Having escaped my youth with no need for braces, I’ve found it hard to understand just what my daughter is going through since she had hers fitted last week. This has stirred within me two unpleasant sensations: utter uselessness as a father, and a perverse nostalgia for the things that traumatised me as a child.
I’d rather not dwell on my paternal shortcomings, but I’m more than happy to dig into my past terrors. There’s something darkly satisfying about recalling the electric thrill of being scared witless as a nipper.
Overall, I enjoyed my childhood in the north-west England of the 1980s. However, there were moments when I felt truly terrified, when I experienced a glimpse into an unfathomable darkness, when I could almost feel my childhood innocence eroding away. In hindsight, they were all pretty tame, but back then it was a different story.
Check out these four nuggets of infantile terror from the catacombs of my mind. If you were around in the 80s, maybe you’ll remember them too.
Weetabix Scary Stickers
An extraordinary amount of breakfast cereal went to waste in our house in the ‘80s, and it’s all the fault of those pesky promotional gifts. Baking soda-powered submarines, bicycle reflectors, Snap, Crackle and Pop figurines—these little bits of plastic caused a frenzy, and once I’d got my eager mitts on the toy, I had no interest in munching my way through even a single bowl of actual cereal. And they were usually pretty good fun, those little bits of tat. But then, in 1988, Weetabix released six glow-in-the-dark Scary Stickers, each one bearing a horror-themed illustration. There was an aggressive spider, a blood-red xenomorph-alike, a disgruntled werewolf, his winged werewolf cousin (WTF?), a snake-human hybrid skull, and a warped, eyeless face with blood spatters on it. They varied in artistic style and seemed to have been thrown together at random. You can experience their unsightly horror here. What troubled my young mind was the idea that the good people at Weetabix would want to frighten children, and that some twisted kid would actually want to look at the gruesome designs. As it turned out, I was that twisted kid. I stuck the spider and the snake-skull on my wooden bedhead and would gaze at their glowing outlines until the world of nightmares enveloped me.
Madonna
To be fair to Madge, it wasn’t exactly her that turned my blood to ice. It was her music. Specifically, the song ‘Live To Tell’ from her 1986 True Blue album. Even more specifically, the atmospheric interlude around the 3:27 mark. Something about the way the synth suddenly rushes in really chilled me as a youngster. It sounds like ghosts sweeping out of the darkness. Listening now, it seems utterly ridiculous and I’m a bit embarrassed by it. However, ‘Live To Tell’ is now my third-favourite Madonna song, so make of that what you will.
John Craven
Now, I know this might seem like a stretch, but before he became known as the kindly face of BBC’s Countryfile, John Craven’s appearance on TV would prompt me to run from the room screaming. And appear he did, every single weekday around 5pm on Newsround, which throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s went under the full title—and here’s a measure of the man’s true tyrannical nature—John Craven’s Newsround. I can’t put my finger on what it was about him I found so repellent. Maybe it was the permanent scowl on his face, or his rather nasal voice and aggressive delivery (hilariously caricatured by Bob Mortimer). Bizarrely, I encountered Craven in person while on a high school geography field trip to the Lake District in the 1990s. On that occasion, he spared my life, and in that moment all childhood fear of him seemed to evaporate. Which might just be part of his ultimate plan.
Picture Box: ‘The Man in the Moss’
In primary school, our teachers would regularly wheel out the TV and give us something educational to watch, and sometimes it was downright disturbing. Lots of people shudder to remember Look and Read’s ‘The Boy From Space’, and that was indeed very spooky. However, I recall being even more troubled by a two-part story on Picture Box called ‘The Man in the Moss’. This tale of the discovery of a preserved body in a peat bog was likely inspired by the unearthing of the Lindow Man in 1984. My memories are hazy, but the scene that lingered with me most involves a child in the woods. Peering through the trees, they see in the distance a figure of a man resembling the ancient body exhumed from a local bog. At first, the figure stands motionless. Then he starts striding towards the child. I’ve never forgotten the sense of terror I felt, a result I suppose of the story’s grim real-life inspiration and the helpless terror portrayed by the child actor as their character attempted to flee. Today, I’m a huge fan of horror movies and all things macabre. Maybe I’m eternally searching for the same thrill I experienced on that cold classroom floor.
So there they are, a handful of the weird things that rattled my impressionable little brain in the ‘80s. The fact that I’m now an ardent fan of horror TV and cinema, and of music infinitely more terrifying than anything Madonna could hope to produce, perhaps hints at how certain trivial discomforts in our infancy can shape our passions in later life. Or maybe I was just a wuss.
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