Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was Hammer Films’ last desperate effort to save itself. Their final feature film was To the Devil…a Daughter in 1976. Due to unfortunate financial decisions, failed to make them any money. The British film industry was on its last legs and things were about to get worse, with home video about to arrive and drive the final nail in the coffin. Hammer’s decision to move away from movies into television was actually quite sound.

It’s a decision which should have worked. Hammer House of Horror, made in 1980, was well received and the ratings were healthy. The American network was initially keen on the idea of a second season. Sadly the deal fell through. Without the US network onboard the series was doomed.

Hammer House of Horror did demonstrate that Hammer could do TV horror extremely well. And by the late 70s it was becoming obvious that TV was more suited to Hammer’s style of horror. At the beginning of the 70s Hammer had realised that they needed to vary their formula, and that they needed to add more blood and more sex and more nudity. Their late 1960s efforts were starting to seem a bit tame and a bit stodgy. Hammer responded by making a series of extremely interesting early 70s horror films, with the extra blood, sex and nudity. But Hammer never seemed entirely comfortable with the idea of erotic horror. It just isn’t British. They preferred to leave that sort of thing to the Europeans who were very comfortable indeed with the concept. On TV however they could make the kind of horror that they were comfortable with, a bit bloody but not too much so and with just enough sexiness.

With Hammer House of Horror they hadn’t extricated themselves from their financial mess but the results of the series were still moderately encouraging. In 1984 they tried again, with Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.

This new series was a co-production with Fox’s TV arm in the US. That caused problems from the start. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was too rushed, and to please their American partners the series had to be squeaky clean, bland and inoffensive. If Hammer were uneasy about sex they were to find that American TV preferred to pretend that sex just didn’t exist.

The episodes have a 70-minute running time, presumably at the insistence of the American partners who intended the series to be screened as a mystery movie series. The running times are definitely too long in some cases. Some of the episodes are a bit slower than they should have been, with not quite enough plot to justify the movie-length running times. But it's only a problem with some episodes.

The Americans presumably also insisted on imported American stars. 

Episode Guide

The Sweet Scent of Death was directed by Peter Sasdy. It was written by Brian Clemens so it’s no surprise that it plays out exactly like an episode from his 1970s anthology series Thriller. If you’re a Thriller fan you’ll know what to expect. The plot twists are done reasonably well but some key aspects of the story are a bit too predictable.

Dean Stockwell (an actor I have never been able to warm to) plays an American diplomat in England. Shirley Knight plays his wife Ann. Someone seems to be out to get Ann, although it’s not clear just how serious the threat might be. The prologue suggests to us that there’s a connection to events in New York ten years earlier.

There’s an obvious suspect on whom the police focus their attention but the viewer will immediately realise that there are three or possibly even four alternative suspects.

Peter Sasdy directs the episode competently. It’s an OK episode but just a bit on the bland side.

A Distant Scream, written by Martin Worth and directed by John Hough, is more interesting. An elderly man is dying. He spent the lest few decades of his life locked up for the murder of his girlfriend years earlier. He has always proclaimed his innocence and has been obsessed with finding the real killer. Close to death, he is transported back in time (presumably by supernatural or paranormal means) and is able to witness the two days leading up to his girlfriend’s murder.

The old man is Michael (David Carradine). At the time of the murder Michael was a freelance photographer spending a holiday at a fishing village with his girlfriend Rosemary (Stephanie Beacham). She’s a married woman with whom he is having an affair.

Michael as an old man is not only able to witness the events leading up to the tragedy, he can interact with the people involved. Rosemary can see him. He can talk to her. At times others can see him and speak with him. Even his younger self sees him at one point.

This of course involves one of those famous time travel paradoxes. If he can interact with people in the past then he should logically be able to change the past. I was rather interested to see whether the scriptwriter (Martin Worth) was aware of the time travel paradox and if so how he was going to deal with it. Or whether he was simply going to ignore it.

The weak link in this episode is David Carradine. He just can’t act. There’s another problem - as a dying old man he looks younger healthier than he does as his younger self. Stephanie Beacham’s performance on the other hand is quite solid.

The Late Nancy Irving, written by David Fisher and directed by Peter Sasdy, concerns a lady golf champion. She has diabetes but it’s always been well controlled. She also has an incredibly rare blood type.

Then she wakes up in hospital. She is told that she crashed her car. She has only vague garbled memories of some kind of car accident. She is assured that her injuries are not all that severe. What worries her is that she feels rather confused. Her mind seems foggy. She is a bit disturbed by the bars on the windows of her private room but she is given a reasonably plausible explanation. The bars date from a time when the clinic treated mental patients who might try to throw themselves from windows. Of course she isn’t being locked in and she’s silly to think such a thing.

Gradually she becomes a little worried. Why hasn’t she heard from her fiancé? Why hasn’t she heard from anyone? Why does she feel so weak? And why are they giving her blood transfusions? And then she sees a story on the TV news and she starts to get the picture.

The main problem here is that while the basic idea is excellent there are not enough plot twists to sustain a 70-minute running time. The excessive length weakens the suspense. Cristina Raines in the lead rôle is also just a little bland. This is an OK episode that could have been a great episode.

Black Carrion was written by Don Houghton and directed by John Hough. Journalist Paul Taylor (Leigh Lawson) is hired to write an article about the Verne Brothers. They were (according to the story) a hugely successful pop duo who disappeared in 1963. Totally disappeared. No-one knows what happened to them. They were never heard from again. To Taylor it’s obvious that this is a promising story. Researcher/photographer Cora Berlaine (Season Hubley) has been assigned to assist him. Cora has a prodigious knowledge of 60s pop music.

Cora is troubled by memories. Disturbing but totally disjointed memories. Are they real memories? She thinks so but of course she can’t be sure.

