KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Vanessa Berry
May 2, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

IN SEARCH OF… | 1977–1982

On weekends in the early 1980s, my family dinnertimes were unusually terrifying. For half an hour every Saturday evening the television became a portal to the unexplained, broadcasting Great Mysteries of the World, a program that focussed on the paranormal, pseudoscience and unusual phenomena.

Great Mysteries of the World was a series better known as In Search Of…, presented by Leonard Nimoy, which in Australia had been retitled and given different opening credits, and a brief introduction by a local host. These reworked credits featured a montage of images of ghostly apparitions and the aftermath of disasters, with a soundtrack of ominous orchestral music. This culminated in a few seconds clipped from Nosferatu, in which the Count, skulking at his victim’s neck, looks slowly up, meeting the viewer’s eye. This scene activated the tantalising, spiralling fear of the unknown and unexplained that accompanied my watching of the episodes of this program.

Its prime-time broadcast, and the fact that the Australian host of the show, Scott Lambert, also then went on to deliver the nightly news, only added to In Search Of…‘s considerable ability to convince me of the possibilities of aliens, extra-sensory-perception, psychic abilities, and malevolent spiritual forces. Once Lambert delivered his introduction it was then over to Nimoy, whose calm, deep voice and slightly otherworldly presence made him the perfect guide to the extraordinary. Over six seasons of the show he narrated stories of hypnotism, Martians, ghost hunts, Stonehenge, killer bees and other mysterious subjects.

The episodes wove together archival footage, interviews, dramatic re-enactments and scenes of Nimoy postulating on the mystery of the week. He would be wearing a turtleneck and a Tweed jacket, or a waistcoat and cravat, standing on a hiking trail or leaning back against the cushions of a sofa, asking us: could dreamers dream about the future? What is beneath the surface of the Loch? Do plants have feelings? Then the surging, spiralling electronic music would start up, accompanying a scene of undersea exploration, or a dramatisation of a nightmare, in which a composition book page with handwritten sums on it rips in the centre to reveal an angry, snarling face. Re-watching it now I laugh, but I’m still not entirely un-scared, or unconvinced.

The series is a combination of the superstitious and the scientific, one distinctly of its time, and not only because of the turtlenecks and moustaches. As invested as it was in the stories of the bizarre and mysterious, it also held the promise that, given the technological advancements of the era, the answers were coming ever-closer to being discovered. Psychic researchers were solving crimes. Soon we will be able to control our dreams. We know more about the lost world of Atlantis than ever, and in the near future we will hopefully make contact with the otherworldly reaches of space.

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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