Nationwide – Blood and Porridge

October 13, 2026October 13, 2026

More things that terrified the young me

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

Here’s the second half of my account of things that scared me, to the point of scarring me, when I was wee.

Space: 1999 – Dragon’s Domain (1975)

Even as a kid, I knew the TV show Space: 1999 was silly. I already had enough awareness of science to realise the ridiculousness of its premise – a titanic explosion on the moon in the then-future year of 1999 sends it, and 300 human beings crewing a base there called Moonbase Alpha, careering out of earth’s orbit and into deep space. Particularly ridiculous was how every second episode the moon hurtled into a new solar system and came close enough to an earth-type planet for the Moonbase Alpha folk to explore it. Space: 1999 depicted the universe as a giant pinball machine with the moon bouncing between earth-type planets like the silver ball bouncing between the machine’s flippers and bumpers.

And yet… A Space: 1999 episode called Dragon’s Domain petrified me. It has the runaway moon approaching a sinister graveyard of abandoned spaceships in which a horrifying, one-eyed, tentacled monstrosity lurks. Okay, seen today, the monster in Dragon’s Domain doesn’t impress, being a mass of wavy tentacles obviously animated by wires. But the barrage of things that accompany it still inspire fear – it initially materialises as a swirling pattern of lights, it makes hideous shrieking noises and its victims are battered by gusts of wind. Most horribly, moments after those victims are dragged into its maw, they’re spat out again as desiccated corpses, apparently drained of all their moisture.

There’s something about the episode’s ineluctability that got me too. It focuses on a Moonbase Alpha member (Gianni Garko) who’s encountered the monster before. While he was captaining a mission into deep space, it ate his crew and only he managed to escape. Now stuck on the moon after its unexpected departure from earth’s orbit, fate has cruelly decreed that he’ll meet the thing again.

The pictures in The Horrific World of Monsters (1974)

I might have been terrified by monsters like that Space: 1999 one, but I was also fascinated by them and in the mid-1970s I bought a hardcover, kids-orientated book called The Horrific World of Monsters by Dulan Barber. This provided an A-Z of monsters from myth, folklore, cryptozoology, movies, TV and comics.

© Marshall Cavendish

Lavishly illustrated, a couple of the book’s page-sized movie-stills troubled me, lodged themselves in my psyche and occasionally caused me nightmares. These depicted the mummy, played by Lon Chaney Jr in 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost, throttling a victim; a fanged, hairy Michael Landon pouncing on a victim in I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); and, in unflinching close-up, the title character of The Return of the Fly (1959), the second film in the series about a scientist experimenting with a teleportation device who gets his molecules mixed up with those of a fly and acquires a massive, insectile head. Just as well it wasn’t a close-up of Jeff Goldblum from late in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly. That sight would have left me gibbering.

Eventually, I sold the book to a schoolmate called Geoff Simmons, who was a gifted artist and who used some of its illustrations as inspiration for pictures – I remember him showing me one he’d drawn based on the mummy. Geoff is now a graphic designer (and also a community historian) in London. I’d like to think The Horrific World of Monsters played a small part in shaping his future career.

Bodega Bay gets attacked in The Birds (1963)

By the mid-1970s, someone had informed me that the Americans and Russians both had ‘bombs that could blow up the world’, so I had a new thing to worry about – the end of humanity. Accordingly, apocalyptic movies frightened the bejesus out of me. For example, Steve Sekely’s Day of the Triffids (1963), a cheap adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, scared me with its depiction of a world where nearly everyone has gone blind. Even at 10 years old, unfortunately, I could tell how shoddy its special effects were, especially the ones involving the triffids.

But the apocalyptic movie that traumatised me was 1963’s The Birds, directed by the impeccable Alfred Hitchcock and based on a 1952 short story by the equally impeccable Daphne du Maurier. Most traumatic for me was the part where Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor find themselves in a diner in the middle of the little coastal town of Bodega Bay, trying to convince the locals – who react with varying degrees of scepticism – that the area’s feathered population is behaving very strangely. After seven minutes of conversation that mingles humour with growing unease, and is brilliantly performed by character actors like Doreen Lang (as an increasingly frightened mother), Charles McGraw (as a gruff fisherman), Ethel Griffies (as an elderly, know-all ornithologist) and Karl Swenson (as a Bible-quoting Irish drunkard), all hell breaks loose.

