h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While touring the north of Scotland by rail my friend and I arrived at a train station in Tain. It immediately brought to mind the Train Station episode, as the place seemed very eerie. There were piles of newspapers, tied up with string, dated about 5 weeks old, and 'tumbleweed' skittered past. No-one in sight, cobwebs everywhere...

It was a very odd place in general.

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Spooky, scarey episode that one was! It's the only one I can remember apart from the very end of the last one.

Waah! I got accepted and didn't notice!

I hope you had some of the Glenmorangie while you were in Tain. It helps keep ghosts at bay quite nicely I find.

Good one, Munchkin!

This series scared the crap out of me in the early 80s - sinister war songs, ominous nursery rhymes, and guys with no faces...

Local NZ tv replayed it last year, and the thing that struck me was the minimal settings - the stories took place in or around a single building - a house, a train station, a petrol station/diner, an apartment... By the end of the story arc, you could just about draw a set of floor plans from memory.

That and a very small cast gave the show (on re-viewing) a theatrical/stage-like quality.

I'm gonna have to give this Entry a link in the h2g2 Historical Society!

But was it as spooky as you remembered it being?
It's the kind of thing I wish they'd repeat over here in the UK. Might be worth getting a TV for if they did

Some were, some weren't.

The Nursery Rhymes, the Train Station and the Petrol Station stories/chapters are still incredibly creepy. These were set either at night or twilight. Nursery Rhymes and Train Station make great use of music to create atmosphere.

The ghostly chorus of "Pack up your troubles", (supposed to be an uplifiting ditty) getting increasingly louder while discordant notes strike out over it. The growing sense of manipulation and hopelessnessw in the final story in the Petrol Station.

The ones that weren't as scary to me anymore, generally lost something through the age of the show (ie godawful 70s-80s Brit design and fashion).

Well ok then we won't talk about fashion of the late 70's and early 80's

Good to hear that some of it did age well enough though.

Its a major problem in being a fan of 70s/80s British Telefantasy, you have to look hard past the godawful design to get the good bits. But then there are some very good bits.

The mention of this series fired off a long dormant neuron.. It kept my family enthralled. It just so happened we moved up to Scotland during some of the more climactic parts of the drama racing to watch the series in the hotel TV room (fortunately the series was on at a time compatible with football matches, etc.). In the following reality the closest thing we got to an eery Scottish train station was getting off on the Ayrshire coast to buy haggis with my Glaswegian Gran, a 2 day old copy of the Sun blowing around with the second leaf mysteriously missing.