Too scary to screen
QUESTION Was the BBC show Late Night Horror destroyed for being too scary?
It was! Broadcast on BBC2 during april and May 1968, Late Night Horror was a six- episode colour series produced by Harry Moore, who adopted a robust approach to his material.
Episode one, No such thing as a Vampire, was a creepy Richard Matheson tale about the undead. william and Mary was a Roald Dahl tale in which a radiologist discovers a way of preserving the brain after the body has died. It was later remade as one of the tales Of the Unexpected. John Burke’s the Corpse Can’t Play explored a children’s party game gone horribly wrong.
the triumph Of Death was a haunted house mystery by H. Russell wakefield, the Bells Of Hell was a Robert aickman tale in which the bells of an East anglian church spell doom for a newly married couple. Finally, the Kiss For Blood was a nasty little story by sir arthur Conan Doyle, in which a surgeon is tricked into operating on his mistress by a vengeful husband with horrific consequences.
Even the opening credits were both horrific and innovative. the camera honed in on the multi-faceted eye of a fly, which contained multiple images of a screaming woman shaking her head from side to side.
Contemporary reactions to the production were full of outrage. so the series was discontinued and the tapes were scrubbed. However, some TV archaeologists managed to unearth a black-andwhite copy of the Corpse Can’t Play.
a re- colourised version, along with a book about the series and a specially made trailer, featuring Valentine Dyall (whose famous radio role was as the Man In Black), has been released by Kaleidoscope Productions.
QUESTION Why do we say ‘it’s up to them’ and other times ‘it’s down to them’?
THE two phrases have different subtleties of meaning, even if they are almost synonymous in common usage. ‘It’s up to them’ means it’s their choice, whereas ‘it’s down to them’ means it’s their fault.
However, the exact colloquial connotations of particular words vary widely between countries or localities, so some will use ‘up’ or ‘down’ almost interchangeably: ‘slow down’ or ‘slow up’, for example, so there will be disagreement.
we are ‘divided by a common language’. the loss of differentiation in the meanings of almost synonymous words or phrases, particularly in social media, is depleting the richness of our language.
Ken Wood, Newport, Gwent.
QUESTION How large does a lump of rock sticking up out of the sea have to be to be classified as an island?
FURTHER to the earlier answer which defined an island as a body of land that is surrounded by water, a coastal farmer in scotland once explained it to me like this: ‘we put a sheep on it, and if it’s still alive in a year it’s an island; if it’s not, it’s a rock.’
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