"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 stairs of a suburban semi-detached house in Northolt, but now nothing but portal into pure, unconscionable evil. Live and on camera, we’ve all seen the proof that previously existed only in our peripheral vision: ghosts are real, and their powers are beyond anything our worst nightmares have imagined.

For those yet to be initiated into the cult of Ghostwatch, let me first reassure you that dear old Parky snapped out of it, and even went on to revive his chat show format, bagging himself a knighthood for good measure. Mike Smith, though sadly no longer with us, was successfully reunited with a thankfully-unharmed Greene. The programme we all sat through on Hallowe’en Night 1992 was not a true attempt to investigate a suburban poltergeist but rather a meticulously-realised pseudo-documentary, employing all manner of production tricks and diversionary tactics to create believers from the most ardent sceptics.

Modelled as a live outside broadcast with regular input from studio-based experts, the fictional premise of Ghostwatch was simple: investigate the apparent haunting of a normal house in Foxhill Drive, Northolt, where a mother (Pam Early, played by Brid Brennan) and her two daughters Suzanne and Kim (Michelle and Cherise Wesson) had been plagued by a presence they had come to call ‘Pipes’, after the mother’s attempt to disguise the terror as nothing more sinister than plumbing issues. The broadcast, cinéma vérité played as a straight reportage, accelerates over the course of ninety minutes from amused indulgence to outright physical violence, until not even our beloved celebrities are safe.

In the thirty years since the BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, the programme has taken a place in the British imagination alongside celebrated folk scares like The Wicker Man or The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water. Its single British broadcast has only added to its mystique, as has the wild estimate of a million phonecalls to the BBC on 31^st October 1992 to either praise or complain about the programme. Its reputation is such that at the dawn of the social media age, I myself joined a Facebook group called ‘Ghostwatch is the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen’, and as somebody who finds themselves easily bored by slasher flicks and jump scares, I still think that’s about right. On the following Monday at school, it was all anybody could talk of; Hallowe’en had been a Saturday, and there was still a lingering feeling that maybe Sarah Greene hadn’t returned from Northolt alive. Of course, I pretended to have sussed the whole thing immediately, instead of having been good and properly shit up (despite my earlier career as a Ghostbuster).

Given the certainty of some complaints, and the knowledge that rare viewings help build a legend, the BBC have declined to broadcast Ghostwatch in the intervening decades. I’ve had a copy on DVD for a number of years, but rarely do I give in to watching it. This is not so much because of the famous quote from the programme, “we don’t want to give anybody sleepless nights”, emblazoned on the cover, and more because I like to ration out my reminiscences. In this, I appear to be the minority. Ghostwatch has spawned documentaries of its own, considered articles and even suggestions it’s been the inspiration for mainstream horror hits like The Blair Witch Project.

However, with this important anniversary approaching, I decided now would be a good time to revisit Foxhill Drive to see if it really remains the scariest fucking thing I’d ever seen in my life. Other blogs have done fine jobs of dissecting the cultural impact of Ghostwatch, counting the number of Pipes sightings or analysing how the show was conceived. But as a writer of some years standing, I’m much more interested in the beats of the story, how its use of misdirection and expectation helped to raise what could have been schlocky into a work of high concept art. This is because I happen to think that Ghostwatch is one of the most subversive things the BBC ever broadcast, and it would be a shame if its 30th anniversary passed by without at least a literary investigation of the investigation, as it were.

I think this is a justified exercise, given that Ghostwatch has always been described as a drama, or a docu-drama. In fact, its creator and writer Stephen Volk planned it to be a six-part serial, of which a live investigation was envisaged to be the climax. Ghostwatch was eventually made under the Screen One banner, hence the use of a credit sequence in which the night’s host is introduced as ‘Michael Parkinson in Ghostwatch’, before flashing up the main participants and writer. This detail, lasting a couple of seconds and fairly innocuous, is more important than it seems: although superficially there to reinforce the fictional nature of the show, it’s a convenient piece of misdirection, suggesting what’s to come won’t be too distressing. Michael Parkinson, for instance, is a reliable and solid figure from light entertainment, rather than a noted dramatic presence.

Indeed, even though that week’s Radio Times billed Ghostwatch as a drama, the production was at pains to play up to its realism as early as possible, and until Volk’s writer credit in ninety minutes’ time, that flashed caption is the only concession that Ghostwatch is not true reportage. This light touch allowed the BBC to have its cake and eat it, but that stylistic decision (and its additional use of childrens’ TV presenters instead of actors) would backfire, with the Broadcasting Standards Commission later criticising the channel for (amongst other things) catching some parents off-guard as regards the programme’s suitability for minors.

