Thriller - Lady Killer, Possession (1973)

I purchased the complete series boxed set of Brian Clemens’ celebrated 1970s horror/thriller anthology series Thriller back in 2010. I’ve worked my way very slowly through it and I finally reached the end about a year ago. By the time I started this blog I’d already reaches season four. I’ve posted lots of reviews of the later episodes. And now I find myself wanting to revisit the earlier seasons. It is after all around twelve years since I’ve seen some of these episodes.

So if I’m going to do this I should start right from the very beginning.

Lady Killer

Lady Killer is the first episode of the first season and was originally screened in April 1973. Lady Killer was, like just about every episode, scripted by Clemens.

Lady Killer starts in an English seaside hotel. Paul Tanner is romancing Jenny Frifth (Barbara Feldon) but we’re immediately suspicious of his intentions. He sneaked it into her room to get a look at her passport before making his first approach. Then we hear him talking on the telephone to a colleague or accomplice and we realise that for some presumably dishonest reason he is planning to manipulate Jenny into falling in love with him.

Which he has no trouble doing. Jenny is pretty and seems like a pleasant person but she’s obviously shy and lonely, and we know from that phone conversation we overheard that Paul has selected her specifically because she is a lonely lady.

Jenny is swept off her feet. Had she been less lonely and a bit more worldly she might perhaps have realised that this guy is just a bit too smooth and too charming and that he knows every trick in the book when it comes to playing with a woman’s emotions. Jenny is so emotionally starved that she agrees to marry Paul even though she’s known him for just a couple of days.

Gradually she notices little things, or little things are pointed out to her, and the seeds of suspicion are planted in her mind. The problem is that Paul is incredibly quick-witted and is able to provide a plausible explanation every time.

We know that Paul is up to something and it’s pretty obvious what his plan is. But don’t despair. Brian Clemens has a few very neat plot twists up his sleeve.

The casting is quite interesting. Robert Powell was an obvious choice to play Paul. No-one could do oily sinister charm and emotional manipulativeness better than Powell.

Jenny is played by Barbara Feldon. Yes, 99 from Get Smart. She gives a terrific performance, capturing Jenny’s unworldliness and vulnerability without ever allowing her to seem ridiculous or pathetic. And her performance is totally believable - Jenny reacts the way a rather lonely woman desperate for love would react.

The other major female character, Toni, is played by Linda Thorson, which is somewhat surprising since Clemens and Thorson had a fraught and uneasy relationship on The Avengers. Thorson is excellent and her performance is also believable - she has certain logical motivations but they’re complicated by emotion and Thorson makes Toni just sympathetic enough - we don’t approve of her actions but we can understand them.

The icing on the cake for me is the presence of T.P. McKenna, one of my favourite British character actors of that era, in a secondary but crucial role.

All the performances are extremely good and, most importantly, Powell and Feldon and Powell and Thorson work exceptionally well together.

A mystery-thriller needs to have a coherent plot but it doesn’t matter if it’s a little far-fetched. That’s the nature of the mystery and thriller genres. In real life people rarely plan incredibly elaborate crimes, but that’s why real-life crime is boring. The mystery-thriller genre should have nothing to do with realism. As long as the plot has internal coherence there’s no need to ask yourself if anybody would really carry out such a complicated crime which apparently required three years’ worth of planning.

It’s a clever enough plan. Not dazzlingly original but the sheer effort and sacrifice and patience required to make it work are impressive. It won’t take most viewers very long to figure out what Paul’s plan is. That doesn’t matter because Clemens has a couple of very nifty little plot twists to spring on us in the third act. And those plot twists are very cleverly executed.

That’s so much here to enjoy but the greatest pleasure comes from the performances of Robert Powell, Barbara Feldon and Linda Thorson. They really are a joy to watch.

Lady Killer is a great way to kick off a brand new series.

Possession

Possession is episode two and already the series is shifting gears to keep us on our toes. Suddenly we’re in supernatural territory, with a haunted house story. With Thriller you could never be sure if there were going to be supernatural elements or not. And the supernatural could be handled in a rather ambiguous way in this series.

In this case the setup is a classic haunted house story. Successful businessman Ray Burns (John Carson) and his wife Penny (Joanna Dunham) have just bought a lovely old house in the country.

At first everything goes well, with just a few very tiny odd things that disturb Penny. Then there are problems with the central heating and the basement floor (which for some mysterious reason had been concreted) has to be dug up. A gruesome discovery is made, which seems to provide a partial solution to a 20-year-old mystery. This discovery also explains some increasingly odd events. There is a ghost haunting the house, but whose ghost? Is it the ghost of the victim or the murderer?

The obvious step is to get a medium to conduct a séance. As is always the case in movies and TV the séance turns out to be a seriously bad idea.

Penny is now quite frightened and Ray is pretty shaken as well.

And there’s the matter of the murder that takes place nearby. There’s no connection of course but it is an odd coincidence.

This story leads us up the garden path pretty effectively. We think it’s a very conventional ghost story but things are by no means as simple as they appear to be.

There are some clues as to what is going on, clues such as the killer’s fondness for whistling Greensleeves, but these clues can mislead us if we’re not careful.

It’s a clever variation on the haunted house theme.

So two very good episodes right at the start of season one.

Coronet Blue (1967)

Coronet Blue is a short-lived offbeat series that aired on CBS in 1967. It was created by Larry Cohen. Cohen also created The Invaders with which Coronet Blue has some slight affinities.

A young man is mixed up in something big. It’s something dangerous and possibly illegal. Whatever it is the people behind it decide the young man has to die. Before killing him they remove all traces of identification, even the labels on his clothes. Then they dump him into the harbour. But the young man doesn’t die. He is fished out of the water, but now he doesn’t remember anything and he doesn’t know who he is or what his name is.

He is taken to the hospital where a psychiatrist tries to put him back together again but he still can’t remember anything but the words Coronet Blue. He decides he can’t stay in the hospital but before he leaves he needs a name. His psychiatrists name is Michael and the hospital is Alden General Hospital so he becomes Michael Alden.

Now he has to find out who he is. He also has to bear in mind that somebody is still trying to kill him. Neither Michael nor the audience has any idea initially as to his identity or to the part he played in whatever it was that got him dropped into the harbour. He may be a criminal. He may be an undercover cop. Or a spy. Or even an innocent bystander.

Coronet Blue is a thriller but it’s an attempt to add a few psychological and philosophical dimensions to the genre. The hero grapples with the problem of either rediscovering his identity or constructing a new life while the thriller plot bubbles away in the background, occasionally coming to the forefront suddenly and unexpectedly.

Coronet Blue belongs to an odd genre very characteristic of the 60s in which a man is both running from something and searching for something. What they are searching for varies. Sometimes it’s a meaning to the puzzle of life but often it’s the answer to a question. The Fugitive and Run for Your Life are obvious examples of this genre. The Invaders is a variation on the theme.

