Adam S. Leslie Discusses His Childhood Fears
Growing up in the depths of rural Lincolnshire was probably as close to a peaceful idyll as it was possible to get in 1980s Britain. Out in the wilds of Carlton Scroop, there were no riots, no unemployment queues, no racial tensions, no miners’ strikes, no football hooligans, no IRA atrocities, and no grimy grey tower blocks – just endless green nothing.
The horrors of modern life arrived exclusively via of the honorary fifth Leslie family member ensconced permanently in the far corner of the living room: our black and white television set – brand and model long since lost to memory – the approximate size and weight of one of Wile E Coyote’s boulders, balanced precariously on its metal stand.
This wasn’t my window onto the outside world so much as the portal through which the outside world would intrude upon our cosy rural cocoon, day after day after day. Like a lank-haired Japanese ghost girl, anything might emerge from that television set, crawling across the carpet towards us… and for a small person like me, still finding my way in the world, it was impossible to predict what it might be or interpret what any of it meant. On a good day, it might turn out to be a Doctor Who monster – Scaroth the Jagaroth ripping off his human mask to reveal wobbly green spaghetti underneath, or the misshapen animated statue Melkur lurking in the stately gardens of Traken. On a bad day… well, it could be the end of the world.
Children of the 1980s dreamed of mushroom clouds while we slept. We listened for sirens and kept a watchful eye out for Russian bombers flying black and broad-shouldered over the eastern horizon.
Two words terrified us more than any other: BREAKING NEWS. White letters against a black background, flashing up on screen part way through The Dukes of Hazard. “We interrupt this programme to bring you an urgent newsflash,” the continuity announcer would say. Usually it would turn out to be a member of the royal family birthing a brand new baby, or maybe a siege being stormed by the SAS – but surely it was only a matter of time before we’d cut to an ashen-faced newsreader who’d report that Britain and America had at last declared war on the USSR, and that we all now had approximately two minutes left to live.
Adults didn’t feel the need to protect children from the threat of impending Cold War doom. My dad – who had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis – watched the Six O’clock News and the Nine O’clock News gripping the arms of his chair and grimly commenting on proceedings, more convinced than even his nervous children that events were soon to catch up with us. The prospect of nuclear war never seemed to be far from the conversation – even now, I can still feel the little curl of anxiety in my stomach whenever I’d overhear my parents discussing something serious in the next room but couldn’t quite make out the words. Surely, this time, my dad had heard on the radio, or from work colleagues, that we were but hours away from declaring war.
And it went beyond the four walls of the family home too. My headmaster at primary school once informed us that it would only take an amount of radiation “the size of a grapefruit” to escape from a nuclear reactor to end all life on the planet. The nearby aluminium plant would sound its sirens at irregular intervals, maybe once every few weeks (I still don’t know why) – each and every time, I assumed the end was on its way, and half-expected the teachers to rush out, herd us indoors and hide us under the desks. My English teacher at secondary school told us that, in the event of the two minute warning, we should ask our parents to drive us to RAF Digby – a probable target – so that we would be killed instantly, rather than suffering a lingering death in the nuclear winter of the villages further out. In that moment, I felt quite envious of my grandma in her little Digby bungalow.
But many of the horrors that Uncle Television ushered into our living room were all-too real. The Nine O’clock News and Panorama rubbed shoulders with Blankety Blank, Wogan and The Generation Game. The evening’s viewing schedule could veer wildly between the frothiest light entertainment and the bleakest tragedies within moments. The news didn’t shy away from depicting actual violence and disaster… not just the after-effects of the violence and disaster, as tends to be the case now, but the violence and disaster itself. It was possible to witness strangers being horribly injured with very little warning, often on nightmarishly grey and grainy 16mm film. Angry men thrashed by police till blood came. Buildings burning. Every week there seemed to be a new disaster, often somewhere in the UK. And it wasn’t limited to the news. Barry Norman’s Film ’83 – ostensibly a breezy cinema review programme – showed the Twilight Zone: The Movie catastrophe in full. Noel Edmonds’ Late Late Breakfast Show shrugged off one near-fatal live-on-television car-jump-stunt-gone-wrong, and proceeded to broadcast a second (In the context of modern health & safety and television standards, the clip is jaw-dropping).
