Behind the Couch

Armchair Thriller was a British television series, broadcast on ITV by Thames in 1978 and 1980. It was essentially a horror/supernatural orientated anthology series that specialised in adapting various spooky novels and stories. It consisted of two weekly 25 minute episodes, usually screened at 8pm on a Tuesday and Thursday evening. I’m too young to remember it, but a recent conversation with several ( ever so slightly) older friends alerted me to one particular episode of the series entitled Quiet as a Nun … Adapted from the 1977 novel of the same name by Antonia Fraser, Quiet as a Nun was a six part dramatisation revolving around Fraser's regular sleuth Jemima Shore, who revisits the convent where she was schooled following the mysterious death of one of the nuns. The nun, Sister Miriam, was a former friend of Jemima’s and she apparently starved herself to death in a ruined tower in the grounds of the convent. Jemima soon learns from the girls at the convent about a myste...

As you may or may not be aware, this blog takes its name from a phrase in popular culture that apparently originated from commentary on Doctor Who – namely the actions taken by younger viewers being frightened by episodes of the show - particularly during the 1970s. According to Sam Leith, who wrote an article titled ‘Worshipping Doctor Who from behind the sofa’, the cliché that Doctor Who had us ‘hiding behind the couch’ whilst watching it – ‘is more telling in its tone than its questionable factuality. It connotes nostalgia and a pleasurable mixture of fright and fascination - but above all it connotes domesticity. It united fear and soft furnishings in the British mind.’ Apparently The Economist actually went so far as to present this notion of "hiding behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear" as a British cultural institution on an equal par with Bovril and ‘tea-time’. Indeed, the phrase is so strongly associated with Doctor Who in the UK, that in 1991 the Museum ...