Today marks the 30th anniversary of Ghostwatch, one of the most renowned genre dramas ever broadcast by the BBC (just the once!). To mark the occasion, there’s a new release by 101 Films, which contains a new documentary looking back at the programme, and its writer Stephen Volk chatted with Paul Simpson about its creation and legacy…

 

We know Ghostwatch was originally pitched as a six episode series. If the last hour was expanded into the 90 minute Ghostwatch, what were the first five hours?

The gist of it was about a foot in the door journalist, working for the likes of what would now be Panorama but what was then World in Action, investigating reports of a haunting house on a council estate. And they come across a psychic researcher as they called it in those days, it was a clash of personalities. So the two people would be working together and the family were the family, as eventually in Ghostwatch.

I had B and C stories. One was about a paranormal researcher researching with psychic people in a lab and there was a very Nigel Kneale style of strange things happening all over the place. And these all knitted together over the four or five episodes to become the one thing that was centred in the haunting in Foxhill Drive, if indeed I used that address in the first place.

But it was constructed like a conventional drama. I think the first episode was called Fly on the Wall which I thought was a rather good title, because it’s what they called those kinds of documentaries, like The Family.

One of the things in my DNA was, ‘What if you filmed The Family and they were haunted?’ That idea that cameras could go in and record everything you’re doing, in a domestic environment, one of the background thoughts was ‘What if that was a haunted family?’

That would be the five episodes and then the sixth episode would jump to a so-called live transmission from a haunted house. But I wasn’t thinking of that last episode being actually live until [Ghostwatch producer] Ruth [Baumgarten] asked me to think about a 90-minuter. It would have still been in context with a normal drama series, shot on film, and edited. And it was only when she said ‘Let’s do the 90 minuter’ I realised you couldn’t put all six episodes into 90 minutes. I said ‘Let’s just do the last one and all the rest is backstory.’ And then it all came from that really.

What’s the thing that’s been said about Ghostwatch that you really have been surprised that people have found in it?

That’s interesting. I’ll tell you what never occurred to me until afterwards: the relevance of the phone number [on screen for people to call into] being a phone number that was used on children’s shows.

That never occurred to me because I didn’t know what phone number they were going to use. And it became ‘Oh that number was used for Going Live on a Saturday morning’ and ‘Why did you use a children’s presenter like Sarah Greene?’ I thought ‘What? She’s not a children’s presenter, she’s done loads of things since then.’ So, that accusation about using a children’s presenter as if we were targeting children to be traumatised.

One of the things that is clear, looking at it from outside, is that involving Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, gave it a very different flavour than it might have had, had it been any other combinations of presenters. Obviously the dynamic of Mike and Sarah being married added an extra element.

That was a last minute thing, a very fortuitous last minute thing. It was sent to Sarah Greene, I believe, and Mike read it, almost over her shoulder and said, ‘What is it? Can I have a look at it? Can I be in it?’ So I got a call from Ruth saying, ‘How would you feel if Mike Smith was in it? And we were thinking he’d be the phone presenter.’

Notes come from left field and there’s this kind of calibration in your mind, a bit like the inside of a safe that goes click.. click… click, all the spin off ramifications of something that’s just hurled at you.

But in all honesty, I think it was about ten seconds of silence before I said ‘No, that’s a great idea.’ I could immediately see the dynamic of a TV couple, one in the house and one not in the house, adding a frisson. I can’t imagine not doing it now.

It’s such a good idea because part of the dynamic of Ghostwatch was, you’ve got this traumatised family – and a dysfunctional family in a way, with no father figure – and you have a surrogate mother, who is the scientist,  but wrapped around that, you’ve got the whole surrogate family of the BBC descending. So thematically, there was a lot of resonance in the fact that television is a surrogate family to all of us really. The idea of having a TV celebrity couple being in something like this, I thought was a wonderful reminder that sometimes we feel we know these people we see on TV, sometimes we see them and feel more familiarity with them than we do our own family, which is absolutely ridiculous.

They serve an emotional function in terms of security. Obviously anything horror-related is about undermining that security, so our affiliation with a real life celebrity couple was yet another thing to be subverted, really. So I really took that on board, excitedly.

Years back, I read newsreader Robert Dougall’s autobiography in which he talked about the fact that somebody had written to him after their widowed mother had died and Robert Dougall had been the person to whom she said ‘Good evening’ when he was reading the news and last thing at night she would say ‘Goodnight’ to him, at the television. And he said that there is that responsibility, which hadn’t even crossed his mind, of being part of somebody’s family and yet not.

Well, part of the whole reaction to Ghostwatch, in a way, was because it was [on] the BBC. It is the voice of the nation, it tells you when wars break out, it tells you who’s the next prime minister, talks interminably about who might be the next prime minister etc.

