As Ghostwatch celebrates its 30th anniversary, Andrew Brassleay revisits the classic horror-show-sold-as-harmless-BBC-reportage to explore the confirmed – and potential – sightings of Pipes…
October 31 1992. Say the date to anyone in the UK who was an adolescent at the time and it might not bring up any immediate reaction. But delve deeper and long-forgotten memories of what they watched that night will almost certainly be pushed back up, screaming – perhaps from out of a locked Glory Hole – to the forefront of their traumatised minds.
Ghostwatch. What could be considered the best practical joke the BBC ever made on the Great British public. And, much like all ambitious practical jokes, faced unconsidered consequences. A live report on Halloween from what we were told was a haunted semi-detached home, with some of the nation’s most respected faces. There’s children’s TV’s Sarah Greene, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; her husband, Mike Green manning the phones; Red Dwarf funny man Craig Charles taking a side-eyed cheeky glance at the whole spectacle as roving reporter; and national treasure Michael Parkinson – Parky! – the grandfather of the talk show. Surely he’d be there to hold our collective hand if things get spooky? Right, Michael? Right?
As kids stayed up late to watch the action with familiar, friendly faces, it was all fun and games – and a bit of tedious tech talk to set the realism scene – until the ghosts appeared. And then the public weren’t sure what they were watching. Sure, what some thought of as unnatural acting, rather than an actual petrified family and neighbourhood, alerted some sceptical viewers to believe this was a drama broadcast as part of the BBC’s Screen One anthology series.
However, with publicity such as a Radio Times article that the cast conducted as though they were about to conduct a real investigation, and those trusted celebrities – who had played the investigation for jovial laughs before the tone terrifyingly shifted mid-show – appeared to truly fear for their lives as strange things rumbled in the Northolt night, millions wondered if a real life haunting was going on. Hundreds of thousands of calls were made to complain or enquire following the broadcast, and school playgrounds the next day were filled with pupils wondering if Parky really had been possessed and if the beloved Sarah Greene really had been captured by a malevolent spirit in the cupboard under the stairs.
And the thing that held the uncanny terror altogether was Pipes, the apparition formerly known as Raymond Tunstall, the undead child molester who in death now walked the corridors of the ill-fated Early family’s residence. Pipes didn’t get much screen time, but sure made an impact with each glimpse of his partially eaten-by-cats features adding to the sense of dread and menace. “Did you see the ghost?” people asked each other the next day. Indeed, they had, but no one could really figure out how many times he had made his presence felt.
Well, 30 years on from Ghostwatch’s one and only transmission on terrestrial TV – and with a new Blu-ray release of the show out soon – it’s time to explore the confirmed (and potential) Pipes’ manifestations in Foxhill Drive – and beyond – and rank them in order of their goosebump-inducing abilities.
9. ‘We sealed her lips with tape’ (30 minutes 30 seconds)
Parkinson and parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe, who has been investigating the haunting at Foxhill Drive, have some fun in the studio with a tape purportedly featuring the voice of Foxhill Drive’s spook, having a netter through the portal of eldest daughter Susan Early. Before the tape finishes and Parkinson sniggers ‘Bizarre!’, Pipes’s shimmering apparition appears over the shoulder of the unsuspecting doc. It’s one of the easiest to spot appearances of Pipes although one that perhaps would have thrown the more cynical viewers off the haunting scent, as the early studio appearance would have had impact of stripping the show of some of its believability.
8. ‘I believe in the Devil says spook-house mother’ (21 minutes 7 seconds)
Pipes makes his first appearance in the show during a VHS recording of the Early sisters’ bedroom. Played first time round, there is no real evidence of an entity’s shape in the curtains, but when a ‘Emma Stableford from Slough’ calls up the studio, the team run the recording back and, this time, as the girls switch the bedside light off, a white outline of a figure can be seen, standing still – the tape rewinds but the shadow has disappeared. ‘Can’t see much myself,’ Parkinson utters, playing on his admired status in the national conscious to thoroughly mess with it.
7. ‘Boo! I bet that scared you’ (47 minutes 20 seconds)
Midway through the production, Craig Charles has a natter with other residents of Foxhill Drive by the neighbourhood haunted playground that’s previously played host to a pregnant Labrador’s butchering (‘The kids weren’t right for weeks’), before going for a chat with Arthur Lacey, professional exorcist. Lacey can’t be that good at his job because, in among the crowd behind him, there stands Raymond Tunstall in all his partially eaten glory in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it manifestation.
6. ‘Of course, 12 days… They got hungry. They got to work… on his face’ (87 minutes 41 seconds)
The finale provides a split-second image of the true terror of Foxhill Drive. As Sarah Greene, after a gruelling passage when the only images of the house available is via the infrared camera, meets her fate in the cupboard under the stairs, Foxhill Drive’s resident spook takes ownership of the situation and directs the cameras back to the now-possessed studio, but not before a flash-frame of static depicts a close-up of his own bloody face.
