Strange things happen at the guest house. There is a talking stuffed toy called Otto with murderous intentions, a cracked painting of two girls in Victorian bathing suits that leads to another dimension and a freaky weird band that has something to do with the older brother. I didn't watch the show. It just happened to be on occassionally when I turned on the tv. They possibly did a repeat on a Sunday evening in some scheduling vacuum.
I think I was too old to be it's intended audience, the puppets were ugly-ass , wrinkly yokes, difficult to look at, I could never tell if they were girls or boys, the clothes were horrific, and they had mad Cork accents that annoyed the hell out of me. Plus, it unnerved me. Even as a casual viewer I could tell something wasn't 'right' with it. That it really had the potential to be genuinely perturbing, hair-rising on the back of the neck stuff (if only I could have gotten over the Cork accents), the best RTE children's production since Fortycoats talked backwards under the sea.
But it wasn't, it never quite cut it, maybe the scripting wasn't right or there was too much going on (that band).
There were imaginary friends, inter-dimensional portals, high stakes of good and evil and the sense that something catostrophic is at work just beneath the surface of your domestic setting and all the other things that matter to a child. Much like this gem, Chocky, that resurfaced in my mind today. I must have seen it when I was 2/3 years old (I shit you not) but remember still. That intro music floods me with anxiety. His voice. Even the font used in the credits. They were communicating without speaking. No one else could heard him. They were best friends but he was somewhat evil so their friendship hurt them. No one believed him even though he was telling the truth (the injustice of that one really got to me as a child.) There was a lot of distress mainly around separation and abandonment I think. They did maths. My mind was blown.
I hadn't seen Chocky since then because I thought it was called Chalky, I was pretty illiterate at the time. And the English accent would have confounded my little bogger ears.
I didn't even know it was about aliens. I didn't know it was called telepathetic communication. The fact they were English was probably disconcerting enough for my three year old self.
Anyway, it appears I have subconsciously incorporated aspects of these shows in my novel - inner voices interpreted either as madness or the presence of an 'entity', talismen, portals, time on a loop, predestination, children telling the truth and not being listened too, a savage world thinly concealed beneath a layer of domesticity. And so continues the cycle of scarring the impressionable psyches of children (i hope).
