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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 adapta- tion 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 pro- gramme 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 pro- grammes, 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 chil- dren’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 dis- cussion 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 pro- duced 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 under- standing 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 domes- tic 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 identi- fied by the following:12 a mood of dread and terror; the presence of highly stereotyped characters and plots, often derived from Gothic fiction; repre- sentations 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.

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