One of the first faces we see is Craig Charles, then at the height of his Red Dwarf fame. This lends a kind of fantasy credibility, but in Ghostwatch he represents the side of us which suspects we’re being sent up. His cheeky, ad-libbing, everyman persona pulls the programme away from the script as written, the glint in his eye and his NFL bomber jacket flagging it all as a spooky jape for Hallowe’en Night. He has to rein it in abruptly after gently prising a potted history from a distressed Pam.

Presenter and DJ Mike Smith is aiding Parky in the studio, manning the public telephone lines. The inclusion of these is a nice touch; at the time, public interaction over the telephone was a routine way to ensure audience investment, via Comic Relief, ITV Telethon, all the way back to Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. He's the one who gives us the phone number to call (081 811 8181) if we're experiencing our own phenomena, the same one as Going Live! uses, and this was supposed to play a recording confirming that the show was indeed fictional. However, because of the volume of real calls, it had the unintended effect of amplifying the unreality, as some people assumed the disturbances had bled into the phone lines too.

As regards perspectives, Smitty is the professional; while the experiment seems to unsettle him, he suspects this wouldn’t be happening if there was any real risk. His slight nerves are explained by the fact his wife is to be the BBC's canary in the coal mine, "spending the best part of a night in the most haunted house in Britain". Parky later alludes to the programme taking place over many hours rather than the hour and a half we're treated to.

Smith's wife, of course, is Sarah Greene, star of many a BBC daytime broadcast and at that time one of the hosts of Going Live!, a kids’ show she co-presented that very morning. Greene had long been a recognisable blend of go-getting head girl and sympathetic ear, and presenters in that vein were everywhere in this televisual era: Challenge Anneka; Treasure Hunt; The Interceptor. Though Ghostwatch will invite us to view the night’s events through multiple perspectives, Greene serves as the show’s main protagonist, the person we’ll be mainly experiencing the story through. It’s essential that a protagonist is relatable, and fortunately Greene is, through long familiarity and her unflappability under live pressure. In Ghostwatch Sarah Greene is essentially us - open-minded, intrepid, and braced for the perils to come. She even gets a dig in at Smith for his cold feet. It’s handy for the BBC to be able to call on a) a pair of experienced live television anchors and b) a real-life couple, not only to firm up the sense of this being a live broadcast, but to establish a credible personal risk. 

These opening images, a kinetic blend of broadcast technology, recognisable presenters and contextual footage of the Early sisters being violently jostled (handily filmed decades before the widespread adoption of high-definition), immerse us immediately in the setup. There’s something nasty going on here, and we’re taking it extremely seriously - you can tell this because of the BBC offering up its temperature gauges, light pens and state of the art thermal imaging, none of which would come cheap. At this remove it’s amusing to think that an audience could be convinced by these bits of tech, but in cheaply celebrating its budget Ghostwatch is actually introducing key elements of the story to come. As a ninety-minute TV play, Ghostwatch doesn’t have the time to dawdle, so any inconsequential details are anything but. These camera views are examples of Chekov’s famous gun - at some stage, these pieces will help to complete a wider puzzle.

Parky, standing in front of a bank of cathode ray tubes, reiterates the promise of the premise: tonight, we are live at a real-life haunting. His role as serious journalist somewhat undermined by the cheap skulls and chalice on the studio mantelpiece, he nevertheless gives due importance to his guest, Dr Lin Pascoe. Played by the now more familiar screen presence of Gillian Bevan, Dr Pascoe is a parapsychologist and ostensibly Ghostwatch’s yardstick of realism: she has spent her career studying the paranormal, and indeed is heavily involved with the family we’re with tonight. 

At this stage, it’s important to acknowledge the unspoken gender split in Ghostwatch, with every primary female character admitting to some degree of belief in the supernatural and every primary male on a scale between mildly sceptical and outright mocking. This is clearly intentional, an open invitation to consider the disturbances at Foxhill Drive as nothing but hysteria. After all, the objects of Pipes’ dissatisfaction are three women: mother Pam and her daughters Suzie and Kim. Pam is internally dealing with the breakup of the family unit, weighed down even before this paranormal nonsense, wearing her grubby clothes and her hangdog expression. Newspaper reports mock her, and even Dr Pascoe passively kicks dirt into her face in their interactions.

