Those Creepy Old Classics

I've got to stop watching all those old US TV shows on various dubious streaming channels I can get via Roku.  I swear to God that until two weeks ago I'd never seen an episode of Mr Ed in my life, yet now I pretty much know the words to the theme song by heart.  Mr Ed, if you didn't know, was a sitcom about a talking horse which was popular in the States in the early sixties.  As it turns out, it is surprisingly weird - and not just because its main character is a horse that talks, (but only to his owner Wilbur).  Not only is Mr Ed himself a bit of a lech, (he's always telling Wilbur about his latest conquests amongst the local population of fillys), but he's also something of a voyeur, frequently wandering out of his stable to peer through neighbours' windows and eavesdrop on their conversations.  I recently caught a particularly bizarre episode from 1962 in which Mr Ed makes threatening phone calls to Clint Eastwood, (who has recently moved into the neighbourhood.  (Clint's stallion has been muscling in on Ed's filly action, so he launches a campaign of harassment to try and get the actor to move away - which includes arranging for Eastwood to share a party line with Wilbur, so that Ed can listen in on - and interrupt - his phone calls).  As I said, it's all pretty weird for what's generally remembered as a lighthearted fantasy sitcom aimed at family audiences.  But that's precisely how the makers got away with some darkly humourous and off-kilter subject matter - they could always shrug off criticisms of its content by pointing out that it was simply a silly sitcom about a talking horse.  A talking horse, however, who is a self-confessed snooper and sex pest.

Unlike Mr Ed, I had previously seen episodes of The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which originally ran for two series between 1968 and 1970.  I sometimes caught it as a kid, when ITV used to run it late afternoon or early evenings in the early seventies.  Seeing episodes, I was surprised by how much about it I had forgotten - that the Captain (the 'Ghost' of the title) had a living relative who featured very prominently in many episodes and that Mrs Muir actually had two young children, not just the one that I remembered.  (Somehow, the years had erased her daughter from my memory).  Derived from a novel via a 1948 film adaptation, (which had starred Rex Harrison as the Captain), the TV series (which updates the story to then contemporary times), is surprisingly dark in many respects.  For one thing, it centres on a male chauvinist mariner who died a century ago having the hots for a young widow and romancing her in spectral form.  In the first episode alone, he physically prevents her and the children from leaving his house (which they have rented from his great nephew), by taking control of her car and steering it back to the house.  Whichever way you look at it, his attentions, no matter how well intentioned they might be, are more than a little bit creepy.  Quite apart from the fact that Mrs Muir has to live with the knowledge that she now lives in a house where she has no privacy, as Captain Gregg's ghost could pop up suddenly any time and any place.  Then there's the matter of his campaign of terror against his great nephew, who the Captain despises and feels is unworthy to bear the family name.  OK, the great nephew is a venal and deceitful creep, but I'm not sure that justifies his late relative's continuous harassment of him.  All pretty disturbing stuff , when you think about it but, like Mr Ed, presented as a family orientated sitcom.  You see, those supposedly cosy old TV classics are as dark and edgy as anything produced nowadays.