At one point she tried to keep Lucy trapped in Victorian times by concealing all the mirrors in the house. Catherine Butler talks about how Garner is “ careful to integrate his fiction with the physical reality beyond the page” but here it’s woven with a sense of escalating dread that scared me more than half of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (and I love those) and director John Woods deserves huge credit for the inventive camera work . A teacher has to interrogate the other kids who witnessed it but who don’t want to grass him up before the police arrive to find out what happened.

Then afterwards, all seems to be well, the corpse is removed and the room converted into another bedroom, until one day the poltergeist activity starts up again. No concession is made to the intended age range of the audience and over 25 minutes, this claustrophobic two hander concerning an amateur investigation into the haunting of an abandoned gamekeeper’s lodge takes the oppressive influences of Shirely Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House – and it’s subsequent adaptations – and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972), and combines them with the isolated rural horror familiar to viewers of The Blair Witch Project (1999). A precursor to the later Dramarama series, Spooky explores the supernatural, and ventures into the dark corners of the imagination. There’s a neat and rather nasty twist ending too that would have completely wrong-footed its young audience.But I’m even more disturbed that this was broadcast before 5pm in a slot designed for children, because The Keeper was made for children, and watching it now it’s really hard to relate to that. According to the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, a naked wild man, covered in hair, was caught in the nets of local fishermen. These outstanding screenplays venture into the dark corners of the imagination to create some of the most spine-tingling scenes ever seen on children s television! A genuinely scary story from that golden age of kids television when film-makers had literally no qualms about utterly terrifying their young audience.

It’s another disarmingly simple story that becomes increasingly unsettling as Roberts is driven to distraction trying to identify the source of the voice, eerily played by a never-seen Reich. All episodes produced by Thames Television have been released on DVD by Network on 13 January 2012, [7] who have also released the 1983 series Spooky which was shown under the Dramarama banner on 15 August 2011.Uniquely, various episodes were made by different ITV franchises and the first series was broadcast in two parts. The boy runs to the road and there’s his dad’s truck but just as he reaches it the truck drives off – dad has the doppleganger in the passenger seat. It's a short little tale that uses many well worn tricks to build suspense - eerie acoustic instruments, predominantly a dulcimer, and a restless camera that's constantly circling and hovering just behind Peter and, particularly, Janet - but it must be remembered this is a show made for kids for whom many of these tricks of the trade would be new and also they are well worn because they work. The Exorcism of Amy’ is set in a super-minimal, soft-focus household version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and pits a youthful Lucy Benjamin (best known as EastEnders’ Lisa Fowler) against both Amelia – a horrifying, quasi-Bonnie Langford incarnation of herself – and Elizabeth (Annabelle Lanyon), a po-faced Hermione Grainger-wannabe whose idea of niceness involves being as scary as possible to a new friend who just wants to be left alone. I have recently watched the first instalement of 'Shadows' which is some 7 years older but much more 'spooky' - so it's not my current age!

Note: Our refurbished grades - Pristine, Very Good and Good - are solely based on the cosmetic condition of the phone. It was also the site of the Cobra Mist listening station, still held by the MOD but seemingly abandoned after unknown interference rendered it unreliable.The first seven episodes all had a supernatural theme and were made by Thames Television under the umbrella title Spooky. Things start to move, curtains blow in a non-existent breeze and he catches sight of what he presumes must be ghosts but which turn out to be schoolchildren from mid-WWII. Spooky aired shortly before the main series was broadcast, exploring the supernatural vein that would appear throughout Dramarama s run. Having spent my childhood, and most of my adult life haunted by a particular episode of Dramarama it was wonderful to watch them all again.