Post by alice on Oct 5, 2020 15:07:29 GMT
I have a faint memory of being a young child in Australia and seeing a kid's programme called The Nine o'clock Tiger. It told a story of a little girl whose parents told her she needed to be in bed by nine o'clock - and if she didn't, the tiger that roamed the house at night would eat her. I remember it being a dark, gothic tale made from live-action footage but featuring a large tiger puppet. Needless to say it scared the shit out of me, (this was the eighties, so traumatising kids via TV was en vogue), but recently I discovered that there are many other people out there with similar memories.
I decided to go hunting for the Tiger and have managed to get part of the way. The story "Jandy Malone and the Nine o'clock Tiger" comes from a children's book by Barbara Bolton and Alan White. It seems to be inspired by a Canadian folk tale called "The Seven o'clock Man" which follows the same basic set up - a man who roams the country side who kidnaps (and/or eats?) children who aren't in bed by seven o'clock.
The book was indeed made into a TV show. It was a two part episode of an ongoing ABC series called "For the Juniors" (ABC = Australian Broadcasting Corp.) For the Juniors ran for decades and I can't find any kind of episode list for it. Judging from when people's memories go back to, it was probably aired in the mid-to-late 1980s, but may have actually been made much earlier. Also, many people seem to have the memory of seeing it in school (this wasn't uncommon back then) so maybe schools bought or were even issued tapes of this series.
As for research, here's what I've found. Apparently there was a FB group for people talking about it, but I can't seem to find it, so it may be gone forever. I found an archived reddit thread here https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/3cyzug/do_you_remember_the_nine_oclock_tiger/ where a number of people discuss their memories of the show. I also managed to find a blogger - James Ross - who details his memories here www.kiltlifecrisis.com/journal/day-089-the-9-oclock-tiger . In the comments, there's a link to a gallery of screenshots from the second episode, just to confirm for everyone that this is in fact a real thing (and yes, it's terrifying) imgur.com/user/80stvaustralia/posts .
There are follow ups in both the blog and the gallery about the possibility of contacting the ABC and getting a copy, but details are thin and conflicting. One says they've obtained a copy through "a source" but there's no follow up, whilst another says they can't because of music copyright. Presumably the images from the gallery have come from a master tape, but I can't get more details.
This is as far as I've been able to get, and most likely it's where the trail ends. The only possibility I can think of is if it did go to schools, then perhaps someone kept the old video library for some reason (or handed it over to an archive). The school at which I would have seen it no longer exists, and I don't live in Australia any more to go around doing any leg work. I don't imagine there's much more to find, but I thought I'd put it here in case anyone else came looking, or if someone had another idea. Maybe someone will find a copy in a garage or something one day and hopefully it'll get preserved.
If nothing else, it's helped put my mind partially to rest - The Nine o'clock Tiger was a real thing and I wasn't the only one traumatised by it.
- alice
Edit: Here's another link with some more evidence and discussion, but nothing further imgur.com/gallery/ZrTySDl
