There has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children’s television and literature of the late C20th. In particular, the 1970s and 1980s are seen as decades that shaped a great deal of our contemporary cultural landscape. Television of this period dominated the world of childhood entertainment, drawing freely upon literature and popular culture, and much of it continues to resonate powerfully with the generation of cultural producers (fiction writers, screenwriters, directors, musicians and artists) that grew up watching the weird, the eerie and the horrific.
The proposed symposium aims to go beyond mere nostalgia and investigate the influence of the often ‘strange’ material that featured so prominently as part of the common currency of childhood experience in these years. One starting point will be the work of Mark Fisher, who identifies the weird and eerie as culturally significant in that ‘they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside’ (2016).
