Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75), updated review

Carl Kolchak, investigative reporter with a nose for stories involving the supernatural, the paranormal and the just plain weird, made his first appearance in two TV movies. These were successful enough to spawn a series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which aired on the American ABC network in 1974-75. Sadly the series lasted only a single season. The network might have been well advised to give the series more time to establish an audience. After its cancellation it quickly achieved cult status and became extremely popular in syndication.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker was to the 70s what The X-Files was to the 90s. Kolchak keeps running across stories that just cannot be explained except as supernatural or paranormal phenomena or occasionally just weird fringe science. If only he could just get hold of some hard evidence. But he never does. Or if he does, it gets taken away from him or destroyed. Or for some reason his stories just get killed. But just like Mulder Carl Kolchak never gives up.

Darren McGavin was perfectly cast as Kolchak, a rumpled eccentric who revels in his reputation as a pushy oddball. Kolchak has its tongue-in-cheek side and it has its darker side as well and McGavin handles both effortlessly (anyone who doubts McGavin’s ability to be dark and edgy obviously hasn’t seen him in the late 50s Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series).

You just really really want Kolchak to one day get the evidence he needs, you know he never will but you know he’ll just keep on trying. He’s a reporter. He doesn’t care about having doors slammed in his face. He doesn’t care about being harassed by the cops. He doesn’t care if people thinks he’s annoying and pushy. He doesn’t care if he makes his editor want to tear his hair out. Those are just the challenges that make being a reporter so much fun. And Kolchak loves being a reporter more than life itself.

This is a series that had a lot of promise but it never quite found its feet. Of course it wasn’t given time to do so. At times it does rely too much on Monster of the Week stories. It’s never quite sure if it wants to stick to the slightly jokey tongue-in-cheek tone or if it wants to get dark and serious. The episodes that rely on special effects suffer from the fact that the effects sometimes look cheap. But the promise was there and there are plenty of solid episodes with original and creepy ideas.

The series may just have been ahead of its time. Even science fiction series had a rough time on US television in the 60s. Weird stuff seemed to be accepted in anthology series (such as The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone) but perhaps audiences were not ready for a series that must have seemed an odd mix of a conventional newspaper reporter drama with outrageous story lines. It may have been too much of a collision between television drama normality and weirdness. The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone really didn’t pretend to take place in our reality, but Kolchak did. Two decades later The X-Files was a major hit, following just about the same formula.

Episode Guide

In Mr R.I.N.G. Kolchak stumble across a secret government robotics project called R.I.N.G. (Robomatic Internalized Nerve Ganglia). And it appears that one of their robots is loose, and he’s kinda dangerous. This is a very paranoid X-Files sort of story with the US Government, and especially the military, as the enemy. And the military is a much scarier enemy than any mere monster. An extremely good episode.

They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be… is the other Kolchak episode that is in the X-Files kind of mould. It starts with some seriously weird unexplained happenings. Zoo animals supposedly vanishing. People dying and the post-mortems reveal odd disturbing things. Electronic equipment that goes missing. There’s no actual evidence of anything, so why are the Feds so interested and what are they covering up? If you can’t afford fancy special effects a really good option is to avoid showing anything and rely on suggestion and that’s what his episode does. A lot of people don’t like this episode and I can see why. It is very low-key and lacks any real scares. But it is extremely interesting and I’m quite fond of it.

In Primal Scream an oil company has found some strange cells in a core sample from the Arctic. What’s really strange is that the cells are millions of years old but they show signs of life. Then there are the murders. Murders so brutal it’s as if they were carried out by something not quite human. And Carl Kolchak has some photos of footprints are they’re not quite human either. A fairly typical Kolchak episode, a bit silly but kind of fun.

