Quarter 3 Review - 6/12

008 Horror – Old

This tends to be a large category, and what can I say?  I like horror radio drama.  There were some spectacular gems during this quarter, such as Night of the Wolf by Victor Pemberton from 1975.  Apparently Price was in London appearing in a play and so took time out to record this, with his third wife, Coral Brown.  Price played an American judge in the early 1880s who has come over to Cambridge after the disappearance of his son.  Questioning everybody in the nearby Fen village of Northcote, he spends time with the stuck-up, insular Northcote clan (think the Cullens of Twilight) in an attempt to find answers.  This is drenched in Gothic (Dracula, “Fall of the House of Usher,” even “The Thing That Cries in the Night”) but doesn’t suffer for it, mainly because of the winding, relentless, intricate nature of the writing (though it is, perhaps, 15 minutes too long).  The performances, too, really sell it and give us a less-than-predictable werewolf tale that rises above much of the occultist drivel of the 1970s.  Coral Brown played the matriarch of the Northcote family.  Other parts were played by Hugh Manning, Sheila Grant, Peter Whitman, John Rye, Elizabeth Proud, Norma Ronald, Paul Gaiman, Michael Cochrane, and Hayden Jones.  It was directed by the ever-reliable John Tydeman.

The Price of Fear is a perennial favorite on Radio 4 Extra, and I finally caught some of the episodes this time around.  While I enjoyed all of them, the one that made the biggest impression was “Blind Man’s Bluff” by William Ingram.  Easily the goriest of The Price of Fear stories from 1975, this one involved Vincent Price sharing his train compartment with a blind man who eventually explains how he was dependent on his mother due to his disability, and after she died, he had to rent out the house in order to make ends meet.  Unfortunately, the only person who would take the house was a sadistic and cruel layabout who destroyed and sold the blind man’s things and humiliated and taunted him.  (Wonderfully played by Freddie Jones with a distinctive whiny voice.)  The blind man’s revenge is creep-ville.  He was played by Geoffrey Collins.  It was directed by John Dyas.

I have never yet read Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm, but I am very intrigued to do so after this interesting adaptation from 2004, directed by Rishi Shankar and produced, I think, for the Word Service.  I really enjoyed it, though I found the story quite strange and shocking, quite bewildering actually.  There are many similar elements to Dracula pushed to extremes:  the young professional (who this time is Australian!) who is out to save the countryside from the depraved aristocrats, his virginal, polished lass, the older doctor mentor; it’s a cracking good adventure, and very radiogenic (with music specially composed by a San Francisco-based sound art group).  

In a very different vein, and quite experimental in its time (and having earned its place in the annals of horror radio drama history) is Mike Walker’s The Dark House from 2003.  Produced by Nick Ryan and Izzy Matt, it was a drama experiment.  A story that took place in a haunted house (well, flat) where the listening audience could phone in or text which of the three main characters’ threads they wished to follow in three minute segments.  The conceit was that a radio station had sent a journalist, Lucy, into an empty flat on Halloween night in order to do a broadcast (à la Most Haunted Live).  There she met a little girl, Kelly, and an old caretaker, Jim, with a dog.  Grim stuff if you stop to think about it, but I think the interactive, almost commodified nature of it lessoned the impact.  Still, interesting and well-acted if occasionally a little repetitive (part of the nature of the thing I suppose). It starred Claudie Blakeley as Lucy, Connie Jury as Kelly, with Alan Ford and Eddie Nestor.  It was directed by Izzy Matt.

I started to listening to Beyond Midnight, an OTR program from South Africa.  I enjoyed many of the stories, but my favorite so far is “Harry” by Michael McKay.  It features an outstanding actress as the main character, with a distinctive lower register voice.  The main character and her husband have an adopted daughter—it’s never made clear why they can’t have children—who has an imaginary friend named Harry.  The woman is tipped off when the daughter starts talking in a Cockney accent, and goes to the adoption agency.  I can’t tell you much more without ruining the surprise, but  what a rich gold-mine for class and gender!