But maybe it’s not Pam’s fault: the focus of the investigation is firmly fixed on Suzanne, a pubescent. Whereas Kim, the younger daughter, somehow sees the figure of Pipes as a tolerable presence (even drawing pictures of him), Suzie radiates waves of negative energy. It’s not too big a leap to bracket Suzie with familiar characters such as Carrie White, a harnesser of demonic psychic power. Girls in adolescence are fertile feed for horror, with their dark moods and self-harm and simmering resentments towards mother figures. As the plot wears on, Suzie is the clear physical conduit for anything inexplicable: scratches on the face; hijacked voicebox; manic scrawls in the rough book like the scribbles on the wall inside Borley Rectory. Again, the suspicion is that this is someone’s fault, that it’s been brought upon them because of...well, who (or what) they are. It’s all rather uncomfortable.

Once we’re into the story proper, we await the first proper scare. Disappointingly, it turns out to be a cheap jump one in the kitchen, courtesy of Charles and a bet he made with Smith to force Greene to swear. Aside from this nothing much happens, hence us spending most of the time in the safety of the studio. Here, it’s Pascoe firmly in charge, not Parky, whose hands-off disbelief is partly driven by the doctor’s nagging careerism. 

It took me until this close rewatch to realise that it’s not Mr Pipes who is the antagonist in Ghostwatch, but Dr Pascoe. It’s Dr Pascoe who has driven a sober investigation into the Earlys. It’s her who wants to have the paranormal proven on live television, to back up her credentials as a serious scientist. It’s her who needs the BBC’s toys and its trusted figureheads to take her seriously and finally kill off her running battles with critics, such as the wonderfully-monikered Dr Emilio Sylvestri.

But despite her power-suit and cool amusement at the public’s telephonic contributions, Pascoe is an absurd figure, unironically calling her latest book Angels of the Odd and referencing “the Gunfeld Technique'' in her investigations (nothing more than covering the eyes and ears of a subject). Oh, but her tapes have been verified by "forensic scientists at Cambridge". Well, now; what could be more robust proof than that? Parkinson, to his journalistic credit, extends her enough rope to hang herself; despite her love of jargon we get a huge red flag of her real capabilities when viewing footage of Suzie channelling the voice of Pipes - Pascoe flaps: “Jesus Christ! Are you joking? Are you dead, are you in heaven?”

Furthermore, Pascoe not only needs the paranormal to be proven this very night, but in a measurable frame of reference. Seeing the Early girls flung around their bedroom will never be enough, because without scientific proof she’s still nothing but a crank, something she secretly believes in Pam Early. Despite having worked with the Early family for some time, she doesn’t care about them as people, hence her being in the studio some distance away rather than guiding them through an emotionally draining night in person, despite her insistence that to prove things, you have to leave the lab. Mentally, we are itching to see her comeuppance.

Soon we return to Northolt. Sarah is getting anxious at the lack of activity, while Craig Charles meets some locals behind the estate, who recount the gruesome discovery of a gutted labrador (black, naturally) on a kids’ playground. This is another puzzle piece, this time flagging the spirit’s enmity towards children. Pascoe, although she would almost certainly have heard this tale from Pam Early, could never take it seriously, because it’s folk horror, nothing but a scare passed down the generations. Neither would she have the time for spiritualist Arthur and his “nutty” belief that houses absorb feelings (incidentally, a nice callback to another celebrated BBC play, The Stone Tape). But in real life we all carry tales like this with us from wherever we hail from, whether it’s green men, chupacabras, witches’ covens or simply the local weirdo. The effect this has on the audience is to now place them at a crossroads between what they see (represented by the expert with her labs and tapes) and what they feel (that even mundane places can have an innate darkness). This is the show’s midpoint, and the audience has seen enough to now be located exactly between the emotional and the rational. To sell this a true horror story, whatever is going to happen needs to start happening now, as we’ll never be as receptive again.

Right on time, a perfectly circular wet patch appears on the living room floor (Pascoe, naturally, is delighted at the possibility of measurable proof). In itself, it’s got a whiff of the ridiculous, but this development is useful as a direct opposite of all the technology the BBC are employing - the O/B team use a spare lens demister to collect a sample, highlighting that despite all the fancy camera tricks, the people really in peril are only dogged amateurs.

Then it all kicks off in Foxhill Drive. Everybody’s in panic mode, we move from room to room as the crew follow scuttling and banging. Then, it stops. Absolute silence. Parky begs Sarah not to go upstairs, despite the risk to the kids.

And this is the moment that Suzanne is exposed as a fraud.