The better Kolchak episodes are the ones that don’t rely on guys in monster suits and have to rely instead on atmosphere and genuine scares. Episodes like The Trevi Collection in which Kolchak discovers the links between the worlds of high fashion and witchcraft. There are some women who want to have it all, and they are willing to practise the black arts to achieve their desires. Store mannequins are always slightly creepy (the whole uncanny valley thing) and they play a big rôle in this episode. There are also a couple of pretty devious murders. On the whole an excellent episode.

In Chopper a graveyard is cleared for the construction of condominiums. Disturbing the dead is not a good idea. Several brutal slayings follow, with witnesses reporting a headless figure on a motorcycle. Carl gets some photos of tyre tracks but that makes things more confusing - such tyres have not been made for nearly twenty years. They’re the tyres you would have expected to find on the sorts of motorcycles that were popular with motorcycle gangs in the 1950s. Of course there’s no point in trying to tell the police any of this. Kolchak will have to deal with this mystery on his own, if he lives long enough. A pretty decent idea mostly well executed even if the headless biker is a bit unconvincing.

Demon in Lace involves the mysterious deaths of a number of young male college students. There’s no obvious cause of death but they died looking very scared. In each case the body was found along with the body of a young woman, but what worries Kolchak is that the young women had not died at the same time as the young men. And then there’s that Mesopotamian tablet with the weird inscription. The translation of one of the words as succubus worries Kolchak a lot. A truly excellent episode.

Legacy of Terror begins with two murders, both victims having had their hearts torn out. Literally. The only people Carl can think of who do things like that are the Aztecs, but Aztecs in Chicago in the 1970s. It seems unlikely. Then a third similar murder follows and Kolchak starts to see a pattern. A very good episode.

The Knightly Murders begins with a political boss being killed by a crossbow bolt. More murders follow, all done with medieval weaponry. Is the murderer a disgruntled medievalist, an actual medieval knight, some kind of lunatic or something else entirely. Kolchak has his own ideas after having a close encounter with a lance. John Dehner guest stars as the delightfully egotistical, highly literary but incurably lazy Captain Vernon Rausch, a legend in the Homicide Squad. A good fun episode.

What do eternal youth, Greek goddesses and dating agencies have in common? Quite a lot perhaps. Beauty and physical perfection seem to Carl to be the connecting thread. Youth Killer actually starts with 90-year-olds dropping dead all over Chicago. Not very unusual, but the circumstances are puzzling. Carl is particularly intrigued by the ring and the glass eye. This is one of the best Kolchak episodes, combining cleverness with subtle creepiness and wit.

The Sentry takes place in a gigantic underground data storage facility. It seems there have been a few accidents at the facility. Bodies found with teeth marks. Reptilian teeth marks. The cop in charge of the case is a glamorous lady detective but she’s determined to stop Carl from digging around in this case. The setting is very cool but the monsters are pretty silly.  It’s still a fun episode in a good kind of way.

Final Thoughts

OK, some of the guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters are a bit embarrassing and there are a few dud episodes but the good episodes outnumber the bad ones by a considerable margin. And the good episodes are often very good indeed. Darren McGavin is so likeable he makes even the weaker episodes watchable.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker is immense fun. Highly recommended.

The Owl Service (1969)

The Owl Service is a 1969 mini-series from Britain’s Granada Television. It’s a children’s program although it’s obviously aimed at what would probably today be described as the young adult market. In fact it deals with a few concepts that very definitely qualify as adult themes. It’s a fantasy series in a contemporary setting although the supernatural elements are subtle and ambiguous. 

Alan Garner wrote all eight half-hour episodes. He adapted the series from his own novel.

Clive (Edwin Richfield )and his new wife Margaret are holidaying in a remote very rural Welsh valley. Both had been married before. Clive has a teenage son, Roger (Francis Wallis), from his previous marriage while Margaret also has a teenager, Alison (Gillian Hills), from her previous marriage.  Their housekeeper Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) and Nancy’s son Gwyn (Michael Holden) complete the household, apart from a gardener named Huw (Raymond Llewellyn), a strange character who may be a bit touched in the head.

