Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children's Gothic Television in the 1970S and '80S Helen Wheatley Version of Record First Published: 14 Nov 2012

This article was downloaded by: [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] On: 27 November 2012, At: 03:27 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual Culture in Britain Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb20 Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children's Gothic Television in the 1970s and '80s Helen Wheatley Version of record first published: 14 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Helen Wheatley (2012): Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children's Gothic Television in the 1970s and '80s, Visual Culture in Britain, 13:3, 383-397 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2012.712889

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Helen Wheatley

Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children’s Gothic Television in the 1970s and ’80s

The place of children’s television in the history of British television drama tells us a lot about the relationship between scholarly histories, ‘popular history’ and memory. The genre is often disregarded by those scholars seeking to write a history of ‘serious’ or ‘important’ television drama, and the extant academic work on children’s television focuses almost entirely on regulation, effects and questions of ideology and the ‘bad example’. As Maire´ Messenger Davies has argued, ‘Little critical attention has been given to content, despite the fact that children’s material has unique features worthy of critical notice. Children’s drama is less bound by the constraints of realism than adults’; magic, fantasy, fairytale and slapstick humour are staple ingredients, which producers, writers and performers find liberating. Genuinely innovative, even avant-garde, material may be produced.’1 The story of innovation, formal experimentation and boundary-pushing storylines in children’s television drama therefore remains largely untold, except in a few scholarly texts and in a number of publications about cult/children’s television produced for a non- academic audience.2 It would therefore seem that, while writers of verna- cular histories of television embrace their own, and others’, memories of children’s programming, academic scholars are far more likely to be found putting their own memories of (and nostalgia for?) childhood viewing aside in taking on the serious task of taking television seriously. In light of this, Lynn Spigel’s comments on the relationship between academic and popular histories are pertinent: ‘By bringing popular memory [and by extension popular histories] into a dialectical tension with professional history, we might find a way to explicate the biases and blind spots of both.’3 I begin this article on Gothic children’s television in the 1970s and ’80s with reference to Spigel’s work because precisely such a blind spot is to be found in my 2006 monograph, Gothic Television.4 When Gothic Television Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 was reviewed, some astute reviewers5 pointed out a rather glaring absence in my attempt to write a historical study of the Gothic on British and US television. In a move characteristic of much scholarly writing on television drama, I had completely failed to look towards children’s television and a rich tradition of Gothic programming with a long history stretching back at least to the late 1960s. This might be characterized as a tale of the return of the repressed because, on reflection, the realization dawned that these programmes were precisely where my interest in this genre had begun, and I started to recall vividly moments from a number of the programmes

Visual Culture in Britain ISSN 1471-4787 print/ISSN 1941-8361 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2012.712889 384 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

in this study, sounds and images forgotten in the recesses of my mind, often not much more than snapshots or sound bites: the march of ‘Uglie Wuglies’, terrifying scarecrows brought to life, in the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (BBC1); Tolly (Alec Christie) chant- ing ‘Green Noah, demon tree, evil fingers can’t catch me!’ in the Children of Green Knowe (BBC1) in 1986; the spinning of the moondial in the 1989 BBC1 series of the same title. Almost everyone I spoke to had their own version of frightening or haunting images, sounds and stories from their own childhood viewing: my husband still shuddered at the idea of Roland (Philip DaCosta) trapped in a bizarre world accessed via the lift shaft in his family’s tower block in King of the Castle (HTV, 1977); my friend could recall the groaning of the stones in Children of the Stones (HTV, 1977), though not much else about the serial; and my mother remembered her brother’s obsession with the feverish surrealism of The Owl Service (Granada, 1969–70), though again had no memory of the programme’s narrative. The half-remembered text, sometimes only a moment from a programme screened only once, decades ago, is also the topic of much internet discussion on classic-TV websites. A cursory trawl through message boards will reveal long strands of chat about where an image, song or character might be located within the history of British television programmes, with discussion particularly focusing on drama watched in childhood; subsequent discussion often turns to how the (now adult) viewer can re-view this half-remembered text. We might, therefore, see the history of children’s television being commonly experienced as uncanny in light of Freud’s assertion that ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.6 Given that, as argued below, the dramas in question are already steeped in the uncanny (both visually and narratively), there is a doubling of uncan- niness at play here. Maria Tatar, discussing children’s literature, argues that ‘[t]he books we read when young get under our skin in countless ways that do not always register in obvious ways. They can affect us as much as real-life experiences.’7 Arguably, this extreme absorption can also be seen in the programmes we watch, and this realization takes us back to children’s television, to think about where the Gothic can be located in its history, and to examine the resonant images and recurrent ideas and obsessions of these texts. This article was also partly prompted by Alison Peirse’s insightful discussion of telefantasy and children’s television in the 1980s and ’90s in this journal in 2010, in which she argued that ‘[these programmes] have Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 received little sustained critical attention, and children’s television in gen- eral in this period remains obscure and under-researched’.8 While tele- fantasies have sometimes been read and understood as ‘teen texts’,9 the dearth of analyses of children’s fantasy programming, or programming placed in a children’s programming slot, is all the more surprising given the richness of material at hand; this is often eloquent and intelligent television drama, formally experimental, and written, directed and produced by significant figures in the history of British television drama. In offering a history of children’s Gothic television in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s Helen Wheatley 385

