Sammy Davis Jr. scats for Suntory whiskey, 1974.

Adlibs followed by the final take after the jump.
 

 
Final take after the jump…

 
On 31st October 1992, the BBC aired a drama that terrorized the nation. Recorded two weeks before transmission, Stephen Volk’s GhostWatch was broadcast as a live on-air investigation into alleged poltergeist activity in a house in Northolt, London. Presented by journalist and chat-show host, Michael Parkinson, the program had live link-ups with reporters Sarah Greene and Mike Smith, on location at the haunted house. The documentary form of the show and its use of journalists, caused the majority of the British public to believe the televised events were in fact real.

Viewers watched as a series of cleverly constructed interviews, with the family who lived at the house and their neighbors, revealed details of the poltergeist, nicknamed Pipes, so-called from its habit of knocking on the house’s plumbing. The reporters discovered Pipes was the ghost of a psychologically damaged man called Raymond Tunstall, who was believed to have been troubled by the spirit of Mother Seddons – a baby farmer turned child killer from the 19th century. As the show developed, it was revealed (in Quatermass fashion) that the broadcast was acting as a “national seance,” giving Tuntsall’s ghost horrific powers. It ended with host Parkinson possessed by the evil spirit, and reporter Greene seemingly killed.

Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, a mass panic ensued. Over 30,000 telephone calls were made to the BBC switchboard in 1 hour, with some people claiming poltergeist activity in their own homes. One man, 18-year-old Martin Denham, was so disturbed by the drama that he committed suicide 5 days after its broadcast. The central heating in his home had broken down and caused the pipes to knock, as in the show. Denham left a suicide note that said, “if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost.”

In February 1994, a report in the British Medical Journal described cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in two 10-year-old boys. It was the first recorded occasion that a TV show had caused PTSD.

After its screening, GhostWatch was banned by the BBC for a decade. Since then it has only ever been shown once on Canada’s digital channel Scream and the Belgian channel Canvas

Stephen Volk, author of the screenplay, recalled in a BBC interview the effect GhostWatch had:

What surprised me was the avalanche of ‘IT SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED’, ‘HEADS MUST ROLL’ and ‘HOW DARE THEY INSULT OUR INTELLIGENCE!’ The anger at being, as certain members of the viewing public saw it, duped and hoaxed by trusted Auntie Beeb.
I think the only [serious] review I read about it as a piece of drama was in Sight and Sound where Kim Newman, bless his cotton socks, referred to Quatermass and obviously got ‘it’.

We were doing a piece of drama with a theme and nobody discussed that. It was all ‘SHOCK, HORROR, SICK’ tabloid stuff.

I must say in all honesty that in all the meetings I had with the Drama Dept at the BBC, I never heard anyone at any time use the word ‘hoax’. We were just doing a drama in a particular style (as The Blair Witch Project has done more recently) to give a modicum of authenticity. The idea that we wanted to make fools of people is absurd and just wrong.

Subsequently Ghostwatch has become a staple subject for Media Studies projects: one University lecturer told me that somebody chooses it virtually every year!

In 2002 the British Film Institute released a DVD of GhostWatch.
 

 
Bonus clips of ‘GhostWatch’ including TV response after the jump…
 

 
1970 Pink Floyd performance for San Francisco public TV Station KQED.
 

 
Tom Snyder interviews Divine, Andy Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and playwright/director Ron Link in July of 1979. Link wrote “The Neon Woman” which starred Divine and ran off-Broadway in 1978.

This is wonderful. Part of the fun is watching Snyder struggling to fathom the whole thing. By the end, Snyder seems ripe for a lifestyle change.
 

 
Parts two and three after the jump…

 
New York garage-psych band The Druids Of Stonehenge on the Joe Franklin Show 1968.

Vocalist Dave Budge, guitarists Carl Hauser and Bill Tracy, bassist Tom Workman and drummer Steve Tindall came together in 1965 as r&b ravers The Druids. In 1968 they went psychedelic and changed their name to The Druids Of Stonehenge. This clip of the band on the Joe Franklin Show has to be one of the weirdest of the 1000s of weird moments on Franklin’s loveably nutty TV program. Franklin, who knew alot about music and film pre-dating the sixties, was comically clueless when it came to rock and roll, as evidenced by his inept attempt to be “with it’ in this wonderfully warped video.

The Druids Of Stonehenge had a good rep for their live performances at New York nightclubs like Ondine’s and Cheetah, but this performance on the Franklin Show is pretty dreadful. Their take on Billy Holiday’s ‘God Bless The Child’ borders on the sacrilegious, but the arrangement, a total rip of ‘Paint It Black’, is the kind of wackiness that makes rock and roll the unruly mess I love.  
 

 
I grew up watching Joe Pyne and marveling at his bitter rants. He was the template for Fox News and geek journalism.

Lewis Marvin was a stone cold freak who happened to be very very rich. He was the heir to the Green Stamps fortune and with his inheritance established the hippie community Moonfire in Topanga Canyon. Moonfire was at the epicenter of Southern California’s new age scene, drawing a mixed bag of rock and rollers, actors, groupies and wandering flower children. In this clip, Pyne attempts to scramble Marvin’s already scrambled signals. Pyne, an ex-Marine, was notorious for his loathing of hippies, beatniks and pinkos. He was the Bill O’Reilly of the sixties…without any intellectual pretense.

Witness Marvin as he boldly confronts Pyne and the screaming tomato.
 

 
Joe Pyne locks horns with Anton LaVey after the jump…

 
A pretty wonderful skit from UK comedians Harry and Paul.
 

 
Thx Brian Kehew !

 
From wearing his mother’s red patent leather ‘fuck me’ pumps to 4 or 5 sexual encounters with men everyday and finally into the arms of Jesus and a loving wife, the inspiring story of Tony the Black homosexual who crawled out of the dark hole of the downlow lifestyle.
 

 
This is really, really creepy stuff.

(via HYST)

 
The Black And White Minstrel Show was a hugely popular variety program that ran on British TV from 1958 to 1978. Yes, you read that correctly. This throwback to an era in which men performing in black face was perfectly respectable entertainment was a big hit in England right up to 1978. Good gawd almighty.

One hundred years after the “Nigger Minstrel” entertainment tradition had begun in London’s music-halls, the convention was revived on television in the form of The Black And White Minstrel Show. This variety series was first screened on BBC Television on 14 June 1958 and it was to stay on air for over the next two decades. The Black And White Minstrel Show evolved from the “Swannee River” type minstrel radio shows. The Black And White Minstrel Show harked back to a specific period and location—the Deep South where coy White women could be seen being wooed by docile, smiling black slaves. The black men were, in fact, White artists “Blacked-up.” The racist implications of the premise of the programme were yet to be widely acknowledged or publicly discussed. But it was this which largely led to the programme’s eventual demise. ” Museum Of Broadcast Communications

This clip is from the last episode of The Black And White Minstrel Show which aired in 1978.
 

 
More fun with Negroes after the jump…