 Starring: Andrew Ellams, James Hazeldine, Carol Drinkwater, Glynis Brooks, Annabel Worrell
Director: Vic Hughes
Year Of Release: 1984-1986
Plot: Based on John Wyndham's novel, Chocky follows young Matthew Gore who is chosen by a strange alien visitor to be a source of information about Earth. The alien communicates directly with Matthew’s mind, which leads his family to think he’s got an imaginary friend. However things escalate to the point where is almost seems Matthew is being driven mad, while a shadowy organisation plot to get access to the knowledge Matthew now has available to him. |
Boy did the TV series Chocky absolutely terrify me when it was first shown on ITV in the mid-80s. While other British kids hid behind the sofa from the Daleks in Doctor Who, for me it was the show based on John Wyndham’s novel about an alien intelligence called Chocky that speaks directly into a young boy’s mind. It literally left me with nightmares (although for some reason I couldn’t stop watching it). To be honest, I was only five at the time, so it’s perhaps not surprising it scared me, but it’s the only thing that terrified me as a youngster where the fear has stayed with me into adulthood.
Despite the fact it hasn’t been shown on TV for decades, just the mention of the word ‘Chocky’ is enough to have me looking around in wide-eyed fear. It’s utterly irrational, but the show had such a profound impact on me when it was first shown that any later thought of it is unsettling. As the years passed, I could hardly remember what the plot was, but the fear remained.
It was, and is, utterly irrational, so I suppose I suffer from a phobia of my very own, which shall henceforth be known as Chocky-o-phobia. Sufferers are likely to get an unexplained creepy feeling in their spine whenever the word ‘Chocky’ is uttered, as well as a tendency to run for the hills if they ever hear the strange, synthesised theme music – not to mention that they’ll to scream if they ever hear a disembodied voice claiming to be an alien, which thankfully has never happened to me.
When the three Chocky series (Chocky, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge) came to DVD in the UK in 2002 I bought all of them, attracted by the strange lure of something that had scared me as a child. I then proceeded not to watch them for the next three years.
They sat on my shelf feeling unloved for a couple of reasons. The first was the lingering sense of fear from my youth. Something inside me just didn’t want to be exposed to Chocky again, even though I knew that 20 years had passed and what scared me when I was five was unlikely to have the same effect nearly two decades later. However there was also a converse reason. What if I watched it and it was rubbish?
Chocky has held such an odd power over me that I don’t think I could have stood it if I watched it 20 years later and it turned out to be awful. So many shows that seem great when you’re young turn out to be dreadful when you watch them through older, more jaundiced eyes, and half of me didn’t want to watch Chocky again in case it destroyed that sense of creeped-out-ness, and revealed that I was indeed just being an idiot.
However, eventually I got over myself and watched the Chocky trilogy. While the second and third series aren’t very good, I was immensely relieved to find the first still had me cowering behind a cushion. Watching it again I suddenly realised why it had terrified me when I was youngster.
Both the TV series and John Wyndham’s original novel are basically about a child on the verge of adolescence having a schizophrenic breakdown. While it’s presented to us as if the alien Chocky is real, there’s no actual proof. It’s essentially a boy hearing voices in his head that nobody else can hear (for the first three episodes we can’t understand Chocky either, as it’s just a strange electronic sound), which causes a major, sudden personality change and results in crisis for all those involved and the near breakdown of a family. If in the early 80s, ET was about how nice it would be for a kid to find an alien, Chocky was more about the existential crises it would throw you into and the problems of trying to communicate with an intelligence radically different from your own.
The boy, Matthew, is utterly freaked out and confused by what’s going. He’s convinced the voice is real, while his parents believe he’s going mad and don’t know what to do. At first Chocky is constantly mocking Earth for its primitive and pointless ideas, taunting Matthew and upsetting him (largely because it doesn’t understand how humans work), so he ends up depressed, confused and has uncontrolled tantrums. This is probably the scariest aspect of the show, when you have a child screaming because of a laughing, mocking voice in his head that no one else can hear, and parents with no clue how to deal with it or even communicate with their child about what’s going on.
The series plays with the fine line between whether Matthew really is in contact with a great intelligence, or if he’s simply going nuts. And even if Chocky is real, there’s a good chance it could inadvertently send Matthew insane anyway. It a rare case of a story where the problem isn’t whether an alien is good or bad, but whether its lack of knowledge about humanity might destroy the person its communicating with both mentally and physically. It’s not a happy, jolly children’s TV show, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing they make nowadays.
Chocky also does a couple of other clever things. The first is to play with an idea that’s always scary to a child, which is that a parent might stop loving you. Matthew is adopted and his mother has a hard time dealing with the presence of Chocky. While she never actually stops loving her son, she often seems on the verge of giving up on him, because she can’t handle what’s going on. The other thing the series does is to turn the normal logic of what’s good and bad on its head.
Matthew is granted new abilities, such as the being taught how to paint. However rather that his powers being presented as positive things, it largely causes a lot of suffering, confusion and upset, as Matthew tries to work out what’s going on and what it means. It’s more what would happen if you really turned into a superhero, where you wouldn’t immediately start fighting crime, as you’d be too panicked about what the hell was going on.
Chocky is a pretty dark story that just keeps getting worse and worse and stranger and stranger. Everything that the main character feels is certain about their world is slowly destroyed, as his family disintegrates and Matthew’s sense of self is thrown into chaos. It is basically about a schizophrenic break, with the only difference being that Matthew’s voice in his head is real. Thinking about it now, I think I’m lucky it just scared me as a five year old and didn’t send me straight into therapy.
I can’t think of any other children’s TV series quite like it, as it’s difficult to imagine many television executives greenlighting a series about a 12-year-old boy having a schizoid breakdown. It’s just a shame the follow-up series, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge, don’t follow that through and instead are fairly generic stories, with a far simpler sense of good and bad, and more of the ET sense of how jolly nice it is to have an alien chum to help you get out trouble.
Now I’ve tried to justify why I suffer from Chocky-o-phobia and attempted to suggest that while it is irrational, at least it is very disturbing children’s programming, I can’t help wonder if I’m the only one who suffers from this condition. I realise there’s a very narrow band of potential victims, as you’d have needed to have been between about 4 and 8 year old in 1984 when the series was first shown, because otherwise it’s unlikely to have had the same effect on you. However I find it difficult to imagine there aren’t at least a few other people out there who eyes irrationally widen at the very thought of Chocky.
And while Chocky is my personal phobia, are there other shows or films that people watched at a particularly impressionable young age, which still scares them now as an adult even though they know as a grown-up the fear is irrational? I’d love to hear from fellow Chocky-o-phobia sufferers and those who have other kids’ shows that still creep them out. So if you do, let everyone know in the comments below (we promise not to laugh at you – well, maybe a little bit, but we promise not to mock you too much, especially as a voice only you can hear).
By the way, while the three Chocky series aren't currently available on DVD in the UK, the first series - which is the only one you need to bother with - is getting re-released on March 22nd, 2010 through Revelation Films.
TIM ISAAC
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