Scare their pants off “Confessions from a Haunted House (1979)”

CONFESSIONS FROM A HAUNTED HOUSE
By Timothy Lea (Christopher Wood)
Published 1979 by Futura Publications
RRP 75p

“More gripping than The Exorcist, funnier than Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”


Despite by 1979 the Confessions films and books having been in limbo for two years, Christopher Wood decided it was time to crank another one out….. and write a book as well. With both the authorized and unauthorized books using up just about every occupation theme going, arguably jumping the shark with Confessions of an Astronaut, Wood decided to drop his characters into a horror film context. Well if haunted houses were good enough for Frankie Howerd, The Three Stooges, Bob and Bing, Martin and Lewis and various other comedy acts its good enough for Sid Noggett and Timmy Lea.

Haunted House actually comes across like a sexed up version of the Sid James/Kenneth Connor film What A Carve Up, along with elements of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which gets referenced a few times. Ironically the nearest British Sex comedies ever got to haunted house territory was rival series’ Adventures of a Private Eye, there are ahem similarities there as well.

The book begins with what looks like the end of the Sid/Timmy relationship, after Timmy puts a spanner in the works of Sid’s latest scheme when ogling a woman undressing causes a fridge to land of top of Sid’s beloved van. Enter American Harper Deneuve, an obscure relative of the Lea family who has arrived in Britain to claim her estate and inherence, after her father Septimus Deneuve fell from a cliff, or was he pushed? Being an American tourist Harper tends to say “Gee” a lot as well as things like “this is really Dickensian. I gotta to take a picture of this for the folks back home”. A reading of the will revels she’ll have to spend seven nights in Grimstark Manor, the ancestral home located on windswept dart moor, to receive the family fortune and the Manor. The smell of money means Sid is more than willing to accompany her, while Timmy tags along because… well early on in the book its established that due to a complex family tree Timmy and Harper aren’t blood relatives thus leaving our hero guilt free thoughts about Harper’s “shapely breasts”.

With the knowledge that the film series was probably gone for good Wood throws in some action set pieces that would have certainly stretched Columbia Pictures’ budget including two explosions in the opening chapters and a Van hanging off the edge of a cliff in a scenario straight out of The Italian Job. Once we reach Grimstark Manor, Wood gleefully piles on the horror clichés, the local pub “The Cock Inn” is full of superstitious villagers who wont refer to the Manor by name, snakes are hidden in beds, hairy hands emerge from walls, pseudo headless ghosts (predictably inspiring a giving head joke) make an appearance, and moaning rings throughout the manor at night “clearly a soul in torment or somebody listening to Des O’ Connor crooning”. With Sid suffering delusions of grandeur and playing lord of the manor, its left to Timmy to cotton that one of the staff is out to bump off Harper. Could the killer be horse riding posh bird Fiona Frenzy, Festering the Butler, Fanny the Undermaid or maybe even the ghost of Mad Black Jack Deneuve, the evil squire who went over the cliff cursing his family line.

While the setting maybe noticeably different the psychical comedy plays out as you expect, hence people shagging away till beds collapse, naked people falling into cow muck, Sid losing his trousers in quicksand, Sid losing his trousers in the moat. The book also sticks closely to the Confessions template with Harper being idolized as Timmy’s Miss Right/potential steady girlfriend, similar to the characters Linda Hayden and Lynda Bellingham play in the films. Thus giving him slight twinges of guilt when he pursues/is pursued by every other female character in the book. The important word in the last sentence is “slight”.

Much as the Confession films make you question if Robin Askwith isn’t just playing himself, especially given that elements of the Timmy Lea character crop up in his other films (Queen Kong, Horror Hospital etc). The books have you wondering how much of Christopher Wood’s personality is in the character, having documented them for the best part of a decade he writes about Sid and Timmy like two close friends. Sid the would be con man, who always ends up turned into a psychopathic nervous wreck by his accident prone brother in law and Timmy the trouser dropping, carnal klutz who can’t meet a female character without passing on to readers descriptions like “a lot of bum housed in riding jodhpurs” and “pert little knockers”. Writer/character comparisons are also inevitable given that these are novels credited to “Timothy Lea” rather than “Christopher Wood”, and are written from that first person perspective. Thus allowing Wood the very in character trait of congratulating himself whenever he finds a long or poetic word to describe something “good word, eh”, “another impressive word”.

Here’s an example “I thought Sid had gone into a Catatonic Shock, look it up, if you buy a class read you must expect to do a little work to get the most out of it”. There is quite a lot of that in Confessions from a Haunted House, which could of course be interpreted as a writer showing contempt for a perceived low-IQ readership, but most of the time it comes across as lighthearted jibes, with Wood’s writing not being saved from self parody either “nothing seems to flow. All the polish and wit, the subtle phraseology, the brilliantly realized descriptions, all up the spout”. What impresses most is less his command of the English language and more the mind bogglingly endless amount of sexual euphemisms most of which you swear our man was making up. Hampton Court, Marquis of Lorne, Her Top Bollocks, Bulging Grumble, ready to play in a heavy BBC 2 drama (?) and other expressions that don’t have there own Wikipedia pages. There also the type of product cross referencing that David Sullivan would approve of “Poor Sid, I did feel sorry for him. Especially after what that stupid nurse did. Rosie Dixon I think she was called”. Upon its release the retail price for this was 75p, don’t let people tell you the prices of these things don’t increase with age, I recently paid 88p for it.

Text: Gavcrimson 2006
E-mail: [email protected]