Because just having fingers isn’t frightening enough

Looking like a vulcanised Gonzo or other freak cast-off from the Henson workshop, Finger Frights promised “hours of joy for a girl or boy”, or so cried the nicotine-stained street trader who sold them out of a suitcase in the city centre. (The same scruffy fella later made a living peddling Gordon the Gopher squeaky hand puppets, only to return the following year with exactly the same stock dyed pink and touted as Mr Blobby.)

Inexpensively fashioned in crude, coloured latex, these digit-targeted mini-monsters had distinctive, staring white eyes and wobbling rubber arms, raised - Curse Of The Mummy style - in predatory fashion. Their appeal lay not in the perpetually snarling expression (for who was ever frightened of a Finger Fright?) but in their ubiquity and variety.  At the very least there were red, blue, gold, green, purple and white Frights, crammed into big boxes of novelties (pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap!) in toy shops and newsagents across the land, alongside squeaky spiders, chunky stacking felt-tips, gonks and Squirmles (those cute fluffy worm things you pulled around on invisible fishing wire).

And yet it was impossible to own enough. Kids leaving birthday parties would be seen ferreting around in their goody bags for a prized rubber freak.  Entire bull trading floors were established in primary school quads.  Like pigeons, Finger Frights were vermin. (Also like pigeons, it was quite easy for them to lose a limb through excessive gnawing or sheer violent accident.) But these were vermin of the playground and pencil case; wherever you stood or sat, you always knew you were less than two metres from one. Now that’s frightening.