here, I seek to contextualize my own work on the history of Gothic TV in Britain, as well as to provide a pre-history to the current boom in Gothic culture for children and young adults. In the era of Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and whole aisles of Gothic literature for children, a better understanding of the genre’s televisual past might help us better locate and comprehend contemporary trends and traditions. In order to do this, some initial definition of Gothic television is necessary. As a genre which is suffused with familial dramas and disturbing domestic spaces, the Gothic is ideally suited to television, though it was not acknowledged as a distinct category of television programming until rela- tively recently. While some have seen television as too ‘literal’ or ‘bland’ a medium to present potentially affective Gothic fictions successfully,10 others have argued that it is precisely the quotidian nature of the medium that makes it a most suitable site for tales of young women trapped in old houses, confused paternities and sinister relatives, and houses that are troubled by family secrets, hauntings and other uncanny occurrences.11 Given the Gothic’s notorious ‘slipperiness’ as a generic category and the multiplicity of interpretations of its meanings and identifying features, it is difficult to offer a singular definition of Gothic television. Nonetheless, it can be identified by the following:12 a mood of dread and terror; the presence of highly stereotyped characters and plots, often derived from Gothic fiction; representations of the supernatural; the structures and images of the uncanny; homes and families that are haunted by events/figures from the past; complex narrative organization (flashbacks, dreams, memory montages); dark mise-en-scene` ; and subjective or impressionistic camerawork and sound recording. This description outlines Gothic television as a critical category; it is not, however, a label frequently used by audiences and programme makers to define the programmes they watch or make. The above definition is also complicated further by television’s generic hybridity, which means that it is possible to identify Gothic ‘elements’ in a range of texts that do not necessarily fit this generic categorization. Those writing about Gothic television have centralized the uncanny as a defining feature that distinguishes this programming from other generic categories (such as ‘made-for-television horror’ or the broader category of ‘telefantasy’). This work has drawn on Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’ and his contention that the heimlich (or ‘homely’) and unheimlich (the uncanny or, literally translated, the unhomely) are inextricably linked together, rather than entirely separate categories. Therefore, Gothic television, with its emphasis on the uncanny, joins together the homely or familiar elements of the medium and its domestic spaces (those repre- Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 sented on screen and those in which television is viewed) with the unfamiliar, unsettling and often supernatural elements of Gothic storytelling. Thus the uncanny can be found in:

the very structure of Gothic television . . . located in its repetitions and returns, in an aesthetic which combines traditionally realist, familiarizing programme making and non-naturalistic disorientating filming and editing, in Gothic television’s familiar characters and plotting . . . and even in the generic hybridity of the Gothic text. The uncanny is therefore located in the moments in Gothic television in which the familiar traditions and conventions of television are made strange.13 386 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

There is a small body of work on children’s Gothic literature, which charts a history of this genre from the Gothic narratives of the eighteenth- century ‘cautionary tale’, told by nursemaids to secure docile behaviour in their young charges, to picture books for younger children, to the Goosebumps series of popular children’s novels, and a wider resurgence of interest in the Gothic across youth culture. In rather broad sweeps, this critical writing has, first, taken the stance that such literature is harmless fun, seeing fiction as a safe space in which to explore the pleasure of fear: as Anna Jackson et al. argue, the appeal of these fictions ‘rests in the safe distance of reader from text. The reader or listener can experience a frisson, the pleasure of a good shiver, confident that he or she does not live in the world the [Gothic] evokes’.14 This has been seen as particularly true of Gothic fictions that are set in a distant past, allowing for a significant ‘disconnect’ between the reader and protagonist. On the other hand, writing on the children’s Gothic has viewed this sub- genre as a set of fictions which ‘work through’ real issues, and real threats, facing children in the past and present. The genre challenges the view that childhood is a time of innocence, safety and protection, and instead sees the world as full of threat and menace, with high infant mortality rates and children and young people living in abusive relationships. For example, Jarlath Kileen’s work on Gothic literature tracks the eighteenth-century middle-class ideology of the child as innocent from Locke and Rousseau, through the poetry of the Romantics, to the Gothic representations of childhood in Dickens, in whose work the child is at once under threat but also threatening.15 In viewing the lineage of Gothic children’s literature as extending from the cautionary tale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dale Townsend also reminds us of the didactic possibilities of a ‘good scare’.16 Given that, as Messenger Davies has noted, producers of children’s television ‘to a much greater extent than those of adult television, analyse storylines with a view to their didactic possibilities’,17 it is perhaps no surprise that in the 1970s and ’80s children’s drama producers frequently turned to the Gothic. It is possible to identify two distinct traditions of the children’s Gothic in the period in question. First, there was a cycle of original serial drama produced for ITV in the 1970s, much of which was created by a core creative team at HTV (including The Georgian House (1976), Children of the Stones and King of the Castle); these dramas were often set in contemporary and ordinary locales, but usually involved some kind of time travel or other dislocation in space and time (removal of protagonist/s to a parallel universe, for example). Second, this period saw a cycle of Gothic costume Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 dramas for children produced by the BBC in the late 1970s and 1980s (e.g. The Enchanted Castle, Children of Green Knowe and Moondial); in these programmes, narratives often took place in a more distant past (through themes of time travel and/or haunting) and heritage locations (stately homes, ornamental gardens, etc.) were common. In this analysis, particular attention will be paid to the child protagonist(s), their place within the domestic spaces of the children’s Gothic, and their relationship to the idea of the uncanny. The representation of houses and their interstitial or hidden spaces within both sets of texts (secret rooms, hidden gardens, Helen Wheatley 387

