‘Our pact with the dev­il was to try and pull it off’ – Ghost­watch at 30

Thir­ty years ago this Hal­loween, the BBC acci­den­tal­ly beamed a live séance into tele­vi­sion sets across the UK, caus­ing super­nat­ur­al chaos in house­holds up and down the coun­try. At least, that’s what the folks behind Ghost­watch would have you believe. In real­i­ty, this now-cult slice of pre-inter­net tel­ly was noth­ing more than an expert­ly-made Hal­loween dra­ma that some­how spi­ralled wild­ly out of con­trol, ulti­mate­ly land­ing the Beeb with over 30,000 complaints.

Writ­ten by Stephen Volk and direct­ed by Les­ley Man­ning, this fic­tion­al dra­ma was pre-filmed but aired as-live and fol­lowed a cam­era crew inves­ti­gat­ing a sup­pos­ed­ly haunt­ed Lon­don home. With rov­ing reporters Sarah Greene and Craig Charles run­ning around ​‘live’ on the scene, we meet Pamela (Brid Bren­nan), a mum at her wit’s end after a pol­ter­geist known as ​‘Pipes’ (named after Pam’s expla­na­tion for the ghoul’s unex­plain­able nois­es) has been busy ter­ror­iz­ing her two young daughters.

Mean­while, TV icon Michael Parkin­son was in the stu­dio, play­ing him­self and work­ing with a para­psy­chol­o­gist (Gillian Bevan) to try and deci­pher fact from fic­tion. How­ev­er it wasn’t long before things took a sin­is­ter turn, caus­ing all hell to break loose, both on screen and off.

“I pitched the idea of a psy­chic inves­ti­ga­tor in cahoots with a film jour­nal­ist,” explains Volk, revis­it­ing Ghostwatch’s 1992 ori­gins. ​“There was a show called World in Action, which was foot-in-the-door jour­nal­ism where a reporter would ​‘door-stop’ peo­ple and thrust a mic in their face. The idea was: what if that kind of reporter was inves­ti­gat­ing a haunt­ed house? My orig­i­nal pitch was for a six-part dra­ma series but we couldn’t do that, so I pitched it as a 90-minute one-off done as if it was going out live. Our pact with the dev­il was to try and pull that off.”

Enter Man­ning, the direc­tor with the mam­moth task of athen­ti­cal­ly repli­cat­ing the spon­tane­ity of live TV: ​“My research was not in oth­er dra­mas; it was all TV pro­grammes and how they were pre­sent­ed,” she tells us. ​“Fac­tu­al, light enter­tain­ment… we were absolute­ly look­ing in that area. The Blair Witch Project hadn’t hap­pened yet. I remem­ber watch­ing Night­mare on Elm Street for its cam­era posi­tions, what you tell and don’t tell the audi­ence and when you reveal stuff. I didn’t have any­thing to go on.”

With­out the ben­e­fit of music to add an eerie atmos­phere, Man­ning enlist­ed the help of David Lean’s for­mer Sound Design­er, Win­ston Ryder, to amp up the frights. ​“It was excit­ing because he was from a dif­fer­ent era,” recalls the direc­tor. ​“He’d get real­ly excit­ed about bal­loons being rubbed togeth­er to get cat nois­es or he’d play a cym­bal back­wards and say ​‘I think this is real­ly inter­est­ing for when you hear spooky feed­back.’ He was real­ly inventive.”

When it came to scares, Volk was keen to inject his own love of the genre: ​“I thought I had to lay­er on the tropes because if I made it too sub­tle, it’d look like noth­ing is hap­pen­ing, so I fed my knowl­edge of hor­ror films in. The ghost end­ed up being a mix­ture of Nor­man Bates and Fred­dy Krueger, and the siege men­tal­i­ty is a lit­tle bit like The Birds or Night of the Liv­ing Dead but because it’s in such a dif­fer­ent for­mat, you don’t recog­nise those influ­ences. It’s a straight-down-the-line ghost sto­ry, just told in a very dif­fer­ent way.”

