Overview
- The one‑off aired on BBC One on October 31, 1992 at 9:25 p.m., drew about 11 million viewers, and has not been shown in full on British television since.
- Presented like a live investigation despite being billed as drama, it featured Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles appearing as themselves.
- BBC switchboards were later estimated to have received around one million calls, with roughly 30,000 complaints filed after the transmission.
- The Broadcasting Standards Commission said the programme intentionally fostered “a sense of menace” and deemed it excessively distressing, imposing a 10‑year repeat ban and leaving it credited with shaping later found‑footage horror.
- A 1994 British Medical Journal report linked the broadcast to PTSD in two children, while a complaint connecting it to a teenager’s suicide was not upheld by the regulator now known as Ofcom.