Investigating odd scratching noises coming from the attic Alison and Gwyn discover an old dinner service (this is the owl service of the title). The pattern on the plates is a little puzzling but after tracing the design Alison finds that it comprises flowers and that when put together the flowers make an owl. She starts, rather obsessively, to make paper owls from the tracings. The paper owl models seem to have a rather disturbing effect on Alison.

The plates have some kind of connection to a local legend involving a romantic triangle that ended in a strange double murder, one of the murders being committed by a dead man. There’s also a mysterious stone near the house with a hole through it, allegedly made by a spear cast and also connected with the legend. This legend also tells of a woman made from flowers who turns into an owl.

The plates have a surprising property. After Alison copies the design on one of the plates the design disappears from the plate.

There’s a good deal of tension between the various characters, at least some of this tension being emotional or sexual in nature. There’s an obvious attraction between Alison and Gwyn while the relationships between Alison and some of the other characters are slightly unsettling (I did say this series touched on some adult themes).

There are other complications with roots in both the distant and the recent past.

The pacing is leisurely, which is a polite way of saying that it’s slow. I’m inclined to think this story might have worked better as a six-part rather than an eight-part series. There’s not quite enough plot to sustain eight episodes and while it’s useful to develop the characters and the atmosphere of unease at a deliberate pace it really is unnecessarily slow.

Of course a potential problem with a series in which the key characters are children or teenagers is that it makes heavy demands on inexperienced actors. The big problem here is Francis Wallis who fails completely to get a handle on his performance as Roger. Roger ends up being not only a character the viewer doesn’t care about - we also can’t imagine any of the other characters caring about him or even bothering to notice his existence. Michael Holden gets the brooding intensity right as Gwyn. Gillian Hills (who at 25 should have been much too old to be playing a teenager) does pretty well in what is a formidably demanding role.

In some ways The Owl Service strikes me as the kind of series that adults would imagine that teenagers would like. I suspect that actual teenagers might have preferred a bit more spookiness or a bit more excitement, and possibly just a touch of humour. As it stands the series has at times a bit of a dour kitchen-sink drama feel to it. There’s a teen romance angle that would obviously appeal to girls but I can’t imagine most teenage boys lasting beyond the first couple of episodes. That’s not to say that this is a bad series. It’s just terribly serious and intense, and slow.

At the time there were those who felt that the series was quite unsuitable for children and I have to say I agree with them. It’s wildly unsuitable material. Alan Garner’s original novel was apparently not actually intended as a children’s novel although it ended up being labelled as such. It’s probably better (and less disturbing) not to regard The Owl Service as a children’s series at all.

It also has a feature that is, alas, rather common in British television of its era - it pits cruel snobby wicked upper-class people against a noble long-suffering working-class hero. This is always tiresome and in this case it also seems like an unnecessary distraction from the main story.

The inspiration for both the novel and the TV series was a Welsh legend from The Mabinogion. A wizard creates a woman named Blodeuwedd out of flowers, and as a punishment for betraying her husband (and causing two murders) she is turned into an owl. The central premise of The Owl Service is that the tragic romantic triangle of the legend is destined to repeat itself over and over again.

Rather surprisingly for the period this series was shot mostly on location in Wales. It was also shot in colour at a time when this was still unusual for British television. Unfortunately it went to air in December 1969 in black-and-white and was not seen in colour until 1978.

Network’s DVD release contains all eight episodes and image quality is pretty good. There are some worthwhile extras as well. There’s a documentary film on Alan Garner which left me determined not to read any of his books. More interestingly is the accompanying booklet which includes an incredibly detailed essay on the production of the series, interviews with Gillian Hills and Raymond Llewellyn and a brief but enthusiastic appreciation by Kim Newman.

