Playing gta and hearing 'gloryhole' in that context was so confusing as it was where the washing machine lived in the my parent's house. many many years later the penny dropped....
@@trinidaitobago2hey rhe teeth part isnt fair, the Tories literally closed most of our dentists over the last decade, including private ones. Our healthcare situation is so bad even American private companies are struggle to expand here (except for ambulances, that IT Crowd joke came true theres at least 1 private ambulance company per county its nuts, and theyre so bad theyve made the news and even our old Conservative government intervened and dismantled one)
@@trinidaitobago2 I agree about the tea. Though I would suggest that artificially bleaching your teach so they are paper white or filing them into stumps and putting veneers on them, Is not actually what healthy teeth look like. Ironically, their teeth are healthier than most, even when though they might not look as visually appealing.
I was in my early teens at the time, and watching TV at my neighbour's house after trick or treating. They put this on, but we missed the announcement at the beginning that said it was a film. So we watched believing it was real. I remember getting very discomforted, and then we got quite scared when the scratches appeared, and that's when I went home. Those 2 kids were truly talented. So sad that young man took his life
They scheduled it slightly earlier than usual so that most people switched over 5 mins in and missed the warning at the start. The “warning” is fairly ambiguous and many people went in thinking it was real - and not just kids, many adults really believed it too, my mates mum firmly believed it was real all week until she saw Parky back on Tv the following Saturday!!
I was 9 when my brothers and I watched it. I couldn't sleep all night because I kept expecting Pipes to appear at the window. I heard that a reason most people thought it was real was because ITV was playing a movie that finished after GhostWatch had started and would have missed the continuity announcer stating it was fiction.
It was a sportsball game that went into overtime. I think one of the teams had a chance to go up a league or something so people were pretty locked in until the end and would have missed the first 5 minutes. I saw ghostwatch "live" and to this day can't remember the announcement being played before it but the copy I have that was taken from a VCR recording definitely has it on there.
It was definitely a film - it finished at 9.30 and Ghostwatch started at 9.25 (whyyyy?) so a lot of people switched over straight afterwards and missed the continuity announcement about it being a drama. I was 13 at the time and should have known better, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise it wasn't real.
So was I. And now, at 41, I wonder: why did my parents let me watch it? I have 10 year olds now and would've changed the channel if I was a parent then 😂 Even though its clearly fake with hindsight
@@louisebeilby9244 firstly why have you put 4 ys in why? Secondly you are wrong. ITV were showing the film Wall Street, which started at 9:05pm. Wall Street finished after Ghostwatch so it can't even be that people turned over after the end of Wall Street and were scared/confused by the end of Ghostwatch.
I knew that the film was fake way before I saw it, but it managed to affect me in a way that no mockumentary has managed to do before just by playing it straight with brilliant framing and heading face first into the realism of the situation (as real as ghost stories can be but whatever)
Same here. I watched it on DVD around a decade or so later (missed it on the actual night). I knew full well it was complete fake but it still managed to scare the heck out of me. It was very well done for the time.
Remember watching this live as an 11 year old and in 1992 with no internet to desensitise everyone against this kind of thing it was actually quite scary.
Im a Gen Z and as a kid even when knowing a movie is a fictional horror it will still mess me up. Had I been around for Ghost Watch Id have been traumatised for life lol
Wait, what is this? 'Inside No.9's Deadline'? Ghostwatch was 100% the first Analogue Horror, how incredibly planned were those glimpses of the presence that don't reappear when replayed after home audiences phone in!
I was 15 when it was aired and it scared the shit out of me. I've refused to watch it again since because I want to retain that legacy in my memory, but maybe I should give it another go now, 32 years later.
I was 10 when I saw this, when it was broadcast. It didn't scare me at all, I found most of it quite funny, but that's probably because I had worked out it wasn't real.
The fact that parents allowed their kids to watch something that was clearly not for kids, and then blamed the BBC, is ridiculous. Parents - do your job and parent your kids.
@@datcheesecakeboi6745yes, I am well aware of that. But people actually did let their kids watch the film and then complained that their kids got scared. It's literally talked about in this video.
7 going on 8 years old at the time, just got back from Blackpool pleasure beach with the family, all of us in costumes at my grandparents house, us kids eating our sugar and the adults drinking, my grandad put it this on in the living room, most of us not paying attention to it (he knew full well what it was thanks to the tv guide), halfway through you could of heard a pin drop as most of us were engrossed and believing it to be real, my younger siblings and cousin in tears, me in absolute awe of spirits being real. Hand to god we were all on the literal edges of our seats, then the cheesy ending made us realise what had just happened, the BBC got us, just the once but they got us. You sir just brought back some treasured memories, thank you.