parallel buildings) and the ways in which the young protagonists inhabit and traverse these spaces are therefore at the centre of this exploration of children’s Gothic television. While not all these dramas are strictly centred on a haunted house, Barry Curtis’s book, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film,18 is extremely useful in evaluating the meanings of the houses at the centres of these dramas. Curtis describes ‘a particularly intense relationship between narrative and mise-en-scene’ in the haunted house film, arguing that ‘[t]he house conceals a truth that has to be symptomatically worked out’;19 this is also true of the houses in the Gothic children’s dramas in the period in question. Curtis goes on to argue that the ‘encoun- ter with the haunted house often stages a generational conflict . . . Haunted houses are characteristically explored by young women, as if they have a particular responsibility for resolving the problems of habitation gone wrong and bring a courageous capacity for entering into a relationship with the troubled past.’20 Again, this notion of the child as link between the past and present, as an active figure working through or worrying at the uncanny, or what Peirse calls ‘the plucky child protagonist [located] within formations of space and place that move constantly between the normal and the abnormal’,21 is found at the centre of Gothic children’s drama in the 1970s and ’80s. One might wonder at the particular meanings and attractions of Gothic television for children, extending and complicating the author’s earlier discussion of the implied or ‘model’ viewer of Gothic television and the issues that are ‘worried at’ in these dramas.22 In understanding childhood as an unsettling time of transition, where the family home acts as the key site of this period of uncertainty and when the child must also come to understand their place within wider society, it is unsurprising that young viewers embraced these programmes so completely, finding pleasure in the frisson of fear and excitement. Given the focus on houses and families in these serial dramas, the specific fears at play here all return to what we might see as the separation anxiety of being removed from one’s home and one’s family, a fear which, at its root, is a fear of isolation, a growing awareness of a world full of risky strangers – in short, a fear of growing up. Karen Coats has argued in her analysis of Neil Gaiman’s stories for children that ‘[f]ear of sounds in the night, fear of monsters under the bed, fear of a certain space (the basement or attic, for instance), fear of the house catching fire, fear of intruders etc., are all linked in some way to the anxious residue of the trauma of separation from that first womb-home’. She goes on to say that ‘[w]hat is interesting about this particular anxiety is that it is not all irrational; rather it will come to pass’.23 It will be argued below that it is precisely these fears, experienced by protago- Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 nists on the cusp of maturity, which are located in the Gothic dramas for children produced for ITV in the 1970s.

The adolescent and the uncanny Beginning with The Owl Service, an adaptation of Alan Garner’s 1967 novel, which was produced by Granada in 1969, the regional ITV companies made a number of Gothic serials for children’s television, along with other serials that might be more easily understood as telefantasy, as well 388 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