Multitudinous seagulls swoop down and cars and petrol pumps explode (thanks to fuel spewing from a dropped hose), more cars crash, horses run wild and many townspeople get clawed and pecked. Hedren spends a nightmarish minute trapped inside a telephone booth with birds, plus one unlucky human victim, smashing into its sides. Taylor rescues her and gets her into the diner again, but… The atmosphere there is suddenly less welcoming.

From wikipedia.com / © Universal Pictures

Hitchcock’s orchestration of this blew me away. The telephone-booth bit was possibly the first time I’d been exposed to what film-fans would describe as ‘pure cinema’. But Taylor and Hedren’s return to the diner provides the chilling coup de grâce. The people inside are cowering in terror, including Griffies’s no-longer-cocky ornithologist, and already a superstitious irrationality is taking hold of them. This crystalises when a now-crazed Lang accuses Hedren of, basically, being a witch: “Who are you?” What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. Evil!” No doubt a young Stephen King was taking notes at this point. Similar things happen in his 1980 novella The Mist, with many of its characters reacting to another apocalyptic event by succumbing to medieval-style hysteria.

Doctor Who – The Seeds of Doom, episode 4 (1976)

I could write a whole article based only on moments from the BBC’s long running science-fiction / fantasy / horror series Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25) that scared me: the shop dummies coming to life in the serial Spearhead from Space (1970); the killer plastic chair in Terror of the Autons (1971); the murderous Morris dancers in The Daemons (1971); a scaly hand appearing over a boat’s gunwale in The Sea Devils (1972); an infected crewman removing his hand from his pocket and revealing it transformed into a slab of glistening green slime (okay, it’s really green-painted bubble-wrap, but hardly anyone at the time knew what bubble-wrap was) in The Ark in Space (1975)… But scariest of all was the 1976 serial The Seeds of Doom, about alien seed-pods that infect humans and transform them into malevolent, carnivorous plant-monsters. Episode 4 of The Seeds of Doom, to be precise.

One alien pod becomes the possession of an insane millionaire plant-lover called Harrison Chase – played by character actor Tony Beckley, who’d been in The Italian Job (1969) and Get Carter (1971) – and at the start of episode 4 it germinates, infecting one of Chase’s minions, a hapless botanist called Arnold Keeler (Mark Jones). Ignoring Keeler’s pleas to be taken to a hospital, Chase has him chained to a bed, purring in delight, “The rate of increase is astonishing… Protein absorption from the animal, of course… We shall have to give you some food soon… You’re changing into a plant, Keeler… a marvellous new species of plant!”

© BBC

With Keeler turning green, then fibrous, then tentacular, and Chase trying to speed up the metamorphosis by feeding him pieces of raw meat, what I was witnessing here was the icky sub-genre of horror known as ‘body horror’. But it was the performances of Beckley and Jones, one disturbingly malevolent, the other distressingly pathetic, that truly conveyed the horribleness of the situation.

Legend Horror Classics, issue 4 (1976)

The same impulse that made me buy The Horrific World of Monsters inspired me to purchase issue 4 of a British film magazine called Legend Horror Classics, edited by Gent Shaw, who’d also edited the scary-movie magazine World of Horror in 1974-75. Issue 4 of Legend Horror Classics was devoted to zombies, which until then I’d understood to be dead people brought back to life by voodoo and put to work on Caribbean sugar plantations. By the 1970s, however, thanks to the influence of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombie stories and films had become less voodoo-reliant and a lot grislier and more visceral. This issue contained several gruesome photos that, like those in the Monsters book, gave me nightmares.

However… Since then, I’ve discovered, indignantly, that the yuckiest pictures in the issue weren’t actually from zombie movies! There was one of the mouldering, prehistoric ape-creature inhabited by an evil alien intelligence in the Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing horror film Horror Express (1972); and one of a rotting corpse (not reanimated as a zombie) from another 1972 movie featuring Christopher Lee, Deathline. If you’re reading this, Gent Shaw, I’m accusing you of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act.

