Revisiting the Watch House was supposed to provide some form of catharsis for me. On the 7th December 1988 I watched the original broadcast of the first episode and about twenty minutes in became so scared that I switched the television off and refused to watch the remaining episodes. This was a very silly thing to do for two reasons, firstly because you should never switch off something frightening half way through because it creates issues around resolution and secondly because it wasn’t actually that scary.
The beginning of the Watch House is almost identical to the start of Moondial, which is unfortunate as Moondial came out earlier the same year and was better. Anne is a bright, well spoken young girl who is unlucky enough to have parents that are going through a divorce. As we know, when your parents are getting divorced in a children’s drama this means you’re inexplicably sent away to live with a distant relative for a bit, ideally one that isn’t very keen on children. For this to be most effective it’s helpful if the place is as isolated as possible, with very little for the child to do, thus forcing them to take lots of long solitary walks in the erratic British weather. Where as Minty in Moondial got sent to stay with Aunt Mary in Belton, Anne gets Prudie in Garmouth. Actually as a bonus Anne gets Arthur, Prudie’s brother too, a nice enough man, BUT VERY SHOUTY. He’s in charge of the Watch House, on old coast guard centre of which he is hugely protective, but not enough to have cleaned or maintained it in any form over the last 40 years.
Click to view slideshow.The Watch House is a BBC North East three-parter based on the 1977 book of the same name by Robert Westall. Garmouth is the fictional town based on Tynemouth in Tyne and Wear that Westall has used as the setting for many of his books including the Machine Gunners. Garmouth has it’s own café/ice cream parlour and inexplicably for a town with only three inhabitants under 40, it also has an ice rink. What it doesn’t have is a half-arsed maritime museum, so bored of ice-skating and consuming knickerbocker glories Anne goes about creating one. With hilarious consequences. Actually no, that wasn’t the word I was looking for, with mediocre consequences.
As it turns out the Watch House is haunted by a man called Henry Cookson and he really needs Anne’s help. We know this because he has a tendency to write ‘Ann help’ in dust a lot, he’s clever like that, but not clever enough to realise she spells her name with an e. Later he moves on to communicating in Morse code through the use of a model light house. Unfortunately Anne like most teenage girls is really crap at Morse code. In the end he just has to possess her to get the message across. Inadvertently this almost results in her throwing herself off a cliff a couple of times and falling out with her best friend who accuses her of attention seeking (and flirting with her boyfriend, which she totally was). It’s the BBC though, so it’s alright in the end and by way of a couple of acts of vandalism, the desecration of a graveyard and some fannying around with a skull Anne manages to not only solve the mystery but also permanently put Henry Cookson’s soul to rest. Phew.
It also puts my soul at rest, resolving a twenty-odd year niggling feeling. The Watch House isn’t widely remembered as a classic of it’s genre because it isn’t really very good. This made it considerably harder to re-identify as an adult. After ploughing through encyclopaedias of children’s television and googling ‘haunted museum” and “seaside drama” and anything else I could think of, I ultimately tracked it down. So now at long last, 23 and a half years later, I finally get closure and can confirm closure feels very like being told you’re an idiot and shouldn’t have been so silly in the first place.