The search for the Verne Brothers takes Paul and Cora to the village of Briar’s Frome. It was rumoured that the Verne Brothers were going to buy the palatial manor house there. The village is deserted. It’s a ghost town. But weird things are happening in Briar’s Frome, and Cora’s memories are getting more vivid.

The plot is all over the place and there’s some silliness but there are lots of great ideas (and even original ideas) in this episode. And lots of creepy atmosphere. I enjoyed this episode a great deal.

In Possession was written by Michael J. Bird and directed by Val Guest. Frank Daly (Christopher Cazenove) and his wife Sylvia (Carol Lynley) reach their hotel room only to find that it’s already occupied by a woman and an old lady. When they fetch the manager to sort things out the woman and the lady have vanished. Then Frank sees them again by the river, and again they vanish.

Frank and Sylvia start seeing various people in their flat. People who are not there. But they seem very real. Slowly it becomes obvious that in some way Frank and Sylvia are witnessing events that lead to a murder. Is this a shared dream? Or is it something that happened in the past?

Whether you consider this episode to be a haunted house story depends on how broadly you define that term. Whether this counts as a haunted house story doesn’t really matter. It’s a fascinatingly weird and disturbing tale with some real moments of terror and creepiness. An excellent episode.

And the Wall Came Tumbling Down was written by Dennis Spooner and John Peacock and directed by Paul Annett. An old deconsecrated church is being demolished by the Ministry of Defence. There’s a mysterious accident on the site, and we then get a flashback to events in 1949, events involving a coven of devil-worshippers. The devil-worshippers are betrayed by a young man. More than three centuries later another young man has a peculiar interest in this old church.

As you may have guessed the world of the 1980s is about to encounter evil from the 17th century. Maybe not wildly original but it plays out in a very satisfactory manner with plenty of gothic atmosphere and some real creepiness. Caroline Trent (Barbi Benton) works for the government but her real interest is in the occult. She isn’t sure what is going on with that old church but she knows that Dark Forces are at work. The site manager Peter Whiteway (Gareth Hunt) doesn’t believe her, at least not at first.

This one has an interesting cast. There’s Gareth Hunt (best-known for The New Avengers), the wonderful Peter Wyngarde from Department S and Jason King and there’s Barbi Benton, best known as a Playboy model. Hunt is very good, Wyngarde is sinister and charismatic and Barbi Benton is quite OK. It all builds to a satisfying conclusion. A very good episode.

Child's Play was written by Graham Wassell and directed by Val Guest. Mike and Ann Preston are a young couple with a daughter. They wake up in the middle of the night to discover something very odd and disturbing. They have been walled in. Their whole house has been walled in. And it’s getting rather hot. The telephone doesn’t work. The radio doesn’t work. The TV works, but every station has nothing but a station identification logo and it’s the same logo on every channel.

They haven’t noticed it yet but that logo has appeared on all sorts of items in the house. It’s getting hotter and they’re close to giving way to panic.

Mike comes up with various plans to break through the wall but it seems impossible. The two of them also come up with possible explanations. The actual explanation is one they hadn’t considered, and it’s pretty clever. There are some clues but I certainly didn’t guess the solution. This is a nicely scary creepy story, a bit like a good Twilight Zone episode. A very fine episode.

Paint Me a Murder was written by Jesse Lasky Jr and Pat Silver and directed by Alan Cooke. Painter Luke Lorenz finishes a painting then gets into a rowing boat and heads out to sea. He then smashes through the planking of the boat. His body is not found. Suicide is assumed.

He wasn’t a very successful painter when alive but now that he’s dead his paintings start to fetch huge prices. That’s good news for his widow Sandra (Michelle Phillips). And for art dealer Vincent Rhodes (David Robb).

The major early twist won’t come as much of a surprise but the twists do keep coming. I liked this episode.

Tennis Court was written by Andrew Sinclair and Michael Hastings and directed by Cyril Frankel. This is a haunted tennis court story. A middle-aged woman, Maggie (Hannah Gordon), inherits an old but moderately palatial country house. She has recently married Harry Dowd, a Member of Parliament. In the grounds of the house is an indoor tennis court. Slightly odd things happen on that tennis court. It has some connection to events many years earlier, during the war. A British bomber was shot down. One member of the crew survived. They other did not.

The local vicar, John Bray (Peter Graves), knows something about that wartime incident. At the time he was a Canadian volunteer in the R.A.F. and he was there.


Maggie is becoming increasingly terrified of whatever is in that tennis court.

Not one of my favourite episodes, but entertaining enough.

The Corvini Inheritance was written by David Fisher and directed by Gabrielle Beaumont. This one starts with a young woman, Eva Bailey, encountering a peeping tom. She is unharmed but rather scared. And it starts with a robbery at a fine art auction room.

Frank Lane (David McCallum) is in charge of security at the auction room. He also happens to live in the same building as Eva. Frank offers to help make Eva’s flat more secure. They have dinner together. Frank is divorced and a bit lonely but he’s a nice guy.

Frank has a big security job on. The Corvini inheritance, a fabulous collection of jewels amassed in Italy during the Renaissance by a family of professional assassins, is to be auctioned. It will be in the keeping of the auctioneers for several weeks. It’s an obvious target for professional thieves. The most valuable piece in the collection is a necklace with a grim history. It may be cursed.

There are two plot strands here. Someone seems to be stalking Eva, and there’s the possibility of an attempt to steal the Corvini jewels. I liked this one a lot. There’s some nice ambiguity here.

Czech Mate was written by Jeremy Burnham and directed by John Hough. This is a straightforward Cold War spy thriller but it’s nicely executed with plenty of cynicism and paranoia. Susan George plays an Englishwoman, Vicky Duncan, caught up in a web of deceit and betrayal behind the Iron Curtain. In this story there is no difference whatever between the good guys and the bad guys. People disappear and corpses turn up and Vicky discovers that she can’t trust anyone.

Susan George and Patrick Mower (as her ex-husband) give excellent performances and it’s always nice to see Peter Vaughan in anything. This episode is a bit out of place in this series but it’s entertaining.