I was 15 when this was broadcast, and the second "Mr Pipe" appearance by the bedroom curtains still remains one of the most genuinely terrifying things I've ever seen on TV!!! It still pops up in my head now! I wasn't aware of someone taking their own life because of it- that is awful...
I remember my mum being in tears over this calling my aunt just blubbing down the phone. This was ALL over the news the next day, people were literally having heart attacks over it. People need to remember that this was before the internet, there was still a fear of the unknown and people were still deeply spiritual. This was the early 90's version of the Exorcist.
@@SamuelBlack84 remember the days of I Clavdivs, of when the boat comes in, of excellent documentaries, relevant current affairs programmes, history....I could weep
I was too young to go to the local rave, so we watched this instead. Were it not for some of the acting, we would've thought it was real. I shat m'sen regardless. Best thing on tele ever.
You missed some aspects of this story, Mike Smith was married to Sarah Greene in real life so he went from concern about her safety to out and out panic as the show progressed. Also there was another house on Fox Hill Drive before the modern building had been built. The previous house had belonged to a notorious Victorian baby farmer and murderess Mrs Seddons. She would take in unwanted babies, murder them and continue collecting a fee for their care. She was caught and hanged but continued haunting the site of her home, eventually possessing the wicked Mr Tunstall and driving him to commit further crimes. This is why Tunstall dressed as a Victorian woman. It was deeper lore like this that sucked people in.
All I saw was a shameless pastiche of the Enfield Poltergeist incident from the late 1970s, which in itself was almost certainly fake nonsense and a prank by two disturbed young girls who had been through recent domestic upheaval by their father moving out.
I was 10 years old when this aired. I was staying at my dads house and we were just watching whatever saturday night TV was. Obviously it was Halloween themed, with a Halloween special of Beadles About. My dad switched over to BBC where this had already started, meaning we missed the "this is all fake" message at the start. Not that it would have mattered to me. It was still scary as shit. It started off pretty tame, but when all the demonic voices and banging started, that's when I really got scared. Even though I was shitting myself and covering my ears to the noises, I refused to just go to bed. Anyway, after this I was too scared to stay at my dads house for at least a year or two. Back in 2010 I managed to get hold of Ghostwatch on DVD. Even though it had been 18 year, watching it again still kind of freaked me out.
i love ghostwatch, it was a genius idea then and it's still a genius idea now. let alone the execution. i'd go so far to say that this does an even better job than the blair witch project, just due to the fact that, unlike blair witch, i think it's aged really well. i watched it with my parents when i was about 12 and it terrified me. it's a shame that this kinda thing can't really be done to this effect again. although, come to think, inside no. 9's deadline does a similar thing, and that is also really well executed.
I’ve only ever seen it through clips through videos like this, but whenever someone says something along the lines of ‘it’s just pipes’ I do immediately think back to this
I've always put off doing a Ghostwatch video as the idea has been done before many times, but this video goes way more in depth and is more interesting and entertaining than every other video on the topic. Well dome Reuben :)
I don't think I saw the original broadcast, I was a bit of a wuss in my early teens, but I did see it quite a few years later and it was genuinely convincing and I can definitely see how it would have worked on the public. Such a shame the BBC don't try edgy stuff like this anymore. Excellent video!
Absolutely love when the RU-vid algorithm dishes me up videos like this! Inside No 9 deserves so much more praise, and you nailed how this series affected our country 😂
I like how you start by saying "This isn't very scary" and then go on to show through editing why it absolutely terrified people at the time. It's a clever sleight of hand.
I mean the entertainment value of Olympic ceremonies is so low its ocean floor level. The whole thing is a way for politicians to take cuts and get private kickbacks while shifting the cost to taxpayers, most countries hosting it get years of debt out of it even after all the ticket and merch sales
I watched this live, I was 16, alone in the house as my parents were out. Wasn't sure about it at first, but gradually, because of the girls ropey acting, it started to give it away. It was still quite creepy. I must of missed the beginning annoucement.
one thing you missed mentioning is how the BBC thought that if people thought it was real it would cause mass panic, so in every piece of advertisement they made sure to say that it was just a story.
As a 12 year old I thought this was real but as an adult it seems so ridiculous. I’d even previously read ‘This House is Haunted’, the story of the Enfield Poltergeist, a year before but didn’t connect how obviously similar this programme was to that case.
I was only a little kid at the time but even I worked out it wasn't real by the end. That grown adults were stupid enough to fall for it is eye rolling. No wonder they got so upset afterwards that it highlighted their stupidity so much.
Maybe if even a fraction of people were as astute, intelligent and wise as you were even at a very young age, then perhaps the world wouldn't be in such an awful mess as it is now.
