I was very lucky to grow up in a house with digital TV from a young age. Not many other kids I grew up with had it, so whenever I mentioned the shows I’d seen to folk at school, I was either regarded as a wizard or a liar. I still remember telling one kid there was an entire channel that played nothing but music videos, which made him cry before running to tell the teacher what I’d said. I had to apologise to him and tell him that I’d made it all up so he’d settle down. This particular kid has since gone on to turn his social media accounts into rolling news networks on “snowflake” culture and how kids are too pampered these days, and every time he does I just want to remind him and his followers of the time I was forced to lie through my fucking teeth about the existence of an entire media platform because the concept of digital television scared him to the point of tears. Fucking scrub.
I did have interests outside of making up television stations to scare my classmates, for example I had a habit of flicking back and forth between Living TV, Bravo, and the Sci-Fi Channel almost every evening before bed, because this specific timeframe would be when all the shows about aliens and ghosts would air. I loved things about aliens and ghosts when I was a kid, and admittedly not much has changed since then, but this whole new frontier of entertainment was just what I needed to feed my appetite in those early years. Like anyone with an interest in ghouls and specters with access to Living TV in the late 90s early 00s in the UK, I watched a lot of Most Haunted. It’s laughable now sure, but as a susceptible little punk this was grade A television. I think I started to cotton on to how bullshit it was after watching my first live broadcast of it, and in all honesty even before then Derek Acorah had been testing my limits of belief, but I stuck around because that intro music was fuckin’ gravy. My grandma thought he was great. She bought his biography and everything. I read a bit of it. I think he might’ve used a ghost writer.
Over on the Sci-Fi Channel though was the real crowning jewel of the pre-bedtime spookathon – Beyond Belief : Fact or Fiction. Beyond Belief, a sort’ve hybrid of Unsolved Mysteries and The Twilight Zone, was an anthology series with a tantalising twist; it would feature five or so stories about all manner of eerie goings on, which you then had to decipher which were either fact or fiction. If you were ever able to correctly guess every story in one episode then chances are you’re a worse liar than me telling my classmates about MTV, because there was absolutely no way you could use any form of intuitive thinking to figure out the correct answers. The stories featured on the show would either be urban legends re-skinned or totally new tales by the show’s writers if fiction, whereas the “true” tales were “researched” by author Robert Tralins. Robert gained fame by publishing the memoirs of a Miami madame who wished to release a tell-all book of her rich and powerful clients following a raid on her bordello in the 60s, and as well as this he wrote over 250 books ranging from James Bond knock-offs to sci-fi to romance novels. He was also the researcher on a similar show, Miracles and Other Wonders, which was Beyond Belief but for good, God-fearing folk.
Tralins’ credentials should certainly leave you questioning the legitimacy of the truthful stories, because where we read “research”, it should read “found in a newspaper”. If your immediate question is “what newspapers?” then congratulations, you’ve found the first crack in the paintwork. I would like to bring forward some of the stories Tralins passed off as stories of factual basis:
· A ghost in a mirror scaring off a house intruder
· A plant ratting on a murderer to the police
· A dead woman e-mailing her lawyers to stop a stranger stealing her inheritance
Now you’ve got to wonder to yourself… what kind’ve newspaper would print this kind’ve story as fact to begin with?
Even the presenters are sketchy on the details, often simplifying the sources in vague statements such as “this actually happened to a woman in Texas”, or “this took place sometime in the 1930s”. The voiceover would occasionally add a little more information at the end of the show, though it usually consisted of a quick mention that stories X and Y were sourced from some unnamed newspaper printed somewhere in a state of America.
Does it matter though? Absolute not. While I might’ve been willing to believe many of the stories when I was younger simply because I hadn’t quite figured out yet that television was a small box of lies that would feed me any old bullshit to ensure I stuck around long enough for their sponsors to target me, I’m still able to watch and enjoy Beyond Belief as an adult even after I have become jaded and distrusting of all information I am fed during the fake news climate. The stories were entertaining well before a title of “fact” or “fiction” were slapped onto them and they continue to be just that; the addition of claiming which are real or not was always just a lovely added bonus to help Beyond Belief stand out against other anthology series. The stories are never quite as gripping as The Twilight Zone, nor are they as thrilling as Tales from the Crypt, but their flea circus illusion tactics presented with the moral tale of questioning what we perceive to be real gave it the essential features it needed in order to fend for itself as essential guilty pleasure TV viewing.
