‘Do the terrors of our ’70s and ’80s childhoods have power over our adult selves?’
COLUMNIST
IN SEARCH of the next box-set to binge-watch I stumbled upon a potentially life-changing discovery. All nine series of Tales of the Unexpected – that’s 109 programmes – are available on Now TV.
I almost sprang to my feet to start dancing in a vaguely suggestive way to sinister carousel music. Albeit with my clothes on. And without a scattering of tarot cards.
The stomach flip of suspense first felt on a Sunday night in childhood returned. It will be a familiar sensation for a whole generation allowed to stay up late to watch these terrifying yarns with a twist.
They began in 1979 and ran until 1988, framing our adolescence in horror, mystery and the blackest humour imaginable.
The series was originally called Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected as the plots were dramatised from the author’s sinister and sardonic adult short story collection. His name was dropped from the title when the work of other writers – including Ruth Rendell, Jane Gardam and Somerset Maugham – was sourced for the small screen.
Whether Dahl had penned them or not, the Cardiff-born maestro of narrative would introduce the stories from his fireside chair. And 30 minutes later, still reeling from the shock of the denouement, I’d be packed off to bed knowing that night’s dreams might brood on what we’d just witnessed.
Yet more than 30 years later, can Tales of the Unexpected still chill? I scanned the episodes to choose one at random. Big names sprang from almost every billing. The shows may have been made by Anglia Television – whose idea of a sophisticated ident was a rotating Airfix model of a knight on horseback – but the foremost actors of the day fell over themselves to appear on the Tales.
John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Joan Collins, Elaine Stritch, Nigel Havers, Frank Finlay, Leslie Caron, David Suchet, Topol, Timothy West, Michael Gambon, Brian Blessed, George Peppard, Elaine Paige, Telly Savalas and Sharon Gless – yes, they even had Kojak and Cagney – while Elizabeth Taylor also allegedly sent a telex asking for a role.
But after skimming the synopses I spied Sian Phillips in a 1980 episode entitled Back For Christmas. This seemed the ideal place to start so I started streaming.
Dame Sian looked fabulous, all shiny auburn bob, elegant tailoring and beautiful cheekbones. She plays Hermione, the long-suffering and waspish wife of orchid-loving Dr Carpenter, the cad who’s in love with the younger Samantha.
It begins in usual Tales of the Unexpected fashion, seducing the viewer into a false sense of security with an establishing scene of normality – in this case the kind of do Jerry and Margo would have hosted on The Good Life.
After the last guests have left, Hermione and the Doctor are due to fly to America for a lengthy work placement. But we are then plunged into quite jaw-dropping horror. Within minutes of the party-goers making their exit, the husband bumps off Hermione, chops her up with a power-tool, packs her into plastic bags and buries her under the floor of the greenhouse.
I was still in open-mouthed shock at the dismemberment of Sian Phillips when The Twist came along. The dastardly doc believes he has his wife’s disappearance quite literally covered but when he is about to embark on his new life with the mistress across the Atlantic, he discovers Hermione had arranged to have the builders in to dig up the greenhouse during their American soujourn. Cue twanging carousel music and the expression of a murderer who realises his victim has avenged herself from the grave.
Sharing my discombobulation on social media, the suggestions poured in for even more nightmare-inducing episodes.
“I remember one about a father feeding his baby Royal Jelly as it was underweight. I believe that said child then turned into a bee, much to its mother’s dismay,” said my mate Anna, referencing a particularly classic episode featuring Timothy West and Susan George.
“That was a bizarre one to say the least” agreed another friend, Romana. “Do you remember The Landlady, who did a bit of taxidermy on the side in her B&B?”
I watched that one too. Let’s just say when the Landlady tells her guests to get stuffed they might not actually leave...
“I loved this series,” said Victoria, “the episode where hitch-hikers were being murdered has stayed with me since childhood. Won’t spoil it and tell you what happens!”
But one episode was the stuff of more juvenile nightmares than any other. It just kept coming up. “Check out The Flypaper,” said Simon. “Not a Dahl story but written by Elizabeth Taylor (the English novelist not the Hollywood actress). It’s honestly the most terrifying thing I have ever watched!”
So I did. And, even with some comically clunky acting, this story of a schoolgirl stalked by a creepy bloke against the backdrop of the police investigation of another missing child, was seriously scary.
As its review on the Cultbox website points out, its horror is derived from its closeness to reality: “One of the nastiest stories from the series, and horrifyingly, blandly believable.”
That’s the reason the stories that began with Roald Dahl in his armchair were more likely to end up with us cowering behind the settee than supernatural fare like Doctor Who.
Davros was pretty disturbing but we weren’t going to run into a hybrid Dalek on the school run whereas Tales of the Unexpected’s most frightening characters sprang from everyday scenarios.
Looking back, I wonder how our youthful psyches coped. But the children of the ’70s and ’80s developed resistance because this is a period when popular culture accommodated horror even more readily than today – however much we imagine the internet and computer games are scaring youngsters witless.
It’s a phenomenon explored in a new book. Scarred For Life Volume One takes a light-hearted look at the darker side of pop culture in the 1970s. Authors Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence are following up with Volume Two on the 1980s.
As the blurb says: “Public information films, scary kids’ TV shows, bleak adult dramas, dystopian sci-fi, savage horror films, violent comics, horror-themed toys and sweets and the huge boom in paranormal paraphernalia; all this and much more is covered in depth. Prepare to relive your childhood nightmares. The things that made us... Scarred For Life!”
They’ve got a point. Horror was inescapable. I remember seeing more Hammer vampires than Disney characters as a kid.
From watching that first episode of The Singing Ringing Tree as a tot to reading all those teenage novels of post nuclear-apocalypse survival, via Children of the Stones and the haunting ghosts of Misty comic, our entertainment was constantly shaped around mild terror.
Even when they were simply telling us how to keep safe they insisted on the fear factor. A sense of the macabre was never far away from the public information film. That’s why they worked. They may have traumatised sensitive children but only a graphic electrocution shot would prevent little Jimmy from scaling a pylon to rescue his stranded frisbee.
And you won’t find me dipping a tentative toe into a woodland pond to this day thanks to the image of the deathly monk stalking kiddies whose game of Pooh sticks could end in tragedy.
“I am the spirit of dark and lonely water ready to trap the unwary, the show-off, the fool...” droned the spectral tones of Donald Pleasance before some poor lad was fatally trapped in river-bed weeds by the hood of his duffel coat. Avoid potential drowning hotspots, however, and Donald would slope back to the Stygian gloom, muttering: “Sensible children... I have no power over them”.
But do the terrors of our ’70s and ’80s childhoods have power over our adult selves?
Scarred for life? No. But in the spirit of spooky nostalgia, perfectly happy to be scared for 30 minutes at a time. So, three Tales of the Unexpected down, 106 to go...