as Gothic anthology drama series,24 in the 1970s and early ’80s. Without exception, these Gothic dramas were set in the present day, sometimes in the context of quite ordinary families and domestic spaces. In the case of the HTV dramas in particular, this ‘ordinariness’ is enhanced by the regionality of the stories, which were made and set in Bristol.25 Also regionally located, The Owl Service was set in the Welsh valleys, and some of Escape into Night (ATV, 1972) was filmed on location using outside broadcast facilities in Barr Beacon, Aldridge, Walsall. To a certain extent, then, this challenges what Peirse sees as children’s telefantasy of the 1990s’ new concern with ‘contemporary settings and locations, working class spaces and populist genres such as horror and sci-fi’.26 While shows such as Dark Season (BBC1, 1991) and Century Falls (BBC1, 1993), which are at the centre of Peirse’s study, are certainly engaged in a more contemporary and more ordinary milieu than the BBC’s Gothic costume dramas of the 1970s and ’80s, what Peirse identifies is actually a return to the everyday in children’s telefantasy. The Owl Service is a particularly interesting programme: one of the first dramas Granada ever shot entirely on colour film and on location, it was broadcast in eight episodes at the turn of the 1960s in a Sunday teatime slot at 4.15 between The Big Match and the game show The Golden Shot.27 While this slot suggests a juvenile or family audience, the narrative deals with what might be seen as themes for much older teenagers and young adults. Jealousy, class struggle, burgeoning sexual desire and suggestions of incest are writ large through each episode, meaning that, when Granada submitted this serial for the Prix Jeunesse (the international prize for children’s television), the panel in Munich rejected it on the grounds that it was ‘deeply disturbing and questioned whether it was not indeed reprehensible to offer such material to young people’, according to Peter Plummer, producer of The Owl Service.28 It is difficult to offer a brief plot summary (remembering that convoluted plotting is a key characteristic of the Gothic drama), but the action centres on the developing triangular relationship between Alison (Gillian Hills) and Roger (Francis Wallis), step siblings, and Gwyn (Michael Holden), the son of the housekeeper (Dorothy Edwards) (and, we later discover, of the groundsman (Raymond Llewellyn)) of the house in the Welsh valleys where Alison and Roger have been brought for the summer. When Gwyn and Alison discover some floral plates in the attic of her bedroom, with a pattern that also resembles owls constructed out of the flowers, Alison begins to obsessively trace this pattern, and it subsequently becomes clear that the three central protagonists are becoming possessed or haunted by the Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 spirits of the three central figures in the story of the mythical Welsh figure of Blodeuwedd.29 Against the backdrop of this legend, Alison and Gwyn begin a furtive relationship (much is made of Gwyn’s lower-class status) while we also see Alison’s stepbrother’s burgeoning lust for her develop. The teenagers are watched over by Roger’s somewhat lecherous father (Edwin Richfield) and Alison’s mother (who remains entirely out of shot throughout the serial, but whose presence is frequently implied in point- edly subjective point-of-view shots which spy on the young lovers) along with Gwyn’s own mother and father. Helen Wheatley 389

The Owl Service is formally experimental; its use of colour and its costume and make-up design are impressionistic, as are its highly subjective shooting style and the jumpy editing, which attempts to convey the hysteria of Alison, Roger and Gwyn’s summer trapped in a crumbling pile in a claustrophobically small Welsh valley. The house in The Owl Service is significant in expressing the amour fou of the relationships at the centre of the narrative; it both seems to be a cause of the protagonists’ craziness (trapping them, haunting them, shaking their sense of self and their sanity) and, in the expressive nature of its rooms and their decoration, can also be seen as a symptom of the characters’ uncontrollable urges. The house is therefore an uncanny space in which the repressed is seen to return com- pulsively, and thus childhood is figured as prison-like, as something, like the past, which is to be escaped by the conclusion of the narrative. This corresponds with Jackson et al.’s discussion of the uncanny as an apt metaphor for adolescence; for them the uncanny ‘becomes a complex metaphor for the transition the characters undergo with respect to their place in their families and family history . . . the Gothic also offers fertile ground to explore beyond the conventions of the family to the adolescent’s place in larger social and cultural constellations of identity’.30 Similarly, Catherine Spooner has argued that ‘the heroines of the early Gothic novels by Ann Radcliffe and her contemporaries were almost invariably young women on the verge of adulthood, their threatened virginity the driving force of the plot’.31 Thus in young people’s Gothic drama, the adolescent is figured as uncanny, existing between the categories of child and adult and trapped in the interstices of the family home, literally in-between its structures.32 The first interstice we see in The Owl Service is the attic above Alison’s bedroom where she and Gwyn find the floral owl plates in episode 1. The narrative begins in media res with Alison expressing a nervousness about a scratching sound in the walls and ceiling of her bedroom – the house thus symbolizes her unease from the outset. Indeed, it is significant that Gwyn climbs into the attic to try to track down the source of her fear, just as he will explore her body later in the serial: he is shown here to be the character brave enough to conquer both the house and her body, despite an abiding sense of dread being attached to both in the narrative. Correspondingly, in the final episode, as the house is ravaged by a storm and damaged by a falling tree, so Alison’s body is marked by a supernatural force (her face and chest clawed by an unseen owl): her body and the house are thus inextricably linked throughout. The decoration of the social spaces in the Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 house, particularly the pool room where all the characters ‘play’ at some point in the serial, recalls classic images of the uncanny: tatty taxidermy hangs from the walls and crumbling plaster reveals a long-hidden image of Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers who is transformed into an owl in the legend (episode 2).33 The mise-en-scene` is thus permeated with the uncanny, symptomatic of the doomed relationship and, as Curtis notes, of the haunted house film: ‘The contents of [the house are] imprinted with events in time. ‘‘Old things’’ – souvenirs, keepsakes and relics – play . . . a significant role in the idea of home.’34 390 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