Last Video and Testament was written by Roy Russell and Robert Quigley and directed by Peter Sasdy. Victor Frankham (David Langton) owns a vast electronic empire. He has a heart condition and he has a much younger wife, Selena (Deborah Raffin). A much younger wife who may be looking elsewhere for certain pleasures which her husband can no longer provide. Victor’s doctor has been encouraging him to have an operation. An operation which will restore his vitality in the bedroom, which may not be to Selena’s liking.

Victor has a surprise in store for Selena, in the form of a videotape.

This one has quite a clever central idea and it works very nicely.

Final Thoughts

This is an extremely good series, much much better than its reputation would lead you to believe. Highly recommended.

The German Pidax DVD boxed set includes all thirteen episodes, in English with removable German subtitles. The box cover suggests that it only includes eleven episodes but it definitely includes all thirteen. The transfers are perfectly acceptable.

The Twilight Zone - The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine

The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine was the fourth episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone and it’s always been one of my favourites. It was directed by Mitchell Leisen and written by Rod Serling and first went to air on October 23, 1959.

Barbara Jean Trenton (Ida Lupino) was, briefly, a major movie star. But that was many years ago. Her career took off quickly and crashed just as quickly. She is now a middle-aged recluse. She spends her time watching her own old movies on 16mm in a private projection room in her mansion.

While Barbara Jean Trenton, the character played by Ida Lupino, clearly has a kinship with Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard and while the initial setup resembles that of Billy Wilder’s film it is quite wrong to see The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine as merely a television rip-off of Sunset Boulevard. The story does not follow the same trajectory, and there are differences in emphasis. And while it isn’t immediately obvious at first by the end of the story it has become very definitely a Twilight Zone story.

It has the essential Twilight Zone feel - everything seems just like everyday reality until suddenly it’s not everyday reality any more.

In The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine there’s quite a bit of focus on the essential voyeurism of cinema. The twist here is that it’s self-voyeurism. Barbara Jean Trenton has no interest in other people’s lives. She has no curiosity about other people. The subject of her voyeurism is Barbara Jean Trenton. Not Barbara Jean Trenton the woman, but Barbara Jean Trenton the movie star. She watches herself obsessively on the screen. A further twist is that Barbara Jean Trenton the movie star no longer exists. This is voyeurism focused on the past.

And of course the viewer is watching Barbara Jean watching herself.

The twist at the end was later borrowed (or homaged if you prefer) by a certain very famous film director but to say any more would constitute a spoiler. It goes without saying that the film director in question was hailed as a genius for this ending, but The Twilight Zone did it first.

This is Rod Serling’s writing at its best. It packs an emotional punch but without sentimentality and without the viewer feeling manipulated. Serling could be guilty of sentimentality and manipulation but when he avoided those pitfalls he could come up with some top-notch scripts. And this is a wonderfully subtle script.

Martin Balsam is excellent as Barbara Jean’s loyal long-suffering friend and agent Danny Weiss.

But the success of this episode depends entirely on Lupino’s performance. She’s superb. She wisely avoids self-pity. Barbara Jean has isolated herself entirely from the contemporary world but we don’t despise or pity her. She has made a choice. She is happier living in the past. She knows that the modern world would destroy her. Lupino gives her a certain dignity.

While Sunset Boulevard was a rather scathing look at Hollywood and what it does to people The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine has a different tone. It certainly acknowledges that Hollywood uses people, makes them stars and then discards them but Serling’s story lacks Sunset Boulevard’s venom. Barbara Jean’s fate is sad, and yet there’s no question that for a brief moment Hollywood really did give her everything she wanted. It gave her complete happiness. Would she have been better off never having experienced her brief moment of fame and fulfilment? If happiness is fleeting would we really be better off without it? Would we really be better off living safe predictable conventional lives with no insane highs and no insane lows?

Barbara Jean would undoubtedly say that the highs are worth the price one has to pay. She knows that she was a star, and no-one can ever take that away from her.

So rather than the bleakness and venom of Sunset Boulevard we get a bitter-sweet tone here, and the combination of Serling’s writing and Lupino’s acting makes it work.

I’ve now seen The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine four times and it remains one of my favourite Twilight Zone moments. Very highly recommended.

three more Outer Limits season 1 episodes

Three more Outer Limits season 1 episodes from 1964. They’re not among the best episodes but even lesser episodes of this series are pretty good and pretty interesting.

Second Chance

Second Chance was written by Sonya Roberts and Lou Morheim and directed by Paul Stanley. It went to air in Match 1964.

A group of people are drawn to a carnival spaceship ride. They don’t know why. It’s just a silly fake spaceship. They get quite a surprise when the fake spacecraft actually lifts off and they find themselves in deep space. The carnival ride has been transformed into a real spaceship by an alien from a distant planet.

The people on the ride are a motley assortment and it’s difficult to understand why the alien wanted them aboard. That will however gradually become clear.

This is yet another example of The Outer Limits giving the alien invasion idea a major twist. And it’s another example of the series treating aliens as beings who might not necessarily be hostile. The idea of a carnival ride turning into a nightmare ride through outer space is very cool.

And, as so often in this series, there’s more emphasis on character than you’ll find in most TV sci-fi. The plot is mostly a device to allow the characters to learn something about themselves.

The Children of Spider County

Written by Anthony Lawrence, directed by Leonard J. Horn, screened February 1964.

In The Children of Spider County the Space Security agency gets involved when four young men disappear. There are extraordinary links between these four men that suggest a possibility that seems insane, but the links just can’t be explained by coincidence and Space Security takes the matter seriously. There’s also a fifth young man, Ethan Wechsler, and he’s facing a murder charge.

