"We Don't Want to Give Anybody Sleepless Nights": Revisiting 'Ghostwatch'
Lights explode and the studio is plunged into demonic darkness. The souls manning the telephone lines have long since vanished, leaving only Mike Smith ’s panicked requests after his wife's welfare. Papers whip across the screen, caught in a maelstrom of malevolence. Watches attached to wrists hundreds of miles away have come to a dead stop, and there have been multiple reports of inanimate objects tearing themselves from surfaces and throwing themselves across rooms all across the land. The people of Great Britain watch entranced as Michael Parkinson , controlled by some force that earlier in the evening he’d foolishly dismissed, sleepwalks beyond the camera’s lens, muttering a nursery rhyme. Yes, the BBC has paid heavily for messing with the supernatural alright, and on Hallowe’en , of all nights. Samhain ; the night the divide between the living and the dead is gossamer thin. Sarah Greene has passed through a doorway of her own, until this night just a cupboard beneath the sta