In the second key interstitial space in The Owl Service, Alison’s playhouse in the garden where Gwyn discovers her feverishly tracing and cutting out owls from the plate pattern, the miniature house is figured as a microcosm of the larger family home where Alison feels so stiflingly trapped (episode 3). Alison’s desire for sensuous connection with people and the objects that surround her is expressed in her relationship to this setting; she is, first, figured as childlike in this scene, an Alice in Wonderland figure crammed into the small space of the playhouse. At the start of the scene, Gwyn’s grabbing hands give the room the appearance of coming to life and grabbing at her limbs as she struggles against it and the feelings it arouses in her. When they are both inside, however, Alison is simulta- neously the abandoned child (she whines ‘It’s the only place that’s really mine. Daddy built it for me when I was five’) and a woman on the verge of sexual maturity. The location filming inside what was actually an abandoned chicken coop makes us feel the closeness between Alison and Gwyn all the more keenly, the struggle of the adolescent caught in a pattern of uncanny repetition. The feverish jazz score also adds to the dramatic atmosphere of sexual repression and the inevitable re-enactment of ancient sexual dynamics. Here, as in numerous scenes in The Owl Service, we see the process of sexual and social repression dramatized (with the absent, but all-seeing, mother acting as a kind of surveilling super-ego hanging over the drama). As they leave the playhouse in the morning, following a fade from the previous scene, Gwyn’s biological father, Huw Halfbacon, the groundsman who acts as a kind of mystic throughout the narrative and provides a link back to the legend of Blodeuwedd, intones ‘She has come!’ This cryptic dialogue refers to Alison’s ‘possession’ by Blodeuwedd, but also suggests that she has become a sexually mature woman within the confines of the playhouse. While the later HTV dramas and ATV’s Escape into Night do not match the oddness of The Owl Service, and they look very different in that they are mainly shot on video in the studio on a much tighter budget, thematically and narratively they are similar. Like The Owl Service, Escape into Night, The Georgian House, King of the Castle and The Clifton House Mystery all feature children caught in troubling houses who must unravel mysteries and solve often quite convoluted problems in order to bring the narrative to its conclusion. Underlying this quest for understanding (particularly an understanding of the past) is a shift towards a greater maturity for the protagonists. Given that these serials were shot, on the whole, in the studio, they have the feeling of chamber dramas; the studio here is not, however, understood as compromised space, but rather as performative Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 space (as John Caughie has argued in relation to early studio drama)35 and as expressive space (as I argued recently in relation to another 1970s drama, Upstairs Downstairs).36 Within the television studio of these dramas, set dressing, costuming, lighting and all other elements of mise-en- scene` combine to evoke the mood of unease that is characteristic of Gothic television. For example, in the 1978 HTV Sunday teatime serial, The Clifton House Mystery, we can see that yet again the house (and its contents) eloquently Helen Wheatley 391

express the tensions between past and present; this is a classic haunted house story in which the Clare family buy an old house and some of its contents, and are subsequently confronted with the ghosts of a soldier who policed the Bristol riots of the 1830s and his mother. In the opening sequence, which shows the previous owners packing up to leave, setting, costuming and set dressing are all used to create a feeling of dread or unease from the outset. The sepia tones of the boxed-up house, its wooden panelling and whirring grandfather clock all mark this (studio-created) space as a site of ‘pastness’. The old woman, Mrs Betterton, drifts around the space like a relic from a female Gothic novel; her costuming and that of her granddaughter (Victorian-esque fashion, which was enjoying a renais- sance in the Biba and Laura-Ashley inspired 1970s) figure them as relics of the past, as embodiments of the house’s history. Furthermore, the slow- ness of their movements (the grandmother’s hand on the grandfather clock, the revelation of the music box by the granddaughter) renders them strange, almost other-worldly, from the outset. Emily, the granddaughter, is coupled later in the serial with Jenny, the new daughter of the house, to whom she passes on the music box which acts as one of the triggers for the haunting. These young women are the classic female Gothic heroines at the heart of the drama, acting on compulsive desires to return repeatedly to the past and invoke its ghosts. The house is again seen as symptom of their unease and as expressive site of the hysteria surrounding these girls: blood drips from the ceiling and onto dinner guests, everyday objects (a fruit bowl, a vase) suddenly smash into smithereens. This focus on the adolescent girl is almost despite the fact that one of the ghosts is later revealed (by Jenny’s brothers and father) as being a soldier who refused to open fire on the Bristol rioters of the 1830s. While the girls experience the haunting, and are shown to be most dis- turbed by it, the boys are more active in bringing it to its conclusion. As with many of the other Gothic dramas for children made by the ITV companies in this decade, class conflict and inequalities in the British class system are just as central to the narrative as the themes of adolescence and fears about ‘growing up’. In The Clifton House Mystery the ghost can (at least momentarily) be laid to rest by an acknowledgement that he would not participate in the massacre of working-class rioters; in The Georgian House, the young museum volunteers cast back in time must manipulate the past to ensure the safety of an African slave held in Bristol on the cusp of emancipation; in King of the Castle, Roland is, first, made to feel that he does not ‘fit in’ with the working-class milieu of the tower block (he attends a ‘posh school’), but when he is cast down into the eerie and Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 grotesque fantasy world of the Castle, one of the things he must do to escape is to challenge the oppression of lower-class figures within this world. King of the Castle is an oddly fascinating piece of drama; whereas its real-world scenes are shot on film and on location and have the gritty verisimilitude of early Grange Hill (BBC1, 1978–2008), the sequences of Roland’s quest to escape the Castle are shot on video in the studio and employ radical, even avant-garde, visual effects and shooting and editing techniques in order to visualize the uncanny fully and render the space of 392 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

the Castle strange. It is both close to home (located beneath Roland’s tower block) and disturbingly unfamiliar, one of Escher’s impossible buildings brought to life via video effects and imaginative use of studio space. The fact the characters in the Castle are played by actors who also appear in Raymond’s real world makes this world all the more unsettling. As with the rest of the 1970s Gothic children’s dramas, Raymond is positioned as a liberal and democratic figure, objecting to social inequalities and exploita- tion whether figured as a thing of the past or as a nightmarish alternative to contemporary Britain. Indeed, in the drama’s ludic narrative structure, Raymond must come to this position through a series of trials that see him move toward maturity.37