Coronet Blue is a series that struggles a little to find a consistent tone. It’s very 1960s in being at times quite dark and disturbing and then switching suddenly to slightly zany light comedy. There was clearly an intention to aim at a hip young audience, the sorts of viewers that the networks were desperate to reach at that time. It has that  60s “young people trying to find themselves” vibe that characterised series like Route 66 and Then Came Bronson.

Frank Converse is very good in the lead rôle. He’s sympathetic and his performance mercifully avoids wallowing in self-pity.

Larry Cohen lost control of the series early on and it went in a direction which was not at all what he’d intended. He saw the series as a suspense thriller story but it became a “finding yourself” series. Cohen had a very clear idea where the story was going to end up and the solution to the mystery (which I’m certainly not going to reveal) could have been very satisfying. Cohen’s idea also had the virtue of explaining why Michael had so much trouble discovering his identity.

Had Cohen remained in control it would have been more like The Invaders with the protagonist gradually putting more and more of the pieces together. Neither the production company nor the network seemed to know what to do with this series with the unfortunate result that it lasted only thirteen episodes and so we never do find out the answer to the puzzle. If you buy it on DVD then make sure you watch the series before you watch the interview with Larry Cohen in which he reveals that answer.

Episode Guide

A Time to Be Born sets things up. Michael Alden leaves the hospital intent on finding to exactly what Coronet Blue refers to. His search leads him to a party at which he meets Alix Frame (played by one of my all-time favourite actresses, Susan Hampshire). Alix’s father offers him a job selling boats. Alix is searching for something as well but she doesn't know what it is. They fall in love but Michael still has somebody pursuing him trying to kill him so settling down with Alix is obviously not going to be possible. It’s a fine story that sets the tone for the series.

In The Assassins Michael thinks he’s found his mother but he may have found a whole lot of trouble. There’s also a girl to whom he was apparently engaged. He doesn't remember anything about her. Curiously enough the girl doesn’t seem to remember anything about him either. He also gets introduced to a visiting prince. Michael thinks there’s something strange going on but he can’t figure what it is. This seems to be a typical Coronet Blue episode - Michael finds a possible clue to his identity, he meets a girl and falls in love but sinister forces are at work against him. Another very good episode with the trademarks of this series - a vague feeling of uneasiness, of possible deception and manipulation.

The Rebels takes Michael to college, where he’s employed as a campus security officer but he’s actually being used as an experimental subject by a scientist who thinks he can cure his amnesia. It’s a particularly dire example of American television trying to be socially relevant by confronting the problems facing college kids today. In this case they’re being oppressed by having to attend lectures and do exams. The potential interesting aspects of the story (the experiments with memory) end up being ignored. An atrocious episode.

Another attempt is made on Michael’s life and he ends up taking refuge in a monastery in New York City, in A Dozen Demons. The demons are in a stained glass window. It’s a modern window, painted quite recently, of the Temptation of St Anthony. And the St Anthony in the picture looks exactly like Michael. Michael is convinced that it is him, that he must have been the model. This clue could give him some answers. To help him find the answer he has a crazy artist, the artist’s pretty blonde daughter and a runaway monk who, like Michael, is searching for an identity and a place in the world. This is a much better episode that maintains its focus on Michael’s search for the answer to the Coronet Blue riddle.

In Faces Michael finds a photograph. It was taken at a funeral and he’s in it. The funeral took place in a town called Jennings Grove. A popular local girl had been murdered. Nobody can remember seeing Michael at the funeral and nobody can tell him who he is but he’s sure that if he keeps pushing then somebody must remember something. Meanwhile a young man awaits execution for the murder. It’s a decent mystery story with the twist that Michael can’t be sure that he himself is not the murderer.

In Man Running Michael saves a man from an attempted murder. The man (played with aplomb by Denholm Elliott) is being hunted by agents of a Caribbean military dictatorship. He has come to New York to see his daughter for the first time in ten years. Michael really doesn’t want to get mixed up in this situation but of course he does get involved and the situation gets more complicated. This is an odd episode since mostly the focus is not really on Michael. It’s more a straight thriller story, but enjoyable enough.

Although A Charade for Murder does involve a murder this is an episode that is characterised by extreme quirkiness and a slightly farcical tone. Michael’s ex-monk friend Tony (introduced in A Dozen Demons) is framed for murder but the real intention had been to frame Michael. The conspiracy is totally over-the-top with a bogus Navy intelligence officer and a ditzy actress doing a fortune-teller spiel. And it’s definitely kind of fun.

Saturday tries to combine some psychological drama with the ongoing mystery plot. A guy who claims to be able to tell him the secret of his identity but on the way to meet him Michael runs into a kid whose father has just died. The kid suddenly has to deal with grown-up problems of identity which is pretty much what Michael faces. It works reasonably well.

In The Presence of Evil a stage magician believes he really has supernatural powers and that they come from Satan. The powers work through his young female assistant and allow her to see the future. What interests Michael is that blue coronet the assistant wears during the performance.

Michael is used to people bring to kill him but what he didn’t expect was that someone would want to send him to Mars. Literally. But that’s what happens in Six Months to Mars. It’s a U.S. Government project but the guy in charge of it is definitely in the mad scientist mould. Interesting episode.

The Flip Side of Timmy Devon presents Michael with another puzzle. Pop star Timmy Devon is dead. The last song he wrote has not yet been released. No-one has heard the song. And yet Michael knows the words. But how does he know them?

Since this series was clearly aimed at a younger demographic a story with a pop music background was an obviously good idea and although the final twist probably won’t come a huge surprise it’s sill pretty well executed. And it has the oddball feel that characterises Coronet Blue at its best. Another good episode.

In Where You from and What You Done? Michel is in a smarten in Virginia called Coronet catching a bus when he meets ditzy blonde singer Ava Lou Springer. Or maybe she’s a writer. Or maybe her identity is as uncertain as Michael’s. Or maybe there’s not a word of truth in anything she tells him. She is pretty though and although the last thing Michael really needs is to hook up with a crazy young woman that’s what he does. Although he is worried about the guy at the bus terminal who seemed to be taking a bit too much interest in him. Another good episode.

In Tomoyo Michael sees a Japanese girl in the street and he’s convinced he knew her. Trying to get to talk to her leads him to Mr Omaki’s dojo and gets him beaten up. He learns something from this. He learns that he knows quite a bit about martial arts. But is this going to help him discover his identity? An interesting episode with some reasonable suspense and mystery elements.

