Boys and Girls come out to play

[Grosh62]

Does anybody know anything about a TV prog probably mid to late 70's where children's voices sang 'Boys and Girls come out to play'. It was unnerving as a kid watching it. It could have been a Play for Today or Menace??

[Heather74]

Re: Boys and Girls come out to play

taken from Wiki

Girls and Boys Come Out To Play is featured in the television series The Prisoner in the episodes 'The Girl Who Was Death' and 'Once Upon a Time'. It also plays part of the storyline in A Tale of A Vampire

[Grosh62]

Re: Boys and Girls come out to play

It wasn't The Prisoner but i will look into A Tale of A Vampire, Thanks Huggie!!

[Grosh62]

Re: Boys and Girls come out to play

Just found it Huggie. It was a BBC2 series called Menace as i vaguely suspected and the last episode was called Boys and Girls come out to play aired in 1973. Thanks

[vanhelsing]

Re: Boys and Girls come out to play

'Boys and Girls come out to play'.

'On the busy motorway'

(This was on the OIL episode of The Young Ones).

[macster123]

Re: Boys and Girls come out to play

I remember this being very eerie! I seem to remember the small girl taking some drugs that she found somewhere?

[emily13]

Ms

Could it have been Dramarama? That tune always gives me the creeps ever since watching that! The story was about a girl who was possessed by her imaginary friend who kept making her do bad things - getting rid of her involved a battle of wills where the girl had to write her own name on a blackboard. I can't remember the name of the episode offhand.

[Mountain Rover]

I remember it. It popped into my head again today and I thought I'd look for it on YouTube but it's not there. I was a teenager on holiday in the Lake District and we watched it on the B&B's tv in the evening. I found it quite chilling. I don't know what I'd think of it now but I'd like to see it again.

[I. R. Fincham]

Sadly, many episodes of Menace were not kept by the BBC and are currently missing, presumed lost forever. 21 episodes are gone, including Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.

https://www.tvbrain.info/tv-archive?...&type=lostshow

[George 1978]

The tune does sound like that BBC Schools series Zig Zag.

[Robbie8591]

Yes, I remember this play OK! It was the last episode in the Menace TV series, broadcast in 1973, and in fact its broadcast was delayed by 3 weeks, presumably because BBC bosses were worried about it! Peter Jeffrey played a police inspector who was investigating both a murder and a child’s disappearance, and who was horrified to find his own daughter, Belinda, was responsible for the latter.
Belinda’s imagination had been caught by the tune of a music box she’d been given for her birthday, “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play”, and she’d taken to sneaking out through her bedroom window each night and dancing with phantom images in the street. She also witnessed the murder her father was called on to investigate - a woman stabbing a man she’d been having an affair with - and afterwards decided “there’s no end to what you can get up to at night” and got two of her school friends to join in on her nightly outings. She also got hooked on pills from a lad outside the school gates, and matters escalated to the point where she and one of her school friends decided to bump off the other friend (coincidentally the daughter of the woman who’d committed the murder) who was getting cold feet about the whole business.
After that unfortunate girl had gone missing, Belinda and her remaining friend were seen sitting on a hill, taking more pills while looking down on a building-site where cement was being poured into a hole, and remarking “It’s not London Bridge but it’ll have to do…” (a reference to an old legend that bodies of children were used as foundations for that famous bridge!)
Finally, Belinda was standing at her bedroom window, barely noticing her appalled parents behind her, while watching her phantom dancers in the street below - in which the murdered schoolfriend was now reluctantly joining, and suddenly turned and glared up at Belinda, who wasn’t bothered in the slightest.
There was a lot of comment about the play on the Radio Times letters,with one remarking that if Sarah Sutton s performance as Belinda was anything to go by, we should see more of her in the future - as indeed we did, as she later played Nyssa opposite Peter Davison in Dr Who!