Speak­ing of spooks, Volk’s noto­ri­ous ​‘Pipes’ is hid­den in var­i­ous blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments through­out Manning’s film, with eagle-eyed view­ers tak­ing great plea­sure spot­ting him in the years since. ​“The impor­tant one for me is where you see him in the cur­tains and Parkin­son says: ​‘I don’t see any­thing, do you?’ That might have been the only one I put in the script but Les­ley put more in. Nine or 10 have been spot­ted but I think she put more in than that. Some haven’t been spot­ted so far. It’s become a game and part of the mythol­o­gy, which I real­ly love.”

Of course, some ideas proved too much: ​“I want­ed to put in a very high-pitched sound that couldn’t be heard by humans and would dri­ve pets mad. Dogs would start bark­ing up and down the coun­try and no one would know why. I actu­al­ly think Les­ley even looked into how to do that tech­ni­cal­ly but they couldn’t, which is a bit scary,” chuck­les Volk. ​“I also want­ed a more out-there end­ing where Parkin­son says ​‘the ghost’s in the machine and com­ing to your home. What­ev­er you do, don’t switch off your TV.’ The idea was to leave it up in the air, like Pipes is com­ing to get you. The pro­duc­er said: ​‘There’s no way we’re doing that.’”

Despite these ter­ri­fy­ing tricks stay­ing on the cut­ting room floor, Ghost­watch was already noto­ri­ous enough to spark out­rage and engage­ment in equal mea­sure. With a team of real para­psy­chol­o­gists man­ning phone lines that mir­rored the fakes on screen, thou­sands of peo­ple called in with com­plaints and their own tales of ghost­ly encoun­ters. ​“It went out at 9.25. Our Pro­duc­er came to us at around 10.30 and said: ​‘Oh my god, the phone lines have jammed. All across the coun­try, peo­ple are won­der­ing whether Sarah Greene’s okay,’” remem­bers Man­ning. ​“Many were reflect­ing on what they were see­ing on TV – ​‘something’s jumped off my table,’ that sort of thing – and the phone guys would tell them it’s fic­tion and try to calm them down. I was sur­prised every­one seemed to kick off on it.”

“I think peo­ple phoned in gen­er­al­ly because they were either angry, scared or both,” rea­sons Volk. ​“I couldn’t quite believe it, to be hon­est. It seemed peo­ple, at least the peo­ple that phoned in, were tak­ing it seri­ous­ly.” For Man­ning, this tabloid recep­tion was con­fus­ing: ​“We were try­ing to say some­thing about the pow­er of tele­vi­sion and why you shouldn’t believe what you see and nobody got any­where near that,” she sug­gests. ​“It was all: ​‘Parkie’s bro­ken faith with the nation,’ ​‘obvi­ous­ly it’s real,’ ​‘no, obvi­ous­ly it’s fake,’ ​‘it’s obvi­ous­ly crap,’ ​‘it’s obvi­ous­ly great’ – every sin­gle thing was thrown at us. It wasn’t all com­plaints but it was all very con­fused,” she adds. ​“In ret­ro­spect, I think the lan­guage I was so keen to use threw everybody.”

Black­list­ed from the BBC, Ghost­watch has still nev­er been repeat­ed, yet its impact on fans and pop-cul­ture is unde­ni­able. ​“Peo­ple often say the same thing, which is it ter­ri­fied them yet made them want to make hor­ror films,” laughs Volk. ​“Jed Shep­herd who co-wrote Zoom hor­ror Host inter­viewed me before he made the film and was very much influ­enced by Ghost­watch, and lots of oth­ers have said sim­i­lar things. It’s nice to feel that peo­ple have tak­en inspi­ra­tion from it to cre­ate some­thing dif­fer­ent so the genre revi­talis­es itself.”

Man­ning echoes the sen­ti­ment: ​“In the Q&As me and Steve do, lots of peo­ple say they watched it when they were 8, 9 or 10 – which I’m sure they shouldn’t have – and that it opened doors to their careers and inter­est in hor­ror. I’m thrilled peo­ple are still talk­ing about it.”

Ghost­watch is released for its 30^th Anniver­sary on Blu-ray by 101 Films, 31^st Oct 2022. Sheffield’s Hor­ror film Fes­ti­val Cel­lu­loid Screams, in part­ner­ship with Live Cin­e­ma, presents an immer­sive screen­ing of the film on Fri­day 28 Octo­ber at BFI Southbank.