Posts Tagged ‘South Park’

Halloween Horrors: Ghostwatch

Friday, October 16th, 2020

Back on Halloween in 1992, the BBC played a trick on its viewers by broadcasting a program called Ghostwatch. It was an early example of what we would call “Reality TV,” and like the overwhelming majority of Reality TV shows, it was fake.

It was supposedly a BBC camera crew staking out a home where poltergeist was said to be active. In fact, it was a scripted event where viewers intentionally caught glimpses of the malevolent ghost “Pipes” in the background while he was ignored by the cast, with planted on-air callers to the studio adding to the story, and during the course of the broadcast things got progressively weirder.

Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, there were disclaimers that it was fiction, but the form in which in which it was presented (with real-world TV personalities like Red Dwarf‘s Craig Charles and presenter Michael Parkinson) convinced viewers they were watching the real thing.

And like Welles, they caught hell for it:

Five days after the programme’s transmission, an 18-year-old boy with learning difficulties, Martin Denham, hanged himself, having fallen into what his stepfather described as a trance. He had become obsessed with Ghostwatch and was convinced that there were ghosts in the water pipes of his Nottingham home.

In November 1993, a year after the programme’s one-off airing, two doctors from a child psychiatry unit in Coventry, Dawn Simons and Walter Silveira, submitted an article to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recording the first cases of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a television programme. Two ten-year-old boys had been referred to them. One was admitted to an inpatients unit for eight weeks; he would bang his head in an attempt to free himself from thoughts of Ghostwatch and its evil spirit, “Pipes”.

Consultants from Edinburgh came forward with four more children with similar symptoms. Martin Denham’s parents launched an inquiry into their son’s death. In 2002, his mother condemned the BFI’s DVD release of Ghostwatch, saying the programme had killed her son.

The show’s producers, Ruth Baumgarten and Richard Broke, were hauled on to BBC One’s consumer watchdog show Biteback to defend themselves.

Here’s a retrospective video on it:

And here’s writer Stephen Volk on creating it:

Today, of course, fake paranormal reality TV shows have proliferated so far and wide that you can rank over 60 of them and see them parodied on South Park:

Phil Collins Contemplated Su-Su-Suicide

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

Sorry, couldn’t resist. But this is actually a pretty interesting profile about how Phil Collins is really, really tired of being Phil Collins.

As a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis fan, my personal opinions of Mr. Collins are, um, conflicted. Even as late as Duke, Collins-era Genesis were still producing great albums, but after that each each album they put out was worse than the last. Collins’ solo output was mixed: some decent songs (“In the Air Tonight”, “Take Me Home”) mixed with wimpy schlock.

The article mentions criticism of Collins from the guitarist of Oasis being the thing that first damaged his reputation, but here in the states, Oasis was just another Brit band that never broke particularly big. (Personally I think Collins should have respond with a video of him lying in a giant pit full of money. “What’s that, Noel? Sorry, I can’t hear you with all these hundred pound notes clogging my ears.”)

I think the things that really turned public opinion against Collins (at least more so than any pop musician past their natural expiration date) were his taking the Concord to appear in both versions of Live Aid (what was the point), and the simultaneous one-two punch of Patrick Bateman’s oleaginous declarations of his virtues in American Psycho, and his appearance in the “Timmy 2000” episode of South Park within the same week in April of 2000.

Plus, anyone doing songs for Disney movies automatically earns the “lame” tag. It’s just the way the world works.

I do find it interesting that he’s a serious collector of Alamo relics and memorabilia. I mean, who would have thought? Although Phil Phillip, I hate to tell you, but those mystical “orbs” in your Alamo pictures aren’t paranormal energies, they’re dust specks catching the flash. It’s a pretty well-known natural phenomena. Sorry.