© Legend Publishing

The Nationwide report about the Hexham Heads (1976)

The Hexham heads were two little stone heads, possibly Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. Reputedly, the heads triggered paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. And that paranormal activity manifested itself spectacularly in the form of a werewolf that was glimpsed stalking through their homes after dark.

Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – normally a family-friendly TV current-affairs programme, which aired on the BBC every weekday evening after six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. The makers of the report had the not-so-family-friendly idea of spicing it up with ghastly screams, images of severed human heads and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed lurching towards the camera in 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf. This approach traumatised every kid who happened to be watching, me included.

One eyewitness reported seeing the Hexham Heads werewolf after arriving home late at night – allegedly she spotted it prowling about her dark house before she switched on the lights. Soon afterwards, my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland. My parents frequently received invitations to Sunday lunch and dinner at the homes of Northern Irish folk they knew directly, or knew as friends of friends, who were now living in Scotland. After much food, whisky and blethering, we wouldn’t get home until late on Sunday evening. While my parents unlocked the front door and we entered a black, silent house, I’d think of the Nationwide report and wonder, “What if there’s a werewolf waiting in there?”

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

Footage of that legendary 1976 TV report on the Hexham Heads was long believed lost but it’s now been discovered and restored – see here and here.

Jon Voight’s dream at the end of Deliverance (1972)

By the time I was 12, I believed I was a mature, hardened type who’d seen everything and couldn’t be frightened anymore. But then on TV one evening I watched John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), about four Atlanta business men whose canoeing holiday in remote north Georgia turns into an ordeal, and was freaked out by it.

Oddly, it wasn’t the notorious sequence where some hillbillies rape Ned Beatty’s character and insist that he squeals ‘like a pig’ that upset me most. Maybe I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what was happening. No, it was the bit near the end where Jon Voigt’s character has a nightmare about the river they canoed on – which has since been dammed and turned into a lake – and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water. The image of that emerging hand haunted me for weeks afterwards. I obviously wasn’t as tough as I thought I was.

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

Thinking about it, I suppose I must have been a complete scaredy-cat whose childhood was one long procession of moments of terror. So now, half-a-century later, why do I write short horror stories under the penname of Jim Mountfield? I’ve had nearly 70 such stories published.

Perhaps it’s a case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em.”

December 21, 2025

When Stan was the man

From YouTube / © BBC

The great Scottish comic performer Stanley Baxter passed away earlier this month at the venerable age of 99. Newspaper obituaries for him noted that, though he was a bright star indeed in 1970s British television, by the late 1980s his star had seemingly vanished from the firmament. He’d gone. It was almost as if he hadn’t been there in the first place.

As a result, one obituarist wrote, it was unlikely that anybody under the age of 40 in modern Britain had heard of him. That does seem strange. I can remember his TV shows being, in their day, very big events. Over two decades, he only made six series – four of the Stanley Baxter Show between 1963 and 1971, one of the Stanley Baxter Picture Show in 1972 and one of the Stanley Baxter Series in 1981. But during the intervening years, he staged several lavish, one-off specials that kept his face in the public consciousness, especially in the 1970s. And his viewing figures were huge.

The reason Baxter himself gave for his abrupt disappearance during the 1980s was that his shows, full of song-and-dance extravaganzas and loving reproductions of old movie classics, became too expensive to make. In particular, the television executive John Birt – once described memorably by playwright Dennis Potter as a ‘croak-voiced Dalek’ – had a hand in pulling the plug on him. “It’s not that we don’t like your work,” he told Baxter. “It just all costs so much.”

It probably didn’t help that the type of entertainment Baxter was obviously smitten with, and slavishly reproduced and fondly parodied in his shows, had started to seem old-school by the 1980s. Much of his material was drawn from the black-and-white days of Hollywood and he clearly took pleasure of impersonating the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Shirley Temple. He also commonly referenced a former era of British cinema and theatre when accents were cut-glass and upper lips were stiff and he poked gentle fun at people like Sir John Gielgud and Noel Coward. But by the time of his later shows, the audience familiar with those reference points was surely ageing. A younger generation had arrived, more attuned to the 1970s New Hollywood movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and the blockbusters of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Maybe Stanley Baxter’s TV career simply reached the end of its natural lifespan.