This episode illustrates some of the weaknesses of this series - cheesy makeup and iffy special effects. But The Outer Limits never worried about stuff like that. If they felt that the monsters needed to be shown, they’d show them, and if they looked cheesy the producers felt that the scripts would be good enough to compensate. And usually they were.

This episode works because it takes the alien invasion idea and gives it lots of interesting twists, and lots of ambiguity. Cleverly, the ambiguities are never fully resolved. There’s some slightly cringe-inducing speechifying about accepting differences but there are some genuine moral and emotional dilemmas.

There’s some action, with Ethan and his girlfriend on the run from the cops, and maybe from the aliens, and maybe from Space Security. And again there’s ambiguity - maybe it would be better if the alien caught them, and maybe it wouldn’t.

Not one of the great Outer Limits episodes but even the less-great episodes of this series tended to be very good and very thoughtful.

Moonstone

Written by Stephen Lord, directed by Gerd Oswald, screened February 1964.

Moonstone begins, naturally enough, on the Moon. American astronauts discover an artifact which is clearly not natural. At first they assume the Russians must be behind it but it soon becomes apparent that this small white sphere contains a number of alien intelligences. Are these aliens friendly or hostile? They seem benevolent. The aliens have a problem, and it’s a big problem. And it becomes a problem for the crew of the lunar mission as well. The commander of the lunar mission, General Stocker, will have to make a tough decision. He had to do that once before and it had consequences for which his second-in-command, Major Anderson, has never forgiven him.

It’s that decision made by General Stocker in the past that provides the main thematic interest of this episode. It’s all about decisions and decisions that have to be made by both the human and alien characters. The aliens simply function as a catalyst for major personal upheavals involving General Stocker and Major Anderson and the mission’s chief scientist, Professor Diana Brice (Ruth Roman). There’s a romantic drama between the general and Diana Brice but Major Anderson seems to be mixed up in it as well.

It’s not very profound but it is a bit more than just a space adventure yarn.

The special effects are very cheap-looking but the aliens are rather cool. These are aliens who really look profoundly alien, rather than being guys in rubber suits or cheesy makeup.

The acting is good enough to make the characters at least a bit more than cardboard cutouts.

Not a great episode but it’s solid enough.

Final Thoughts

I've described these as lesser episodes but I think they're all worth watching.

I’ve reviewed a number of other episodes of The Outer Limits, including The Sixth Finger, Don't Open Till Doomsday and ZZZZZ and The Man Who Was Never Born and O.B.I.T.

highlights of 2022 cult TV viewing

It's tie to once again look back over the year just gone. I was almost going to say that this hasn't really been a bumper year for me as far as cult television is concerned, but having a quick scan through my 2022 posts I find that in fact I discovered quite a few exciting series that were new to me.

My most exciting cult television find in 2022 was undoubtedly the 1983 first season of Simon & Simon, a delightfully quirky and charming private eye series.

My other exciting discovery was the Japanese anime TV series Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex. It was made in 2002 so it's a bit outside the normal time frame for this blog but it's a terrific science fiction series.

There was also the 1957 cop drama Decoy, the first cop series entirely focused on the work of a policewoman. Not an action series but intelligent, sensitive and occasionally provocative. In fact it's bet series ever made about a female cop.

And this was the year I discovered Miami Vice. This is my kind of TV show - style, style and more style.

So overall, not such a bad year.

The Avengers - Emma Peel in colour, part one

I think that almost everyone would agree that the colour Emma Peel episodes of The Avengers are not quite as good as the black-and-white ones. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they’re not quite as consistent, but the best of them are as good as any of the black-and-white episodes.

Here are four episodes that received the coveted four-bowlers rating on the excellent The Avengers Forever website. Do they deserve those ratings? On the whole I think I do.

Who’s Who???

Who’s Who??? was written by Philip Levene. One of the most popular ideas in 1960s/1970s action/adventure spy series was the double idea - having someone impersonate the hero and impersonating him so perfectly that the double can’t be distinguished from the real hero. It’s an idea that I intensely dislike. I think it’s lazy writing. Who’s Who??? however manages to give the idea some genuinely clever spins. Instead of doubles we have the villains using a machine that can transfer the mind and the soul of one person into another person’s body. So in this case instead of having two Steeds and two Emmas we have enemy agents Basil (Freddie Jones) and Lola (Patricia Haines) who now inhabit the bodies of Steed and Mrs Peel while Steed and Mrs Peel inhabit the bodies of Basil and Lola.

And (in a very nice touch) we have Freddie Jones and Patricia Haines doing a very creditable job of capturing Steed and Emma’s personalities and mannerisms while Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg behave convincingly like Basil and Lola. They still look like Steed and Mrs Peel but they behave in a totally different manner. It also means we get to see Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg kissing frequently and Patrick Macnee patting Diana Rigg’s bottom but it’s OK because we know that they’re actually Basil and Lola.

The purpose of the mind-swap is to use Basil and Lola, posing as Steed and Emma, to break the British floral spy network - a spy network consisting of agents using flowers as code names. The headquarters of the floral network (with an enormous Union Jack covering an entire wall and half the ceiling) is another amusing touch, as is the pompous major in charge of the network.

The end result is much cleverer and more amusing than the straightforward hackneyed double trope. And it gives Macnee and Rigg a chance to play totally different roles - Basil and Lola have none of the sophistication of Steed and Mrs Peel. They’re low-class hoods and both Macnee and Rigg have fun with that. Diana Rigg is particularly good as the gun-chewing rather tarty Lola.

The brain-swap idea was far from original but I don’t think its ever been done with more style and wit. Brilliant stuff.

The Hidden Tiger

The Hidden Tiger was also written by Philip Levene, one of the best of the writers of The Avengers. It begins with two men torn to pieces, apparently by big cats. Judging by the mayhem inflicted, most likely lions or tigers. So Steed turns to big game hunter Major Nesbit, the first of the many wildly and delightfully eccentric characters who populate this episode.

