Remembering Ghostwatch

It is Halloween today and the ghoulies will be out in force tonight, so it is time to recall the last time that UK TV tried go for the full blooded experience. In 1992 BBC1 unleashed Ghostwatch  on the viewing public promising viewers an investigation into a haunted house with hosts Michael Parkinson, Mike Smith, Sarah Greene and Craig Charles, however the more media astute were more than aware that Ghostwatch was nothing more than a piece of fiction. Ghostwatch was going out under the Screen One banner, Screen One was at the time BBC1's single drama strand. Over the years it had shown films like Alive and Kicking a harrowing tale of addiction that starred Lenny Henry and Robbie Coltrane, A Very Polish Practice which saw Peter Davison star in the sequel to A Very Peculiar Practice and A Foreign Field starring Alec Guinness, Leo McKern and Lauren Bacall in the story of D-Day veterans going back to Normandy. To understand how Ghostwatch became a cause celebre you have to understand a few things, every other Screen One production was shot on film where as Ghostwatch was made as a standard TV production, ITV was showing Wall Street on at the same so an amount of people will have missed the announcement at the start that tried to infer Ghostwatch was not what it seemed to be and the use of professional actors to play members of the public. However after the scares started the hotline whose number posted became deluged with calls and a lot of people missing the message telling them it was piece of fiction they had been watching. And at the end of night people thought Michael Parkinson had become possessed by a ghost and Sarah Greene had been eaten by cats. Such was the fury caused by Ghostwatch it has never been repeated on UK TV, although you can get it on DVD. Ghostwatch has lived on many other ways, you can see it's influence on films like Paranormal Activity and perhaps that just shows it became a long lasting phemeon