Incidentally, offscreen, Baxter was a quiet man who avoided publicity. This was partly due to the fact he was gay and for a long time he worried about the world finding out – sadly, he worried about this well after the point when most British people no longer gave a damn whether someone was gay or not. Anyway, by the 1980s, he was entering his sixties and probably welcomed retirement and being out of the public’s gaze.

I have to say, watching some of his sketches now, I find myself agreeing with a comment posted below one of the recent obituaries. The comment-writer said he thought much of Baxter’s TV work was ‘clever’ rather than ‘funny’. In fact, technically, those sketches are sometimes astonishing. Baxter played all the parts in them. However, because the digital compositing technology didn’t exist at the time to layer several images of him together in the same shot (and older techniques like multiple exposure and split-screen effect weren’t very convincing), the sketches were filmed from multiple camera angles with Baxter in different roles at different times. Copious use was made of filmed-from-behind body doubles and much editing was done afterwards. They must have been meticulously planned and taken ages to put together. No wonder, most years, we only saw him in a one-off special. Also, their writing was smart and Baxter’s impersonations were impeccable. But as far as comic value is concerned – well, I find myself smiling, perhaps chuckling, at them at best.

An example is his spoof of Upstairs Downstairs, the masters-and-servants-in-a-big-house costume drama that aired on British TV from 1971 to 1975 and was the Downton Abbey (2010-15) of its day. Baxter’s take on it is surprisingly meta. The servants downstairs are discussing how many of the toffs upstairs have been written out of the scripts recently and replaced by new characters played by bigger-name stars. Surely, they think, that can’t happen to them, since they’re all played by sturdy, salt-of-the-earth character actors? But it does – the punchline comes when housekeeper Mrs. Bridges is informed that she’s about to be replaced by Glenda Jackson. As usual, Baxter plays everyone during the eight-minute sketch and his impersonation of the starchy butler Mr. Hudson (in the real Upstairs Downstairs played by Baxter’s fellow Scot Gordon Jackson) is absolutely spot-on. But while I might be full of admiration by the end of it, I haven’t done much laughing during it.

From wiki.scotlandonaire.com

In his sketches, Baxter plays women as well as men and his female impersonations are frequently great. British comedy has a long tradition of men dressing up as women: the Carry On movies (1958-92), Monty Python (1969-74), The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017), Little Britain (2003-6), Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Les Dawson and practically every pantomime ever. But those drag acts were invariably grotesque, their grotesqueness designed to provoke laughter. Baxter, though, delights in making his female characters as believable and, well, feminine, as possible. The novelist and critic Anne Billson responded to Baxter’s death the other day by observing how she now can’t watch Barbra Streisand singing Don’t Rain on My Parade in Funny Girl (1968) without thinking of Baxter impersonating Streisand and singing that song on one of his shows. I have no doubt that Baxter as Streisand was awesome.

For me, Stanley Baxter’s work was funnier when it left the showbiz world behind and focused on other things – especially things inspired by his Scottish roots. I fondly remember a sketch from one of his last specials, in the mid-1980s, wherein a strict Free Presbyterian clergyman (played by mighty character actor Andrew Keir) in the Scottish islands is enraged to hear sounds of partying coming from a house. It’s Sunday – the Sabbath. When he confronts the little old lady (Baxter) living in the house, she pertly informs him, “Oh, but we’re not dancing. We’re having an orgy.” She then describes a game being played inside. “The men-folk take all their clothes off and stand in a long line… The women are blindfolded and they have to identify the men by touch.” She invites the clergyman in, saying, “As a matter of fact, your name has come up twice.”