After several more unfortunates are gored to death the trail leads Steed to P.U.R.R.R., the Philanthropic Union for the Rescue, Relief and Recuperation of Cats. But they only rescue domestic cats and whatever killed those people had to be much much bigger. A domestic at couldn’t kill someone, could it? P.U.R.R.R. is run by a Mr Cheshire (played with some wonderfully odd mannerisms by legendary comic Ronnie Barker). Also working for P.U.R.R.R. are a Dr Manx and a young lady named Angora, played deliciously by a very feline Gabrielle Drake (of UFO fame).

The cat-themed sets are wonderfully witty.

One could fill pages with all the cat-themed double entendres in this episode. As Mrs Peel remarks at one stage, "Pussies galore!” Diana Rigg also does a remarkably sexy 

purr.

This episode has exactly the right mix of wit and cleverness. The plot is outlandish and has the right touch of the surreal. It really is great stuff.

Murdersville

Murdersville was written by Brian Clemens. And it’s a bit of a mixed bag. 

It starts superbly. Little-Storping-in-the-Swuff is the perfect, idyllic, picturesque little English village.It’s full of loveable eccentric rustics. It has a cosy pub. It’s the sort of place to which anyone would love to retire. And then, completely out of the blue, we witness a brutal murder. The villagers witness the murder, and take no notice whatsoever. Immediately we know that we’re in the bizarre surreal world of The Avengers. And all this happens within the first few minutes. It’s a brilliant start to the episode.

Little-Storping seems like such a wonderful place in which to spend one’s retirement that Mrs Peel’s childhood friend Paul has decided to do just that. Mrs Peel drives him to the village to help him settle in. And then we get another touch of the bizarre. Two of the loveable village rustics go on a destructive rampage, smashing all of Paul’s most treasured possessions.

Paul’s manservant Forbes disappears. Mrs Peel finds a body in the woods. And Paul disappears. Mrs Peel decides it’s time to call the police but it soon becomes obvious to her that there’s something very sinister going on and that she shouldn’t trust anyone in Little Storping. 

This is where the plot starts to get a little wonky. What Mrs Peel should do is quite obvious - she should take off in her car to go and fetch the cavalry. But she doesn’t. The plot requires her to behave irrationally and to make things easy for the bad guys. Patrick Macnee only makes brief appearances in this episode so it may be that Brian Clemens had to find a way to keep Mrs Peel in the village on her own even though it makes no sense.

This episode showcases a side of Mrs Peel that we haven’t seen before. We’ve seen her in tight spots before and we’ve seen her frightened before but we’ve never before seen her in a cold vengeful rage. We’ve also never seen her kill in a cold-blooded ruthless way. But in this episode that’s exactly what she does. We see her display raw emotion. This is definitely a major plus.

We also get to see her in a chastity belt, which we definitely haven’t seen before. 

Her telephone call to Steed is a wonderful comedy moment. There’s some delicious dialogue. There’s a pie fight. The episode is a weird mix of light-hearted zaniness, genuine terror and deep emotion. And mostly the disparate elements do come together.

There’s an enormous amount to enjoy here if you can ignore some really glaring plot holes. A very good episode that just misses out on greatness due to the wonkiness of the plot.

Epic

Epic was written by Brian Clemens. Some people consider this to be one of the best-ever Avengers episodes and some consider it to be one of the worst.

Has-been silent era film director Z.Z. von Schnerk (Kenneth J. Warren) has decided to make a comeback. He still has his original stars from the silent era, Stewart Kirby (Peter Wyngarde) and Damita Syn (Isa Miranda) under contract but he needs a new face and he’d decided on Mrs Peel. He’s going to make her a star. Posthumously. The film will be The Destruction of Emma Peel and it will climax with a real-life death scene. He has Mrs Peel kidnapped and she finds that she’s in the middle of a movie but she hasn’t read the script. She gets shot a couple of times and when she discovers that the guns are loaded with blanks she treats the whole thing as a joke. Until she finds a real corpse on the set. Not all the guns in this are loaded with blanks.

This is the surrealism of The Avengers pushed to an extreme. It’s also an extreme exercise in metafiction. Z.Z. von Schnerk and his faded stars can no longer tell the difference between movies and reality. But of course there’s no reality here because this is The Avengers and it’s a TV series so it’s not reality either. And that’s how Diana Rigg plays it - as if she wants the audience to be aware that this is a TV show about a man making a movie, but the movie he is making is essentially a movie about movies, packed with references to other movies.

The surrealism really works in Epic. It’s not just clever but at times genuinely disturbing and spooky (such as the wedding and funeral scenes). But then at the same time it’s all a joke. Mrs Peel isn’t sure whether she’s supposed to be scared or amused. The viewer isn’t sure whether to be scared for her or just amused.

The metafictional touches continue into the very clever tag sequence. Are we watching Mrs Peel and Steed or are we watching Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg on the set of The Avengers?

This episode has been criticised for being soulless but that misses the point. Any genuine emotion would have spoilt the effect. Epic draws attention to its own artificiality. These are not real people. It’s all just make-believe. Mrs Peel mimicking the MGM lion is a joke within a joke. The fact that Mrs Peel makes no serious attempt to escape from the movie studio is not a weakness in the plot. It’s just another part of the joke. The fact that the plot of the episode is nonsensical is part of the joke.

I think I have to come down on the side of the people who love this episode. It revels in its own archness. At times it’s almost too clever for its own good but somehow it gets away with it because we’re supposed to notice the ostentatious cleverness. Kenneth J. Warren (very obviously channelling Erich von Stroheim) and Peter Wyngarde are outrageous and delightful. Epic is great fun.

Final Thoughts

All four episodes are in their own ways Avengers classics. Murdersville has its flaws but its strengths easily make up for them. Epic is an episode that will always divide fans but I adore it. Great stuff.

