Come Back Lucy: The Strangeness of 1970s Children's TV Drama
- The Time Chair
- Aug 10
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 12
In the early Spring of 1978, the six-part children’s television series, Come Back Lucy was aired for the first time in the UK. The programme was an ATV adaptation by Colin Schindler and Gail Renard of a 1973 short story by Pamela Sykes.
The plot centres on a little girl named Lucy, who lived with her Aunt Olive in an old Victorian house. Following the death of her aunt and the subsequent loss of her home, Lucy is welcomed into her cousins' house, although she doesn’t know them very well and has difficulty fitting in.
The set and costume design of Come Back Lucy is typical of the time. Children’s television dramas often had a Dickensian feel to them and a muted colour scheme containing lots of browns, oranges and greys. The lighting was flat, and the dialogue had a typical grammar school feel to it. Children were often portrayed as middle class pseudo-intellectuals, irrespective of characters' inferred socioeconomic status.
As the story progresses, Lucy is visited by the ghost of a Victorian little girl called Alice who wants Lucy to become her friend, but in addition to the series being a classic Victorian ghost story, there are numerous esoteric elements that make it stick in the memories of those who watched the original broadcast.
If you ever kept the wardrobe door open at bedtime when you were a child, or recall seeing furniture move out of the corner of your eye whilst drifting off to sleep, then there’s a good chance that some of those experiences were fuelled by children’s television dramas in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, content creators didn’t have a problem with scaring the living daylights out of children. In many cases, programmes were produced with the same vigour as adult dramas, and then the cast simply replaced with children. The transitional space of the 'teenager' was only a couple of decades old at the time, and for many the idea was more of an inconvenience than a blessing. You could basically leave school at 16 and be working the next day, and whereas the thought of hard labour at such an age may seem bizarre by today's standards, it was better than how things were in the 1880s when you could leave school at the ripe old age of 10.
In Come Back Lucy, the first unsettling element (aside from the loss of a loved one and eviction) is the way in which the ghost of Alice interacts with Lucy. She appears and communicates (often uninvited) in mirrors and reflective objects. If you were a young child in the late 1970s, you’ll no doubt be familiar with stories such as Alice Through the Looking Glass, and the idea of mirrors being used as symbolic portals between the physical world and other realms. But using something as simple as a mirror as a portal via which ghosts could interact with the physical plane was quite disturbing for many. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, mirrors were dominant features in a lot of houses, and they often had chunky, ornate frames making them difficult to ignore.
As the story unfolds, Lucy discovers that she can move between the present and the past using these portals, and is initially happy to visit Alice, until her new friend becomes increasingly possessive and tries to force her to join her permanently in the 19th century. This supernatural function is alluded to from the outset in the opening titles. A little girl goes into a bathroom to check her hair, sees her reflection in the mirror which then turns to leave but the little girl remains static. When the little girl does turn around, there’s no face beneath the hair. If the trauma that we might experience something similar were we to look into one of our own mirrors wasn’t enough, then a good dose of Freud’s Uncanny was sure to do the trick. Not spooky at all!
The next esoteric element of note, is the concept of infinity. Alice has been dead for over a hundred years and wants to drag Lucy back in time to play with her "for ever." The idea of eternity or infinity has long been the stuff of nightmares for more people than you might think. It was even employed by Stanley Kubrick in the Come Play with Us scene from The Shining, and there’s a word used to describe the fear of eternity which is, Apeirophobia, the thought of an existence which goes on forever.
You can gain some insight into the idea by positioning two mirrors with their reflective surfaces facing each other. This arrangement was available on a large scale in my school's PE wash room. Two facing walls were covered in huge mirrors and I hated washing my hands in there. By positioning my head at just the right angle, I could see down a tunnel of infinity which turned dark green and curved to the left. I also used to imagine what it would look like were I to find myself stuck in a lift with all of its walls, ceiling and floor covered in mirrors, and if you can imagine what might happen to you after you die, picture it just being complete darkness with no end, and when I say no end, I mean, no end. Not for just a year, not even for a million or a billion years. I mean…for ever.
This was Sunday afternoon entertainment for children in 1978. Not long 'til bath time and the smell of Vosene and Dettol!
The next esoteric element of note is time travel. When faced with difficult life experiences such as bereavement or the shock of a rapid change in circumstances as Lucy was, some people will often turn their attention inwards as a means of escape, or create invisible friends or alternate realities to help them cope. When Lucy glances into an old mirror in the attic, she finds herself transported into the house’s history.
In 1970s television drama, the attic was often used as a metaphor for that strange space we occupy between childhood and adolescence when you're thinking is a lot more mature than your physical age, but you don't want grown-ups to know about it yet. That space would go on to be symbolised by gardens in 1980s children’s television drama, but has been presented in numerous forms if you know what you're looking for such as Mr Benn’s changing room, the ladder leading to the cloud at the top of the Magic Faraway tree, the wardrobe leading to Narnia, and the helter-skelter used by Jamie and his Magic Torch to access Cuckoo Land. What makes Come Back Lucy so poignant in this regard, is that mirrors are common, everyday objects, and not simply the reserve of a vivid imagination. They're everywhere and difficult to avoid.
At the climax of the story, Alice manages to lure Lucy out of the house and into a park with a frozen lake. As she walks across the ice, it gives way and Lucy plunges into the cold water with Alice pulling at her legs in an attempt to drag her under. As grown-ups it’s easy to interpret this scene from a purely psychological perspective with Lucy above the ice representing the conscious mind of a child trying to forge their way in a difficult world, and Alice below it symbolic of bad experiences repressed in the subconscious trying to drag them under. I suspect we all have distant memories we'd rather not dwell upon for fear they may be powerful enough to drag us under.
For a young child of the 1970s, some of Lucy's experiences might have been a little too real or close to home for comfort. With little in the way of technology or visual special effects at the time, the primary source of many of our fears was our very own imagination, and content creators at the time were experts at pushing the right buttons to achieve this.
Do you have any esoteric experiences from the 70s or 80s that you are still unable to explain?
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