40 years ago | Runshaw Avenue, Appley Bridge, UK | 3rd December 1983

Forty years ago,  I overcame technology and bedtime to watch the most anticipated TV event of the year – even though it was shown in the middle of the night. It was the UK’s first showing of the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The official story was that the lavish John Landis-directed 13-minute love letter to horror films was so scary, it could only be shown after midnight. It’s more likely that MTV’s worldwide exclusivity for the first showing elapsed late into the night. in the UK. This meant that Channel 4’s Friday night music show The Tube scored a major coup in being first to air it here. It’s therefore recorded as having been first shown in the UK on Friday 2nd December, as that was the date of the TV listing. As it happened after midnight it was technically on December 3rd.

Even today, when hype is a more ubiquitous (and therefore a less effective) part of the cultural landscape, it’s difficult to explain just how heavily-anticipated this video was. Just like today, there was a lot of reference to it in the build-up before the day of its first showing and, just like today, it gave an opportunity to those who wanted it to talk about the concerns they had about ‘that sort of thing’ – in this case, the burgeoning “video nasty” market, fulled by the recent uptake of VHS and Betamax video recorders.

I even remember discussing it with my grandma, trying to understand why something that was so demonstrably ‘cool’ (because everyone was talking about it) must, by definition, be a good thing. She explained her (and others’) concern that what people see on their screens was likely to influence their behaviour – a debate that’s still taking place today. I suppose it was the first time I can remember deciding to try to understand an opposite viewpoint in order to demonstrate why I believed it to be wrong – the essence of debating. My grandma loved a good debate and so, it transpired, did I. That’s why we got on so well.

There was no way I was allowed to stay up that late to watch it live and we didn’t own a video recorder so, like millions of others, we relied upon someone we knew videotaping the event and then going round to their house to watch it back. In our case, it was an uncle and that Saturday morning, we arrived to watch it in all its glory.

I have to say, it didn’t disappoint. The storyline, the production values, the conventions of the genre, the dance moves, the resolution and the final twist all combined to make it every bit as memorable and significant as the hype suggested it was going to be. 

In retrospect, the whole ‘scary’ thing was pretty tame but it’s difficult to imagine the release of any song, album, TV show or film garnering quite the same level of attention, these days. It was definitely thought to be quite edgy, even though some of the tropes of the ‘storyline’ element were decidedly Fifties . A year or so later, on one of those end-of-term days when teachers used to roll out the TV/video trolley and just put a film on, we even watched ‘The Making of Thriller’ (in which it explored the evolution of horror special effects, via Landis’ other recent hit, An American Werewolf In London). Far from being another ‘video nasty’, this was content which primary school teachers seemed happy to put before schoolchildren.

This was also the. moment when Jackson’s star was shining brightest. Obviously, we all know how it began to flicker and dim in the years that followed (hence the pun in the title above) but it’s undeniable that Thriller absolutely was, for a time, a piece of work which dominated popular culture.

You can watch the full video, in all its extended glory on YouTube, here.