La Cabina

It’s interesting how certain sensory and emotional experiences from your childhood stick with you even later on in life. I remember the smell of Camay soap in the bathroom, 4711 eau de cologne and my father’s Old Spice.

I also remember seeing lots of posters in the 70s of people, usually women, disappearing down lavatories. There is always that moment of hesitation…

I was always trying to stay up late. This was usually accomplished by offering to brush my mother’s hair. Of course, what I didn’t bargain for is the reason why there’s a watershed when it comes to TV viewing. There was Danny Kaye in ‘Five Pennies’ whose daughter ended up in an iron lung because she got polio, although I’m sure my parents told me it was because she had too many late nights hanging out in jazz clubs with her father, and didn’t get enough sleep.

But the film which has haunted me all these years is a Spanish 30 minute film – ‘La Cabina’ which was made in 1972, but must have been shown on the BBC sometime later because I think I must have seen it when I was about 8 years old. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people saw it ‘accidentally’ when they were of a similar age. There is very little dialogue which makes it even more disturbing. A man goes into a telephone box and can’t get out. Passersby try and help him but fail, as do the fire brigade. He’s hoisted onto the back of a lorry and taken away, and at one point he sees another man in a phone box on the back of a lorry. He ends up in a huge underground warehouse where he’s offloaded amidst hundreds of phone boxes with decaying bodies, some of which have ended their suffering by using the phone cable.

It won an International Emmy award. I wonder whether it should get an award for messing up a generation of children, along with ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’.