"I thought women's bladders were different?"
And so already we come to the last of the three surviving episodes of this rather interesting early '70s BBC 2 horror anthology series. Return Flight may have been... flawed. But I'm happy to report that this is a good 'un. Two out of three ain't bad.
As I'm increasingly fond of remarking, the '70s was another age. Jane and Frank are a middle class couple in very eary middle afe, living in an enormous house in Sussex with their two young children, yet they are able to sustain this entirely via Frank's salary working in advertising (shades of Reginald Perrin here...) while Jane is a stay-at-home housewife and mother.
Oh, and the house can't be haunted, because it was built in 1910, and so is "no older than your mother", the equivalent of the early '60s today.
Yes, I know...
The main conceit is that Jane is being increasingly driven mad by hearing the sounds of a woman sobbing, with a nice little twist ending. As horror, it works well. Yet there's a deeper horror here, the Beddy Friedan awfulness of the existence of a housewife, with the ennui and the Valium and the au pairs and the awful children and the sexlessness.
It may not be a subtle subtext, but it hits hard. This episode works very well indeed, anchored by apowerful performance from the late Anna Massey.
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