Now let’s talk presenters. Beyond Belief featured two presenters in its four season run, as well as two voiceovers. The original host and narration duo were James Brolin and Don LaFontaine, one of which you make recognise as the husband of Barbara Streisand and father of Josh Brolin, while the other you may recognise by his voice rather than his name. That would be Mr LaFotaine (he wasn’t going to be the father of Josh Brolin, was he?). A legend in the world of voiceover work, he is the creator of the much loved phrase “in a world…” which he used in almost all of his movie trailer work, as well as the “don’t try this at home” bumper for the WWE. Brolin stuck around for one season of the show, however the following year another face synonymous with Sci-Fi would take the reins…
From season two until its eventual cancellation, Jonathan Frakes was the face of Beyond Belief, while Don would remain the voice up until the final season, when Campbell Lane stepped in on voice over duties. But those two seasons with Frakes and LaFontaine, those were the powerhouse years. No disrespect to Brolin, but Frakes just had that certain kind’ve aura that came with him onto the set. As he wrapped up each story of the night, he’d make sure to drop a pun relating both to an element of the story and the search for the truth, followed by the grin.
That’s it. That’s the grin. It’s the grin that represents the peak levels of suave and smugness Frakes is able to harness. Ever wonder why your mum would let you watch TNG on an evening despite how much your dad complained how he’d been at work all day and didn’t want to watch fucking sci-fi? Well this is the grin that ensured she had your back. The power word of every mother of the 90s was “Riker”.
So what made the stories so good? Well they all centered around the paranormal and the mysterious, generally the idea being that each story could be explained by powerful unknown forces or spirits from beyond the grave. One of the standout stories is the first tale of the first episode, the previously mentioned ghost in the mirror. It’s a bolt right out of the gate for the series, and has a level of horror well beyond the usual mystical tone the other episodes tend to go for. Other tales you may recognise as famous urban legends, which may cause outrage when guessing the truth from the fiction as a story listed as bogus on Snopes.com is very likely to turn up as “true” without worries of internet sleuths calling their bluff. Beyond Belief hails from a time when computers had only just begun to creep into the home of the average Joe, and as such it was distrusted and viewed as some sort of magic device that could not be feasibly explained to the general public, which lead to a number of “spooky” computer-based stories turning up on the show. It was a simpler time.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and the same can be said for Beyond Belief. Following sporadic and unpredictable airdates, with months between some episodes and years between seasons, viewership numbers had dwindled and by 2002 the series was cancelled. Admittedly the stories during this final season had begun to drop in quality also, however as the stories were never exactly top quality television drama to begin with this had never been a concern to the diehard fans who were no doubt surprised to see it go despite the programming issues.
That is not to say it has gone for good, as the cult-like fans have dared to show us as recently as November 2018, when two new episodes were produced in Germany under the title X-Factor: Das Unfassbare kehrt zurück, in honour of the show’s 20th anniversary since its original broadcast date in Germany, where it was re-named X-Factor for some reason. The Germans were so stoked on Beyond Belief in fact, that series three and four broadcast prior to America’s own premier broadcast of the show, and they even got their own unique title sequence for the final season. Beyond this, the show also lives on in spirit via an on-going podcast entitled simply the Beyond Belief Podcast, as well as the folk at Youtube’s Top10Archive channel featuring a Fact or Fiction series which works in a similar vein. As well as that, Beyond Belief lives on via streaming services such as Amazon Prime, and the UK’s Channel 4’s streaming site.
So Beyond Belief may not have been the best show of the 90s, and it may not be the best paranormal or anthology show, but something tells me nobody on board making it ever saw it as a contender for any sort’ve crowning title. What it was was TV entertainment at its finest, a show that simply existed because somebody somewhere had a neat idea to tell a bunch of weird and spooky stories, and then try and get the audience to guess which were real and which were not. What’s helped Beyond Belief stay in the minds of many like myself though is that this idea was such a unique and engaging gimmick, and that it still has not been replicated again to this day, which may be due to how of its time the show was. Airing on the cusp of the technological age and before distrust and paranoia didn’t quite grip the world as it does today, Beyond Belief was able to squeeze those last few morsels of mystery out of life before we had the mask pulled away to reveal the stone hard reality underneath it all. You didn’t need to believe in ghosts and magic to enjoy the show, you simply had to enjoy sitting down to hear some campfire-esque stories before bed, and Beyond Belief was the champion in that field.
Comments