Yes, the sullen teenager is indeed the source of tonight’s disturbances, somehow causing excessive nuisance by crouching down and banging on a cupboard wall. This plot point is an important narrative beat (the end of act two, traditionally when the protagonist is at their lowest ebb; in this case Greene’s open mind and the BBC’s folly exposed), and its cheapness is Ghostwatch’s card up the sleeve. Suzie’s crude method of satisfying the production’s demands is nowhere near enough to explain the video footage taken of the girls’ bedroom, the scientific experiments or things we’ve seen with our own eyes, like the patch on the carpet or the ring of crayons by the back door. But because the script has hinted so strongly at Suzie being the main node of discontent in the Early household, and that the evidence for the disturbances we’ve encountered are so…well, unprofessional, it’s entirely plausible one teenage girl has wasted everyone’s time and emotion. Her admission is our excuse to dismiss it as an overhyped swizz.

Better still, it gives Parkinson a chance to be incandescent with bluff rage, rounding on a speechless Pascoe. Deftly, we switch perspective to see events through Parky. Like him, we’re an hour in, having invested a lot of time and tension, and right now, we’re angry: at Suzie, at Pascoe, at the whole concept of “watching ghosts”. The programme limps on, an increasingly desperate Pascoe clutching at any straw, but it's getting harder to keep our minds open. We’re disappointed, we’ve wasted our evening, that breath we’ve been holding in is fully exhaled. So where do we go from here?

Act three, that’s where. Endgame.

From this point, the action comes thick and fast. This, I think, is a legacy of Stephen Volk’s compression of six episodes worth of ideas into a ninety-minute special. Like any good horror, things start happening to people rather than them being able to manipulate events. Because what’s going to happen cannot now be stopped, the only thing left to do is watch open-mouthed. 

This breathless finale kicks off with finding a catatonic Suzie lying on her bed, covered in scratches. The uniform nature of these animal cuts in her face and arms suggest something unnatural at play (the distant meows of cats in the sound mix is a particularly nice addition), especially when shown her fingernails bitten to the quick.

It’s also in the bedroom, while we’re fussing over one daughter that the other declares the seriousness of the situation: “Pipes says we’ve got to stay.” Previously, Pipes has been a family secret, even a joke, but this is the first time we confirm he has an agenda. Maybe Arthur the exorcist was right, and this standard family home has absorbed the painful memories of its inhabitants? Even Pascoe is at a loss to explain what she’s seeing, unable to provide answers for Parkinson’s persistent questions, thus destroying her credibility as a scientist and as someone who can bring rationality to the terror. Her smug certainty has caused disaster.

With only fifteen minutes to go, the real Mr Pipes appears. Just briefly, as the camera flashes across the bedroom curtains, a squat and blooded figure stands in shot. Director Lesley Manning was insistent that all of the footage shot of Pipes be cut to the bare minimum, until he was a figure glimpsed only in the periphery of the mind. The appearance of Pipes is one of Ghostwatch’s most celebrated moments, and he is indeed gruesome:  face running red, standing malevolently in a room populated by images of Jason Donovan and the Care Bears. And what’s worse, we realise later, is that one of the children could see him all the time.

For a BBC show, an institution not noted for its expertise in horror, what occurs in the last quarter of an hour is what really seals Ghostwatch’s legend: telephone reports of clocks stopping, nationwide electrical interference, pets going crackers. After Pipes’ chaotic reveal the action moves downstairs: the feed begins to break up and Suzie, now crammed into a tiny space next to the sofa, growls in Pipes’ voice: “What big eyes you have”. Kim, the younger daughter, has ripped the eyes off her toy rabbit and drowned it. She’s hiding behind the fridge, flung open in the darkness to provide the only light source in the kitchen, the cheap Hallowe’en decorations now completely incongruous.

The one location in the house they haven’t yet set foot in, and unlike the other rooms, lacking a camera, is the understairs cupboard. This was another rifle on the wall, set up by Pam, who reveals her husband once used it as a darkroom. After a disturbing incident in which she found herself unable to get out of it, she sealed it up. Naturally, this is where Ghostwatch was always heading, and it’s only in these final moments when the pieces are slotted into the jigsaw we discover why this "glory-hole" has such importance.

We return inevitably to folk horror, both via telephone calls casting light on Foxhill's history before it was occupied by the Earlys. Firstly, it’s said that the area was home to a baby farm, the craven operator of which, one Mother Seddons, drowned dozens of babies on the site (a nice nod to the whole Native American burial ground trope). But it’s the later second call, from his former social worker, who reveals that Raymond Tunstall, a child molester and psychiatric patient, had been sub-let a room in the house in the 1960s. Tunstall fits the profile for early-nineties local oddball: he’s both a transvestite (specifically, “a woman on the inside of his body” who feels Mother Seddons is making him do her bidding) and a confirmed danger to children. Coincidentally, The Silence of the Lambs, a huge hit the previous year, revolved around the crimes of a cross-dressing serial killer. Hopefully, we’ve moved beyond LGBTQ+ being invoked as a horror trope.