Thriller - Brian Clemens’ favourite episodes

I’ve finally made my way to the end of the 1970s British Brian Clemens anthology series Thriller. It’s taken me eight years to watch all 43 episodes. That might sound a bit ominous. It might suggest that I’m not a big fan of this series. Nothing could be further from the truth. I adored this series when I first saw it many years ago and I adored rewatching it. I’ve watched it slowly because I like to do that with anthology series, especially ones of which I’m particularly fond. I just like to return to them every now and then when I feel the need for reliable spooky entertainment.

And given that each episode is feature length and of course completely standalone it’s a perfectly feasible way to approach such a series.

Having reached the end I’ve decided to revisit the five episodes of which Clemens himself was most proud. Since I haven’t seen these particular episodes for seven or eight years that also seems to me to be a feasible idea.

Thriller occasionally dabbled in the supernatural. It did this very seldom, but it did do it occasionally. Which was actually a rather clever move on Clemens’ part - when you watch a Thriller episode you might be confident that everything will have a rational explanation but you can never discount the possibility that Clemens might unexpectedly throw something supernatural at you.

Someone at the Top of the Stairs

Someone at the Top of the Stairs was the third episode of the first season.

Chrissie Morton (Donna Mills) and Gillian Pemberton (Judy Carne) are two broke art students in London. They think they’ve had a fabulous stroke of good fortune when they find a room in a charming old Victorian rooming house. The rent is ridiculously cheap.

The rooming house of course turns out to be a nightmare.

At first it’s just very subtle creepy things. Odd sounds. One of Chrissie’s bras disappears. The other guests seem to laugh at inappropriate things. Various little things just don’t seem quite right. Then Chrissie discovers the peephole in the bathroom.

Chrissie’s unease grows, as does her frustration that Gillian refuses to take her fears seriously. She does find a boyfriend, Gary, but he doesn’t take her fears seriously either.

The viewer knows that there’s definitely something wrong in this house but we don’t really know much more than the two girls know. Like Chrissie we just slowly grow more uneasy.

Director John Sichel handles things carefully. He avoids anything too obvious. He’s content to let the creepiness develop through hints and through the accumulation of very trivial things, things that taken in isolation would not even be disturbing but they become unsettling when taken together.

Clemens of course wrote the script and it’s a fine effort which builds to a satisfying payoff. It’s satisfying because at the end we have to admit that this really is what all those hints have been pointing towards.

The two lead actresses, Donna Mills and Judy Carne, are effective because they really do come across as two very ordinary girls. Chrissie is the one who gets worried but she’s not hysterical. She’s reacting in a perfectly understandable way. She sees a pattern of little things adding up to something that might be sinister. Gillian’s scepticism is equally plausible. That same pattern of little things seems to her to be very unlikely to be anything to get worried over. They’re not showy performances but they work.

Someone at the Top of the Stairs is pretty effective stuff. Highly recommended.

An Echo of Theresa

An Echo of Theresa is the fourth episode of the first season. American businessman Brad Hunter (Paul Burke) has taken his wife Suzy (Polly Bergen) to London for a second honeymoon. It’s a business trip as well - an English businessman named Trasker wants to negotiate an important deal with him.

Brad starts doing strange things. He calls Suzy Theresa by mistake, and then claims that he’s never met anyone called Theresa. Although he’s never been to London he insists that a cabbie take him to an obscure street to find an old red-brick block of flats. That building was demolished years earlier - how could he possibly know it even existed? He becomes agitated an aggressive. He writes “I love Theresa” on a postcard.

Hardly surprisingly Suzy insists that he sees a psychiatrist pronto.

The psychiatrist discovers that there are two things Brad is sure of. Firstly, that he knows Theresa. Secondly, that he has never met Theresa. He knows her from Vienna, but he has never been to Vienna, in fact he has never been to Europe.

Suzy has a friend at the American Embassy who suggests that this might be a case for Matthew Earp (Dinsdale Landen) . Matthew Earp is a private detective. He claims to be not just a very good a private detective but a magnificent one and he charges accordingly for his services. And he really is as good as he thinks he is.

There are those who find this episode confusing. I have no idea why. Most of what is going on is perfectly obvious very early on. There’s simply no other plausible explanation and there are abundant and very obvious clues. Of course we still don’t know exactly how such an outlandish situation arose and we don’t know how it’s going to be resolved but we know enough for the story to lose much of its punch.

It’s played out rather oddly. Paul Burke and Polly Bergen play it very straight (and Paul Burke is very effective as a man caught in a bewildering situation) while the other main characters are more off-the-wall and seem like they would have been more at home in a different story. And Dinsdale Landen plays Matthew Earp with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Ultimately it’s Dinsdale Landen’s gloriously over-ripe performance that makes this one worth watching.

An Echo of Theresa is interesting and at times very clever, but it’s not a complete success.

One Deadly Owner

One Deadly Owner was the fourth episode of the second season. It went to air in February 1974.

Fashion model Helen Cook (Donna Mills) buts herself a new car - a Rolls-Royce. It has only had one careful owner. Her boyfriend Peter (Jeremy Brett) thinks the car is a foolish extravagance. The odd things is that Helen feel that it rather than her choosing the car, it chose her.

The car seems to have a mind of its own. It takes her places she doesn’t want to go. And then she finds the ear-ring in the boot. She tracks down the previous owner, a very rich man named Jacey (Laurence Payne). She’s sure the ear-ring belonged to Jacey’s wife. His wife left him a few months earlier. Helen becomes convinced that there’s some mystery involving the wife and she feels compelled to solve the mystery.

Most of the things that happen early on are not really frightening or even particularly disturbing - they’re just puzzling. It’s almost as if Helen is being led on. Led on by the car.

Now I know what you’re thinking - that this haunted car story sounds a bit like John Carpenter’s Christine, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. But Brian Clemens came up with the idea of a possessed car almost a decade before King. And they are two quite different stories.