Also Scottish were perhaps his greatest achievements, the Parliamo Glasgow sketches, filmed in the manner of TV language-learning programmes of the time. The characters perform a skit in the target language, then change to English and inform the viewers about some of the useful words and phrases they’ve just heard. This being a Stanley Baxter piss-take, however, the target language is Glaswegian and the skits involve such expressions as “Thatzum bahookey yu-voan-yu” or, fabulously, “Zarra marra oanra barra, Clarra?” When the instructors switch to English, it’s in the ridiculously posh tones of Received Pronunciation (then a requirement for British TV presenters): “Again, an amorous young lady might use the word romantically to her bashful lover – ‘Zarra bestye kindae?’”

This fascination with language, dialect and accent informs another Baxter sketch, involving Nationwide (1969-83), the current affairs TV show broadcast on weekday evenings that consisted of reports from the BBC’s newsrooms across the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. The joke is that each presenter in each newsroom, in Belfast, Leeds, Cardiff and so on, speaks the local dialect there so strongly that nobody else can understand them. Finally, the programme switches to the main newsroom in London – where its presenter speaks with such exaggerated Received Pronunciation that he’s unintelligible too.

Though his television fame faded elsewhere in Britain, Baxter remained a name in Scotland. Throughout his career he’d appeared in Scottish pantomimes and in the 1980s and early 1990s he starred in a number of productions at Glasgow’s King’s Theatre: Cinderella (1980-81), Mother Goose (1983-84), Aladdin (1986-87) and, again, Cinderella (1991-92). I remember that last production getting much attention in the Scottish press because it was billed as his farewell to the stage. His pantomime work was often done in tandem with another Scot, Angus Lennie, who was best known for playing Steve McQueen’s sidekick, the ill-fated Archibald Ives, in The Great Escape (1962). Baxter and Lennie’s performances as the Ugly Stepsisters in Cinderella are legendary.

He also turned up in Fitba, a 1990 episode of the Scottish TV sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-99, 2008-14). Here, he plays an elderly man, at death’s door, who’s a football fan. He’s so determined to see the Scottish men’s football team perform in the 1990 World Cup before he passes that he pays the titular character, the garrulous though rough-and-tumble Rab C. Nesbitt, to take him to the country hosting the tournament, Italy. Baxter’s character is decrepit and moribund and Rab is understandably sceptical about the undertaking. But he gradually wins Rab’s respect with his determination to make the most of what he has left. “My time is precious,” he tells Rab in Rome. “I’m taking a taxi into town. Then I’ll walk to Via Garibaldi and into Palazzo Doria Tursi to see, among other treasures, Paganini’s violin.” When he asks about Rab’s plans that afternoon, and is told he’ll maybe get a pizza, he retorts, “A pizza? In Italy? My, you’re full of ideas!” Thanks to Scotland’s recent qualification for the 2026 World Cup in North America, I was thinking about this episode and Stanley Baxter just a few days before he died.

Finally, he featured in a handful of movies too: Geordie (1955), Very Important Person (1961), The Fast Lady (1962), Crooks Anonymous (1962) and Father Came Too! (1963). Decades later, he was one of the many people (also including Vincent Price, Donald Pleasance, Anthony Quayle, Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, George Melly and Joss Ackland) who did voice-work for Richard Williams’ legendary, but never properly finished, animated epic The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

As a kid, I loved The Fast Lady, though I daresay I’d find it juvenile and knockabout if I saw it today. But what a sublime cast it has – Baxter as the bumbling hero, Julie Christie as the woman he’s in love with, James Robertson Justice as Christie’s irascible and deeply disapproving father, and Leslie Philips as Baxter’s smooth best friend who tries to aid him in his love-life but only makes matters worse.

Ah, it makes me nostalgic. Who would you get in a British comedy film nowadays? Danny bloody Dyer – if you’re lucky.

November 3, 2025November 6, 2025

Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine. Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’ Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more. ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.” My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of. Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977). But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story. The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook. All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them. Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it. My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles. One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research. My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books. “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought. “That’d make a good premise for a story.” I wrote the idea down.

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go. His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021. So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field. One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land. Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!” And another idea was scribbled down.

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads. These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching. It certainly scared the shit out of me. (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored. See here and here.)

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers. For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous. But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story. Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work. This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.