I have never been one for scary stuff. Mere mention of the word ‘horror’ or anything related to it is enough to send me scuttling for the safety of my duvet. I have always been the same. As a child I would be the one jumping out of their skin whenever someone or something jumped out on screen. I was a nightmare in the cinema.
But these things really affected me! Stupid I know. I would obsess about things that had scared me, worry about them even have nightmares. When I look back now at the things that I was brave enough to watch at the time, they are laughable now, in comparison to the modern day gruesomeness that had become commonplace.
Take Doctor Who for example. Yes, I know it’s essentially a children’s program and not at all scary. I grew up watching Doctor Who and I am a massive fab. Tom Baker was in the role when I first started watching and I loved it, but aged seven or eight some of the episodes scared the life out of me. And I mean the life out of me.
As the years passed, I occasionally watched films that I considered to be ‘scary’. The Nightmare on Elm Street films came out in my teens and I managed to watch them, albeit from behind a cushion. I can still remember watching one at a boyfriend’s house in the dark and at a particularly jumpy bit, his cat jumped out of nowhere on to my lap. It took a long time to recover from that one, I can tell you.
As a fully fledged adult, I am able to choose what I watch and serial dramas such as the incredible ‘Waking the Dead’ were on my must watch list. Brilliantly written and acted, but at times seriously gruesome and scary. Some episodes left me really troubled and unable settle to sleep; lying in bed with it all whizzing around in my head!
Since the demise of Waking the Dead, I have continued to avoid anything which I would consider as overtly scary. However, I have tried to get into other thrillers of the same genre, more recently Silent Witness and White Chapel. I’m sure there have been others, but I mention both of those as they have been on recently and because I have genuinely struggled with them.
Silent Witness is so clever and I find the writing and the suspense amazing, but at times it is just so hard to watch. Yes I am squeamish. Yes I am a scaredy cat. But there are some things I just don’t want to watch. The same with White Chapel. Great script writing but even the very lovely Rupert Penry Jones could not entice me to the end of the series.
There is more to this than my inadequacy to cope with ‘adult drama’. When I have watched some of these programs, I am often left with the feeling that as much as they offer great entertainment there is a side to this that concerns me. Firstly, is nine o’clock a little too early for that sort of thing; there are a lot of children and young teens who watch television after nine o’clock and I for one would have been seriously traumatised if I had watched some of these programs as a teen. Secondly do these programs give the crazy people out there some really good ideas (well I mean bad really).
As for me, well I think I will be tuning into programs that are a little on the gentler side. I do have most of the current series of Silent Witness recorded and when I am feeling brave, I will probably watch them. On the other hand, maybe I should just leave the TV on Nick Junior after A has gone to bed, although I’m not sure about that Mister Potato!