@@SamuelBlack84I mean, being in the military doesnt mean you're not afraid of anything, especially not something as subjective and belief-based as ghosts. (If anything, It might make you more afraid of that, PTSD and such).
this show absolutely traumatised me. I was exactly the wrong age when this was broadcast and couldn't tell the difference between reality and fiction. I really clearly remember arguing with kids at school who said it was fake and I was sure it was real. One of the kids was pretty clever and said that he had seen at the end credits that it said 'written by' so it had to be fake. But I remember not everyone was convinced by that argument. It seems so mad that there was a generation of children in the UK that saw something like this and never really got any closure that it wasn't real. I still feel a really deep dread looking at the images from it. And sometimes when I'm on my own in my flat and hear a noise if I accidently think that it might be pipes I become really irrationally scared. Very tragic what all happened and I can attest to how unearthly terrifying it was to watch this and think it was real. But also really amazing work by the creators. It really is amazingly crafted and I don't think they can be held accountable at all for the problems it caused. I really think it is a brilliant and terrifying piece of horror.
I was 19 when I saw it. Too old to be properly scared, but it was slightly chilling. It was really well done though, and the use of 'false jumps' (Lister in the monkey mask etc) meant that when the denouement came with Sara Greene doing her 'Poltergeist' heroine thing, and Parky being befuddled in the studio, it was pretty effective. It obviously made use of the trust you had in the stalwarts. The BBC did some other things like this - I think there was an 'underground fighting circuit' one, presaging 'Fight Club' by a decade or so. Can't remember what it was called.
Certain parts of this still gives me goosebumps. I was 19 at the time, living in student digs. We didnt know it was a drama and was frightening, hard to believe now but millions were!
I watched this recently, knowing full well what it was and how it ended, and it still had me on edge the whole time. I can’t imagine how scared other people must have been in the 90s without being able to turn to the internet afterwards to discuss it with other people and find out if it was real or fake.
I remember my 10 year old self watching this, and afterwards my mum telling my dad off for letting me watch it when I didn't want to be alone in my bedroom.
@@kleptrep94 Very debateable but he was certainly very well known for it (and as a poet) in 1992 (as the video even says), so yes, he very much did exist before Robot Wars and Takeshi's Castle.
Genuinely the best video you've made yet Reuben, incredible stuff. Gripping, entertaining and informative. Not a fan of horror personally but I really REALLY loved this video. The script was perfect and the editing is even better than usual. Feels like a Tom Scott video mixed with storytelling and genuine suspense. Great work mate
Hi🙂, Thank you for covering this x I saw this with my father when I was 10/11yo and it Really did frighten me, I would even go as far as saying it traumatized me fr about two years intensively, and even longer, it was a different time, even my father thought it was real, up until the very end (in the studio), it really did have an impact on me❤ x🇬🇧x
I was 7 years old, and it was back when halloween was an actual holiday, an event. everyone around us watched it, everyone only had like 4 channels at the time, so you could walk out to your garden, see a neighbor and say "did you just see that..." and odds were, they were watching it too. But for me, while the hustle and bustle of halloween was going on around us in the street, while my parents were outside in the garden talking to the neighbours, I was watching what I thought was the news, or just Live TV of whatever was happening around us. I was raised on horror, Evil dead was my dads favourite movie, my parents used to tell scary stories by candlelight when we ran out of electric and all had to sleep downstairs, so I knew what horror was, even at 7, i could laugh along at the "swallow your soul" bit in Evil Dead, Poltergeist 2 was my favourite movie back then, but nothing that night was anything like a horror movie, or horror story, as far as I was concerned, this was real. And I don't remember much of the show, just snippets of images and memories of thoughts, but I do remember the absolute panic when I seen the thermal camera and the noise of cats, when it went from an investigation to a real physical threat, they'd opened pandoras box and everyone calling in saying it was happening to them, neighbors out in their gardens talking about it, for a 7 year old, this was the apocalypse, this was the end. At 7 years old, I thought they'd done something absolutely terrible, along the lines of "that's it, they've poked the bear and now all the evil spirits in the world will come out and do what they want" I'd never really been scared of anything up to that point, but it took my dad and mum all night to convince me that it wasn't real, it was just like the movies, it was just done to look like it was real and happening now. I'm convinced now that any kid who was alive and consciously remembers it, remembers it the same way. this was something that had never been done before, something new, and at the time, something terrifying. And even at almost 40 now, I still get shudders up the spine when I hear the cats.
The boy's death was extremely tragic but at the same time I think that if he had learning disabilities and other severe mental problems, his TV time should be more supervised - 90s TV was far from PG rated. Or should we blame the content creators? I think they were irresponsible too, especially by casting celebrities that were popular with kids to host an adult's show, and by giving no disclaimers throughout the program. Though situation.