The Owl Service was a wildly ambitious project. Not surprisingly it’s not always a complete success. Producer-director Peter Plummer approaches the series more in the spirit of an art film than a popular television series and on occasion he gets a little carried away (the surreal touches in the final episode seem out of place). At times it’s heavy going and it has severe pacing problems but it’s still a fascinating if somewhat pretentious attempt to do something different in the field of television fantasy. If you have a higher tolerance than I have for artiness and you can overlook some clumsy “social commentary” then it’s worth a look.

Zodiac (1974)

Zodiac was one of several attempts by British television in the late 60s and early 70s to come up with a formula that would successfully add the paranormal or the supernatural to a mystery or action adventure series. ITC had some success with a ghostly private detective in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969. Baffled was an Anglo-American attempt that got no further than a pilot episode in 1973 although it actually had considerable potential. Zodiac, which lasted just six episodes in 1974, was Thames Television’s foray into this sub-genre.

Detective-Inspector Gradley (Anton Rodgers) teams up with astrologer Esther Jones (Anouska Hempel) in this series which seems to have aimed mostly for gentle comedy.

Anton Rodgers was better known for situation comedies like Fresh Fields. He was certainly adept at light comedy although he makes a somewhat unlikely policeman. On the other hand Gradley is supposed to be an unconventional policeman. He was all set to be an idle young man living on a fortune he’d inherited until he discovered the rather disturbing terms of his grandfather’s  will - he only gets the fortune as long as he remains a serving police officer. As a result he has a slightly casual and even haphazard approach to the job. He doesn’t really think he’s all that suited to being a police officer but he doesn’t have much choice and he’s the sort of chap who accepts such things philosophically. That all works well enough although he’s still perhaps just a little too gentle and effete and aristocratic and laidback.

Anouska Hempel has the advantage of looking the way you might expect a 1970s astrologer to look, or perhaps she really looks more like a model who might dabble in astrology. 

The first episode, Death of a Crab, introduces the two lead characters. Gradley is investigating the murder of a man found in the bath of a penthouse flat only it wasn’t his fault and how he came to be there is as much a mystery as his death. Esther Jones is a suspect. Gradley is pretty sceptical when he discovers she’s an astrologer although his scepticism soon starts to fade. 

The most difficult problem for this type of series is to get the tone right. It can’t be too jokey and there’s a danger in overdoing the whimsy but on the other hand you don’t want to take things too seriously. Initial impressions suggest that Zodiac doesn’t take itself quite seriously enough. There are other problems. Unless you’re aiming for pure comedy there’s not much point in introducing paranormal elements unless there’s at least some spookiness or some definite sense of the uncanny. There isn’t quite enough of either of these elements in the first episode.

Also if you’re going to have a crime-solving team of a policeman and an astrologer you need to convince the viewer that the policeman really could not solve these cases without the astrologer. I’m not sure that Zodiac entirely succeeds in doing this. The astrology stuff doesn’t seem to be quite central enough to the plot of Death of a Crab.

Zodiac was created by Roger Marshall, one of the best TV writers in the business. This was a change of pace for him which was presumably what attracted him to the idea. Marshall was known for writing clever and witty scripts for series like The Avengers and Zodiac demonstrates a certain amount of exactly the same sort of wit. Marshall had also created the superb Public Eye series and the sympathy and humanity with which he imbued that series is also in evidence in Zodiac.

The good news is that the chemistry between the two leads works surprisingly well and they both handle the witty banter with assurance. 

This is fundamentally a good-natured series. Gradley is an unlikely cop but he’s a nice fellow and while Esther has a few hippie tendencies she’s a pretty nice person as well.

Episode two, The Cool Aquarian, is more interesting and a considerable improvement. It relies a good deal on coincidence but then when you’re dealing with astrology maybe the reliance on coincidence could have been quite intentional. A hard-driving businessman receives a ransom demand after a young woman is kidnapped. Which is very strange since he’s never even heard of the young lady concerned. In this episode the series starts to come together quite nicely. The paranormal/psychic/astrological elements play an important plot function but without dominating too much - good old-fashioned psychology and logical deduction help as well. The banter between the two leads seems more relaxed and more natural and the sparks start to fly between them in a very pleasing way.

