Kim Newman on Ghostwatch

The precedent most often cited in the flurry of controversy that followed BBC 1's 'live' telecast of Ghostwatch on Halloween night 1992 was Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air's radio version of H G Wells' The War of the Worlds broadcast exactly fifty-four years earlier, on October 31 1938. Both fictions made great play of imitating the 'feel' of current events broadcasting. Welles captured the tingling sensation of 'breaking news' in uncertain times when war was looming abroad and the radio was the primary medium of mass communication. Ghostwatch perfectly mimics the tone of the slightly-sensationalised repackaging of the true-life sufferings of ordinary people in series such as Crimewatch or (as mentioned in the script) 'Hospitalwatch'. As with The War of the Worlds, it is hard to get through the outrage in the press and the programme-makers' discreet encouragement of tales of unwary viewers terrified into believing that they were witnessing real events.

An item in The Independent on December 23 1992 reports: 'The parents of a teenager who hanged himself a few days after watching the television documentary Ghostwatch blame the BBC for their son's death. An inquest yesterday in Nottingham recorded a verdict that Martin Denham, 18, killed himself, but his mother, April Denham, said 'I blame the BBC - it is all their fault. They said it was based on a true story but it was all a hoax.' Ten years  on, the irresponsibility of soliciting and printing such a statement from a grief-stricken parent seems a great deal more dubious an exercise than prefacing a ghost story with an elaborate framing device to suggest the authenticity of the following events. The documentary format of Ghostwatch  is no more than a television version of the first chapter of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), which describes the circumstances  surrounding the discovery and publication of the manuscript that constitutes the bulk of the famous story. Even earlier, James Hogg had mounted a more elaborate authentication for his terrific doppelgänger tale The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). A year before publication, he published a letter in Blackwood's Magazine which detailed the discovery of a manuscript clutched in the hand of a corpse unearthed from a Scottish peat bog; then Hogg let it be known that an editor was examining the manuscript; finally, the book came out anonymously, presented to the public as a genuine memoir. All this is no more than the campfire storyteller's prefacing of a tall story with the words: 'This really  happened to a friend of a friend ...'

Stephen Volk, then best known as the  screenwriter of Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), originally conceived of Ghostwatch as a six-part serial along the lines of Troy Kennedy Martin and Martin Campbell's successful Edge of Darkness (1985), which had mingled the police, spy, science fiction and supernatural genres with political satire and still worked as gripping popular entertainment. Volk saw it as 'my chance to do a supernatural thriller film serial on the BBC... dark, moody, grainy, etc. Maybe featuring an investigative team who'd go on to have other stories. Anyway I did this treatment of six one-hour episodes, starting with a poltergeist in a North London housing estate, which is investigated by an  eccentric young psychical investigator (male) and a TV Roger Cook-ish journo (female). I also had a scientist who was investigating psychic people in a lab, but that was lost along the way, along with the reporter's clash with her  bosses. It worked in a conventional  drama serial sense, structured a bit like a Stephen King mini-series, not pretending to be "real". Except  Episode Six was to be a "live" broadcast from the haunted house in North London, and all hell breaks loose.' In this, as in much else in Ghostwatch, Volk shows the influence of Nigel Kneale: the last episode of The Quatermass Experiment (1953) purports to be broadcast from a monster-swamped Westminster Abbey.

However, plans for a Ghostwatch serial did not come to fruition. 'Then one day  the producer Ruth Baumgarten said to me, "Look, there's no way the BBC are going to commit to this as a series, is there any way we can do it as a one-off ninety  minute drama?" I remember very clearly sitting in her office and saying, "Look, I had this idea: what if we do the whole thing like Episode Six and pretend it's going  out live?" There was this look on her face and I thought "Oh my God, there's no going back now. How  the hell do I pull this off?"' Volk  and Baumgarten, later joined by director Lesley Manning, were not quite the first people to think along these lines - in 1976, ITV broadcast the paranoid  Alternative Three, a documentary special hosted by Shaw Taylor (presenter of the proto-Crimewatch show Police Five) which used convincing fake footage and expert testimony to 'expose' a cover-up of an enormous conspiracy that included a manned landing on the Moon in 1963 and the discovery of malign alien life. Several American TV movies play similar games: Special Bulletin, about a terrorist siege that goes nuclear, and Without Warning, about a meteorite storm that turns out  to be a Wells-style attack from space. The extra dimension that enabled Ghostwatch to have a larger impact than these was the convincing pretence that it was going out 'live', complete with the technical fumbles and the announcement, one hour in, that 'Those joining us for the next scheduled programme should be aware we are staying with these events'. Like the various crime-themed shows, which depend on audience members phoning in their testimony, or even such slot-filling nature pieces as Badgerwatch, Ghostwatch has an excuse for unfolding in 'real time', although its effectiveness as a hoax is perhaps muted (as was the Welles-Wells show) by the need to compress an actual story into a ninety-minute span.