In this outing we know from the start that there’s something vaguely supernatural (or paranormal) going on. We also know that a crime has been committed, and there are multiple plausible suspects. It’s both a haunted car story and a whodunit and it works equally well both ways.

One of this episode’s major assets is that Donna Mills and Jeremy Brett work so well together. Their relationship is convincing and both give fine performances.

The fact that it’s a rather low-key story works in its favour. We’re slowly drawn in, just the way Helen Cook is slowly drawn in.

This is an extremely good episode.

A Coffin for the Bride

A Coffin for the Bride opened the third season. We know what is going on right from the start. A ex-merchant seaman (played by Michael Jayston) marries rich middle-aged women and then drowns them in the bathtub (after they have made wills in his favour of course). The murders are successfully passed off as accidents but a lawyer named Mason (Michael Gwynn) is convinced that murder is indeed what they were. Mason is just a very ordinary solicitor but he’s intelligent and once he gets an idea into his head he pursues it grimly. And he does not intend to forget this particular murderer.

The killer, calling himself Mark Walker, has now found himself in a very curious position. He has fallen for a woman. Really fallen for her. A young pretty woman named Stella (Helen Mirren). This time he really wants the woman, and not for the purposes of murder or profit.

But of course he still has a living to make, and murder is his business. He already has his next victim picked out, a rich widow named Angela. I can’t tell you any more without risking spoilers.

The twist ending is outlandish but justly celebrated - there are hints earlier on and when the big reveal comes you realise that of course that had to be the explanation. Which is of course the hallmark of good writing.

It’s not just the ending that makes this one notable. The performances by Helen Mirren and Michael Gwynn are superb but it’s Michael Jayston who really impresses. Mark Walker is a monster but he has odd vulnerabilities. They certainly don’t justify his actions but they do suggest that there are things in his past that have made him into a monster.

Arthur English is a delight as the friendly barman Freddy.

A bravura effort from scriptwriter Clemens and from a fine cast make this deservedly one of the most fondly remembered episodes of the entire series.

I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill

I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill is the second episode of season three. This is a pure suspense episode - we know the killer’s identity right from the start. But the police don’t know. They think they do, but they don’t.

It starts with the murder of a woman. Then there’s a second murder. They’re clearly the work of a serial killer. Ann Rogers, an American working in London, saw the killer. Unfortunately she can’t identify him from the police mug shots file.

She does however fall for Mark (Tony Selby), the Detective-Sergeant in charge of the case, and Mark falls for her. A few weeks later she sees the killer in the street, she recognises him and he recognises her. She realises immediately that he’s going to try to kill her. She returns to her office and as usual she has to work late. There’s nobody else in the building, apart from the security guard. But the killer is inside the building. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game which occupies the whole of the second half of the episode. 

To makes things even more exciting the killer has locked the building so there seems to be no escape for Ann.

Robert Lang plays the killer and he’s a wonderful choice. He’s just one of those scary sinister-looking actors. Julie Sommars is very good as Ann - she’s convincingly terrified but she’s also quick-witted.

A deserted office building proves to be a fine setting for such a suspense story. Everything looks so harmless, except that there’s a psycho running loose.

The tension builds up and up and when you think it’s all over, it isn’t.

This is an effective Brian Clemens script and it’s perfectly executed by director Shaun O’Riordan.

This is a classic woman-in-peril story which works beautifully.

Final Thoughts

I’m not totally sold on An Echo of Theresa but the other four Brian Clemens favourites can certainly be very highly recommended.

Hannay (1988-89)

Hannay is a thirteen-episode (spread over two seasons) TV series featuring the hero of John Buchan’s classic thrillers, Richard Hannay. The series serves as a kind of prequel to The 39 Steps.

The episodes really have nothing to do with Buchan, apart from borrowing his hero. They’re all original stories. If you’re expecting the stories to be in the same class as Buchan’s novels you’ll be disappointed.

The stories are all over the place as far as tone is concerned. The best episodes are very lightweight and rely to an embarrassing degree on unlikely narrow escapes carried out by methods that are both silly and corny. These stories are much more like a cross between an Edwardian Boys’ Own Adventure Paper tale and an episode of Ripping Yarns. But they are fun in their own way. Other episodes are much more humourless and try to be serious. Many episodes are not spy tales at all but mysteries, some good while others are not so good.

The series does have one huge asset - Robert Powell as Hannay. He played Hannay in the 1970s movie version of The 39 Steps and he was by far the best thing about that film. In fact I’d go so far as to say that Robert Powell is the definitive screen Richard Hannay. Even better than Robert Donat in Hitchcock’s 1935 movie (which I rate as one of the ten best movies ever made).

At least he should be a huge asset. Unfortunately his performances are uncharacteristically restrained. A bit too restrained. If you’re going to put Robert Powell in an adventure series then you expect him to go totally over-the-top. You expect him to sparkle. But he doesn’t.

I can’t help thinking this series would have been much much better had it been made fifteen years earlier. For starters a younger more vigorous Robert Powell would have been a lot more fun. And it would have featured fewer ludicrously anachronistic social attitudes.

The biggest problem with this series is that not a single character behaves as you would expect people to behave in 1912. They’re all 1980s people wearing period costume. All the political, social and cultural attitudes are pure 1980s.

The characters we’re supposed to find sympathetic never express a single thought that is at variance with the orthodoxies of late 1980s social attitudes. This has the effect of making them seem self-satisfied and at the same time lacking in any actual personality. The characters we’re supposed to find unsympathetic come across as cardboard cut-out villains. Richard Hannay himself has no real personality whatsoever.

The TV series was shot entirely on videotape. Even the location shooting (of which there’s quite a bit) was shot on videotape. In spite of this looks it looks quite handsome. This is British TV at the tail end of its golden age so the costumes are terrific and it takes advantage of the abundance of superb character actors in Britain at that time.