Poor old tortured Raymond, we are told, hung himself in that locked understairs cupboard, becoming chow for his motley collection of cats, who went first for the soft tissues of his eyeballs. By the time he was found, he looked roughly as Pipes does. He has ached for another person to inhabit since, choosing the unfortunate Suzanne Early as his conduit, and by the later stages of the evening Suzie has ordered poor Pam away, playing on her guilt about her broken marriage. 

There’s also an argument, I think, for reading Pipes’ intent as beyond a simple haunting and more like a trap - by leading the BBC here, the spirit who has inhabited the Foxhill site gets to demonstrate its power on a national scale The fake picture of a harmonious living room is a placeholder while he gathers his strength, but by the time we’ve figured out it’s fake, it’s too late. 

“He’s in the machine!” realises Pascoe. “The picture isn’t live. It’s a dupe!” She babbles that the whole of the UK, everybody watching this, is part of a massive seance. All of the telephone calls the viewers made, treated as bad jokes, were dire warnings. By this point, the line between drama and reality has been erased: the F/X and sound are spellbinding, the script delivery beyond compare. 

It’s only fitting that now we’re in a world we cannot comprehend that the unreality of the infra-red is returned to. The purple and orange facsimile of Sarah Greene motions around the lower floor of the house, disorientating the viewer. Injuries to the crew cause the cameras to tilt at strange angles, normal rooms now unfamiliar. The emergency services screech into the street, pulling survivors from the house, until only three human beings remain in Foxhill Drive: Suzie, Sarah Greene and her cameraman. Despite her colleague's protestations, Greene climbs into the cupboard under the stairs, determined to save Suzie, who has been lured inside.

As the cupboard door slams shut, accompanied by the whines of those infernal moggies, we return one final time to the studio. It’s all so unbelievable and fantastical, but our disbelief is complete enough that we can accept it to be deserted; a previously sober space abandoned completely to a ghost in the wires. 

Almost abandoned, anyway. In its ballsiest move, Ghostwatch ends by daring us to accept that Michael Parkinson, mate of Billy Connolly and mucker of Muhammad Ali, is really wandering a cavernous television studio, completely alone, muttering “Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear” like a puzzled grandfather. In a perfect world Ghostwatch would have cut straight to black, removing any credits, and the BBC remaining off-air for a few minutes following. In a time before social media, an ending like that would have kept viewers on tenterhooks, not having a clue whether what they saw was really what happened.

But for all that, the fact we’re still talking about it thirty years later says that Ghostwatch could succeed on its own terms without such chicanery. In hindsight there’s no real forerunner to it: the BBC had pranked people before, but this was faux-reality of a different order, and something sadly which can’t now be repeated. Inside No. 9 lovingly replicated it in their 2018 Hallowe’en Special, ‘Dead Line’, camera interference and all, but these kinds of experiments are increasingly rare and almost impossible to sell as a communal event. This is probably why Ghostwatch is still so loved and admired, because it’s a perfect confluence of smart script, great direction and genuine heavy-hitters involved to give it heft. Writer Stephen Volk gave it a sequel in a short story, ‘31/10’, but any remakes or filmed sequels should probably be resisted for the reasons suggested above.

Watching Ghostwatch closely for this article has given me a brand new respect for the risk the BBC took in both creating and broadcasting it. What it has over a lot of other inferior horror (not that I’m a connoisseur) is a “Who, Sir? Me, Sir?” earnestness that you can’t really expect with a feature film or even a lavish drama instead offering a balanced blend of unknown actors and respected presenters, camcorder footage and a studio full of telephone operatives. Because your expectations are never entirely solid, the special really gets to milk its conceit, offering you a solitary glimpse and then disappearing, until you can’t really remember what it was you saw in front of the curtain. Consider this: my DVD has a 12 rating, so Ghostwatch's power lies not in its jump scares or costumes, but almost entirely in its ideas and suggestions.

We don’t want to give anybody sleepless nights, Parky said. Yeah, well, tell that to my bloody eleven year old self, mate. Ghostwatch terrified me then still gives me chills now, and I haven’t seen anything else in thirty years which even comes close to giving me the kind of nightmares I suffered on Hallowe’en Night, 1992. It’s still a triumph and should be rightfully celebrated as one of the BBC’s major milestones.

Chris Stanley