5. ‘It’s in the machine’ (87 minutes 43 seconds)
After nearly 90 minutes of maintaining a realistic façade, the broadcast finally loses its grip on sanity. As wind whips round the studio, paper flips off a table, Smith, demanding to know the whereabouts of his wife, berates the production crew, and lighting grids fail, Pipes gives one last valedictory appearance, on the studio rigging, surveying his domain as chaos reigns – the show having created a nationwide ‘massive séance’ giving him untold levels of power. Certainly enough to take over the body of the once-cynical Parkinson, mockingly leaving him to utter nursey rhymes in the gloom, all authority and trust now gone. ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear…’
4. ‘It’s Pipes! Pipes is here!’ (55 minutes)
There’s one last moment of light relief when the studio team field a nuisance call from Wales about a flying cheese-and-pickle sandwich (‘It frightened me to buggery it did’) before the real terror begins. Sarah and the house-bound TV crew investigate a crawling noise in the walls before heading downstairs to find the children’s drawings scattered in a line toward the patio windows. As a neighbourhood cat spooks Greene, the camera spots something in the reflection – a figure by the fridge (‘He likes the cold,’ Kimmie says earlier) that shouldn’t be in the kitchen, but has definitely joined the fun.
3. ‘Pipes said he was a bad bunny. Here are his eyes’ (77 minutes 12 seconds)
Photographs flying off the walls… a possessed Susan (‘What big eyes you have. What big ears you have’) – with some of the last words she’ll ever say – telling her mother she ruins everything and that she hates her… Kimmie drowning and enucleating her treasured toy rabbit… the screams and howls of mewling cats as a mirror tremors on the wall. If anyone was in doubt, Ghostwatch had now passed the point of family viewing and television sets were busy traumatising the nation’s children. The finishing blow to the senses for this section? The few seconds of silence as the TV crew remove the bars to Mrs Early’s Glory Hole cupboard and, as the doors creaks forward, the audience catches another, terrifying glimpse of Pipes, half-seen, peering out of the gloom before a mirror smashes and Susan screams echo around the home, before the live link is lost.
2. ‘We don’t want to give anyone sleepless nights’ (71 minutes 57 seconds)
Ghostwatch’s perfectly executed jump scared comes soon after Mary Christopher’s creepy call suggesting that the home in Fox Hill Drive, Northolt was the site of terrible crimes committed by Victorian baby farmer Mother Seddons. And sure enough, as the upstairs bedroom of the Early sisters is evacuated, Chris the cameraman takes one look around, to see the black-dressed Pipes lurking in the curtain. A quick jolt back finds the figure gone.
It’s the moment that the crew, those making the show, finally get a glimpse of what we have seen. There is danger here. And we all now know Foxhill Drive is a house of horrors.
1. ‘I have this overwhelming sense of evil’ (47 minutes 45 seconds)
Straight after cheeky chappy Craig has picked up unsuccessful medium Dr Lacey for an evening stroll, the pair head down Foxhill Drive. There, watching from the backdrop wasteland appears to be the head of a figure emerging, watching, at first glance it seems, the pair pass from the undergrowth, the glimmer of a deep scratch near its eye.
This seems like a fairly non-descript appearance as things go from Raymond Tunstall’s canon, so why is this No. 1 on this list?
Well, because, despite the fact I clearly see the image of Pipes at this moment, there doesn’t appear to be any mention of this sighting anywhere on the internet.
Why, I wondered. I thought at first that maybe it was a trick of the mind, as Michael Parkinson dismisses Emma from Slough’s suggestion of an outline in the Early’s house. Just ‘faces in the fire’.
But again I watched, and I researched. And fear took hold…
Ghostwatch’s ‘writer’, Stephen Volk, published a follow-up account, titled 31/10. In it, he wrote an alternative depiction about what had happened that night – that Sarah Greene and Susan Early were truly never seen again. That a lookalike had played the children’s TV presenter during her shows in the aftermath. That the surviving members of the Early family were secretively moved abroad. That the BBC studio was sealed off and boarded up.
Maybe this was a final act of horseplay, a mischievous coda to a twisted tale. But that account is now no longer found on Volk’s website. The Radio Times TV listings presenting it as a drama can be found on the internet but the interview with the team discussing a real-life investigation? Gone without trace, as if someone wanted to ensure the real nature of the show’s activities remained forever hidden.
What if Ghostwatch wasn’t a hoax? That those events millions of us witnessed were real? What if Ghostwatch depicted a real-life haunting but the BBC had to cover it up as a drama? A show they were not ashamed of, as the public perception of it was, but, terrified of – of the very real monster it had created.
What if Raymond Tunstall really did get into the machine – all our machines? Because he’s here now. On my screen, at home with me, where only I seem to see him.
Maybe, it would be a relief if you can see him too. Not for you, dear reader. For I am no longer ever truly alone. But maybe you could join us and, like me, see one more special appearance? For, if you can spot Raymond Tunstall too, looking out from Foxhill Drive’s waste ground toward the camera, watching you… you too will one day be woken up but the sound of banging. Late one night.
In your house.
In your room.
To see him grinning at you. From behind your curtain.
Andrew Brassleay