Final Thoughts

In commercial terms Coronet Blue was perhaps a bit too quirky for its own good. I personally like its quirkinesss but structurally it’s a bit too loose. It needed a tighter focus on the ongoing story arc involving Michael’s past. Michael just doesn’t discover enough about his past to keep the mystery and suspense thriller elements interesting. Having said that it’s still an intriguing series that had potential. And the theme song will burrow itself into your brain!

The DVD release offers excellent transfers and a very revealing interview with the show’s creator Larry Cohen. If you like slightly offbeat dramas Coronet Blue is worth a look. Recommended.

two Thrillers - Good Salary Prospects Free Coffin, The Next Voice You See

Two more episodes from the excellent British ITC anthology series Thriller, both from season five and originally aired in 1975.

Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin
Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin (retitled as Mirror of Deception in the U.S.) starts with a hole being dug, a hole that looks not unlike a grave. The scene then switches to a London flat shared by three girls, Wendy, Babs and Helen. The delivery of the newspaper has raised some excitement, It contains a job advert that sounds very tempting. It’s a well-paid live-in job in the country for a young woman with no ties and a sense of adventure.

Wendy lands the job and Babs and Helen never hear from her again. Of course that’s not all that unusual - they had only shared a flat for six months or so, and Wendy did not the other two all that well. A few months later the same job advert appears again. This time Babs gets the job. And Helen never hears from her again. This is a little surprising since Babs and Helen were reasonably close.

Another few months go by. Helen gets married to her long-time boyfriend Charley (Keith Barron). Helen is an American and so she has to go to the American Embassy to get her passport updated with her new marital status. She has quite a shock when the Embassy official dealing with passports turns out to be Babs Bryant, an amazing coincidence since Bryant was the surname of Helen’s friend Babs. And this Babs is from York too, just like the other Babs. But it’s not Babs.

The other curious incident concerned the scarf. Bans had borrowed Helen’s scarf and left it behind at the office where she was interviewed for the mystery job. When Helen turned up at the office the following day to retrieve her scarf the office was deserted, and she was informed that it had been deserted for months. A very curious employment agency.

In fact Helen has no idea just how curious this employment agency is.

It doesn’t take too long to get a fairly good idea as to what’s going on. That’s not a weakness in Brian Clemens’ script - he wants us to know exactly what it is that is happening. He wants us to be very afraid indeed for the heroine when she decides to play amateur detective. He wants us to know just how much danger she is putting herself in.

And he has some twists still held in reserve.

Julian Glover is deliciously sinister as the sadistic Gifford. James Maxwell is extremely good as Carter and there’s a nice edge to the relationship between the two bad guys.

The weak link is Kim Darby as Helen. This was an ITC series which meant that it was pretty much compulsory to have at least one American star per episode (ITC boss Sir Lew Grade being totally obsessed with the wrong-headed notion that this was the secret to cracking the U.S. market). Thriller’s American imports are all very much second-string stars but mostly they do a decent job. Kim Darby however is just a bit too bland. The chemistry between Darby and Keith Barron just isn’t there also and it’s difficult to imagine why two such people would want to get married.

On the whole Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin delivers the necessary suspense and thrills. A fine episode.

The Next Voice You See
The Next Voice You See (retitled as Look Back in Happiness in the U.S.) concerns a man who is an eyewitness to a crime. Or, more correctly, he is an earwitness.

It opens with a prologue in 1964. Visiting American jazz pianist Stan Kay (Bradford Dillman) is caught in the middle of a bank raid in London. His wife is killed and he is blinded permanently by a shotgun blast.

A decade later Stan Kay is back in London, as part of a successful European tour. At a party he hears a voice. A voice he has not heard for ten years. It is the voice of the man who killed his wife and blinded him. It is the voice of the armed robber from 1964.

That sounds like a lucky break for Stan, a chance he will finally get justice. The difficulty is that it was a voice heard at a very crowded party and in such circumstances it is just about impossible for a blind man to tell which of a hundred or so guests was the man with the voice.

He does have an ally. Julie (Catherine Schell) works for Stan’s agent and she is acting as a kind of personal assistant/companion to him during the British leg of his tour. She likes Stan and she believes his story. It’s still an awesomely difficult task to identify the killer. Stan knows the voice and Julie doesn’t, but Julie has eyes and Stan doesn’t. Maybe between the two of them they can do it.

The danger of course is that their snooping is going to be noticed by the killer, so that while  Stan and Julie are stalking him through the crowded party the killer could be stalking them.

Bradford Dillman is this week’s cheap imported American star and he’s OK. He manages to be convincing as a slightly temperamental musician type and he conveys Stan’s anger and frustration pretty well.

Catherine Schell is also good as Julie. She’s a woman whose job entails being nice to people who are sometimes very difficult but she’s a sympathetic sort of person and although Stan is prickly she copes with him very well. She gets completely drawn into Stan’s obsessive quest to find the murderer.

Thriller was made on tight budgets with very little location shooting. That’s ideal for this kind of story where everything has to take place in just a few rooms and a claustrophobic feel is highly desirable. The nature of the story also means that almost every scene involves at least a dozen people - it is all taking place at a crowded party - so you need a competent and pretty experienced director to keep things under control. Robert Tronson was perfectly qualified for the job and he handles it well. He manages to make a party overflowing with guests seem like a very dangerous place.

This is another Brian Clemens story but the actual screenplay is by Terence Feely. So you’ve got a lot of very experienced and talented TV people involved and the results are more than satisfactory.

Another fairly good episode.

Thriller - If It's a Man, Hang Up/The Double Kill (1975)

Brian Clemens had a major success with his anthology series Thriller, made by ITC and running from 1973 to 1976. The stories were psychological thrillers, very much in the style of the psychological thrillers made by Hammer Films from the early 60s to the early 70s. In fact the immediate inspiration for the series was probably a film Clemens had written in 1970, And Soon the Darkness.

Thriller went into production just before Euston Films revolutionised the look and style of British television with Special Branch and The Sweeney. Thriller belongs very much to the previous era of British television. Its in colour but has a shot-in-the-studio shot-on-videotape feel to it. The production values are not overly high. There is very little location shooting. That particular era of British TV relied very heavily on the quality of the writing, which fortunately tended to be rather high. Clemens certainly had an illustrious track record as both writer and producer thanks to The Avengers. Thriller, perhaps deliberately, has absolutely no resemblance to The Avengers in either content or style.

Clemens wrote most of the forty-three episodes himself.

If It's a Man, Hang Up kicks off the fifth season. It went to air in Britain in early 1975. In common with many of the other episodes it has an imported American star, and one who is very much of the second rank. Carol Lynley is very attractive and that’s about the best thing you can say about her as an actress. Fortunately in this episode she plays a model and we don’t exactly expect sparkling wit and intellectual sparkle from models.

Suzy Martin (Lynley) is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. When she starts getting heavy-breather telephone calls she probably should have taken the matter a bit more seriously. A young pretty woman who is a minor celebrity and lives alone should perhaps be a bit more aware of the importance of taking at least some very basic precautions to protect herself.