It is debatable exactly how convincing Ghostwatch was supposed to be. In a complaining letter to the Radio Times, primary school teacher Robert Kensit wrote: 'I describe myself as a pretty hard-bitten sceptic, but by the time it had finished I was feeling very frightened indeed ... all that was  needed was to have a message flashed on screen every few minutes which would have informed people that this was a fictional account.' Although Welles was persuaded to do something similar during an ad-break in his live broadcast, Volk quite rightly retorts, 'If we'd had a screaming banner across the screen reading "This is not true", what is the point of that? You might as well have a comedian give you the punchline before he tells  you the gag. The BBC insisted on certain billing compromises in the Radio Times such as a cast list (that almost had me slitting my wrists!) and a lot of the magazine coverage pretty much gave the game away. What do you do? Destroy the fun of the programme for the people who might enjoy it, for the sake of pleasing those who might be offended, who probably won't like it  anyway? The BBC's answer to that would be YES! My answer would be NO.' Volk in fact, to that end, did not even want his name to appear on the programme credits, however the BBC got the collywobbles the day before the transmission and insisted that the writer's name appear on the opening titles, this in addition to the already seemingly giving-the-game-away Screen One drama strand title sequence.   Even so, right up until the last minute it was touch and go whether the programme would be pulled.

Apart from casting familiar TV presenters  like Michael Parkinson (who also plays himself in the 1974 horror movie Madhouse), Craig Charles (manfully sending up his motormouth image by playing himself as an obnoxious, insensitive exploiter) and the married couple Sarah Greene (Pebble Mill at One) and Mike Smith (Breakfast Time), who  also play themselves in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997), Ghostwatch works hard on its verisimilitude, well before the even more controversial Brass Eye attacked the conventions and ethics of TV sensationalism. A flashed-up telephone number encourages calls from the audience (during the broadcast the lines were manned by volunteers who explained that the show was a fiction but listened to any ghost stories contributed), the sometimes unsteady technical  links between the supposed safety of the studio and the 'front line' of haunted Foxhill Drive, where the Early family is beset by poltergeist phenomena. As in Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (1959) and The Stone Tape (1972), a standard ghostly mystery is peeled of its onion layers as more and more information is revealed. We witness a series of cumulative hauntings, each generation's evil piled upon the next until the ghosts can actually harm the living. It is to the show's credit that its closing sequences features material that retains all its power to shock: the possible trapping of a teenage girl (and a nationally known TV face) in the glory hole under the stairs with 'Pipes', who might be the ghost of a baby-farmer or a child-molester. Perhaps borrowing from Kneale's uncredited script for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983), Ghostwatch suggests that TV itself plays the role of a literal 'medium', hosting 'a massive seance', supposedly spreading the poltergeist phenomena into the homes of the viewing public.

It has been said that the controversy surrounding Ghostwatch led to its suppression: it has never been repeated, and this marks its first release on any home video format. However, the last ten years have seen a proliferation of 'reality TV' programming which happily blurs the lines between documentary, fiction, entertainment and experiment: The Real World, Cops, Survivor, Big Brother, Fear (which has a very Ghostwatch-like premise). The cinema has responded with fictions rooted in a similar premise: The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Last Broadcast (1999), The St Francisville  Experiment (2000), My Little Eye (2002). If produced today, Ghostwatch would probably use an internet backdrop or a guerrilla video look as opposed to the relative slickness of a BBC Outside Broadcast Unit.

Kim Newman

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