Dead of Night: A Woman Sobbing

 "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.

Dead of Night: Return Flight

 "He'll shut up soon, Skip. He's, er, got no legs left."

It's an amusing start as a plane descends to land at Heathrow and the stewardess requests the passengers to "Please extinguish your cigarettes". 1972 was a long time ago, even if it's only five years before yours truly was born...

This one promised to be good. Written by Robert Holmes, known to us Doctor Who fans as being bloody good. A premise that seems to have a fair bit of potential- a recently bereaved airline pilot with his little demons and greavances ishaunted by the subtle presence of the ghost of a Lancaster bomber, with inevitably grim results.

And the thing is... in some senses the  script is good. The characters, from Captain Rolfe to his friends to the surprisingly decent investigator are all well-rounded and believable. Peter Barkworth, too, is excellent. There's a level in which it works as drama.

And yet... there's just no tension. As horrow, it fails utterly. There's a surprising lack of emphasis on the supernatural here. And, well-written though the characters may be, the whole thing is so slow, uneventful and... well, dull.

Unusually for a Holmes script, I'm afraif this is a bit of a dud.

Dead of Night: Exorcism

 "Just my husband frightening the life out of me- it's quite normal">

You may be wondering what is this new series I've started to blog, because it's somewhat obscure. Dead of Night was a horrow anthology series broadcast on BBC 2 in late 1972. This being British television of the early 1970s, only three episodes exist of the seven which were made. I'm going to blog all three of them. Let's just say that all three may just be possible on a certain online medium known for pronouns and tubing...

Anyway, this is simply a superb piece of horror and social commentary, once you get over the shoch of seeing Clive Swift looking so young, with a full head of ginger hair. It's Christmas, it's a remote thatched cottage which is rather charming, if renovated with all mod cons such as, er, a rotary telephone, a big wooden television that needs to warm up, and (gasp) a stereo. And two rather posh couples in their mid-thirties are looking forwards to a slap up Christmas dinner with lashings and lashings of booze.

It's the most early '70s dinner party of all time, with talk of the mind's hidden potential, the recent three days week and the recent miner's strike, as well as lapsed Marxist views, something which will become relevant later. These couples are privileges, and know they are.

I won't spoil things, but lets say that odd things increasingly happen, and the bleak and brutal conclusion has a very pointed subtext about rich, poor and the evils of living in luxury as others starve. It's all so very astoundingly political, yet as horror it's no less effective. Superb.