Suzy does the sorts of things you’d expect a model to do. She’s having an affair with married middle-aged photographer Greg Miles (Gerald Harper). She’s dumped the photographer who established her reputation, Terry Cleeves (Paul Angelis), because now she’s a big name and she doesn’t need him any more.

She does have the sense to call the police about the phone calls but all she gets out of that is a few visits from a couple of not very bright constables. Being a celebrity she might have been wise to make more of a fuss and demand to talk to an inspector at least.

As you might anticipate the situation starts to escalate, the heavy breather moves on to making vague threats. And then something happens that convinces Suzy that she is in real danger.

There are lots of men around who are anxious to play the white knight and rescue this damsel in distress. There’s Greg Miles, there’s Terry Cleeves, there’s Terry’s Sicilian friend Bruno (Tom Conti), there’s the caretaker who thinks Suzy is a kind of goddess and there are the two young police constables. The problem of course is that one of these would-be white knights is the psycho killer who is stalking her, and Suzy’s judgment when it comes to men is just a little questionable at the best of times. She seems to have a knack for making decisions that she hasn’t really thought through and this is going to place her in very great danger indeed.

Thriller is a series that can be just a little clunky at times, just a little stilted, probably mostly due to the very studio-bound production methods. The acting can also be rather variable.

What matters here though is that Clemens muddies the waters with considerable skill, misdirecting us and encouraging us to go after the red herrings that he has deployed. It’s not an incredibly complex plot but Clemens was a pro and he keeps us guessing. Every single character is a totally plausible suspect.

Carol Lynley might not be a great actress but she does succeed in doing the one thing that she has to do. She manages to make us care about Suzy. She has her flaws and she’s not all that bright but Suzy is basically a sympathetic character and she doesn’t deserve to be terrorised. Tom Conti gives a nicely relaxed performance while Gerald Harper and Paul Angelis manage to make their respective characters just creepy enough to make them plausible suspects.

If It's a Man, Hang Up is a generally very successful episode.

The Double Kill opens with an odd encounter between a home-owner and a burglar. It gives us a hint that some kind of game is being played, possibly a dangerous game, but at this stage we have no idea what the game is.

We’re introduced to married couple Hugh and Clarissa Briant (played by Gary Collins and Penelope Horner). Their relationship is tense to say the least. Clarissa is extremely wealthy. She collects things. She collects paintings, silverware, antiques, jade, pretty much anything that’s expensive. One assumes that her purchases include her husband. They live in a rather palatial home stuffed with treasures and protected by - well actually they’re not protected by anything at all. There is no security. And the fact that the house is filled with outrageously valuable trinkets is no secret. Hugh never stops talking about how worried he is by the lack of security. He talks about it everywhere.

There is another odd encounter with another burglar and we start to see the game that is being played. It’s a nasty clever little game but that’s only the beginning. Other people can play games as well. All sorts of unexpected people play games in this story. You can easily find that the game you’re playing is not the one you thought you were playing.

Gary Collins is another of those second-tier American stars who feature so heavily in Thriller but he’s a pretty good actor and does an effective job. James Villiers (as Hugh’s friend Paul) has long been one of my favourite British actors of this era, always at his best when he’s being a bit morally ambiguous. Peter Bowles is another favourite of mine. He plays Superintendent Lucas, who knows a thing or two about games. Stuart Wilson is nicely ambiguous and unpredictable as Max Burns. This really is a very fine cast.

OK, you can see one of the plot twists coming but in a way that makes it more fun - it adds a delicious touch of anticipation as you can see characters making wrong moves but there’s nothing they can do about it since they don’t know that the rules of the game have changed. And there are plenty of twists that you won’t see coming.

The Double Kill is a superb episode.

Season five certainly gets off to a terrific start with If It's a Man, Hang Up and The Double Kill. Great stuff. Highly recommended.

I've previously reviewed Night Is the Time for Killing and several other season four episodes of Thriller.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents season 3 (1958), three episodes

Three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, all from 1958 and from the third season.

In Flight to the East American foreign correspondent Ted Franklin (Gary Merrill) tells his story in a series of flashbacks while on a flight from Nairobi to Cairo. He tells the story to a woman, and she seems to be remarkably interested in it. It’s all about a news story he covered that attracted a lot of attention but also caused him a lot of trouble. Sasha Ismael, a French Arab, had been accused of gun-running during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. As his trial progressed Ted Franklin had become more and more convinced that Sasha was innocent and was the victim of a conspiracy.

Franklin gets permission to speak to Sasha alone and what he is told convinces him that an injustice is about to occur.

Initially it’s rather puzzling that the story is told in flashback but the reason will eventually become clear. The key to the puzzle is that interview with Sasha Ismael. What exactly did Sasha tell him?

I get the feeling that writers Joel Murcott and Bevil Charles don’t really understand the English legal system. They seem to assume that a prosecutor in an English court is a bit like a District Attorney in the United States, which of course is not the case at all. As a result they make the mistake of thinking that the prosecutor plays a part in the investigation before the case goes to trial. It’s an unfortunate weakness in the story.

Apart from that it’s not a bad story. The necessary major plot twist is nicely complex and ambiguous.

Listen, Listen…..! is definitely one of the weaker episodes. Bernard C. Schoenfeld wrote the teleplay from a story by R.E. Kendall. An old man goes to the police. He has a theory about a murder case. The police are not interested. As far as they are concerned the Stocking Murder Case is all wrapped up and the man who killed three young women is safely behind bars awaiting trial. The old man tries to convince them that a mistake may have been made - the third murder may have been a copycat crime.

He tries more than one policeman. Then he tries to convince a hardbitten reporter. Finally in desperation he goes to a Catholic priest - he must find someone who will listen to him.

Unfortunately the twist ending is rather too obvious and in fact the whole story is rather too obvious right from the start. This episode just falls rather flat.

Post Mortem was written by Robert C. Dennis and based on a Cornell Woolrich short story.  Woolrich’s stories were the basis for countless movies including some of the finest examples of the film noir and psychological thriller genres so my expectations for this episode were very high indeed.

Winning the Irish Sweepstakes is always good news. And Judy Archer (Joanna Morre) has just discovered that that’s exactly what she’s done. Judy is now married to Steve Archer and they’re comfortable enough since Judy collected on a very large insurance policy when Harry died. Now they’re very very rich.

Except for one slight problem. The ticket was bought by her late husband, Harry. And the problem is, she has no idea where Harry put the ticket.

A frantic search ensues. The trouble with searching for something is that sometimes you find more than you bargained for.

This is a delicious story and it has all the ingredients of the best Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes - it has the black comedy and the vicious little plot twists and most of all it has the seemingly innocuous situations that become unexpectedly nasty. It also has a delightful performance by Joanna Moore.

