Singing, Ringing...

My old friend Maddie Grigg, whose excellent blog 'The World From My Window' inhabits a Dorset village somewhere between Dibley and Royston Vaysey, asked for this.
It's a piece about the TV programme The Singing Ringing Tree, which was probably the most frightening thing ever to appear on TV.

I WAS never really that scared of Doctor Who.
I never watched episodes from behind the sofa.
I never peeked out from between my fingers at the Daleks or the cybermen.
There was one, in which people in cars were suffocated by some horrible expanding plastic dolls, which caused me a few moments of concern.
But, on the whole, I was all right with the Doctor.
However, somewhere back in my memory I knew there was a programme which had been bothering me for many, many years.
I occasionally had flashbacks to a land of brilliant colours and strange noises. There was a white horse with antlers there, and a giant golden fish with rolling eyes.
It sounded like something from the darker recesses of chemical-induced psychedelia, but I was at Hayes Road at the time and not in Haight-Astbury, so it can’t have been that.
It started to come back to me during an episode of the Fast Show, in which Charlie Higson dressed as a medieval prince and crossed a bridge into a magic kingdom.
As he stepped on the bridge, it played Gary Numan’s Cars.
And so it came back in a blinding flash.
The most frightening television programme of my childhood, in fact of my entire life, was The Singing Ringing Tree.
You may remember it.
It was made in 1957 in what was then known as East Germany, and had the first of its countless showings in Britain in 1964.
For some reason, presumably some film stock that had been left out in the sun for a while, all the colours were extremely bright, with great watercolour washes all over the scenery.
The characters all spoke in German, naturally, but instead of dubbing them into English, the BBC had a narrator speak over the German voices.
The story concerned a prince who set out to get the singing, ringing tree to impress a beautiful but selfish princess, but fell foul of a vertically-challenged gentleman in the magic kingdom where it grew.
He got turned into a bear, and then the princess learned the error of her ways by being nice to the animals in the magic kingdom and, after a battle with the vertically-challenged gentleman, they and their tree lived happily ever after.
As simple as that.
The antlered horse and the big fish came in at this point, by the way.
I know all this because I recently saw The Singing Ringing Tree on video, thanks to my mate Patrick.
He came into the office the other day and said he had a video which might interest me.
His wife, he said, had banned his children from watching it because it was too frightening.
It wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to see in the house.
Would I like to see it, he whispered conspiratorially?
My mind boggled. What manner of video nasty could this be? Something with chainsaws and cannibals? Flesh-Eating Cheerleader Zombies III?
No, it was the Singing Ringing Tree, and yesterday I was terrified all over again as the story unfolded.
You see, it isn’t so much the ghastly colours and the hideous creatures.
It wasn’t even the state-of-the-art special effects of the chilling prince-to-bear transformation, or the shocking fiery demise of the vertically-challenged gentleman at the end.
It was the sound.
Every step on the bridge sounded like a Dan Hawkins power chord, and odd wibbly noises in the background gave way unpredictably every now and then to jarring, shuddering orchestra noises.
Sweat
My palms were sweating long before the princess walked through the flames to embrace the tree and the bear was transformed back into a prince once more.
By the time the credits rolled at the end, I was like a damp rag.
The Singing Ringing Tree belongs to an age when the BBC bought in cheap foreign films and hacked them into episode lengths for the daytime TV schedules.
And they got their money’s worth out of it.
Every time you switched on the TV during the day back then, it seemed to be on.
Mention it to anyone in their 40s and they will remember it. They may even burst into tears and demand counselling.
They certainly don’t make ’em like that any more.