By contrast, Doctor Who’s monsters rampaging down claustrophobic corridors, or Blake’s 7’s random and unjust deaths in the lonely blackness of space, were practically reassuring. They were frightening, but I knew Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 were supposed to be frightening, so that was okay. The scares felt curated, they were in their proper context. Day of the Triffids, The Nightmare Man, Maelstrom too… they all gave me the willies, but it was exciting. You could cosy up on the sofa with your mum, and you knew none of it was real, not a single extermination.
The BBC’s 1981 Day of the Triffids adaptation in particular was deliciously scary: the premise was pure Pertwee-era Doctor Who – killer plants take over Britain – but this was grown up television. It didn’t look or sound like science fiction, it had all the hallmarks of any other dry adult drama. Serious people in serious rooms having boring serious conversations; long interludes in which nothing much happened, sometimes whole episodes. There were no hi-jinks, no gags, no silly costumes or gadgets or robot dogs or long scarves. Heck, the hero of the show just was a normal man with a beard! It all felt real. And yet, every so often, there’d be a towering murderous flower lurking behind a hedgerow, or peering in through the kitchen window, lashing passers-by with its venomous prehensile stigma. You could imagine your dad or your grandma being taken down by a Triffid while mowing the lawn, or your mum on her bike cycling back from the shops. Or yourself, roaming a country lane with your pals, or out on the school playground, suddenly set upon by eight-foot-tall carnivorous plants. And it was wonderful.
More genuinely disturbing were the light entertainment shows that somehow landed wrongly – that for whatever reason, sat badly with me, that weren’t comfortable in their own light entertainment skin. A prime offender was Michael Crawford’s sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, which so frightened me as a child that even now the nerve-shreddingly shrill piccolo theme music still gives me chills.
The show is about the misadventures of sweet-natured, endearing man-child, Frank Spencer – a wide-eyed innocent who just wants to provide for his family and get on in life. Somehow, though, the preternaturally angry 1970s adults who populate Frank’s world find him neither endearing nor remotely tolerable: his clumsiness and naivety serve only to enrage them further. Would-be employers scream abuse at him; blustering bank managers and bureaucrats suffer full-on nervous breakdowns whilst attempting to deal with poor, confused Frank, who more than anything else in the world just wants a hug and a kind word.
Worse still, though, are the life-threatening situations Frank finds himself in (death-defying stunts performed by Michael Crawford himself, for extra horrible verisimilitude). In any given week, Frank might find himself hanging from a helicopter in full flight, or dangling off a window cleaner’s platform fifteen storeys up, or suspended from the exhaust pipe of a car over the edge of a cliff. These were all situations in which Frank could realistically die at any moment – and yet, week on week, his howls of terror would be drowned out by the studio audience roaring with laughter.
And this unsettled me more than any marauding Dalek or Triffid: the fact that we were being asked to laugh at genuine mortal peril. Other sitcoms presented silly antics and catty remarks as entertainment (whether or not you actually found Are You Being Served? or It Ain’t Half Hot Mum funny), but the awkwardly-titled Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em did the same with the bullying and the near-death experiences of its kindly protagonist. His distress and terrified screams only seemed to heighten the viewers’ mirth. Was this the adult world which would be waiting for me when time came to grow up? (Spoiler: it wasn’t. Most people are in fact perfectly nice.)
Pop music chart show Top of the Pops served as a microcosm of television’s wild mood swings. In the 1980s, more than any other decade, TOTP cultivated a party atmosphere – there were balloons and party hats and colourful neons. You might see Modern Romance or Bananarama or Buck’s Fizz or Culture Club bouncing around the gaudy studio set – or clambering all over it like a monkey, if the performer happened to be Cyndi Lauper – cheerfully miming to their latest single. Even the pop hits about nuclear annihilation (and there were plenty of those – Nena’s 99 Red Balloons, The Piranhas’ Tom Hark to name but two) were reassuringly upbeat and brightly lit.
But the tone could turn on a sixpence.