That people felt so affronted when the BBC wasn’t telling them the truth and the Robert Dougall or the Michael Parkinson or the David Dimbleby is shown to be fallible, if not, downright lying to you, was part of the game we were playing, in a way. Sort of saying ‘Be careful who you trust, even the BBC.’ Or ‘Be careful what you’re looking at. Be suspicious of what you’re being told at all times.’ That kind of thing was the whole point of it, really.

The front of the script had the quote about Terry Waite…

Yes, Terry Waite’s brother, when he was told that Terry Waite had been released as a hostage, said ‘I’ll only believe it when I see it on TV.’ That quote was always on the front of the script.

I did a book on conspiracy theories a few years ago now. One of the ones I covered was Alternative 3, the pseudo documentary on ITV back in 1977…

I didn’t see it when it came out though, I saw it much later, but I remember people saying to me ‘Did you see that documentary last night? It’s really worrying.’ I remember a flurry of people being very agitated about it.

I chatted with one of the creators of that, and what you’re saying echoes what they hit fifteen years earlier.

Were they coerced or attempted to be coerced into saying ‘This is not true. What you’re about to see is not real’ as we were?

Well, they had the weird thing. They were supposed to be going out on April the first.

Ah OK, yes.

And for various reasons, they couldn’t get the network slot, so it got moved to June and of course, at that point it lost the ‘Oh it’s a big ITV April Fool.’ thing round it. But one of the key witnesses in it, was in the Bond film that was in cinemas at the same time, Shane Rimmer.

Yes, he was a well known face even in the 60s, and the voice of Thunderbirds as well, wasn’t he?

Yes, Scott Tracy. He’s playing this washed out astronaut and you think ‘How could anybody…?’ And yet, when it went out I can remember not connecting those two bits of the brain.

If I was doing it now and I was doing that and it was a well known actor, I would say ‘We’re revoicing this, in the words of an actor’ just in case anyone recognises him. Or get someone that very blatantly isn’t recognised.

But there was someone in Ghostwatch, I think it was Derek Smee, who played Arthur Lacey, the guy that’s the spirit medium that walks along talking to Craig Charles. He was on a bloody advert that week. Ruth asked them all ‘You must guarantee that you’re not on that week of Halloween.’

I think Gillian Bevan was on something the previous Sunday, on some drama and you think ‘Oh God.’ What can you do? She’s a fairly known face really anyway, but we got away with it.

You were saying about April the 1st [for Alternative 3]; there was no real guarantee that the BBC were going to give us Halloween night! So that was a bit of a shot in the dark for the director, in terms of decorating the set and that kind of thing, with pumpkins and apple bobbing and all the rest of it. Lesley [Manning] just went for broke, thinking ‘Well, they’ve got to do this on Halloween.’ But we hadn’t been given the slot or anything, so it was a bit of a flyer.

Ghostwatch is probably one of the, if not the thing that people associate with you. In real terms, what did it mean for your career within creative fields?

I’ll be really honest, it didn’t, I think, impact on the trajectory of my career, simply because, weirdly, I came from writing feature films before I did television, long before. I’d written two or three films, British and American films, long before I got I had my first meeting at the BBC. So, it wasn’t the usual route of writing TV and then film.

A hell of a lot of producers knew of me and knew of my work before I did Ghostwatch. What was pleasant was when I then had meetings with those producers and they would say how much they liked it or not mention it! Mostly they would say that they thought it was great. So I carried on as normal, after it.

There was a flurry of activity where people said how much they liked it but of course, because the BBC battened down the hatches and sent round a memo to say ‘it should never be mentioned in my lifetime’ kind of thing, it went under the radar, it didn’t really get mentioned until it was re-released.

People weren’t culturally aware of it in a mainstream way until ten years later when the BFI DVD came out under the Archive TV label. So it was brought out to our immense gratification in the same breath as reviving the Ghost Stories for Christmas, which obviously were huge influences on me. That was a marvellous kudos, to have that from the BFI in 2002 and of course, it also afforded me and the director and producer the opportunity to do a commentary, where we could, for the first time, actually talk about why the hell we did this bloody thing. Because no one had asked us why the hell did we do it, this piece of drama.

It had its shock value, it had its impact, it had its aftermath in the tabloids and all the rest of it and on Points of View and Bite Back. Sarah Greene had to go on TV and say no, she was still alive, children didn’t have to worry about her welfare. And then it was kind of buried by the BBC and in a weird kind of way, I like the fact that it was. In retrospect, not at the time. I like the fact that it became a kind of treasured artefact, a historical thing that was buried and rediscovered. I did hear that certain copies were made on VHS and passed around in the playground or sold on the black market. So it existed, it became a thing of mythology, which was sort of appropriate and nice.

When Blair Witch started the found footage phenomenon, it was almost like Ghostwatch was a found footage thing because it was rediscovered in the 2000s from obscurity in a way. And imposed obscurity because the BBC didn’t want to acknowledge they’d made it.

