Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children's Gothic Television in the 1970s and '80s

Abstract

This article challenges the dearth of analyses of children’s television drama by examining two key cycles in the development of Gothic television in Britain: (mainly) original series and serials produced for ITV in the 1970s, e.g. The Owl Service (Granada, 1969–1970), Escape into Night (ATV, 1972), King of the Castle (1977), and Gothic costume dramas for children produced by the BBC in the 1980s, e.g. Children of Green Knowe (BBC1, 1986), Moondial (BBC1, 1988). It examines the child hero, his or her place within the domestic spaces of the children’s Gothic and relationships to the idea of the uncanny, paying particular attention to the representation of interstitial or hidden spaces within these texts (secret rooms, hidden gardens, parallel worlds) and the ways in which the young protagonists inhabit and traverse these spaces. It offers discussion of the particular meanings and attractions of Gothic television for children and of the issues that are ‘worried at’ in these dramas. In understanding childhood as an unsettling time of transition, where the family home becomes the key site of uncertainty and when children must also come to understand their place within wider society, it is unsurprising that young viewers embraced these programmes so completely, finding pleasure in the frisson of fear and excitement.