Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995 - Paperback

by Stephen Prince (Author)

Exploring the Haunted Airwaves

Before the ubiquity of streaming, British television was a landscape with room for strange experiments, folk-horror nightmares, and "wyrd" transmissions. Today, many of these programmes have vanished from official channels, leaving behind only "ghost signals" a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet.

Ghost Signals maps this territory from 1968 - the foundational "wyrd" year of acid folk and iconic folk horror - to 1995, the dawn of the digital revolution. The book delves into a unique era where public funding met social experimentation, creating a "broad diet" of television that was often as challenging as it was chilling.

This landscape invited viewers to encounter the seasonal hauntings of A Ghost Story for Christmas, the suburban occult of Scorpion Tales: Great Albert, and the layered mythologies of The Moon Stallion. It was a time that embraced the edgeland quiet horror of Unnatural Causes: Lost Property, the prescient virtual worlds of Play for Tomorrow: Shades, and the metatextual timeslip satire of ScreenPlay: The Black and Blue Lamp. From the paranormal pathways of Leap in the Dark: Jack Be Nimble to the non-horror folk horror of Play for Today: The Lonely Man's Lover, these broadcasts pushed the boundaries of the terrestrial signal.

Released as part of the A Year In The Country project - which explores the intersection of folk horror, hauntology, and the "eerie" landscape - Ghost Signals is a journey through the fading frequencies of a spectral past: the hidden gems that continue to resonate within our collective cultural memory, flourishing quietly in the digital attic of the internet.

Chapter List:
1. A Ghost Story for Christmas - Whistle and I'll Come to You, The Stalls of Barchester and The Icehouse: A Lineage of Seasonal Hauntings

2. Tales of Unease: Conjuring Half-Hour Worlds of Unsettling Tension and Intrigue

3. Play For Today - The Lonely Man's Lover and Stronger Than the Sun: From the Fields of Non-Horror Folk Horror to Seaside Secret State Cycle Subterfuge

4. Scorpion Tales - The Great Albert: Occult Summonings and Ambiguity in Suburbia

5. The Moon Stallion: A Teatime Layering of Legend and Mythology

6. Leap in the Dark - Jack Be Nimble: Pathways Through Paranormal Powers and Between the Roots of Magic and Glamour

7. The Bells of Astercote: Trapped Forever Guarding the Chalice

8. A Pattern of Roses: Timeslip Echoes and Cold War Controversies

9. Play for Tomorrow - Shades: Escaping from Real World Shadows into Prescient Virtual Worlds

10. Dramarama - Spooky: The Exorcism of Amy: Stepping Into a Fever Dream Nightmare

11. Screen Two - Unfair Exchanges and The Blue Boy: A Multi-Layered Shadowed Whirlwind of Creativity, Paranoia and Fringe Science, A Phantom's Revenge and Roads to Doom

12. Unnatural Causes - Lost Property: A Bubble Edgeland of Quiet Horror

13. ScreenPlay - The Black and Blue Lamp: Metatextual Satire and Preternatural Timeslip to Life on Mars and Back

14. The Plant: Unearthing a Leafy Suburban Invasion

Appendix: A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk, Folk Horror and Explorations of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape

"For any self-respecting hauntologist, A Year In The Country is a treasure trove of wyrd delights." Sarah Gregory, Shindig!