When you look back on it now would you do anything differently?

Not really. I think there’s a lot of bonuses that happened that were unexpected. I would never have expected Michael Parkinson to work as well as he did.

I’m not sure I would have liked this to happen because the repercussions might have been awful but one of the thoughts was to put a high pitched tone on the programme so that pets, dogs at home would have gone crazy. Mike Smith says at one point ‘We’ve got reports of pets going crazy up and down the country.’ And the idea was that pets would be going crazy because they could hear this sound. Lesley looked into it and found out it wasn’t technically possible to do that. That was one thing that was maybe a neat idea or horrible idea that never happened.

I’ve got a slight regret that my real ending didn’t come to pass, even though it would have been absolutely chaotic. It was less the idea of chaos in the studio and more the thought that Pipes is in the machine and coming to your house so it’s coming to your TV set… I think I had Parkinson saying ‘Whatever you do, don’t switch off the TV. Don’t switch off the TV because he’s coming to get you’ kind of thing and then it cuts to black. That was my idea, and Ruth Baumgarten, the producer, said ‘There’s no way on earth we’re going to do that. So forget that!’ I’ve got a slight regret: that would have been the perfect ending, dramatically speaking.

But there is so much that was pulled off effectively that I can’t go down the route of thinking ‘What would be different?’ It is what it is, and it came together and happened.

Ten or fifteen minutes in, you’ve forgotten that it’s a drama. You’ve forgotten that logo into the credit…

For me, it’s curious. I always tell the story of a friend of mine who a week before I said ‘I’ve got something coming out on BBC next Saturday called Ghostwatch. I hope you enjoy it.’ And then I met her a couple of weeks later and she said ‘Oh, I thought it was real.’ And I said ‘Excuse me, why did you think it was real when I told you that I’d written it?’ ‘Oh, when I saw Parkinson, I thought you must have gotten it wrong.’

I think there’s something about the way Lesley, so brilliantly, made it in the mode, in the idiom of outside broadcast and studio transmission, that even people that knew and even people that watch it now, on a big screen… They know for certain that it is recorded. It’s not 1992 and it’s not on television and it’s not live, it can’t be live. But there’s something about what they’re watching that bypasses the critical faculties and works on some reptilian part of the brain and seems real – and that’s quite nice to observe really.

Maybe that’s part of the thrill and why people really enjoy it now because it works on  the part of the brain that knows it’s not real but is sucked into it.

I was up at Sheffield at a horror festival and some questions came from the audience. The nice thing about doing a Q&A is they open thoughts in your mind that you otherwise wouldn’t have. My DNA is horror, always has been. Reading, watching and everything, long before I did Ghostwatch, so there’s all sorts of horror influences under the surface in Ghostwatch. There’s The Exorcist, there’s even siege movies like The Birds or Night of the Living Dead. I think Pipes is an amalgam of Freddy Kreuger and Norman Bates in many ways. There’s the scratches, like on Regan’s face in The Exorcist.

I had a store of these kinds of influences already percolated into my psyche. They were all there and I was going to use all of them because my fear was there wouldn’t be enough horror under the surface. The surface was going to be anodyne so I had to have horror underneath the surface. All these horror films are like a bubbling ferment underneath this innocuous level.

I like that the surface was so banal, just Craig Charles using a microphone to talk to someone in a playground but all these horrible things are being talked about and referred to. It was a straight down the road ghost story essentially and a straight down the road horror film but the idiom was what made it different and I’m just so grateful we got away with it.

The question that came up often was ‘What were you hoping for it? Were you hoping that 30 years later, people would remember it?’ Lesley and I said, ‘You don’t hope for anything like that when you’re making something. You hope to just get to the last day and for it to be on TV. You’re not even hoping for the next day or even the review, it’s like let’s just get it done and make sure it goes out.’ And that’s all your thoughts are going towards. I mean, you obviously want it to get a reaction and to get seen and for people to like it, don’t get me wrong. But you’re not thinking in terms of legacy.

There was a wonderful interview with Anthony Hopkins when he was getting lots of interviews about Hannibal Lecter. He’s very self effacing about his own talents, all the time, and people would say ‘What were you thinking when you’re Hannibal Lecter and you’re staring at Jodie Foster?’ He says, ‘Sometimes, I’m not thinking about anything.’ And that’s both comical and truthful because what he then says is ‘If the script is doing its job, then I’m just staring. And if I stare… and I don’t do too much, the audience will project their own fears on my face.’

He knows all that but he says it as a quip but there’s an iceberg under that very simple thought, which I think is really kind of cunning and interesting. Because he has faith, if the writing works, that he doesn’t have to do a lot, and I thought that was really interesting.

 

Ghostwatch is available now on 101 Films