A dark heritage: absent parents and hidden histories To close, we look towards a later Gothic turn in children’s drama. In her analysis of children’s telefantasy in the 1980s and ’90s, Alison Peirse groups together a series of programmes produced by the BBC in the 1980s, including Box of Delights, The Children of Green Knowe, Moondial and Tom’s Midnight Garden, arguing that ‘[t]hese programmes, with their country mansions, ‘‘received pronunciation’’, polite children decked out in fitted tweed suits, crumpets toasted over the fire and loyal servants, all presented a nostalgic vision of pre-war Britishness calculated to have broad appeal’.38 In short, Peirse understands these programmes in relation to the international mar- ketplace and 1980s’ heritage culture, as offering a set of rather cosy attractions that sell Britain as a kind of historical theme park to the international viewer. To conclude, this reading will be complicated by thinking about what the children’s Gothic costume drama might have offered to its juvenile audience beyond heritage cosiness. While Peirse’s point is valid, as is that of Peter Hutchings when he argues that, ‘menacing . . . landscapes, which form what might be termed ‘‘dark heritage’’, are in their own way just as pictur- esque and marketable as their more conventionally pretty counterparts, and can signify Britishness as much as, if not more so than, the critically privi- leged heritage dramas’,39 perhaps we ought to re-examine the darkness that lies at the heart of such representations of the past. In Gothic Television,I explored a similar argument in relation to the BBC’s M.R. James adaptations of the 1970s, dubbing these anti-heritage dramas (though I think perhaps Hutchings’ ‘dark heritage’ is a better label). In the specific context of children’s programming, these dramas are perhaps not quite as cosy as they first seem, not least because, to return to the discussion of the interconnection of

Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 historiographical enquiry and popular memory in the introduction of this article, I personally did not recall them as such when thinking back to my half-remembered history of Gothic children’s television. Maria Tatar makes an important point that reading with a child provides a ‘contact zone’ (borrowing a term from colonial theory) which produces simultaneous but opposing sentiments for adult and child. She argues that ‘the adult longs for a return to the pleasures of childhood, through Wonderland, Neverland, or Narnia, while the child uses these same places as launching pads for moving beyond childish things. Children want to light out for new Helen Wheatley 393

territories and make those symbolic stories work for them, using them as road maps for navigating the real world.’40 Reading between the lines here, might it be legitimate to argue that, in the case of these literary adaptations, the child-viewer does not read these serials as necessarily cosy or nostalgic, in short as a heritage text (although this is how an adult viewer might understand them); instead, might the child be drawn into a reading of these dramas as an exploration of such primal fears as separation from their homes and families and as enabling them to see some of the cruel history of childhood, allowing them to experience the threats of death, disease and abuse that have been so rife in this history? As Maire´ Messenger Davies says of these serials, ‘The desired sense of relaxation into the comfortably distant prettiness of ‘‘heritage’’ cannot be achieved. The past is seen to be an unstable place, never to be relied on as a refuge.’41 In the dramas at hand the space of the garden is often as expressive as the house is in the 1970s dramas discussed earlier. Roni Natov, in her book The Poetics of Childhood, draws a distinction in children’s fiction between the Green World (as a fantasy space which expresses feelings of loss and a longing for a return to an earlier state) and the Dark Pastoral which ‘depicts the nightmare world of childhood’. She states that ‘[The Dark Pastoral] is, essentially, the other side of the green world’, arguing that ‘[t]he nightmares of children, like all our dreams, serve significant func- tions: they tell us what we are afraid of, what we need to know about our fears’.42 The forests of Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood might be seen as quintessential Dark Pastoral spaces, and such spaces can also been found in the television dramas at hand. In Moondial, the cultivated gardens of the stately home where Minty (Siri Neal) makes contact with the past are rendered ‘Dark’ by the dusk light in which they are shot and by the threatening characters who populate them (evil governesses and cruel masters, as well as a pack of masked children who torment the facially disfigured Sarah (Helena Avellano), with whom Minty makes contact via the moondial). In The Children of Green Knowe, and in Tom’s Midnight Garden (BBC1, 1989) to a lesser extent, the green spaces of the homes at the centre of each drama are alternately magical spaces of fantasy and play and threatening spaces in which the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, and the past and the present are troublingly blurred. When Tolly first approaches the house at Green Knowe (at night and in the middle of a flood), we see a scene of the Dark Pastoral; Tolly, at first unsure of how he is going to reach the house, and wary of the taxi driver who eventually carries him some of the way through the darkness, Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 is picked up by the groundsman in a boat and rowed to Green Knowe. A series of low-angle reverse shots shows Tolly gazing through the gloom up to the imposing house at the edge of this Dark Pastoral space; these shots are accompanied by synthesized, tremulous music in a minor key, con- veying his sense of dread and anxiety. While the welcome he subsequently receives in the house is a warm one, these moments of a child on the edge of fear within the Dark Pastoral space resonate with the anxieties of childhood identified above. Significantly, Tolly revisits this scene throughout the drama: in episode one, he dreams he is rowing alone towards the 394 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

