Over 23 million people watched Jaws on British TV in 1981. A few thoughts on watching films at an impressionable age – and a call for your experiences.
Steven Spielberg’s shark-infested thrill ride Jaws recently celebrated its 50th anniversary – it was released on the 20th June 1975, to be precise. But as author and podcaster John Bleasdale recently reminded me, a generation of younger people didn’t see it in cinemas – they watched it on TV.
Jaws premiered on UK television on the 8th October 1981 – and according to stats shared by The Daily Jaws, 23.25 million people turned on ITV to watch it. This made it one of the most-watched films ever put on British television – second, in fact, only to the premiere of James Bond outing Live And Let Die, also on ITV. Essentially half of the British population stayed in to watch Jaws that evening, leaving streets, pubs and restaurants largely deserted. It’s the kind of pop cultural moment you could never re-create in our modern, fractured age of YouTube, Netflix and TikTok.
Appreciating that this ages me horrendously, I was about four and a half years old when I sat and watched Jaws for the first time. My Mum, who’d seen it in the cinema six years earlier, had raved about the audience reaction in the build-up – I distinctly remember her telling me about the moment where a severed head loomed through the ruptured hull of a boat at the bottom of the sea, and how everyone in the room screamed and threw their popcorn up in the air.
I remember far less about the film itself, but I do distinctly remember the impact it had for months afterwards. It’s a cliche now, but it’s true: Jaws left both me and a generation of other impressionable youngsters with sea anxiety. I recall a holiday where I stood on a beach and flatly refused to so much as set foot in the water. When my Mum asked me why I didn’t want to go for a paddle, I simply said, “Sharks.”
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Even when my Mum pointed out that we were in Hunstanton, and you don’t tend to get Great Whites swimming off the coast of Hunstanton, I literally stood my ground. I’d seen how that kid on the lilo had vanished in a fountain of gore, and how that other kid had wound up with his leg bitten off. There was no way I was going to risk sharing their grisly fate.
Jaws’s tagline, “You’ll never go in the water again”
In my Mum’s defence, most of my friends were also watching Jaws at the same time, and I probably would have been massively disappointed if I’d missed out on seeing the massive shark film that everyone had been talking about for days before (and afterwards).
Decades later, and I’m now a parent myself – coincidentally, my daughter’s just shy of her fifth birthday, so only a few months older than I was when I first watched Jaws. She can’t watch animated films like Frozen and Encanto without getting nervous about moments of peril, so I can only guess what she’d make of Spielberg’s toothsome – and occasionally quite graphic – opus.
All of which brings me to a question for you, readers: was there a film you remember seeing at what might now seem too young an age? And if so, what impression did it leave on you? We’ll return with our favourite responses from the comments here and across our social media channels later in the week.