At a moment’s notice, you might be presented with an unsettling experimental art film shot on murky 16mm film, full of jarring disjointed scenes, post-apocalyptic landscapes and ghoulish figures. The music video for Pink Floyd’s dystopian Another Brick in the Wall featured a cartoon schoolmaster feeding children through a mincer; Total Eclipse of the Heart saw Bonnie Tyler pursued by a boy with headlamps for eyes (there are few things scarier than the lyric “turn around bright eyes” depicted in the most literal way possible); David Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes – eerie enough even without the visuals – featured our Dave alternately dressed as a creepy harlequin menacing the viewer with a bulldozer, and straight-jacketed in a padded cell; Paul McCartney’s No More Lonely Nights had Linda, Ringo and Barbara seemingly meeting their end by going over a waterfall in a small boat, for no apparent reason if you hadn’t seen the movie. Two of my earliest music video memories – Dr Hook’s When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman and Ian Dury’s Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick – took place in inky black voids and were unaccountably threatening. Thank heavens for Madness.
The problem was that I was too young to understand what Top of the Pops was for. I didn’t have any context for the conventions of pop music. Early on, I don’t think I even really aware that I was supposed to be enjoying it – it was just a sequence of inexplicable events, most of which were carried out by happy people in a bright room but which would, every so often, morph into a shot-for-shot reconstruction of someone’s deepest and darkest fever dreams.
I haven’t even touched upon children’s television yet:
a supposed safe space populated by such nightmare characters as Bungle, Zippy, Noseybonk, Wizbit and Hartley Hare. Plenty of column inches have already been written about those particular malefactors, but I would like to mention the Ugly-Wugglies, proto-zombies from an otherwise-forgotten 1979 adaptation of Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. They’re originally built as dummies to pad out the audience for a play our posh Edwardian child protagonists are performing for their staff – but at the climax of the show are accidentally magicked to life by a wishing ring, as so often happens. The children take a bow; the dummies applaud with their arms straight out in front of them. It’s one of the eeriest things ever shown on television.
Initially, the Ugly-Wugglies are mute, confused and relatively tame; but as the minutes pass, they become increasingly articulate – and with it, increasingly hostile. Fearing they’ll eventually grow homicidal, the children shut them in a crypt (with the help of Sexy Beast’s Cavan Kendall), where they’re left to die. It’s like a scene from Dawn of the Dead. I saw it when I was five; it’s never quite left me. No one who watched The Enchanted Castle has ever forgotten the Ugly-Wugglies. The Railway Children this was not.
From what I’ve described above, you might imagine I spent my entire childhood a nervous wreck. And perhaps I did. It’s hard now to remember how much of it I carried around with me, and how much I was blithely playing with my Star Wars figures and Beatles records.
There was one programme which definitely did traumatise me,
though: an episode of Wonder Woman called The Deadly Toys, broadcast on BBC1 on 26th January 1979, not long after I’d turned five. In the opening moments, a scientist giving a lecture suddenly dissolves into gloop and spills all over the table. I howled the house down.
My mum tried to reassure me that he was just an android, but I didn’t know what an android was, and besides, the damage was already done. As far I was concerned, people could just dissolve, there and then, without any warning. They hadn’t told me about this on Playschool! Even to this day, any piece of music which sounds even a little like the Wonder Woman theme tune (Eric Clapton’s 1974 version of I Shot the Sheriff, for example) makes me feel slightly sick.
Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie
‘Like an old wives’ tale, like a piece of wisdom passed down through generations which no one questioned or even thought about too hard. Like folklore. It was just something everyone knew, a rule to be followed.
Don’t go to Almanby.’
Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it. And Antonia — poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.
So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever. And as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.
Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable – you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don’t go to Almanby.
Pre -Order a copy of Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie here
Adam S. Leslie
Adam grew up in deepest rural Lincolnshire sometime in the 1980s, a child of Bagpuss, distant pylons and big red sunsets. He can now be found roaming the side-streets of Oxford or holed up in the big Blackwell’s bookshop daydreaming of stories and snacks.
As well as an author, Adam is also a screenwriter, a musician and songwriter (under the name Berlin Horse), and produces and co-hosts RetroTube Archive Television Podcast with his best friend Heather, where they say cheeky things about old TV. However, he can’t do anything useful like drive a car or be married.
Adam likes weird cocktails and old Doctor Who, and is only slightly obsessed by The Beatles.
1 comment