Dip in the Pool, based on a story by Roald Dahl, was directed by Hitchcock himself. Inveterate gambler William Botibol (Keenan Wynn) convinces himself that he has found a surefire way to win the ship’s pool (a kind of sweepstakes based on the number of miles the ship travels each day). If he doesn’t win he’s in very big trouble - he’s lost all the money that is to pay for his wife’s holiday in Europe. He may have to consider drastic measures to make sure he wins.

four Thrillers from Brian Clemens (1974-5)

ITC had a major success in the 1970s with their Thriller anthology series, created by Brian Clemens (who wrote all forty-three episodes). Each episode was feature length allowing for multiple plot twists. What you expect from Clemens are stories that are not necessarily very original but he generally manages to make even old plot ideas seem reasonably fresh and entertaining.

The production values are standard for early 70s British television - shot on videotape, very studio-bound and looking generally very cheap. By the mid-70s the style of British television changed dramatically in the wake of the success of The Sweeney which made Thriller look a bit old-fashioned and even at times just a little shoddy as far as sets were concerned. It doesn’t really matter. Clemens’ stories have enough going for them to maintain the viewer’s interest.

The fourth season aired from late 1974 and on into 1975.

The acting is variable, sometimes very good and sometimes very bad.

Of course there’s the bonus of some amazingly kitsch 70s clothing. And 70s wallpaper and suchlike things which in my view add to the charm of the series.

Screamer opens season four. A young American woman working for the US Embassy is heading off to the country by train to stay with friends. She is a bit nervous since several women have recently been raped near the railway station where her friends live. It turns out her fears were justified. A man follows her home from the station and brutally rapes her.

Nicola (Pamela Franklin) recovers from the attack after spending several months in a mental hospital. She is now cured. Well, almost cured. She still has nightmares. And she still thinks she sees the man who raped her. She still has screaming episodes even in broad daylight. But she is getting better. And the police have caught the man who raped her. So everything will be OK now. Except that everything is not OK. It’s not OK at all.

Pamela Franklin does a pretty fair job as the understandably disturbed Nicola. Derek Smith is fun as the perpetually exasperated, short-tempered but dogged Inspector Charles.

This is an episode for connoisseurs of 70s kitsch clothing. Frances White as Nicola’s friend Vima wears some extraordinary dresses, the most bizarre of which makes her look like a demented milk maid.

The problem with this episode is that you’re going to figure out what’s going on very quickly and the plot twists are all too predictable. The level of political incorrectness is almost off the scale in this episode, political incorrectness being one of the great delights of 70s British television.

Nurse Will Make It Better is one of the rare supernatural horror episodes and it really is unequivocal supernatural horror. An American diplomat’s daughter, Charley (Linda Liles), is crippled in a riding accident. She now needs full-time nursing but to say that she’s a difficult patient would be an understatement. No nurse lasts more than a week, until the arrival of Bessy Morne (Diana Dors). Bessy is more than equal to the task. Bessy is not just a nurse. She promises Charley that she will be able to walk again. Bessy can deliver on her promise but her methods owe more to black magic than medical science.

Charley’s sister Ruth (Andrea Marcovicci) becomes more and more worried, especially when the third sister, sixteen-year-old Susy, starts behaving oddly. Ruth realises her whole family is in danger but knowing this is one thing, doing anything effective about it is another, given Bessy Morne’s formidable satanic powers. The only hope may lie in a burnt-out drunken wreck of a priest named Lyall (Patrick Troughton).

If Thriller has a flaw it’s that it sometimes veers too close to out-and-out melodrama. In this episode this flaw becomes a major asset. Diana Dors is at her outrageous best. Bessy is one of the great horror villainesses. Patrick Troughton, in the minor but crucial role as the gin-soaked Lyall, decides to see if he can match Diana Dors in the overacting stakes. He can’t, but he gives it his best shot. Linda Liles, Andrea Marcovicci and Ed Bishop (as the diplomat’s faithful and rather amiable bodyguard) are all very solid. 

This episode is a real treat with Diana Dors making it an absolute must-watch.

A Killer in Every Corner was episode 5 of season 4 and originally aired in 1974. This is a psychological horror story. Literally - it’s a horror story about psychologists. 

The brilliant but possibly eccentric Professor Marcus Carnaby (Patrick Magee) has invited three psychology students to his home for the weekend - Tim Hunter (Peter Settelen), Helga Muller (Petra Markham) and Sylvia Dee (Joanna Pettet). Since Carnaby is one of the world’s foremost psychologists the students are naturally honoured and excited. The weekend will certainly be exciting, but not in the way they expected.

What the students would of course really love to see is one of Professor Carnaby’s actual experiments. They will certainly get their wish.

It certainly isn’t long before we realise that the professor’s experiments would get him into a good deal of trouble with an ethics committee. In fact he’s quite mad. Possibly crazier than some of the people he’s experimenting on, and they’re very crazy and very dangerous indeed. And at least two of his patients are living in his house, but they’ve been cured by the professor. At least the professor believes he’s cured them.

We can foresee some of the mayhem that is going to follow but writer Brian Clemens has a few tricks up his sleeve.

If ever an actor was born to play a mad scientist it was Patrick Magee. And he’s in splendid form. He gets great support from Don Henderson as his butler Boz and Max Wall as another of his servants - both characters who may or may not turn out to be sinister but both are distinctly disturbing. Joanna Pettet, an actress whose career was already on the downslide, adds some glamour and makes an adequate endangered heroine.

A Killer in Every Corner is fairly typical of this series - nicely dark and twisted and very well executed. Worth it for Patrick Magee’s performance.

Where the Action Is was the final episode of the fourth season. This particular episode went to air in 1975.

Gambler Eddie Valence (Edd Byrnes) has just lost a lot of money at the roulette tables when he meets Ilse (Ingrid Pitt). If he’d won he’d have been suspicious about a beautiful woman inviting him to her hotel room but since he lost he figures he’s safe - no-one is going to rob him of his winnings since he doesn’t have any. 

Nonetheless he should have been suspicious. He is drugged and he wakes up in the country house of ‘Daddy’ Burns (James Berwick). Burns is a gambler as well. He likes to play for very high stakes. The highest stakes of all. And he never loses. Eddie is going to have to do some serious gambling and if he can’t figure out a way to win he is not going to be leaving alive.

Refusing to play is not an option. Burns’ country house is a fortress, or more accurately perhaps a prison, and escape is impossible.

The episode works because the gambling isn’t just the background to the story - absolutely everything in this tale hinges on gambling of one sort or another.

The plot twists are not going to come as great surprises. They have all been used before. Brian Clemens does however fit them together with a fair amount of skill.

