Ten years ago today, Ghostwatch was broadcast on BBC1.
That means I was 14 years old when I first watched this innovative and remarkable piece of TV drama, and was scared witless by it.
Ghostwatch was a drama in the guise of a live television broadcast, and was so accurate and believable in its mimicry of a slightly sensationalised, cheesy outside broadcast based show that it required a real effort of will not to get sucked into its reality bubble. The presence of familiar television faces (Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene) heightened the show's sense of realism, although in this case they were not presenting but acting.
The premise was that the show was a live investigation into the paranormal, with outside broadcast material from a supposed haunted suburban house in London, and linking material from Parkinson in the studio. It all started very believably and uneventfully, lulling the viewer into a false sense of familiarity and security before it spun into genuinely shocking territory.
The script really did make the most of its unusual setup, with some wonderful audience-mindplay moments and inspired sequences that simply could not have been done in the context of a regular drama. And despite the fact that by the end of the 90-minute show, all hell has broken loose and the programme has entered the territory of the ridiculous, it still retains its potent ability to shock and to scare.
The programme prompted masses of negative publicity from angry viewers, and was linked to the suicide of a mentally ill person here in Nottingham some weeks after its broadcast. So, for the majority of the past 10 years, it's been accepted as certainty that Ghostwatch would never be repeated or released.
So I was surprised to read some time ago that a DVD and VHS release was planned. It's due out very soon - I couldn't find a definitive release date but it may have already been shipped - and I encourage everybody to check it out, ideally late at night with the lights off.
I can almost guarantee that they won't stay turned off for long.