Roger Marshall wrote the first two episodes himself. The third episode, The Strength of Gemini, was penned by Philip Broadley - Marshall was obviously determined to get hold the best possible writers for this series. In this episode a scoundrel is making use of Esther’s astrological skills her his own purposes although exactly how sinister those purposes might be is not clear at first. Either way Esther is outraged and Gradley has to admit that there might be something there that he should look into. It is a clever scam and it’s a good story, helped along by a delightfully oily guest starring turn by Norman Eshley.

Episode four, Saturn's Rewards, was written by Pat Hoddinott and is even better. An MP witnesses a murder but has his own reasons for not wanting to call the police. He will discover that this murder strikes a lot closer to home than he expected while Esther absolutely refuses to believe that a friend’s new boyfriend is not a Scorpio. He has to be a Scorpio. She just won’t give up on this, which turns out to be just as well. This is another episode that neatly combines astrological clues with ordinary police work and it has some neat twists.

Sting Sting Scorpio (written by Roger Marshall) opens with the murder of Madame Lavengro, an elderly astrologer in Brighton. At least Esther is convinced it’s murder although it appeared to be a heart attack. Esther has the bright idea of taking over Madame Lavengro’s shop in the hope of finding a clue although Gradley warns her that playing amateur detective can have consequences. Esther believes she’s uncovered a vital lead when she does a tarot reading for a maid in a leading Brighton hotel. A hotel in which a series of robberies has taken place. it’s another episode that succeeds quite well in integrating the occult and detective story elements.

The Horns of the Moon, written by Peter Yeldham, goes further than any of the other episodes in the direction of pure comedy and with guest appearances by capable comic talents such as Peter Jones, Graham Crowden and Michelle Dotrice it works splendidly. A retired general who runs a merchant bank ends up in the deep freeze. Gradley is sure he has the murderer pegged and Esther is equally convinced that he’s wrong. Although played for comedy the mystery plot is serviceable enough with at least one nice twist. The astrological angle is a little weaker in this episode but it’s still there and still plays a reasonably important part. This is a particularly delightful episode.

I mentioned coincidence earlier. Strange coincidences just keep on turning up in these stories. They’re a feature of just about every episode. Roger Marshall was far too experienced as a writer and producer to allow such basic writing mistakes to keep cropping up. The more I watch of this series the more convinced I am that this is an absolutely deliberate technique intended to give the show a subtly spooky feel and since the series deals with astrology I think it’s probably a quite justifiable technique. It’s a neat way of emphasising that slightly odd things happen around Esther Jones.

Zodiac is a series that has to accepted on its own terms. It’s not a conventional cop show but while there’s a good deal of humour and romance it’s not out-and-out romantic comedy or a full-blooded spoof either. It’s not a supernatural adventure series in the style of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) - the paranormal elements are not allowed to dominate too much and in fact they could almost be explained away by coincidence and by Esther’s shrewdness at judging people. Zodiac juggles these different elements with surprising success. With good writing, two charming leads, witty dialogue and a slightly whimsical premise Zodiac ends up being slightly dotty but rather endearing and it’s all so remarkably good-natured it’s hard to dislike this series. Highly recommended.

The Twilight Zone, season 1 (1959)

The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television series ever made and it remains one of the most loved. It has retained a major cult following over more than half a century, and its creator Rod Serling is one of the legends of television.

I have to be perfectly honest right up front and say that I have never been a fan of Serling’s writing. At times I find his work to be overly sentimental. He often seems to me to be excessively concerned with stories that have a moral, and inclined to bludgeon the viewer with that moral. The political content of his writing is less than subtle. And at times his writing simply seems clumsy and heavy-handed. One of the most interesting extras included in the Blu-Ray release of season one of The Twilight Zone is a series of audio recordings of Serling delivering lectures at Sherwood Oaks College in 1975. These show that Serling himself was aware of the flaws in his writing, and was painfully aware of the deficiencies of many of his scripts for The Twilight Zone. In fact he is his own best critic, ruthlessly exposing his writing mistakes.

