One of the few remaining artefacts from Hookland Associated Television’s 7-part children's sci-fi/fantasy serial 'Beyond The Barrow' is Wesley Wakefield’s recently rediscovered original soundtrack score, now digitally remastered and re-released.

The series itself was mired in controversy. Broadcast from 1st November to 13th December 1971 in the 5:30pm time slot, it was aimed at an audience of children aged 7 to 12. Midway through the run of episodes, however, reports began to surface that many impressionable young viewers were exhibiting a range of abnormal behaviours: garbled hypnotic chanting, involuntary ritualistic gestures and, in some cases, episodes of hazardous somnambulism. When questioned, however, the affected children were unable to recall any specific details of the show, apparently so traumatised that they had blocked it from memory altogether.

Outraged parents petitioned HATV to demand that the series never be repeated. In response, the station’s management ordered the 2” Quadruplex master tapes of every episode to be erased and recycled, though they took the official line that this was nothing more than a cost-cutting measure.

But, as Hookland Independent Television video technician Ken Simmons later recalled, “There was that one tape... episode 6. It didn’t seem to want to stay erased.” This anomaly became apparent when the videotape was re-used to record an episode of HATV’s popular Saturday evening programme ‘Little Talent’, a competition for juvenile amateur entertainers showcasing their unique abilities. According to Simmons, “When we reviewed it after the taping, the show looked completely normal. But when it went to air, that’s when everyone saw those... entities.” Viewers tuning into the show that weekend were disturbed to observe dark, indistinct shapes moving around the periphery of the studio set, occasionally appearing behind the show’s oblivious host, and finally hovering in the air above local folk trio The Fuller Children during their a-capella rendition of the traditional lullaby ‘O, the Bairn Bain’t Barely Breathing’. The show was cancelled soon thereafter. In a strange epilogue to this eerie event, less than a month later all three Fuller Children vanished from their home in the middle of the night and have never been found. Their missing persons file at Weychester Constabulary remains open – one of its more notorious cold cases. Simmons has his own theory about the disappearances: “I reckon they’d been somehow chosen.”

A subsequent examination of the videotape by a team from the Hookland Paranormal Research Group was inconclusive, although much speculation centred around the fact that the tape had originally been used to record episode 6 of the series, shot entirely on location at Black Barrow – an area notorious for uncanny phenomena, dating back many centuries. As one researcher commented: “It is possible to conjecture that some form of ‘galvanic spirit’ disinterred itself from the topography and attached itself to the tape – which is, after all, a magnetic medium (...) residual traces of the ancient past interacting with modern technology.” The tape later vanished from HATV’s archives, rumoured to have been returned to Black Barrow and either burned or buried at the site by persons unknown.

So thorough were efforts to suppress ‘Beyond The Barrow’ that the original scripts for the show were destroyed, and efforts to locate even a brief synopsis of the programme have to date proven fruitless. The titles of the music score’s individual tracks do, however, offer a few tantalisingly cryptic narrative clues.

The soundtrack’s creator Wesley Wakefield, a lifelong resident of Marshbone Vale in Hookland County, was the in-house music composer for a number of Hookland Associated Television series in the 1970s including 'MacLeish & Squirrel', 'Hookland Hauntings', 'The Glass Corridor', 'Nautilus' and 'The Witch's Kitchen'. Prior to this, in 1962, he applied for a job at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but was turned down for being 'the wrong kind of beardy-weirdy', a slight that left him embittered until his death by electrocution in his home studio, aged 36.

The themes and incidental music for 'Beyond The Barrow' are typical of Wakefield's signature style, which combined traditional stringed instruments and early monophonic synthesisers, and was notable for its repetitive minimalism. Only on the opening and closing themes was Wakefield able to expand his musical vision, briefly enlisting the services of the Weychester String Ensemble.

250 copies of this 10" mini-album were pressed (on the Hookland Sonic Recordings label), of which 200 or more went unsold and later disappeared from the company's warehouse. One rumour has it that they ended up at EMI's pressing plant The Old Vinyl Factory in Hayes, where they were melted down and reused for T.Rex's 1972 single 'Children Of The Revolution'. This story further alleges that, due to an unaccountable pressing error, a strange hum obscures the word 'revolution' during the song's choruses on copies of the 7” single made using the Hookland-sourced vinyl.

The digital release of this long-lost aural curiosity has been transferred from the only surviving copy of the original ¼" master tape, recently unearthed from the Hookland Associated Television archives. While every effort has been made to deliver the best possible sound quality, certain imperfections and artefacts are inevitable due to the vintage and condition of the source material.