Back in the 1980s, at least on the east coast of America (for television was broadcast over radio waves in those days, and i grew up on the east coast), there were television stations called “public television stations.” They distinguished themselves from ordinary stations in that they were (ostensibly) not-for-profit. They received funding from various places, including members, and didn’t have commercial breaks during shows. These stations were (generally) members of PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, which made most of the programming that they showed, often in coordination with local member stations.

On such show was Mystery!, which was a spinoff of Masterpiece Theatre that focused on mystery and crime genres, mostly British-made. Mystery! was a hosted show—host segments are enormously helpful in adapting shows with their own running time to the running time of the show—and during most of the 1980s the host was Vincent Price. The show also had a fascinating opening title sequence, which was an animation based on the artwork of Edward Gorey. Someone put up a clip on YouTube which was clearly transferred from a VHS tape. The quality isn’t very good, but this isn’t too far off from how it might have been back in 1984, depending on what your reception was like, or if you were watching it taped:

The Edward Gorey intro segment is fascinatingly rich with symbolism. The murder mystery genre is very frequently decorated in symbolism, as I discussed about the cover of my Complete Sherlock Holmes. It’s night time, we have a grave stone, we have flashlights, we have a dinner party, we have a murder, we have a detective hiding behind a pillar, we have a great house—it all reminds us of the potential of the mystery genre and sets us up to be in the mood to enjoy whatever is coming.

The host segment is also interesting, as far as setting us up to enjoy what comes. First, we have the phenomenon of human attention. If one person shows interest in something, we are far more likely to find it interesting ourselves.

We also have the parasocial aspect of the host segment. We feel like Vincent is a friend who is also interested, and will watch it with us. Later, when Diana Rigg hosted Mystery!, when she’d say “Goodnight” at the end, my father would half-jokingly respond, “Goodnight, Diana.” Television in the 1980s had a very powerful parasocial aspect because, in part, of its social aspect. Especially in the early 1980s, families normally had a single television and people would gather around it to watch together. The parasocial feeling of interacting with the person on the screen was thus amplified by the real social aspect of the human beings sitting around you. It’s not just that you felt the company of fellow human beings, but also that they also “knew” the person on the screen, and that person was someone you could talk about with others. They didn’t just feel like a friend, but like a member of the family.

The introductory segment also serves to talk up what we will see. In this one, Vincent Price talks at some length about the greatness of Sherlock Holmes and even reads from a book by an expert.

And then we have the set decoration. It’s not so easy to see in this recording, but it’s a dilapidated opulence. We’re given that the sense that it’s a room in a great house, and there are a great many things in it which would have been expensive when they were bought, but that wasn’t recently and they’ve seen better days. I’ve written about this in Mysteries and Changing Society, but it’s worth pointing out again that great houses falling into disrepair are a wonderful setting for a murder mystery. The thing was designed for many more people than currently live in it, and this gives a lot of scope for people to do things unobserved, plenty of places to hide things, and plenty of things to be important without anyone knowing that they’re important.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that Mystery! also had an outro:

Goodnight, Vincent.