Video Nasty

The Long List Goodnight

Video Nasty
BBC
Six Episodes
Ireland/UK/Germany
January 8th 2025 2024

A short shout out to Video Nasty, an interesting show which kinda passed everyone by at the start of the year.

Two friends, Billy (Justin Daniels Anene) and Con (Cal O'Driscoll) are school kids in Ireland in the early 1980s. As anyone interested in film will know, this was the time of the tabloid dubbed ‘video nasties’, when a list of titles was being used by the police to seize and confiscate said items as people were getting fined, prosecuted and even jailed for renting out certain tapes on an official list deemed harmful to the general public (I’m still ashamed of my country for this period, read more here and here). So Billy and Con are collecting these through the ‘back of a van’ black market (ahhh... the days where you could rent any tapes from the back of a van... this brought back memories) and they have almost put together a full, pristine set of the 72 banned titles on the main list. The opening of the show sees them buying their 71st tape, Nightmares In A Damaged Brain (as it was known over here, review coming at some point)... with Billy, having been in pen pal mode with a girl in England called FangoriaFanGirl (ahh... the days of the original Fangoria), setting up a trip to England to meet up and exchange tapes.

The object being that once the lads get their last tape on the list, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (or Nightmare Maker, as I think it was known in the UK), they can sell the collection for a tidy sum. So they and Con’s sister Zoe (Leia Murphy) run away from home for a bit, having problems of their own back there anyway... and get to England, only to find the girl has been murdered with a power drill and a sinister conspiracy within the village is at work. Can they escape from their twisted Christian captors and their Mary Whitehouse style mantra with their lives and clear their own names of the murder... and can their parents find them in time?

Okay, so I appreciate that someone has even done something themed around the censorious evil of the video nasty witchhunt campaign but, I have to admit, I’d have wanted something, perhaps, a little less subtle than what we get here. I mean, the acting is very strong with all the main and supporting cast and, also, the research is mostly good (Severin films in America supplied some of the footage/tapes and advice, I believe although, apparently the sleeve on the Nightmare Maker tape has slightly different packaging to the original, first generation pre-certificate version)...  but the main story could easily be a stand alone, cautionary tale with any other conceptual window dressing, it seems to me.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that, although there is the proper judgement made on the ‘humanistically challenged’ aka nutters who tried to ban these so-called ‘dangerous films’ (95% of which can now be bought in a bricks and mortar store in the UK with no cuts, nowadays), it all feels like almost an afterthought and, though it ticks certain boxes for the people who remember those dark days, it just feels like more emphasis and enlightenment about why this happened at the time and how wrong it was (and still is, in the case of films like The New York Ripper, which is still censored in its useless UK edition) to have gone through this exercise in the first place.

Everything feels like the writing is just holding back too much. There’s a line one of the characters says in terms of the nature of the predicament they find themselves in, where he’s alluding to the fact that they don’t know if they’re dealing with just one psychotic family or a whole village conspiracy, where he says “We don’t know if we’re in Texas Chainsaw or Wicker Man here.” And while I appreciate the terms in which that sentiment has been couched, I can’t quite feel like it’s a little on the nose in some ways because, as I watched the drama play out for six, half hour episodes, it did feel like I was watching a group of characters from Grange Hill walking into a cast of characters from The Wicker Man. And while I was certainly rooting for the main group of kids... I didn’t really care too much about what would happen to them by the end of the show. Live or die, I wasn’t fussed... everyone had their own shades of grey and I just wasn’t invested in them. And the last scene of the show seemed a little ludicrous too... possibly an homage to a certain style of film but, honestly, a kind of hollow threat of a possible sequel rather than anything I could be bothered with, truth be told. Not the BBCs finest hour, I would say so... yeah, nothing much to see here.