house, and the river is also a site of both excitement and an uncanny sense of dread in episode 4, in his imagining of the dead girl Linnet’s vision of a stone statue of St Christopher carrying the Christ child through the river when left home alone on Christmas night. Throughout the serial, the grounds of the house are further figured as a site of uncertainty for Tolly when he hunts for the ghosts of his long dead ancestors; as he calls out for his dead relations, he constantly catches glimpses of the ghost children (particularly around the folly, an interstice within an interstice), but his visions are frequently revealed as unreliable and his quest for company and solace is, initially at least, thwarted. In the Gothic heritage drama, family heritage and ancestry is experienced as unsettling or uncanny: the lack of distinction between past and present in The Children of Green Knowe, as experienced by Tolly through the constant appearance of ghosts in his temporary home in the house at Green Knowe and his grandmother’s confusion of him with his long-deceased relatives, suggests that the past is permeable and unstable. To use Freud’s phrase, family resemblance is uncanny and sometimes frightening in the sense that it ‘leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. Tolly is taken aback when he first meets his grandmother, who says: ‘So you’ve come back. I wondered whose face it would be out of all the faces I’ve known . . . You’re your grandfather . . . Your house was waiting for you here the whole time’ (episode 1). While adults tend to think this kind of talk is friendly and reassuring, children can find it worrying and bizarre (‘What do you mean I have my mother’s eyes?’). A more pressing fear in all of these dramas, however, is that primal fear of the younger child of being alone or losing one’s parents. In The Children of Green Knowe, Tolly is shipped off to a relative he has never met before because his mother is dead and his father is out of the country with his new stepmother over Christmas; in Moondial, Minty’s father is dead at the start of the narrative and by the end of episode 1 her mother is in a coma following a car crash. In the Secret Garden (BBC1, 1975), Mary’s (Sarah Hollis Andrews) parents are killed by an outbreak of cholera and she is shipped back from her home in India to England to live with her uncle; in Tom’s Midnight Garden, the most benign of these time-travelling dramas, Tom (Jeremy Rampling) is separated from his family by his brother’s measles but Hatty (Caroline Waldron), the girl he befriends in his time travel, is an orphan. The BBC played on these fears in the selling of Moondial in the Radio Times, imploring the young reader-viewer to ‘[i]magine that something happened at home and you were packed off to stay Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 with a godmother you hardly knew. Now try to think how you’d feel when you discovered that your godmother lived in the gatehouse of a spooky 300-year-old mansion.’43 As Minty sobs at the start of episode 1, ‘Sometimes I feel frightened, since Dad died. Things don’t seem safe any more.’ In the distant past, children are constantly threatened by abuse, disease and death, but in the ‘present’ of each drama it is the threat of loneliness and loss of parents that drive the narrative (and drive the central protagonist to explore the uncanny spaces of the drama). Helen Wheatley 395

Even The Children of Green Knowe, with its cosy centre and warm fire-lit rooms, figures Tolly as a lonely parentless figure throughout each episode. When we first meet him, his isolation is emphasized by his small figure placed centrally against the emptiness of his school dining room, andtherearemomentsofhauntinginthedramawhereheseemsach- ingly alone. For example, as Tolly arrives in the sitting room in the evening without his grandmother there, he looks around the room ner- vously, again looking small in an imposing chair. His glance up at a portrait of his ancestors above the fire conveys his loneliness and his desire for family, comfort and companionship. This is a moment of primal fear for the child: close-ups reveal Tolly’s face shot through with fear as he looks towards the window, framed in half-darkness and accompanied by tremulous extra-diegetic music. The sound of scrabbling at the door suggests a threat just beyond the perimeter of the domestic space that Tolly, as a boy alone, is unequipped to deal with. This threat is subsequently humorously undercut, however, by the arrival of his grandmother with a Christmas tree at the end of the sequence. It at first appears as if the tree is walking towards him unaided, only to reveal his beloved Granny behind it, but the feeling of some unknown threat, associated with being alone, or with being without one’s parents, remains present for Tolly (and, arguably, for the child viewer).

