

Two people seated at a table in a dimly lit room, with "Ghost Watch" displayed on a screen behind them.

Many thou­sands of view­ers called in to the BBC to express their hor­ror (as indeed they do with­in the show’s own fic­tion), par­ents com­plained that chil­dren were exposed to, and ter­ri­fied by, its con­tent because it was screened too soon after the 9pm water­shed (again, the­ma­tised with­in the film, as one moth­er calls in to com­plain that her chil­dren won’t take their eyes off the set”, prompt­ing Parkin­son to say, Please tell your kids to go to bed!”).

The tabloids had a field day, crit­i­cis­ing the BBC – meant to be a reli­able source of news and infor­ma­tion – for so wil­ful­ly con­found­ing truth with fic­tion, and in the process scar­ing the beje­sus out of the pop­u­la­tion. Ghost­watch has nev­er screened on British tele­vi­sion again.

Nat­u­ral­ly all this is tes­ta­ment to the horror’s effec­tive­ness and impact – and Ghost­watch would have an untold influ­ence on a new, lat­er cycle of found footage’ films like Daniel Myrick and Eduar­do Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), Der­ren Brown’s TV spe­cial Séance, Jaume Bal­a­gueró and Paco Plaza’s REC, Oren Peli’s Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty, and Rob Savage’s Host. Viewed today, its trick­ery, root­ed in a par­tic­u­lar time and place, comes some­what neutered, but it remains insid­i­ous­ly creepy, and is an excel­lent time cap­sule of a pre-Inter­net age where tele­vi­sion still unit­ed the nation, for bet­ter or worse.

Of course, the shad­owy zone that it occu­pies between real­i­ty and fic­tion, the phys­i­cal and the meta­phys­i­cal – best encap­su­lat­ed by an ongo­ing debate about the super­nat­ur­al between the open-mind­ed Pas­coe and the dis­mis­sive sci­en­tist Dr Emilio Sylvestri (Col­in Stin­ton) – remains a time­less bound­ary which hor­ror is ever strad­dling and transgressing.

Pas­coe insists on the impor­tance of believ­ing, Sylvestri on the exer­cise of evi­dence-based rea­son – while Ghost­watch itself manip­u­lates our desire to believe (or at least our will­ing sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief), lulling us with the banal­i­ty of its real­ism before pan­ick­ing us with a grad­u­al­ly esca­lat­ing, inten­si­fy­ing cav­al­cade of the uncan­ny and the irrational.

Ghost­watch is released on Blu-ray on 31 Octo­ber via 101 Films, and includes Sarah Appleton’s doc­u­men­tary Do You Believe in Ghosts?: 30 Years of Ghostwatch.

You might like