This really nails the psychological atmosphere of my late 70s-early 80s British childhood. I remember being terrified of rabies thanks to films and posters like the one in the article, and believing that I would one day have to fight the Soviets in some foggy, anthrax infested field. All before I was ten years old!
This diminished as the 80s went on, along with that sense of Orwellian paternalism that seemed to suffuse British life (see films like Scum, If..., The Offence) - Perhaps it was the shadow side of the "cradle-to-grave" era which ended with Thatcher - a welfare state administered by former aristocratic imperialists. I don't know. I was too young to have a handle on it, and like the creator of Scarfolk, the time has a kind of mythological existence for me.
The article mentions how the creator of Scarfolk was inspired by public information films. These were a source of pure terror to any kid who grew up in 70s-80s Britain.
Imagine you are watching something fun on childrens TV, then, out of nowhere a short horror film appears - only, as the authoritarian narrator reveals - this isn't fiction - this is real. You couldn't watch tv without the fear of some horrible thing being shown at random. There were certain times of day when they were more likely and you could feel the dread mounting as they approached.
Here's an example of the wholesome and educational material 80s kids were subjected to:
This scared the crap out of me as a child. If you're at all interested in horror or propaganda then I highly recommend them! There are a bunch of them on youtube.
Over the course about 20 mins 6 kids playing on a farm are dispatched by falling into slurry pits, drinking chemicals and getting run over by tractors.
We had something similar to that in America at weird times of day or night with televangelist evangelical christian dramatizations. I remember one particular episode, I'm sleepless with a fever from a cold and mindlessly changing channels and there's some kids playing around farm equipment that would give OSHA a fit (but this was a long time ago, back when OSHA was new...) and naturally one of the kids VERY dramatically loses a leg, and then it cuts to the evangelical preaching part of the sermon along the lines of god loves you so be chill when bad things happen, based on a true story! However effective at converting adults, I will say it was almost subversively ineffective at converting me as a little kid... all I got out of it personally was don't play around farms, and the preacher's god is a complete jerk to rip the legs off a little kid.
I could only have been about 6 or 7, and watched this between some cartoons. Scared the hell out of me. I didn't know how to "protect myself" from this menace so decided I'd just go and hide in the cupboard.
Me too, it really resonated in a very unpleasant way. I have a fear, a phobia maybe, of high tension electric cables and transmission towers. A healthy fear perhaps but I have nightmares periodically, I can't lean out the bathroom window of my house because the cable to the house is at eye level (well out of reach of course), the sound of them buzzing in humid air brings me out in a sweat. I never knew where it came from, but seeing this today I suddenly remembered being shown in school at around age 6 one of those horrid films, this one about a little boy who climbs a tower to get his kite and ends up roasted.
In the U.S. in the 70s children were exposed to media and other exercises with similar themes. In retrospect they were some pretty scary concepts (although nowadays my kids have to deal with "shelter in place" exercises at their own schools thanks to guns).
In my elementary school we didn't do "duck and cover" but we did have to regularly go down in lines to the basement which was an official "fallout shelter" of our city. In the mid-70s I remember being shown a film in school about a society living underground owing to some unexplained environmental catastrophe, and for her birthday a young girl is allowed to go aboveground in a spacesuit with a guide to explore an abandoned city. One of the scenes showed a museum with exhibits like "North American Squirrel - Extinct 1984".
In the early 80s there was a hullabaloo about a TV film showing the impact on Lawrence, Kansas, after a US-Soviet nuclear war. The pundits warned parents not to let kids watch it, yet we kids had grown up with the implicit threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads. Of course I watched it, and was not too surprised about what it I saw on the screen ...
And if anyone thinks this is a joke, I remember watching these adverts as a child and thinking they really could work out what you were watching on the telly.
TV Detector Vans were a legendary hoax. A very small fleet of real vans existed, but they were completely useless and the electronics were just a movie prop.
Which is all extremely weird - because it means the BBC spent real money buying a few vans and kitting them out with fake buttons, lights, and switches. And then more real money driving them around the UK and parking them in random locations. To frighten people.
As for Scarfolk - found it a few years ago, thought it was hilarious. Technically it's an example of hauntology, which is borrowed from Derrida[1], but only really makes sense in the grimmer parts of the UK.
Detecting a CRT television isn't remotely difficult - any decent radio amateur could do it with the equipment they have at hand. The intermediate frequency and the CRT deflection signal are emitted at detectable levels, particularly on cheap sets.
Frankly, I think it's implausible that detector vans were a complete hoax. The BBC undoubtedly had the technological capability to reliably and quickly locate TV sets. I do think it's plausible that the actual use of detector vans was overstated for PR purposes.
There are exactly zero records of prosecutions obtained using evidence collected by a detector van.
It would be one thing to detect an analog TV IF signal, another to triangulate its position precisely enough to identify a specific house in a street or room in a block - given that every other TV in the area would be generating exactly the same IF oscillator signal - and a third to prove the TV was tuned into a program and not being used for pong, a computer, or watching a video.
And it would be unnecessary. The licensing enforcers have always kept a record of addresses without a license. If - like me - you don't have a TV, you get a regular stream of letters threatening prosecution anyway, and an occasional knock on the door.
If you're an enforcer, the easiest way to check if someone has a TV is to look at a house after dark. Most living rooms in the UK are visible from the street.
>There are exactly zero records of prosecutions obtained using evidence collected by a detector van.
TVL say they use detector van evidence as grounds for a search warrant, which seems perfectly reasonable. Why argue the technicalities of RF triangulation in court when you can just get a warrant, search the house and collect incontrovertible evidence?
Well, in theory, yes they could see what you watching (no great stretch, as Britain only had a few channels to choose from at the time), via TEMPEST techniques.
I can't help but think there's a little bit of a Welcome to Night Vale influence - but a (distorted? misinterpreted?) Southern Gothic trend started around 2012-2013. I saw a lot of revisiting of dark recolorings of reality in that vein crop up when that podcast came out, particularly on tumblr.
If you look up the "Southern Gothic Meme" or "____ Gothic" memes (for your city, state, concept, etc) theres some really entertaining shortform writing out there. :)
I'm a little surprised that neither side of the interview brought up J.G. Ballard's collages from the 1960s. Sorry for the lack of link. I know some are included in Re/Search #7/8.
This diminished as the 80s went on, along with that sense of Orwellian paternalism that seemed to suffuse British life (see films like Scum, If..., The Offence) - Perhaps it was the shadow side of the "cradle-to-grave" era which ended with Thatcher - a welfare state administered by former aristocratic imperialists. I don't know. I was too young to have a handle on it, and like the creator of Scarfolk, the time has a kind of mythological existence for me.
The article mentions how the creator of Scarfolk was inspired by public information films. These were a source of pure terror to any kid who grew up in 70s-80s Britain.
Imagine you are watching something fun on childrens TV, then, out of nowhere a short horror film appears - only, as the authoritarian narrator reveals - this isn't fiction - this is real. You couldn't watch tv without the fear of some horrible thing being shown at random. There were certain times of day when they were more likely and you could feel the dread mounting as they approached.
Here's an example of the wholesome and educational material 80s kids were subjected to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWfOLN9Z1yw
This scared the crap out of me as a child. If you're at all interested in horror or propaganda then I highly recommend them! There are a bunch of them on youtube.