Cursed TV Shows

Horror Moments Mini Series, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared Edition

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‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Mondays. Catch up with the recent Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here. Don’t forget to subscribe!

Before we say goodbye to the weird and wonderful Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared series and start a brand new set of horror moments, there’s one last running joke that I want to touch on which opens up a nasty little can of worms (and I mean worms, not eagles whose wings just haven’t sprouted yet…)

Put simply, I’d like to talk about the phenomenon of cursed or disturbing tv shows.

Let’s start with our jumping off point, the example from within the DHMIS universe. Whenever Red Guy, Yellow Guy, or Duck switches on their tv, the show that is playing is the hilariously creepy and bleak ‘Grolton & Hovris.’ Is it supposed to be a sitcom? Are our hearts meant to be warmed? Because it looks on the face of it like programme about a bad-tempered old man with a gum disease bullying his speechless dog. If you know your British television you should be able to guess which real-world show it’s sending up.

Here is the entire transcript of one of the episodes of Grolton & Hovris:

GROLTON: Hey Hovris! It turns out my mother has left me £40 in her will! This is cause for celebration my boy. Let’s heat up some water.

Another episode centres around ‘brother’s visit’ with the plot twist being — brother is visiting next month! *Grolton smashes plate in a fit of rage*

In yet another, the pair have gone out for a picnic, but Hovris forgot to pack water so has to watch Grolton drink plentifully from his many bottles…

You get the drift.

The depressing emptiness of Grolton & Hovris is part of the general goal of DHMIS to parody the unintentional oddness of tv, particularly tv made for children. It’s clearly meant to play on the plasticine world of Wallace & Gromit (the subject of my first ever horror moment series). I’ve been reliably informed by a German friend that for people who didn’t grow up with it, Wallace & Gromit is itself disturbing to look at, and it’s certainly true that Gromit endures almost as much abuse as Hovris at the hands of his complacent owner.

There’s really no reason for the inclusion of Grolton & Hovris in DHMIS, except that this ‘nested tv show’ provides another opportunity for metatextual playfulness. Our characters haven’t yet realised that they are on a tv show, and just as they watch the repetitive purgatorial exploits of their favourites, we have been returning each week to see what torments the colourful trio will endure.

In The Simpsons universe, Itchy and Scratchy is the show-within-a-show, created as a joke at the expense of those who thought that cartoons were getting far too violent. It’s Tom and Jerry taken to slasher-movie extremes and the funniest episodes are the most inventively sadistic. ‘Terrance and Phillip’ was, to the characters of South Park, the badly animated show made up of nothing but fart jokes that South Park was itself in the eyes of many parents. Grolton and Hovris likewise seems to poke fun at anyone who thinks DHMIS itself is too absurd and bleak.

But Grolton & Hovris also reminds me of urban legends that have circulated for decades about supposedly cursed tv shows. There have been enough (unintentionally?) creepy tv episodes aimed at children that each generation seems to have its own defining traumas of this kind. I’m a big fan of the ‘Scarred for Life’ podcast and books series which has so far covered the 1970s and 80s.

There’s everything here from Doctor Who to frightening public information films, but for my money the most upsetting are always the examples that weren’t trying to disturb but managed it by accident.

This is often the case in the 1990s and 00s, when children’s television was trying harder than ever to be colourful, optimistic, and inclusive. There was a lot of didactic puppetry of the kind being parodied by DHMIS, and a lot of otherworldly creatures that behaved like children and toddled face first into the uncanny valley. I actually wrote a section here on one particular ‘banned episode’ from the 90s, but it was interesting enough for its own article so you’ll have to stay tuned.

You might have expected television horror to retreat from view in the Age of the Internet, but instead creepy tvs began to appear in the urban legends of the new online world. Forums like Creepypasta collected tales of haunted television sets mysteriously turning on and playing horrible images. or tv shows that had one ‘weird episode’ that played once and was never aired again.

The best tales often involved conversations with adults who had ‘seen something’ on tv in the 1970s and now wouldn’t talk about it in detail. This motif reveals a truth about the intergenerational transference of horror: parents probably have muttered under their breath about Noseybonk and The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, only for their children to fill in the gaps and imagine far worse tv nasties of the past.

Kris Straub’s 2009 classic ‘Candle Cove’ is now the version of the ‘bad tv show’ story from which all others are derived. It’s written in the form of a conversation between strangers on a forum where one person is asking if anyone else remembers a programme they saw as a child in 1970s or whether they imagined it. We get more and more sinister details as people offer their recollections, or report back on a parent’s unwillingness to speak about it.

Incidentally, I recently enjoyed this title sequence to the lost 1970s series ‘Shadowbox’ uploaded to YouTube by T. W. Burgess in 2023, although the laughing that starts halfway through really unsettles me…

The DHMIS universe is a brilliant encapsulation of everything that can make children’s tv scary, so it feels natural that it ended up moving from internet shorts to its own weird tv show. All the complaints that are lodged at this new longer version, that its pacing is strange, that its plot is meandering, that its Easter Eggs are unexplained, all make me love it even more. There’s something very pleasing about the idea of a child switching it on, watching for several minutes, then hurrying away to tell their friends about the ‘Red Guy with the teeth, the Duck who wanted to see the skeleton, and the Yellow Guy whose batteries inside had gone all gross…’

So three cheers to Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling for making something that has a completely unique voice and is a labour of love that has clearly been nowhere near a committee. If Channel 4 has any sense they will commission a second series, we need more art with heart these days. Even if it’s a fleshy and pulsating heart crawling out from a puppet’s trouser leg…

Next week, we’ll turn to a brand new series of horror moments. You’ll have to subscribe to find out where we’ll be heading next. Catch up with the full DHMIS mini season here. What TV shows scarred you for life? Tell me in the comments below and until next time, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.

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