1973 - Which was Not too Late for Me

[steepholm]

A story I'm currently writing suddenly put me in mind of a TV play I saw when I was young. The only things I remembered about it were that it involved an evil little girl, a body she buried under a motorway, a hanged cat, and a group of ghostly children playing to the tune of "Girls and Boys Come out to Play". Also, that it was either called Menace or was part of a series called Menace. I also remember rooting for the evil girl, which is a little worrying. It was fairly strong meat, but I enjoyed it a lot, and I guessed I'd seen it some time in my teens, say in the late seventies.

My memory turns out to be pretty good as regards content. Thanks to Google and IMDB I learn that the play was "Girls and Boys Come out to Play", and it was part of a series of thrillers that was indeed called Menace. Date is another matter: it was actually broadcast in 1973, when I was ten years old. (What was my mother thinking of?) It was repeated the following year, but not as part of the Menace series, so I must have seen the earlier broadcast, I think.

Now, of course, I wish I could watch it again - and it seems I'm not alone, as these discussion board conversations make clear. It appears to have been deleted, but there are tantalizing rumours that it may still exist somewhere at the BFI, possibly misfiled, or possibly (like the original tape of The Wicker Man and our homicidal heroine's little friend) buried under a motorway.

Does anyone else remember it?

Also, isn't it time we all faced up to the fact that everything good and memorable dates from 1973? From this play to The Wicker Man itself, to The Dark is Rising, to the first ever episode of The Tomorrow People (how well I remember that!)... Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be ten was very heaven! Penda's Fen was broadcast the following year and was a splendid effort, but already the sun was setting on that golden age. Picnic at Hanging Rock, the year after that, was almost too late. Shades of the prison-house were closing in the form of Johnny Rotten and the temporary madness of all my friends, and in their spikey wake trailed the '80s, Mrs Thatcher, The Human League, and thirty years of hurt.

I cling to the memory of that little homicide as to a floating spar.

Comments

[kalypso]

I don't think I saw it, apart from a trailer, but I knew the title was Girls and Boys Come Out to Play and I think I remember my English teacher talking about it - I'd have put it in the late seventies, too. They didn't repeat it any later than 1974?

Unless, of course, there were two spooky plays of that name in the 1970s!

[steepholm]

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that two people might have come up with that title, but for both plays to fit that description seems unlikely. As for when it was screened, my sources of information are in the links in my post, and I know no more than that!

There's a bit more about the series here.

[lamentables]

We are - as you know, Bob - the same age, but I'm certain I didn't see any of these. One of your links indicates that they were broadcast at 9:20pm, by which time I'd have been in bed for almost 3 hours, sleepy or not. Skimming the synopses and actor names makes me wish I could watch them now.

I do regret the amount of TV from our childhoods that is no longer extant. (Quite recently I've noticed how soothing I find those long-gone 60s/70s accents, not for themselves but for the nostalgia factor.)

I could perhaps even be tempted to watch Belle & Sébastien or The White Horses or any of those other programmes that were on summer after summer after summer and provoked a very particular feeling of compulsion and ennui.

[steepholm]

Ah yes, to say nothing of Robinson Crusoe and The Flashing Blade. I remember their theme tunes more vividly than anything else about them.

It's interesting how childhood associations stick. Great Expectations is for ever linked in my mind with Flash Gordon, the b/w series starring Buster Crabbe, which was showing the same Christmas (1975) I had to read Dickens for homework. I remember they both went on a bit.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I've always rather held against The Tomorrow People the fact that Ace of Wands was cancelled -- and its first two series deleted -- to make way for it. I loved Ace of Wands with a deep love.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realised that. Ace of Wands was a lovely piece of work, and I'd have hoped there would be room in this world for both.

As I recently realised, though, stories about groups of secret telepaths (c.f. TP, The Dark is Rising - though I actually didn't read that till a little later - and also The Chrysalids) became very important to me at that age. I was just beginning to be aware of the necessity of carrying my own secret, and the idea of some companionship was impossibly appealing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes, me too. I loved those, plus things like Louise Lawrence's Andra.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

That's 'cause you lot got all the good stuff on TV. I thought the BBC children's fare was pretty good in 1975, the summer I visited. I remember Wombles, who never did make it over to the US.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The Wombles are sweet - but I suppose they are very English. On which note, did you ever get Paddington (books or TV series) there?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

We did have the Paddington books. I can still remember roughly which shelf they were on in the Henry Branch Library of my youth (which I thought for years was called after a man named Henry Branch; it was actually a branch library called after a woman whose last name was Henry).

I think it's something like the golden age of science fiction being twelve, but yeah, 1973 was one of my heavier media years.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

We did get Paddington, though he was never the blockbuster success that he was in the UK. My mother and I went through Paddington station at one point, and it really was PADDINGTON station. Roof to floor, Paddington bears. We were suitably impressed.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Watership Down was 1972, but I read it in 1973. (I would have been 16.)

I had already stopped watching TV by that time, but all I had at my disposal was American television. Monty Python's Flying Circus didn't come to the US until 1975, and I watched that, and later on someone finally re-ran The Prisoner, which I'd seen when I was eleven and desperately wanted to re-watch with more mature eyes, but that was about it for me and TV until Buffy the Vampire Slayer came to pass.