Ooh, some wicked stuff in this category this quarter.
The Drowned Village by
Berlie Doherty from 1982 was an unusual ghost story in that the ghosts weren’t
actually threatening. A woman returns to
where she spent her childhood in Yorkshire, staying with an uncle and
cousin. She wasn’t able to attend the
local school and got lured to the lake where she heard the tolling of a church
bell from the drowned village. The (synthesizer) score dated it slightly, but
it was a refreshing if moody piece.
I really love the unjustly neglected Dark Fantasy, the product of Scott Bishop, originating out of WKY
Oklahoma in the early 1940s. I was
shocked not to find the series in John Dunning; what is any radio drama program
if it isn’t in John Dunning?!
Nevertheless, I was able to dig up some information on the fortunes of
WKY Oklahoma which was a hotbed of radio endeavours in the late 1930s. There isn’t a huge amount of information
still extant on Dark Fantasy. Each episode has a regular cast of actors,
and while there are definitely themes that run through Bishop’s work, each new
episode is more bonkers than the last (which is refreshing; some of them are
even scary). “Curse of the Neanderthal”
is one of the more unique supernatural thrillers from this era of OTR I can
remember hearing, and every time I thought I knew what was going to happen, I
was proved wrong. Once again, it’s Scott
Bishop’s weird ability to bring narrative power to strange stories that don’t
quite come together but can’t be forgotten once heard. In this story, a woman is frantically trying
to phone her sister in England. She’s in
California with her two male friends—it isn’t clear in what sense they are her
friends—who are none-too-gently taunting her until she explains why she’s
trying to speak to her sister. She was
in a canyon painting when it got dark, and she didn’t know how she was going to
climb out of the canyon again. She heard
some unnerving sounds of night birds (or something) before seeing the figure of
her sister in the moonlight. The figure
guided her out and to safety. Naturally,
I assumed this meant her sister had died—as did, subtextually at least, the
main character. However, she spoke to
her sister and found she hadn’t been anywhere near California all day. The sister DIDN’T die (so far as we
know). The woman’s men friends
determined she had been visited by a fetch (they used a different word). In her subconscious mind (apparently) she had
painted a strange humanoid figure into her sketch. The three of them returned to when she had
been painting and discovered a Neanderthal skeleton which had evidently been
dislodged by a rock fall. They brought
an anthropologist (or actually just some sort of Van Helsing-like professor) to
see the skeleton, and they found some Neolithic pictograms which the Professor
translated (!) as basically “don’t disturb my bones, or else.” Interestingly, the Professor didn’t heed the
warning and took the bones into the town museum. I also meant to mention that Dark Fantasy doesn’t have much in the
way of special effects; it’s refreshing to hear regional American accents,
though. The story starred Ben Morris,
Eleanor Naylor Corrin, Eurelio Scofield, Brad Wayne, and Darrell McAllister.
Victor Pemberton,
perhaps now best known for his Doctor
Who scripts, wrote some great stuff for radio. Like his other work I’ve heard so far, Dark from 1978 was histrionic and fevered, sometimes stepping across the line to
overwrought but overall carried through by the supreme commitment of its
actors. Honor Blackman played Mrs
Virginia Preston, a woman whose husband killed her lover some years before and
(this being America) was hanged for it.
Bessie Love played her mother, though it’s never quite clear whether she’s
senile or canny. I was blown away by a
very young Nigel Anthony playing at least three characters, all by modulating
his voice. Mrs Preston believes she is
being haunted by her dead husband George, and while she claims that she wants
him around so that she can tell him she loved him, she also fears that he is
trying to kill her. Simon Elliott is not
a professional medium but has evidently captured Virginia’s imagination as the
man who can help her exorcise her husband.
None of the characters are particularly likeable and are never
predictable; it was like being on a merry-go-round in which you kept waiting
for the real, true story to come to light, but kept being passed around, never
quite knowing the truth. It was directed
by John Tydeman.
I was quite
impressed by the three-part Project
Raphael by Jenny Stephens from 2008. In it, MI7 in Yorkshire is trying to
get the edge over the Noblovsky Colony, a mafia-esque crime organization who
have the first “revenant” spy—someone who they killed and are using as a ghost
informant. Such information drives Finch
(Deborah McAndrew) to kill her partner Raphael in the hopes he will come back
as a revenant, but she lies from the beginning and says he wanted to die. Meanwhile, Malcolm Holmes (Aneiran Hughes)
has been psychic from a very early age and has found it hard to fit in. He advertises as a ghost hunter, but unbeknownst
to him, MI7 has been watching him since childhood and think he’s the person to
bring back a revenant like Raphael to work for them. He gets tricked into helping them, along with
Polly (Emily Chennery), a young journalist whom Malcolm fancies. This has a great premise, good effects, and
features some really dynamic writing. It
was directed by Peter Leslie Wild and also starred Dan Hagley, Sunny Ormond,
Syked Ahmed, Sophie Samooda, and John Flitcroft.