It’s really the acting that carries the episode. Edd Byrnes makes a convincingly cool professional gambler. James Berwick as Burns is suitably obsessive and gleefully malevolent. Ingrid Pitt is glamorous and deliciously treacherous.

Nurse Will Make It Better, A Killer in Every Corner and Where the Action Is are among the most entertaining of the entire series. Screamer has its problems but it’s still worth a look.

 I’ve reviewed the third episode (Night Is the Time for Killing AKA Murder on the Midnight Express) separately elsewhere.

Thriller, two musical episodes (1960-61)

The late 50s and early 60s was the great age of American television mystery/suspense anthology series and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller is one of my favourites. Today I want to talk about two episodes that both deal with music and musicians, in very different ways and with varying levels of success. The episodes are The Terror in Teakwood and Papa Benjamin, both from the first season.

Both are stories about the price that a musician will pay for his art, a price that turns out to be much too high.

The Terror in Teakwood was written by Alan Caillou from a story by Harold Lawlor. It opens, in classic gothic style, in a graveyard. A man has bribed the caretaker to allow him to enter the mausoleum. What did this man want in the mausoleum? We don’t know but it certainly horrified the caretaker.

This is a story of two musicians, both great pianists, and bitter rivals. Carnowitz is now dead, but for the survivor, Vladimir Vicek (Guy Rolfe), the rivalry is far from over. Before he died his hated rival had composed a sonata that he alone could play - no-one else but Carnowitz was physically capable of playing it.

Vicek’s wife Leonie (Hazel Court) has become increasingly concerned about her husband. She suspects that someone is trying to kill him. She persuades her old flame Jerry Welch to take a job as Vicek’s manager in order to keep an eye on him. After an encounter with the creepy graveyard caretaker Gafke (Reggie Nalder) Welch knows that something is certainly going on and that it might have something to do with the teakwood box that seems to be so important to Vicek.

The plot borrows from a couple of classic 1930s horror movies but I won’t tell you which ones for fear of spoilers.

This episode was directed by Paul Henreid who had been a successful actor (best-known perhaps for Casablanca and Now, Voyager) before becoming a prolific television director. He does a fine job here. 

There’s an abundance of gothic atmosphere on display. The special effects work well. Guy Rolfe is terrific as the disturbingly obsessed Vicek. Hazel Court was one of the great cinematic scream queens appearing in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein and several of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies including the superb Masque of the Red Death. Reggie Nalder is wonderfully sinister as the sly Gafke.

Papa Benjamin was written by John Kneubuhl from a Cornell Woolrich short story. An American band leader, Eddie Wilson (John Ireland), in search of the musical inspiration which he feels has deserted him, thinks he has found the answer in voodoo. He does find his inspiration, but at a terrible cost. His choice then seems to be to kill or be killed.

Ted Post directed this episode and in the audio commentary he recorded for the Image Entertainment DVD set he has some very harsh things to say about it. He felt at the time that Kneubuhl’s script was incoherent and badly needed extra work and (with each episode having to be completed in just five days) there was no time to do this. He was also deeply unhappy with the casting (which was forced upon him) of John Ireland in the lead role. He felt that Ireland’s performance was one-note and failed to get to grips with the character. Post was also scathing about producer Maxwell Shane.

It has to be admitted that Post’s criticisms are perfectly valid. While Papa Benjamin is beautifully shot and very atmospheric the story never really engages our interest or our sympathy. It is impossible to care what happens to Eddie Wilson. He’s a flat and uninteresting character.

The voodoo scenes work extremely well and there are some very nice film noir-influenced shots.

Despite the insane pace at which Thriller was made, with constant pressures to keep within the shooting schedule and the budget, production values were always high and it was always a visually impressive series. Sometimes, as in The Terror in Teakwood, the results exceeded all expectations - the best Thriller episodes such as this one are among the most outstanding television achievement of their era. Sometimes, as was the case with Papa Benjamin, it didn’t quite work.

The Image Entertainment Thriller boxed set is superb and includes a wealth of audio commentaries. The transfers are excellent. 

Dangerous Knowledge (1976)

Dangerous Knowledge is a fairly gritty six-part mystery thriller serial made by Britain’s Southern Television and originally broadcast in 1976.

Bill Kirby (John Gregson) has been in France on business and is returning to England. He wants to leave the car ferry unobtrusively and attaches himself to Laura Marshall (Prunella Ransome). He attaches himself in a rather obvious way but Laura is more amused than concerned.

Kirby is trying to avoid two men. He claims they have been following him. In fact it’s pretty obvious that they are following him. He also claims that they mean to do him harm.

Kirby’s later explanations to Laura, after they reach her luxurious cabin cruiser (although it’s actually Daddy’s cabin cruiser), are evasive to say the least. He tells her that he is an insurance salesman but he was in France for unspecified private business - all he tells her is that there are different kinds of insurance and that he has obtained some information that may be valuable. The viewer is entitled to suspect at this point that Kirby’s business in France may not have been entirely kosher. As Laura remarks, it could be anything from industrial espionage to blackmail. And Bill Kirby might be a crook, or an undercover cop, or a spy or possibly even an insurance salesman who has stumbled across something lucrative but dangerous.

This is a series that takes its time letting us know what is going on. We find out a little bit about Kirby in the second episode. He is divorced, the divorce was amicable, he is staying at his ex-wife’s house and he has money troubles. He also drinks rather a lot. 

Kirby’s problem (or at least one of his several problems) is that he’s short of reliable allies. In fact it looks like Laura Marshall might be the only ally he has but it’s doubtful whether he can trust her either. Laura’s stepfather, Roger Fane (Patrick Allen), is a senior civil servant. It’s not entirely clear what he does but it seems to have something to do with security or counter-espionage. Fane seems to be rather interested in Bill Kirby.

By episode five we’re still not sure what is really going on, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and what the motivations of the major characters might be. The mystery is maintained without resorting to willful obscurity. We’re not actually misled, we’re merely handed one piece of the jugsaw puzzle at a time. 

The emphasis is on atmosphere and tension, and a considerable degree of 1970s paranoia, rather than action. 

John Gregson had a reasonably successful film career in the 50s. By the 60s he was working mostly in television, with considerable success. He starred in the hit cop show Gideon’s Way. Tragically he died suddenly at 56 shortly after filming Dangerous Knowledge. Gregson was perhaps getting a bit old, and a bit portly, to be starring in thrillers by this time but then that’s really the point of the series - Kirby really is too old to be getting mixed up in these sorts of activities but he needs money badly and he had no idea it would turn out to be this dangerous. Gregson does an effective job. He’s gruff and grizzled and cynical but sympathetic as well. At the same time we’re not entirely confident that he’s an honourable man. We like him but he could be a hero or a rogue, or even an out-and-out villain.