The director calls this a cautionary tale that you shouldn't trust everything you see on TV. Sure enough, folks call in upset that the program they watched wasn't trustworthy. And media literacy has only nose dived since then.
Gawd I remember this airing. I was 6 and for some insane reason (probably exhaustion, my brother had recently been born) I got to watch it and I love it. It kicked off my love of horror tbh
I remember watching the show with Sarah Green, although I didn't think it was a Saturday program. I confess that I was completely suckered by the whole show. It was fantastic tv but I can't believe I was that naive and gullible.
I'll be eternally grateful that my patents didn't let single-digits-old me watch this at that age! Even though it was in the TV Guide with a 'cast' list, which meant mum and dad clocked on that it was a horror show - mum and dad clocked on that it was a horror, and so I should not be watching it. They kinda dropped the ball on Child's Play though. But anyway, the comment about news on TV being shown at an angle reminded me of my family's brush with the apocalypse - Channel 5 was showing 'Without Warning' one Saturday afternoon, there were no ad breaks with the name of the show (which we couldn't see was a movie at the time as we didn't have that week's TV guide), and we called my aunt as the meteor came closer... confused as to why no other channel was reporting on it... 😅😂 I credit that moment with having tons of love in my heart for relatives far and wide, and even those I live with. Check that out! But anyway, Ghostwatch is 27 years old and a GOAT precursor to Late Night With The Devil. Brilliant!
I was 10 when this aired, and was at a Halloween party. We had just watched A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 right before this. I remember it was freaky, but it didn't stop me from sleeping.
Was a student when I watched it, living in a shared house, nobody noticed the announcement or Screen One logo preceding the broadcast so we were sucked in. Hadn't made plans to do anything after but when it finished I invited myself to a party some of my housemates were going to because it was extremely disturbing.
When the so called ghost invaded the studio i remember shouting to my dad "turn it off or it will come through our tv" and he looked at me terrified and turned it off haha It scared us both to death....
The best mockumentary ever was "Alternative 3". Supposed to be an elaborate April Fools it was aired on another day in 1977. I was 15, it kind of got me for a while but they cast Shane Rimmer. As a big UFO fan I remember thinking, this is a prank. It was so good though, a real classic. It used to be on YT in entirety. The sound track written by Brian Emo was even released as an album?
I did a report on this show a few years back at school and it moved me in a way I didn’t expect. I had many sleepless nights because of the kind of traumatising mockumentary, and because I think I spent way too long working on it. Seeing this brought back so many memories, mainly good ones thankfully!
Everything about this was still so... British. So quaint. Even back in the 90s, when decay had long since set in quite rapidly. Unlike now. When there is very little Britishness left, at all. No quaintness, nothing.
I was 9, I thought it was real. Lookin back now I can appreciate that it was a pretty genius concept. I definitely didn't think that watchin it as a kid though.
This was brilliantly executed and yeah, loads of people were pulled into it believing it was an actually investigation. I remember the Paul Daniels Halloween special and I think it was more scary than this one tbh but it might have been because I was younger then?
The best thing my mum ever did was tell me that it was a real recording of a live show when it first got released on DVD when I was a kid. Burned into my memory
I was 13 when i watched this live and alone in my bedroom. The second time when we caught a glimpse of Mr Pipes in the curtains is still the most effect scare i've ever had.
Great video! I only found out about Ghostwatch after watching Inside No9's "Deadline". Even watching it now it gave me the creeps, gloryhole and all. Have you checked out 31/10?
It was the cats crying under the stairs that did it for me 😬🐈🐈🐈 A few years before GhostWatch aired, one of our cats had somehow squeezed herself through a small secret hole in the airing cupboard and became trapped in the wall between my bedroom and my parents bedroom. I heard her crying during the night and alerted my parents who located her cries to the wall and managed to coax her out of the hole. It frightened me to hear a cat wailing from inside the wall in the dead of night, I was only eight at the time. Then hearing the cats screech on GhostWatch at the age of eleven was enough to trigger that fright all over again 😬😬😅
ABSOLUTELY ONE OF THE BEST SHOWS EVER!!!! I still remember it well,the girls nicknamed the ghost 'pipes' because he was knocking on the pipes... wish I could get this somewhere!!!!
When it first screened, I did assume this to be a real, live documentary right up until the ghosts appeared, then immediately realised it was a spoof. I didn't believe in ghosts or the supernatural even as a kid, you see. 🤷♂️
my mother showed me this when i was 5 (so 2004) and i loved it she told me after that it was all fake and the reactions of people at the time she had recorded it the night it went live. im 25 now and i still watch it every year.
