Readers of Guy Lyon Playfair's book, 'This House is Haunted', may be surprised at the number of liberties taken with the text in this dramatisation. Not content with unexplained activity that may be a poltergeist, this has young Janet Hodgson (Eleanor Worthington Cox, with just the right mix of wide-eyed innocence and sassy retorts) literally haunted by a nasty-looking old ghost (Struan Rodger!) who, when he deigns to speak via a medium (Amanda Lawrence) reveals himself as a paedophile. No wonder the name of the 'entity' or 'voice' was changed from former resident Bill Wilkins to a fictitious 'Joe Watson'. We get the presumed message about paedophiles being the new demons/bogeymen, but it feels here like a ham-fisted and unnecessary add-on. Wouldn't it be terrifying enough to have endless knocking, ambulant furniture and an aggressive force in your house?
Suspected hauntings in reality don't lend themselves to drama - the supernatural by definition is nothing if not unpredictable and inconsistent - so it's an odd choice to dramatise for TV in an era when the audience is thoroughly jaded with cheap thrills and has no patience with a slow build of tension. Timothy Spall plays Maurice Grosse, an SPR investigator still grieving the loss of his daughter, also called Janet, the previous year. In 1977, Grosse was called by the SPR and assigned to the case of the single-parent Hodgson family, suffering knocks, moving objects and other strange phenomena in their modest home in Enfield. The activities seemed to centre on Janet, the younger daughter, who was soon to reach both secondary school and the menarch, and while Grosse, Guy Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen), journalists, neighbours, police, a medium and other SPR members witnessed or experienced things, they also realised that the children were, at least some of the time, guilty of mischief.
The tone of the drama follows that of the book, in portraying this as one of the most inexplicable series of events ever recorded, and well recorded it was, despite the mysterious power drains and corruption of media that, we hear, are frequent occurrences in similar investigations. It isn't relevant to draw conclusions from a drama, of-course, but we can't help but think that this isn't going to convince sceptics that something repeatedly went bump in the night in Enfield. By using the same cinematic tricks used in countless horror films, it appears more like a tall story than the perplexing and troubling case that it was.