Having said that, I still regard The Twilight Zone as a very important series and I still have a great deal of affection for it, although my favourite episodes tend to be the ones written by Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont rather than the Serling-penned stories. Serling’s great achievement was in conceiving the series in the first place, and (against the odds) not only getting it made but renewed for a total of five seasons.

There were other excellent suspense/mystery anthology TV series made at around the same time, some of which (such as the superb Alfred Hitchcock Presents series) pre-date The Twilight Zone. Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff, was another very fine series of this type. These series relied on clever and nasty little plot twists, they were often very dark in tone, and at times they crossed the boundary into outright horror. Thriller at times even flirted with overt supernatural horror. What made The Twilight Zone different was that it was much more explicitly dealing with science fictional and fantasy themes, and it was much more uncompromising in rejecting the tyranny of realism. The Twilight Zone doesn’t even pretend to deal with reality. In 1959 this was a very bold move for a television series.

Serling wrote 92 of the 156 episodes himself. This enormous output probably has quite a lot to do with the unevenness of his writing at this time. He was under so much pressure to produce scripts that it’s not entirely surprising that some are not up to par. 

One of Serling’s most important contributions to the success of the series was his determination to maintain high production values. Persuading CBS that they were going to have to spend real money on the show was an extraordinary achievement and he fought bitterly against any moves to cut costs at the expense of quality. Serling was able to maintain a fair degree of control over the series, and to ensure that the directors employed were not only among the best in the business but were also people who understood his intentions for the series. As a result of these efforts of Serling’s The Twilight Zone is by the standards of its day a remarkably impressive-looking series. Indeed it looks impressive by any standards. It features some of the best black-and-white cinematography in television history.

These to me are the real strengths of this show - superb and imaginative visuals that set the mood plus an overall impression of quality. These strengths are often enough to compensate for the uneven quality of Serling’s writing.

This can be seen quite clearly in the very first episode, Where Is Everybody? A guy suddenly finds himself on a road. He doesn’t remember who he is. He comes to a town and it’s deserted. Totally. We eventually find out the explanation, but as Serling admits in his 1975 lectures, it’s very clumsy and full of bad writing and bad writing devices. As an example, it makes the mistake of having the guy tell us he feels like he’s being watched when that impression should have been achieved by visual means. Show, don’t tell. Serling is particularly devastating in his criticism of his own writing for this episode.

The Hitch-Hiker is a very much much better Rod Serling episode, based on a radio play by Lucille Fletcher. Inger Stevens stars as Nan Adams, a young woman driving cross-country who has a tyre blow-out. After having the tyre repaired she keeps seeing the same mysterious hitch-hiker over and over. This episode is Serling at his most subtle and his most skillful. He gives us a steady accumulation of hints as to what is really going on but the final reveal has real impact. One of the reasons it works so well is that both the audience and the protagonist  learn the truth at the exact same moment. A superb story brillantly executed.

Judgment Night is another very fine Serling story, superbly directed by John Brahm. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric production and it’s an example of a Serling story that succeeds in delivering the emotional punch the author intended. Unfortunately it’s impossible to say anything about the plot without the risk of revealing spoilers.

One For the Angels, Walking Distance and Escape Clause are well-regarded episodes written by Serling. The 69-year-old salesman protagonist of One For the Angels is told by Mr Death that his time is up. There is no escape but there are special circumstances in which an extension of time can be granted. The salesman believes he qualifies for such an extension, to give him time to make the one great pitch that he has never made. This is one of the more successful examples of a gently humorous Twilight Zone. It has some moments where it comes perilously close to sentimentality but on the whole it’s a fine episode.  

