User Reviews

As is usual with anthologies, very much a mixed bag. Half of them I scored 6 or under. Less usually, those currently most highly rated are the ones I most enjoyed, rating a good 9.

The Death Watcher. Professor Emmy Erikson (Judy Parfitt) falls into the hands of Dr Pickering (John Neville) who is researching life after death. Beneath a polite, gentlemanly veneer Pickering is a single minded solipsist for whom other people have no value, his theories are all that matters. The final fifteen minutes will have you on the edge of your seat.

Did You Lock Up? Peter and Moira Astle (Michael Craig and Gwen Watford) suffer a burglary and Peter is determined on revenge. Less tense but more fun to watch than The Death Watcher, as here those imprisoned richly deserve their fate.

While watching I felt a flicker of recognition which I didn't experience with the other nine. Being lodged in the back of your mind for fifty years suggests they must be first rate drama.

The title sequence for this series stuck in my mind from when it was originally broadcast. This is a very creepy series, with the main theme being human paranoia and all the stories have been extremely well written. It's just a shame that current British television no longer sees anthology series as financially viable, even though they're a good training ground to find new writing talent. New television writers are now 'trained' by writing for the soaps. The story lines are varied and covered various forms of paranoia, with psychological threats, rather than the supernatural, though it does have the feel of Rod Serling's Night Gallery to it. Thankfully, as it was made in 1971-3, it's not destroyed by extremely loud and constant incidental music, most have none and only a couple have a few moments with it, with library pieces. Unusually though, a single episode was broadcast in 1970, then there was a run of 9 episodes in 1971, followed by another single episode in 1973. The complete series is now on DVD, but as was common back then, there is no copyright/production date at the end of the closing credits on any of them, so it's hard to know if they were all made in 1970 and just spread out, or if they were made in the year of broadcast. There is very little information online about this series' production, or why there was a 1 year gap between the first episode's broadcast and the run of 9 and the 2 year gap between the 10th and 11th episodes.