Prunella Ransome is very good as Laura. Laura is a woman who is not sure where her sympathies should lie or where they actually do lie. Ransome doesn’t try to play her as a femme fatale. She’s simply a reasonably intelligent woman thrust into a situation where she’s out of her depth.

Patrick Allen is perfectly cast. He could play smooth villains or trusted authority figures with equal assurance and he’s suitably enigmatic here in his portrayal of Roger Fane.

Ralph Bates (best remembered for his appearances in some extremely interesting early 70s Hammer films) as Sanders makes a surprisingly good heavy. He gets virtually no dialogue. Mostly he just looks menacing but in an ambiguous way, as if he could be a cold-blooded hitman or an equally cold-blooded spy or undercover cop. He does the menacing part extremely well. 

Producer-director Alan Gibson did a great deal of television work but also directed a couple of Hammer horror films - the notorious Dracula A.D. 1972 and the underrated The Satanic Rites of Dracula. He also directed the obscure but interesting Goodbye Gemini.

N.J. Crisp’s career as a television writer was prolific and varied. He wrote all six half-hour episodes and his scripts are literate and cunningly contrived to keep us guessing. What’s particularly impressive is that he does this without over-complicating the plot. The main plot outline is quite straightforward, if only we could be sure who is betraying whom and why.

Simply Home Entertainment’s Region 2 DVD release is a single disc without any extras. The transfers are however very good. There's also a Region 1 DVD, from VCI.

Dangerous Knowledge is typical of the best British television of its type of the 60s and 70s, fairly low-key and slow-burning but tense and absorbing. It’s well-written and extremely well-acted. Highly recommended.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents - And So Died Riabouchinska (1956)

And So Died Riabouchinska was broadcast in 1956 as the twentieth episode of the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s based on a Ray Bradbury story and boasts an interesting cast headlined by Claude Rains and a young Charles Bronson.

I’m particularly fond of horror and mystery stories featuring ventriloquists’ dummies -they always make for lots of creepiness.

Claude Rains plays Fabian, a vaudeville performer at a time when vaudeville was not exactly booming. A man is found murdered in the theatre where he is appearing. The man had apparently been trying to get to see Fabian, for some important but unknown purpose.  Detective Krovitch (Charles Bronson) is the investigating officer and he finds that interviewing Fabian is a slightly odd process since Fabian’s doll Riabouchinska insists on being part of the conversation. Krovitch is doubtful as to whether Fabian is being entirely truthful but he suspects that the doll is telling the truth.

The doll was modeled after a real woman, a young and very beautiful woman with whom Fabian was acquainted. Possible quite well acquainted although this was more than twenty years earlier so what connection could it have with the murder of the stranger in the theatre?

Mel Dinelli adapted Bradbury’s story for the small screen. Dinelli was not a prolific screen writer but he did have a few rather impressive credits including the suspense classic The Spiral Staircase. As for Bradbury I’ve always had mixed feelings about him as a writer although I do admit that at his best he could be very atmospheric and very subtle. 

And So Died Riabouchinska is the kind of story that Bradbury did very well and the television adaptation works pretty effectively. It’s typical Bradbury in that it suggests something supernatural but it remains only a suggestion.

Claude Rains gives a very fine performance, managing to be quite disturbing without being too excessive about it. Charles Bronson hadn’t yet found his feet as an actor although there are signs of his later minimalist acting style. In this TV play he’s at his best when he tones his performance right down.

There are better television and movie ventriloquists’ dummy stories but And So Died Riabouchinska is still a worthy example of an odd little sub-genre. It’s certainly worth seeing for the terrific and surprisingly restrained performance by Claude Rains. Highly recommended.

The first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is of course easily obtainable on DVD in all markets.

Thriller - Night Is the Time for Killing (Murder on the Midnight Express, 1975)

ITC’s Thriller was one of the most successful of all British television anthology series, in fact one of the most successful such series made anywhere. It ran for six seasons beginning in 1973. Brian Clemens created the series and wrote the bulk of the episodes.

Thriller is generally regarded as a horror series but it avoids the supernatural (apart from occasional hints that usually turn out to have non-supernatural explanations). The title in fact describes the series pretty well - these are crime thriller stories with an admixture of the horrific and occasionally the uncanny.

Night Is the Time for Killing (retitled Murder on the Midnight Express for a later US release)  came midway through the fourth season in 1975. It was written by Brian Clemens and is slightly unusual for this series in being a spy story.

The opening scenes suggest this will be very much a standard espionage tale. A diplomat from an eastern bloc country wishes to defect to the British. Unfortunately the intelligence services of his own country are aware of his plans to defect and are taking active steps to prevent this from happening. Very active steps, including trying to gun him down in a London street. As a result the would-be defector has insisted on setting up a rendezvous with his British contact in an unexpected manner.

Appearances can be deceptive and this spy tale is not quite as standard as it originally appeared to be. After the brief opening sequences it suddenly switches gears dramatically, focusing on a young American woman, Helen Marlow (Judy Geeson), setting out from London’s Euston Station on a long train journey. The other focus of our attention is on one of her fellow passengers - the pompous, opinionated and supremely supercilious bon vivant and celebrity Hillary Vance (Charles Gray).

Some of the other passengers could be regarded as suspicious characters. One does not normally expect to find men wearing shoulder holsters or young women carrying automatic pistols fitted with silencers on the average British train journey.

Hillary Vance does not like trains. He does not like them one little bit. He makes his displeasure very obvious. We have to wonder what a man with such an evident distaste for rail travel is doing aboard a train.

Helen Marlow is deeply unhappy for other (and rather more valid) reasons. She is being packed off to the country after spending a considerable time in a mental hospital following the sudden death of her fiancé. 

Helen is even more unhappy when she discovers a dead man aboard the train. She is more unhappy still when, after she has reported the matter, the body disappears and everyone thinks she’s crazy. Having just left a mental hospital she’s a tiny bit sensitive on the subject of craziness. She will soon have cause to have her own doubts about her sanity.

It’s obvious that some of the passengers are British agents and some are Soviet agents but we’re unsure which is which and we’re even more unsure about what they’re up to. It has to have something to do with that defector but he is nowhere on the train.

Brian Clemens provides a nicely twist-laden plot. It’s hard to go wrong with a spy thriller that takes place on board a train and the setting is used skillfully by director John Cooper.

I have no idea why it was decided to make Helen Marlow American. There is absolutely no reason why she should be American. Judy Geeson is English and while her American accent is just about passable (she very wisely decides not to overdo it) it seems slightly odd and can probably only be explained by ITC’s ongoing obsession with the notion that US sales for their series could only be achieved by including American characters. Luckily Judy Geeson is an accomplished and underrated actress and does a fine job even with the accent.

Charles Gray always relished playing larger-than-life characters and he’s very much in his element. He overacts with superb style.