Conclusion While, as I have argued, these dramas explore a primal fear (the fear of being alone), which, to a certain extent, is tied to the process of moving away from childhood and towards maturity or responsibility, perhaps the context of the rising divorce rate in the 1980s might also go some way towards explaining the resonance and impact of such dramas for many children; the BBC’s ‘cosy’ heritage dramas for children in fact rehearse the horrors of absent mothers and fathers that were becoming all too familiar to young viewers. To conclude then, this article has offered some thoughts on the thematic centres of two distinct traditions in children’s Gothic television and filled in some of the gaps in my earlier study of the genre. These are powerful, and often strikingly creative, dramas for television, and particularly powerful in the connections which the young viewer is invited to make between themselves and the central protagonists, who experience worlds of fantasy and the uncanny as both enthralling and terrifying. As with the adult Gothic drama, subjective camerawork and Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 sound perspective constantly place the viewer in the position of the protagonist, or alongside them, encouraging identification with their quest, a quest which is often figured as an exploration of the past via ghostly visions and haunted houses. The narratives of these dramas position the child protagonist (and, by association, the viewer) as vulnerable victim, troubled by uncanny images and sensations, and also figure children as more knowing and insightful than the adults around them, producing narratives of children’s power, insight, capability and canniness. 396 uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms

Notes 1Maire´ Messenger Davies, ‘Studying Children’s Television’, in The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeber (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 96–7, esp. 97. 2 See, for example, Alistair D. McGown and Mark J. Docherty, The Hill and Beyond: Children’s Television Drama: An Encyclopedia (London: BFI Publishing, 2003) and Richard Lewis, The Encyclopedia of Cult Children’s TV (London: Allison & Busby, 2001). 3 Lynn Spigel, ‘From the Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women’s Memories and Television Reruns’, Screen 36, no. 1 (1995): 16–33, esp. 33. 4 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 5 Alison Peirse, ‘Gothic Television: Review’, Critical Studies in Television 3, no. 1 (2008): 111–114; David Butler, ‘Gothic Television: Review’, Screen 49, no. 2 (2008): 250–4. 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14, Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1990), 336–76. 7 Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York and London: Norton, 2009), 22. 8 Alison Peirse, ‘A Broken Tradition? British Telefantasy and Children’s Television in the 1980s and 1990s’, Visual Culture in Britain 11, no. 1 (2010): 109–24. 9 For example, Rachel Moseley ‘Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film and Television’, Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 403–22; Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 10 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Macdonald Futura, 1981); Gregory A. Waller, ‘Made for Television Horror Films’, in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Gavin Baddeley, Goth Chic (London: Plexus, 2002). 11 Lenora Ledwon, ‘Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic’, Literature/Film Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1993): 260–270; Wheatley, Gothic Television; Eddie Robson, ‘Gothic Television’, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), 242–50. 12 Definition taken from Wheatley, Gothic Television. 13 Ibid., 7–8. 14 Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis, eds, The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 11. 15 Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature, 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 71. 16 Dale Townsend, ‘The Haunted Nursery, 1764–1830’, in The Gothic in Children’s Literature, ed. Jackson, Coats and McGillis, 15–38. 17 Messenger Davies, ‘Studying Children’s Television’, 96. 18 Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Ibid., 15. 21 Peirse, ‘A Broken Tradition?’, 117. 22 Wheatley, Gothic Television. 23 Karen Coats, ‘Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic’, in The Gothic in Children’s Literature, ed. Jackson, Coats and McGillis, 77–92, esp. 80. 24 Such as Thames’ Shadows which ran in three series between 1975 and 1978. 25 Harlech Television (HTV) served the Wales and the West region from 1968. 26 Peirse, ‘A Broken Tradition?’, 113. 27 From 21 December 1969 onwards. 28 Programme notes, Network DVD release, 2008. 29 This is a figure from the Mabinogi, a woman created from flowers by a Welsh wizard who betrays her husband, Lleu, in favour of another, Gronw, and is turned into an owl as punishment for inducing Gronw to kill Lleu. Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012 30 Jackson et al., eds, The Gothic in Children’s Literature. 31 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 88. 32 Rachel Moseley also makes a case for the teenage years as a site of ‘inbetweenness’ in her analysis of teen television: ‘The Teen Series’, in The Television Genre Book, ed. Creeber, 41–3. 33 See note 29. 34 Curtis, Dark Places, 67. 35 See John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 75. Helen Wheatley 397

36 Helen Wheatley, ‘Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s’, in ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years, ed. Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), 143–58. 37 This sense of the ludic prefigures the children’s CGI game show, Knightmare (1987–1994) in the late 1980s and early ’90s in which Gothic spaces and characters were employed to frame a series of trials faced by a ‘dungeoneer’ and a team watching and guiding him or her onscreen. 38 Peirse, ‘A Broken Tradition?’, 111. 39 Peter Hutchings, ‘Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 27–40, esp. 28. 40 Tatar, Enchanted Hunters, 4. 41 Maire´ Messenger Davies, ‘Classics with Clout: Costume Drama in British and American Children’s Television’, in Small Screens: Television for Children, ed. David Buckingham (London: Leicester University Press, 2002), 120–40, esp. 128. 42 Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 119. 43 Hugh David, ‘By the Light of the Moon’, Radio Times, 6–12 February 1988, 86–7, esp. 86. Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Catherine Lester] at 03:27 27 November 2012