Since it is Hallowe'en

You know what really used to scare me in that era? Bagpuss. Not the positively hallucinogenic setting of talking bookends, singing mice and a toad playing the banjo - it was just that the writers of the programme had a strange talent for accidentally very creepy songs.

This video has perhaps the worst of them - it's about a ragdoll with stitched-up eyes that dances about in a possessed stop-motion voodoo manner that makes it look like it's from a rejected episode of The Twilight Zone. This is all set to the programme's signature haunting sitar/banjo/detuned piano music (I can't decide which it is).

Ah yes. '#Dear little Uncle Feedle#'! I thought both the song and story were quite whimsical but I suppose the crudeness of the dolls renders them sinister to some. Some are freaked out by Play School's Hamble, some shudder at certain newsreaders from the past (just me? Surely not!), and some are petrified of things like idents from the days of yore!

Interesting potential thread-within-a-thread...anyone care to add anything else?

I'll do it myself, then :)

There were actually a lot of things that scared me when I was young that I can't really justify - perhaps it was the result of having an overactive imagination. There was one episode of a programme, again about dolls (called Penny and Victor, I believe, but the name of it completely escapes me) where they were trapped inside a hoover, and that gave me nightmares. However, most of the things that frightened me irrationally came from PC games rather than the TV, and I wrote about those at great length here.

My brother had it the worst, though - for many years, he was plagued with nightmares about the String Owls from Fingermouse coming to get him (I would love to show an image of them, but there was only one result for +"string owls" +"fingermouse" on Google and it turns out I wrote that, too). They eventually stopped when somehow he realized that, just like in the programme itself, they could be killed by simply unravelling them.

Oh, and slightly more relevantly - the worst public information film I remember was "Robbie", about safety at the level crossings, where we had to watch as the title character walked across the tracks with his friends, got his foot caught under the rail and was cut into about twelve bits by an oncoming train.

They just don't traumatize children like that any more.

Yay! PIF time.

I actually watched Apaches about a month ago, being bored and trawling YouTube while taking a small break from World of Warcraft. I actually tried looking for Robbie too, but it is nowhere to be found. You can order it to view online via one of the gov websites, though I can't remember which one (just woke up). There's also another PIF on youtube about some kids getting marmalized on a train track while participating in a scary sports day. Now that was a fun one.

By the way, Davidn, I love the icon...Hooray for Nightmare and the wonderful orange man Tragar!