Less of a blog today, and far more of a plea for the memories of those that read this that are in their late 20s to early 30s. Should you fall outside of this category, don’t worry, you may still read on without fear, but let me warn you that I am about to describe something that scarred my childhood memory quite harshly and I reach out to those who may also remember this to help. There were a number of things on children’s TV that damaged me as a kid. Back in the days when TV wasn’t so scared it might offend every person on the planet with every thing it said, it used to take serious risks, and most of those were with CITV and CBBC where the viewers were young enough for any off key or askew concept to be lodged in their minds forever more. Key examples of this were the series of ghost stories for kids shown on ITV one, in particular the one about the boy who had an evil version of himself living in his mirror. This show single handedly made sure that from the ages of 8 to about 10, I never looked in a mirror again unless someone else was near me. The story had the boy smash the mirror only to find himself trapped inside it and his evil version roam around with glass eyes. SERIOUSLY? WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING CITV? I WAS ONLY 8! Horrible times.
But that isn’t the one that really bothered me. I had managed to suppress this memory for many years until talking to L last night about her friend getting a contact lens trapped behind his eye. I don’t like things to do with eyes. The thought of anything getting trapped in, on, or even by my eye (not sure how this would work) sends shivers down my spine. It was hard enough watching Arnie fork his own eye out as the Terminator and he was a robot, so it has led to me actively avoid films like Wolf Creek where I know nastier eye damage occurs. So, getting back on track, there was a show on kid’s TV many years ago – it might have been CBBC or CITV, I’m not sure – based on the premise of True or False. That may have even been what it was called, or FoT or something like that, I honestly can’t remember. All I know is that it was a magazine show whereby it would show a series of weird happenings from around the world and you would guess if they were True or False. At the end of the show, it would tell you whether you the answers and nine times out of ten, you were easily right.
I quite enjoyed this show. It made me feel like I was extremely clever, being able to tell that dogs don’t have two heads or other banal oddness, but then one show, one day, made me never watch it again. One this episode, a small girl had problems with her eye. She was getting eye pains, and her vision had gone blurry and purple. Doctors did an x-ray to find a lump behind her eye and when they went to remove it, they discovered it was a baked bean. Bonkers right? No way is that frikkin’ true right? I mean, how vigourously do you have to be eating baked beans for that to happen? So it must be false right. NO! NO! The program said it was true! Not only did it say it was true but it in no way said how it happened or how you might prevent it happening, it just left the conclusion hovering in my child’s brain to go over again and again while it smugly knew it had beaten children’s ability to guess what was false and what was true ever again. Do you know how long it took me to eat baked beans ever again? Years. Years and years.
And now, my biggest problem is that I can’t find out anything about it online. Except for someone else who remembers it which you can see at the bottom of these forum posts here by somebody called Sun Ray II:
So I call out to you blogees. Do any of you remember this? Please cease the endless questioning in my mind as to whether or not the telly lied to us or if this girl really did have a single baked bean behind her peepers? Only you can help.
In other news, I made this:
