Are they just as you remember them back in 1994? The cast of My So-Called Life. Photograph: Rex Features
A friend of mine was trawling Amazon recently, when he made an exciting discovery. Dark Season on DVD. This was a children's television programme, written by a pre-Dr Who Russell T Davies, a strange and rather sinister show that we both remembered being hooked on as kids. He was about to order it, but then had second thoughts, and I'm rather glad he did.
The programme had been the source of more than one wine-fuelled nostalgic conversation between us, where we'd tried to recall various plot points. There was something about computers, we thought, and Nazis - there were definitely Nazis - plus some kind of evil machine that was buried under the school. To have the whole thing suddenly there for our viewing pleasure, though - well, it just seemed too easy. What if we watched it and realised it wasn't as brilliant as we'd once thought? What if it only disappointed us?
Dark Season is in fact one of several unsettling children's television shows that, for various reasons, have left an imprint on my memory. There was Century Falls, another one by Davies, of which I remember barely anything, only that it was very, very creepy indeed. Ditto the adaptation of Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knowe, little snippets of which have branded themselves on my brain, and Moondial, with its shifts in time, eerie music and ghostly children. The ropey special effects and, I suspect, ropier acting, may have been forgotten, but it's the sensation of being genuinely unnerved and excited that remains.
It's not just hide-behind-the-sofa telly where this applies. Steven Moffat's Press Gang is one of those programmes that tend to crop up when people my age wax nostalgic about classic children's TV. And indeed, it was a cut above - it played games with story and episode structure and it treated its audience with intelligence. And that's how I want to remember it, as something a little subversive and strange. I don't think I want to watch it again and discover that, while it was undeniably smart and superior kids' TV, it was still, essentially, kids' TV.
Even something like the Claire Danes-starring My So-Called Life: at the time it was broadcast I remember thinking it was one of the Best Things Ever and I was bitterly disappointed when it was axed after one season, leaving the central unrequited relationship unresolved. But friends who have purchased it and rewatched it now report back that it is, well, quite good, OK, just not quite as wonderful as we'd once thought.
There seems to be a trend, certainly among my friends and peers, of buying and rewatching the television programmes of our formative years, now that we can, now that they're there, available, all nicely boxed up, but while I understand the desire to revisit these things, I also think the transience of television is sometimes part of its appeal. You'd watch a show after school and talk about the next day and, unless you'd had the foresight to set the video, that was it - it would be gone (at least until it was repeated).
The internet and DVDs give us the ability to seek out and watch pretty much anything. But some programmes are best left alone. They occupied a certain place in our lives, served a certain purpose at the time, and that's where they should be left.
