At some point during the 1980s, Thames Television created an episode of children’s anthology series Dramarama that was so disturbing that we can still vaguely remember it to this day – something about a haunted house, time travel and a girl who could make pictures fall off walls just by pointing at them. Sadly, that episode wasn’t part of the dedicatedly phantasmagorical precursor, Spooky, but there is a surfeit of similarly supernatural activity on show here – from the dizzily pretentious to the mind-bogglingly bizarre.
‘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. ‘There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there during the day,’ Elizabeth drones menacingly, doing her best to make comfort as unsettling as possible. ‘Things just seem different, that’s all.’
After dressing as a frankly alarming bat at the world’s worst fancy-dress party (where everyone else, for licensing reasons, is clad not as a character from films or books but as unidentifiable horrors from a Ray Bradbury nightmare), she decides to exorcise the demon ‘Amelia’ from inside Amy – only to promptly be revealed (to no one’s surprise) as the baddie after all. ‘I never promised you a happy ending, did I?’ she intones to camera at the end. No; nor did you ever explain what the hell was going on, either.
Meanwhile, in ‘The Danny Roberts Show’, a smug, sub-Midnight Caller radio DJ who looks like the bastard lovechild of Simon Pegg and Peter Serafinowicz with Tommy Boyd hair (Nicholas Ball) is so contemptuously dismissive of his avid listening public (‘Who gives a fig about their miniscule little problems?’) that he’s eventually visited by a ghostly obscurantist who corrects his grammar and then curses him to eternal damnation on behalf of all banal disc jockeys everywhere.
‘I am part of the vastness; part of the silence and emptiness that is filled up with your inane chatter and your trivial words,’ the pedantic phantom croons, sentencing Gary Davies, Simon Bates and Dave Lee Travis to sleepless nights with the sledgehammer obviousness of the satire while Gwyneth Strong (Cassandra from Only Fools And Horses in full-on faux new-romantic glitz mode) plays an endless stream of mostly forgotten hits by Grace Jones, Shack Attack, Fashion, Junior, Lynx and Aswad.
‘The Keeper’, on the other hand, provides moments that are genuinely eerie, even to an adult audience in 2011. Ghosthunters Peter (Tim Woodward) and Sally (Janet Maw) spend an evening in a haunted shack, wracked by the furrowed sexual tension between them – ‘When I said I’d come with you, I expected a little more of a run for my money’ – before being eventually sent over the edge of reason into insanity by twanging string instruments, weird mutterings and a game of Scrabble that leads to a poem straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Goodness knows how many nightmares it provoked in the Children’s ITV audience of 1983.
There are seven episodes of Dramarama: Spooky in total, and while it’s easy to scoff at some of the acting, the occasionally pretentious moments of am-dram surrealism and the overwhelming Eighties-ness of it all, there are some authentically entertaining tales being told here – and even the odd chill or two. It might not be enough to give you nightmares, but the sight of Wilfred Brambell looking like a homeless Rick Wakeman may well be enough to make you think twice about turning the light off before going to bed.
Released on DVD on Monday 15th August 2011 by Network.