Its bloody instalments turned provincial towns into places where fear was never far away. 40 years on, it remains one of the creepiest, strangest shows ever shown on British TV
Forty years ago this month, ITV broadcast a children’s birthday party that no one in attendance would forget. As a group of kids gathered on screen for jelly and games, a torrent of brilliant red Kensington gore suddenly came from above, soaking everything and everyone in the room. The look of shock and upset on the faces of the children invites questions as to exactly how much they – or their parents, for that matter – knew about how the scene would unfold. Listening to them crying, it would have surely been less traumatic had the woman playing mother gone up in a blaze while lighting the candles on the cake.
This was not even the climax of The House That Bled to Death, part of British horror studio Hammer’s TV venture, Hammer House of Horror. That would come when the truth about the birthday girl’s duplicitous parents was revealed – and, indeed, they got their reward. But it was this bloody scene that would become, for many, the defining memory of one of the creepiest programmes ever shown on British television.
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