I’m afraid of the light, mommy.

When I first saw the movie Poltergeist, I was about twelve years old, maybe thirteen. I think it was New Year’s Eve, I was at my best friend’s house, and we’d stayed up to watch it.  If you believe the media, all the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds these days are piercing their eyelids and injecting horse tranquiliser into their toenails, and good luck to them. Because back then, watching a scary movie at midnight was a pretty radical evening for me.

Anyway. There are two impressions the movie made on me at the time – firstly, MILF precocious as I clearly was, I fancied the mother (who replaced Carrie Fisher in my fickle affections), and secondly, I became scared shitless of TV static for about a decade after.

If you’re one of the two people who haven’t seen Poltergeist, basically the little daughter in the haunted house gets sucked into the TV, where she’s held captive by the unquiet spirits of what my mother still refers to as Wild Indians. After that, all sorts of weird shit ensues (man-eating trees, murderous scary clown dolls etc etc), and about ten years later, half the cast, including the actress who played the daughter, are ACTUALLY dead. THAT, boys and girls, is a scary fucking movie. I don’t care how traumatising the torture scenes in Saw or Hostel are meant to be, we’re talking about a movie in which the actors’ contracts said they’re going to die as a result of acting. That’s the kind of commitment that earns Academy Awards. Even if they are posthumous.

But a few days back, I was sitting with my godson watching Dora the Explorer or whatever and I realised, he’s probably never even seen static.

Once upon a time, when you bought a TV, you’d have to tune it manually. You’d spend forever shifting through a wilderness of grey and white fuzz, painstakingly searching for the civilized outposts of each channel. And these days, it’s all done for you. TVs scan through it when you tune them for the first time, simply blacking it out.  If you should stray onto a rogue channel, chances are, all you’ll see is a black screen. The static has been edited out, blocked off, an undesirable eyesore.

And I miss it. Even though I found it vaguely terrifying, there was always something mesmerising about static. It was what your television showed when it was left to its own devices, a kind of secret language all of its own that made no sense to anyone.

In fact, right from the start, there’s always been an attempt to avoid static – back when we were sensible enough to realise we didn’t really need programming through the night, we had closedown, but rather than show static, we had the now-iconic little girl-playing noughts and crosses with her the sinister, dead-eyed clown chum. As far as we know, the girl in the testcard is still alive today, but my assumption is that she’s actually just a hollow corpse animated by the undead spirits of Native American warriors. I can’t prove that or anything, but let’s see the evidence to the contrary, I say.

And if it wasn’t the possessed girl and her grinning doll, then they’d show you Ceefax and Oracle, together with their mental institution easy-listening soundtracks.

Maybe it’s because static is messy, unpredictable, uncontrolled. It means someone’s not in charge. It’s like the scrubby bit at the end of the garden, the bit with the brambles and the compost heap and the stinging nettles, all of which makes it somehow more interesting than the neatly trimmed vegetable patch or the rose bed. It belongs to itself. It’s alive.

And at the same time, dead. Static has become a sort of filmic shorthand for death – for whatever reason, someone’s got some kind of camera, everyone back at base is telling him or her to watch out for the scary monster, or the comet, or the hot lava, or whatever and then… static. And we all know that character’s not coming back.

Perhaps that’s why Steven Spielberg had the little girl imprisoned in static in Poltergeist. Apparently, there’s a whole field of paranormal research devoted to it – words and sounds appearing in static are known as Electronic Voice Phenomena, which, since a belief in the paranormal seems to go inevitably hand in hand with a really firm commitment to verbal economy, gets shortened to EVP. There was even a movie based on this not too long ago – White Noise –  though I can’t really say much about that, as the very thought of spooky voices coming from static is enough to make me physically sick with terror so there was no way I was going to see it.

And digital TVs are the worst of the lot. They don’t have it at all. Where analogue interference was a billion shifting points of white and black, digital interference is just fractured pieces of the original image, little squares moving narcissistically about the screen like a sliding puzzle.

Even its aural cousin, radio static, will soon be a thing of the past, as DAB brings with it a series of neatly segregated stations, each one nestled safely in the airwaves, like a gated community. No hawkers, no unsolicited mail, and definitely no static.

In about ten years’ time, virtually every country in the world will only be broadcasting digital signals – I think here in the UK, the analogue switch-off is due to start next year. And then the theory goes that we’ll all have happy shiny static-free TVs, with lovely clear pictures.

But I’m going to keep my little analogue set for as long as the cathode ray tube lasts. Because when they switch off the signal, all it’ll receive is static – technically a mixture of thermal noise, cosmic radiation, and random electromagnetic fields. It means nothing. But it’s chaotic, it’s mysterious, and it’s alive, dammit. 

Plus, I sure as hell don’t want to piss off those dead Wild Indians.