An early experience with Psycho II taught me that ‘inappropriate’ viewing is not always what it seems
My parents were having a dinner party and I was allowed to stay up, left unattended in front of the TV. This was long before TV-on-demand, when children’s programming aired only on Saturday mornings and for a few hours after school and, as a result, my memory of what I watched is retrievably sharp. This was the era of Why Don’t You? and Danger Mouse and, going back further, prehistoric-looking Bagpuss and King Rollo, all seared into my brain with the force of the novelty that kids’ TV shows still were. My clearest screen memory, however, aside from an image of Mr Benn that I assume will outlast all others, is those two hours I spent, at the age of nine, alone in front of Psycho II.
Consensus around graphic sex and violence aside, definitions of “unsuitable for children” change with the times, and of course vary hugely according to household. My parents were liberal. I had no bedtime at weekends and, if I stayed very quiet, could often stretch out school nights to past 8pm, in the process grabbing 20 minutes of Dallas or Dynasty. These shows were adult only in the technical sense, their cartoonishness ruining the feeling you were getting something illicit. The news was a bore. Most comedy was incomprehensible. Over the course of my childhood, I remember only two occasions when my mother bolted from her chair to change channel: when a drama about the second world war took a sudden torturey turn; and at the sight – this must’ve been very early Channel 4, surely – of two men kissing.