Walking Distance and Escape Clause are not so good. In Walking Distance a 36-year-old advertising executive from New York goes back to his home town and finds that he’s travelled back 25 years into the past. He sees his parents (now deceased) and himself as a boy. Serling in his 1975 lecture admits that the episode just doesn’t work, and he’s right. No-one could experience the shock that the protagonist experiences and continue to function. And as Serling points out the character keeps verbalising things that he would not and should not be verbalising. Escape Clause is yet another story of a man, in this case a hypochondriac obsessed by death, who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for immortality. He then of course finds life unutterably boring. It has a couple of twists, one of them quite clever. It’s another episode that seems too pleased with its own cleverness, and again the moral is too obvious and too laboured.

Apart from Serling the two other main writers of this series were Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.

In Matheson’s The Last Flight a WW1 fighter pilot, Flight Lieutenant Decker, takes off in 1917, flies into a cloud-bank and lands at a US Air Force base in France in 1959. This is not just a case of weird stuff happening for its own sake. There is a very good for his finding himself at that particular place at that particular moment in the future, and it allows him to find his destiny. A World of Difference, also by Richard Matheson, stars Howard Duff as Arthur Curtis, a 36-year-old business executive who suddenly discovers that actually he’s actor Gerald Regan. And that Arthur Curtis is only a character in a movie. These are both very well-written and very well-made episodes that hit their target.

Charles Beaumont’s Elegy by is very creepy and very effective. Three astronauts lost in space in 2185 find an asteroid that seems remarkably like Earth in the 20th century. Except that everyone seems frozen in time. Eventually the caretaker explains to them the purpose of the asteroid. The only wish of the astronauts is to be in their ship on their way home. They get their wish, but with a very clever twist. A great episode.

Beaumont’s Long Live Walter Jameson involves an elderly college professor who discovers why his colleague Walter Jameson is able to teach history so vividly that you can almost believe him to be an eyewitness of the events he describes. This discovery makes it obvious that Walter Jameson is much too old to marry the elderly professor’s daughter. Much much too old. The basic idea is far from original but it’s reasonably well executed. Not as strong an episode as Elegy but still an effective story.

A Stop at Willoughby is thematically similar to Walking Distance, with another protagonist yearning for an idealised past. A Stop at Willoughby handles the idea with much greater skill and subtlety and is a fine and very moving story.

The Chaser was written by John Collier, Robert Presnell, Jr from a story by John Collier, and is notable for the strange and extraordinary book-lined room in which the protagonist meets the seller of potions. Director Douglas Heyes came up with the idea and recalls that despite the considerable expense this set entailed he had no difficulty getting the go ahead for it. The willingness of both Rod Serling and producer Buck Houghton to risk spending extra money was a major factor in the success of the series, allowing directors to create the kind of atmosphere that added so much to the stories.

Mr Denton on Doomsday was one of the very early episodes and it’s generally, and rightly, much admired. It’s a fine example of a Serling script that could have come across as being a little corny but Serling pulls off a fine balancing act and the story works.

The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine stars the great Ida Lupino who gets the opportunity to play a rôle clearly based on Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and she makes the most of it. This is another story which flirts dangerously with sentimentality but gets away with it. The premise of this story was later appropriated by Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo.

The After Hours has always been a favourite of mine and it remains one of the archetypal Twilight Zone stories.

I’d seen many of these episodes years ago on television and seeing them now on Blu-Ray is quite a revelation. The UK Blu-Ray release looks absolutely magnificent and includes quite a few audio commentaries as well as The Time Element, a 1958 television play written by Rod Serling and presented as part of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse series, which served as an unofficial pilot episode for The Twilight Zone. 

Despite the reservations I still have about Serling’s writing this remains an impressive series, a series that set new standards for television in terms of visual boldness and high production values. As Douglas Heyes, who directed some of the best episodes, notes in an interview included in the set, the half-hour format was particularly suitable for this series. Heyes maintains, correctly I think, that the premises of most of the stories could not have been sustained in an hour-long format. Episodes like The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine and the classic The After Hours seem to me to  be good examples of what Heyes was talking about.