The supporting cast is quite adequate with Jim Smilie being likeable as an Australian engineer who takes a shine to Helen only to discover that he may have inadvertently managed to get himself  entangled with a crazy woman. Alister Williamson is also good as the rather shabby Barkly who is obviously a spy for one side or the other.

With a slightly offbeat spy story script from Clemens and great performances by Judy Geeson and Charles Gray Night Is the Time for Killing is a superior episode of a very good television series. Highly recommended.

Network have released the entire six seasons (43 feature-length episodes) of Thriller in a Region 2 DVD boxed set while the complete series has also been released on DVD in the US.

Shadows of Fear (1970-73)

Anthology television series enjoyed a considerable vogue in the 1960s and on until the early 70s, on both British and American television. One of the least-remembered examples is Thames Television’s Shadows of Fear, broadcast intermittently from 1970 to 1973.

This series had a rather odd production history. The first episode went to air in mid-1970. It was followed by a season of nine one-hour episodes in early 1971. A two-year hiatus ensued after this and then one final half-hour episode was broadcast in early 1973. This series was apparently broadcast once and never repeated and I have been able to find virtually no background information on it.

Thames assembled some fairly formidable talent for Shadows of Fear. Four episodes were written by Roger Marshall, one of the best TV writers in the business who contributed episodes to The Avengers, Special Branch, The Sweeney and Target amongst many others as well as creating and writing the superb Public Eye series. Two episodes were penned by John Kershaw, another fine writer whose credits include stories for Special Branch, Public Eye and Callan.

Seven episodes were directed by Kim Mills who had worked on series such as The Avengers, The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The acting talent includes Sheila Hancock, Ronald Hines, George Sewell, George Cole and Edward Fox. With people of that calibre involved it’s rather odd that this series fell into complete oblivion.

This series focuses on psychological horror and suspense rather than the supernatural. It’s the same sort of territory that Brian Clemens would mine in his 1973-76 Thriller series.

Did You Lock Up? was the debut episode, with a script by Roger Marshall. A successful writer, Peter Astle (Michael Craig), and his wife Moira (Gwen Watford) are burgled. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time. It’s irritating but you get over it. Only Peter doesn’t get over it. He wants to see those burglars behind bars. The police admit they have little chance of catching them. Peter decides to have a go at catching them himself. But what will happen when he does capture them? It’s an entertaining story, fairly low-key but with a sting in the tail.

Sugar and Spice is even better. Anne Brand (Sheila Hancock) is surprised on arriving home to find that her son Michael has not returned from school. Her daughter Judy (Suzanne Togni) obviously knows where he is but has an odd tale of having promised her father not to say anything. Judy is clearly a slightly strange child. When Anne’s husband Vic (Ronald Hines) finally arrives home, very late and rather drunk, the plot begins to thicken. He had been having an affair but had told Anne is was all over and done with. Things are obviously very tense between Anne and Vic. And Michael is still not home. Anne is more and more suspicious but she’s not entirely sure what she is suspicious about. The tension builds more and more intensely. It’s not that hard to guess what has happened but it’s the unbearably tense atmosphere and the powerful performances from all three leads that make this a fine exercise in twisted suspense and psychological horror.

In At Occupier’s Risk a young woman arrives at a roadside inn in England. The proprietors, Mr and Mrs Darben, seem strangely disturbed at the prospect of a paying customer. Mr and Mrs Darben are obviously harbouring some kind of secret. There’s certainly something  hidden away in that locked room behind the kitchen but it’s not quite the secret we expect. A nicely moody episode.

The Death Watcher is quite superb. Emmy Erikson (Judy Parfitt) is a psychologist with an interest in the unusual, and even the paranormal. She is invited for the weekend to the home of Dr Pickering (John Neville), ostensibly to take part in an experiment. The problem is that Mrs Erikson is really a sceptic while Dr Pickering is very much a true believer. Mrs Erikson dismisses Pickering’s crackpot theories with scorn but discovers that participation in his experiment is not voluntary. And his theories are even more bizarre than she’d imagined. John Neville is excellent as the plausible but tragically unhinged Pickering while Victor Maddern gives a lovely underplayed performance as his assistant Dawson, a psychiatric nurse. This episode is genuinely creepy and scary with a nice touch of pathos.

There has to be at least one dud episode and in this series it’s Repent at Leisure, by the usually reliable Roger Marshall. A wealthy middle-aged woman on a round-the-world cruise has an affair with the cabin steward. Not unusual, except that she later marries him. She’s wealthy and upper-class and he’s poor and working-class so things don’t work out. The problem is that she (being upper-class) is naturally neurotic, vicious and stupid while he (being working-class) is naturally noble, generous, perceptive and an all-round great guy. This is not only tedious, it also undercuts the drama of the ensuing tragic situation.

Jeremy Paul’s Return of Favours is much better. Mr Marsh (George Cole) is alarmed to find that his wife’s awful friend Judith and her even more awful married boyfriend Roger have been using his flat as their little love nest while he’s out. This turns out to be rather to Mr Marsh’s advantage as it fits in with a little plan of his own. It’s not difficult to guess what’s going to happen but some fine acting (especially from George Cole) makes this a nicely creepy little tale.

Unfortunately John Kershaw’s The Lesser of the Two is another dud, a dreary story of a man recently released after serving a prison sentence for a terrible crime of which he claims to be innocent. He finds he’s now unwelcome in his own home and in his own neighbourhood.

Things get back on track with Hugh Leonard’s White Walls and Olive-Green Carpets, a delightfully twisted story of revenge, infidelity and madness.

In Roger Marshall’s Sour Grapes two English tourists in Spain are menaced by a mysterious but clearly very dangerous German criminal. Staying alive in such a situation is one thing; remaining sane and human is quite another. This episode benefits from its enigmatic quality - there is no possibility of communication with the criminal and his motives remain obscure.

Come Into My Parlour is a story with potential but the motivations of the characters stretch credibility a little too much and are somewhat contradictory.

The final episode, The Party’s Over, is notable as being the only episode to have a period rather than a contemporary setting, being set in the 1920s. It’s an  OK episode although the plot is not terribly difficult to predict. Its main asset is an enjoyably villainous performance by Edward Fox as an utter cad who plans to murder his wife.

When this series concentrates on moody psychological thrillers with a healthy dose of horror it’s very good indeed. Unfortunately when it drifts into Socially Aware Drama territory it becomes very very tedious. Luckily it mostly stays in psychological horror territory and the hits outnumber the misses. And the episodes that do hit the target are very good indeed.

Network have released the complete series on DVD in Region 2. 

Shadows of Fear is, like most anthology series, very uneven. In fact it’s more uneven than most, but in the final analysis there are more good episodes than bad and some are extremely good. Worth a look.