Episode Guide

The first episode, The Fellowship of the Black Stone, opens with Hannay getting shot in South Africa. He is left for dead and is found clutching a black stone. His would-be assassin was notorious German spy Count von Schwabing (Gavin Richards). And a fine melodrama villain he turns out to be. He doesn’t actually twirl his moustache before carrying out dastardly deeds but you know that he’d like to.

On the ship carrying him back to Britain Hannay encounters the Earl of Haslemere (David Waller) and the earl’s daughter, the Lady Anne. Hannay is charmed by Lady Anne, to say the least.

Hannay had worked for the British Secret Service but had left their employ some years earlier. He finds himself caught up in a spy drama anyway, with the Germans hatching dastardly plots and poor Hannay getting himself repeatedly captured, tortured and threatened with certain death. Fortunately, although the German secret service is very efficient their agents have never been taught to tie a knot properly. Hannay keeps escaping by slipping out of his bonds.

The highlight of this episode is Charles Gray as a senior Scotland Yard man.

It’s all breathless stuff with a reasonable amount of action. A fine episode.

In A Point of Honour Hannay meets Lady Madrigal Fitzjames on a train. They get off at the wrong station and then arrive at the wrong country house. The staff assume they are the honeymooning couple whose arrival they were expecting. Hannay and Madrigal decide to have a bit of fun. They pretend they really are the honeymooners.

As it happens there’s an immensely valuable diamond necklace sitting in the safe. And things will soon get complicated and dangerous.

Historical anachronisms are always a problem in series such as this. I have to say that in this episode I just didn’t buy Lady Madrigal’s behaviour. The story takes place shortly before the First World War. We assume it’s around 1912. I don’t believe any well brought up lady at that time would have risked her reputation so recklessly. It would have been social suicide and would have wrecked any chance she might have of making an even halfway respectable marriage. Had she been one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s then I might have found it plausible. But not in 1912.

It’s still an amusing, clever and entertaining story with a certain amount of charm.

In Voyage into Fear Hannay is accosted in an art gallery by a young girl who insists that there is a dangerous man who is trying to kidnap her. She insists that Hannay should pretend to be her father, to get her out of the gallery and back home safely. Hannay is inclined to think it’s all nonsense until he realises that the girl might be telling the truth.

Then things start to go badly wrong, Hannay and the girl are drugged and they wake up on board a ship, having absolutely no idea where they are. This is a really fun episode.

Death With Due Notice is a murder mystery story. Several men have received anonymous threatening letters, all in the form of quotations from Shakespeare. A routine episode that doesn’t really have the right flavour.

Act of Riot is one of the worst pieces of television I have ever seen in my life. A clumsy embarrassingly obvious script, stodgy direction, heavy-handed political messaging, atrocious acting, leaden pacing, a total lack of action, dull and humourless. Robert Powell is clearly bored and uninterested and I can’t say that I blame him.

The Hazard of the Die is better. At least it’s a spy story. The wife of a Cabinet Minister loses heavily at the casino at Monte Carlo and is trapped into espionage. The first problem is that there really aren’t enough plot twists. It’s a bit predictable. The second problem is a total lack of action. This is an adventure series. We’d like to get some adventure. It all falls just a bit flat.

So the first season of six episodes is a mixed bag. The first three are terrific fun. The next three are pretty dull.

The second season opens with Coup de Grace. Hannay gets involved with a woman and he’s charmed by her, and he meets charismatic hard-driving businessman and gambler Sir Marcus Leonard (Anthony Valentine). And Hannay gets caught in the middle. With Anthony Valentine as guest star you assume you’re going to be in for some fun and Valentine certainly delivers the goods. What’s strange is that Robert Powell allows himself to be totally overshadowed by Valentine. It’s a crime plot rather than an espionage or adventure tale but it’s a decent story.

The series gets right back on track with The Terrors of the Earth. Not only is it a spy story, it’s a totally outrageous spy tale. There’s actually some action and Hannay gets to be much more energetic and pro-active than usual. And Robert Powell’s performance has some zest. A very entertaining episode.

In Double Jeopardy a rich dying man entrusts Hannay with some diamonds. Hannay is to pass them on to a man named Desmond Leigh but only on certain conditions. This puts Hannay in a very awkward spot. Leigh has failed to meet those conditions but he has a young wife. Then the plot gets really convoluted with a murder and a kidnapping and Hannay under suspicion and all manner of conspiracies. The plot might be convoluted but it’s quite nicely constructed with some fine twists. A very good episode.

The Good Samaritan gets off to a promising start. Hannay is in central Europe, he’s on a train and he’s just met a beautiful mysterious woman. There’s a shady oilman of indeterminate nationality. And oh yeah, there’s a corpse. And a vanishing lady. It’s hard to go wrong with those ingredients. This is a terrific episode which movies along at break-neck pace.

In That Rough Music an old friend of Hannay’s dies and leaves his estate and fortune to his half-African daughter. A totally unconvincing story told in a very clumsy manner.

The Confidence Man is a major improvement. Hannay comes to the rescue of a music-hall proprietress menaced by an extortion racket. Hannay’s initial attempt to help ends in disaster. He realises he’s going to have to be much cleverer and he turns out to be a rather goof confidence trickster, all naturally in a good cause. A lightweight episode but it moves along briskly and it’s fun.

Say the Bells of Shoreditch involves a disappearing bridegroom. The young man works for his father who runs a shipping and insurance empire. There’s something strange going on in the company with all sorts of rumours flying around.

The jilted bride is Hannay’s goddaughter so he feels compelled to find the missing young man. Hannay discovers an ingenious and dangerous conspiracy.

Final Thoughts

Most of the episodes are quite entertaining but the series just doesn’t quite ring true. It’s very very uneven. The bad episodes are absolutely terrible but the good ones are very good. And the good episodes do outnumber the bad.

The biggest problem is that the series can’t decide if it wants to be fun or if it wants to be serious. Hannay is a slight disappointment but it’s still worth a look.

Network have released the complete series on DVD.