The Twilight Zone is one of those must-see television series and the Blu-Ray release of season one is highly recommended. It should be noted that the screencaps used to illustrate this review are from the early DVD release and do not reflect the superb quality of the Blu-Ray release.

Baffled! (1973)

Baffled! is a real oddity. This 1973 Anglo-American made-for-TV movie got a theatrical release in Britain but it was actually intended as the pilot for a television series that never got off the ground. It’s easy to see why the series was not greenlighted but although it’s a failure it’s an interesting and strangely entertaining failure.

Leonard Nimoy is a racing car driver named Tom Kovack. He’s leading a race in Pennsylvania when he has a vision and crashes his car. He’s shaken up but unhurt and that night in a TV interview he talks about the vision he saw. Psychic researcher and occult expert Michele Brent (Susan Hampshire) watches the interview and realises immediately that Tom’s vision was the real thing, that he’s a genuine psychic.

She contacts him. He’s sceptical but she is very charming and very beautiful so he hears her out. She fails to overcome his scepticism but when Kovack has another, even more disturbing, vision he realises she was right. He agrees that they should go to Britain, to Wyndham in Devon, the site of his vision. The manor house that he saw in the vision is a stately home whose owner rents out rooms during the tourist season. Michele and Tom book rooms in the house.

They uncover some very strange goings-on. Movie star Andrea Glenn (Vera Miles) and her daughter Jennifer are staying in the house, Andrea hoping for a reconciliation with her estranged husband who lives in the village nearby, Jennifer hoping to finally meet her father. Then Jennifer starts behaving very oddly. It’s as if she’s gone from being twelve years old to being fifteen overnight. Michele has warned Kovack that dark forces are at work and it seems these dark forces are working through Jennifer.

But there is more. Why does the landlady (played by Rachel Roberts) seem to be getting younger every day? And why has Andrea’s husband not appeared?

The plot certainly has potential - it boasts an evil child, eternal youth, missing husbands, psychic visions, kidnappings and a general air of extreme weirdness. The basic premise, a reluctant psychic and a psychic expert acting as amateur occult detectives, is excellent and offers plenty of flexibility.

Susan Hampshire is superb. She is a fine actress and she was no stranger to this sort of material, having got her first big break in the excellent science fiction TV series The Andromeda Breakthrough in the early 60s, and having also made an excellent horror fantasy movie in 1971 called Malpertuis (in which she plays no less than seven roles and acts Orson Welles off the screen). She’s perfect for the role. She manages to be obsessive without seeming weird or crazy, she’s likeable without being cloying, she’s sexy in a classy sort of way and she’s pert and lively.

So far it all sounds good. So what went wrong? Sadly the answer to that is Leonard Nimoy. His performance is all over the place. One suspects that he was concentrating too hard on not being Spock rather than just being natural. But worst of all, there is absolutely no chemistry between the two lead characters. The script makes it obvious that there is supposed to be both a sexual and romantic attachment building between the two characters as well as a sense of camaraderie. It just doesn’t happen onscreen. Susan Hampshire tries her best but Michele and Kovack are just too badly mismatched.

The screenplay also struggles with the task of introducing the two characters who were to be the stars of the series while trying to hold the story together and it perhaps throws too much into the mix.

The production values are reasonably high and the atmosphere of subtle strangeness is suggested quite effectively.

Had it been given a second chance and bit of a re-think it might have had potential. There was nothing particularly bad about the concept. As it stands, despite Nimoy’s outrageously wrong performance it all ends up being fun in a campy sort of way. Enjoyable enough, and worth a look for its curiosity value if nothing else.

The original TV-movie pilot episode of Baffled! has been released on DVD in Region 2 by Network DVD and it looks pretty good.