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Ghostwatch

1992 | Horror

Notorious BBC hoax/drama, broadcast on Halloween in 1992, purporting to be a live outside broadcast from a haunted house in London. A family has been terrorised by a malevolent spirit known as Mr Pipes and now a BBC film crew is spending the night in the building to see what happens.

Advertised and listed as a drama, but sufficiently plausible to be utterly credible to casual viewers who happened upon it, the programme ended up jamming the BBC switchboard with alarmed viewers, apparently giving some of them PTSD and being implicated in at least one suicide. The corporation was banned from attempting anything similar again and Ghostwatch has never been repeated, living on only as an urban legend (and various DVD releases).



Network BBC1
Creator(s) Stephen Volk
Producer(s) Ruth Baumgarten
Cast Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles

hoax mockumentary

Main Image Courtesy: BBC.
Background Image Courtesy: BBC.
Images And Data Courtesy Of: BBC1.
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Season listing
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Awix

Added this item on Jul 18, 2018

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Ghostwatch Reviews & Ratings (10)
9-10
10.0% (1)
7-8
40.0% (4)
5-6
40.0% (4)
3-4
0.0% (0)
1-2
10.0% (1)

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Awix (3310 KP) rated

Jul 18, 2018  
Ghostwatch
Ghostwatch
1992 | Horror
10
6.4 (10 Ratings)
TV Show Rating
Don't Have Nightmares
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: do a properly frightening ghost story for the TV age, by framing it as a live broadcast from a haunted house. The really inspired thing about Ghostwatch is the decision to have well-known and trusted BBC personalities playing themselves throughout. Of course, that was probably where the trouble started - not only did it make people more likely to take the show at face value, but putting a children's TV presenter in the middle of the action ensured a rather-too-young audience was tuning in for what remains, by any objective standard, a genuinely terrifying horror story.

The trappings of live TV are painstakingly reconstructed (and maybe desconstructed); Michael Parkinson in particular gives an astonishingly good performance as a seasoned media pro slowly beginning to realise something has gone horribly wrong and the ghost has got into the TV network. Little touches, such as the ghost quietly hanging around unheralded in the back of crowd scenes, mean this is a very re-watchable show.

You could certainly argue that the makers' claim that they weren't trying to fool anybody ring a little false in view of all the evidence to the contrary, and that there is something very irresponsible about the whole enterprise - the fact that people were genuinely traumatised by a horror story they thought was true is not really something for anyone to be proud of. But that doesn't detract from the fact this is a brilliantly executed, really scary hoax.
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