We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal...
A fortnight ago, I revisited the site of my family holiday in 1977. And forty years ago, BBC 2 presented its third and longest season of Horror Double Bills, Dracula , Frankenstein and Friends.
I've celebrated that summer series several times on this blog in the past. In honour of the fortieth anniversary of that season, (which was largely the blueprint of the "black and white/colour" perception we have of the slot), here's my top five Horror Double Bills of all time!
I advise you play Soul Limbo by Booker T to get the full effect:
23/8/75 This Island Earth/Barbarella This may seem like a bit of a cheat since it's from the Fantasy double bill which started it all. But you get some wonderful 50s sci-fi visions, a BEM and the Eurocamp of Jane Fonda's futuristic romp. It's a bit exploitative but it's also a fascinating period piece in terms of design and production.
28/8/76 Hounds of Zaroff/ Hound of the Baskervilles Not only the sublime Rathbone/Bruce team ( perhaps not quite at their WWII zenith) but a really memorable version of The Most Dangerous Game, which inspired Kirby's Manhunter.
9/7/77 Bride of Frankenstein/Brides of Dracula I had to pick two double bills from the landmark '77 season. The first half is the incredible, inky black comedy of James Whale and the second, the most visually striking of the Hammer Draculas- although Dracula isn't actually in it...
20/8/77 Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man/The Raven And the double bill that ended our holiday at isolated Portobello Bay: the ineffably tragic Lon Chaney and the magnificently effete Vincent Price leading two casts of horror alumni: Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre, Lionel Atwill, Dwight Frye, Maria Ousepenskaya and Jack Nicholson!
28/6/80 Night of the Demon/The Ghoul How could I not pick the one double bill which earned itself a Radio Times cover? The first half is an elegant British supernatural shocker with a genuinely unnerving performance from Bryan Wilde. The second of course is the mid-70s slasher with an creepy and pathetic John Hurt cameo.
This was a difficult decision. So many films could have made the cut but they were hampered by a weaker one. Strong contenders included: The Black Cat, Quatermass II, The Devil Rides Out, Bedlam. Plague of the Zombies and others.
Universal horror of course was built on the landmark performances of Karloff and Bela Lugosi, an actor famously impersonated by the late Martin Landau, who died last Saturday on 15th July. Landau was a close friend of James Dean, the Mutant King, a great influence on me in my mid twenties. I first became aware of Landau in Space:1999, the first series of which began broadcasting on STV in the autumn of 1975. Why, yes, that is a contrived link!
My memories of our family holiday in Port William in the summer of 1976 are coloured by these paperback books:
I think my lack of involvement with Series 2 might be because of the long gap before its broadcast in the STV region. I think it was sometime in 1978 before the series was screened on a weekly basis. I do recall that episode one, The Metamorph had a one-off showing a little earlier, in the summer holidays. Most of my impressions of the series were formed by the weekly tie-in strip in Look-In.
Nonetheless, there are several haunting and somewhat scary episodes of 1999: Force of Life, Dragon's Domain, Mission of the Darians - one really disturbing moment is in Earthbound where the cowardly Commissioner wakes from his cryogenic sleep too early and finds he's effectively buried alive.
Speaking of cult television, last week on my trip back up to Elgin, I read a my birthday book, Number 11 by Jonathan Coe. One episode in the novel recounts an academic's obsession with finding out details of "The Crystal Garden", a short film he saw as a boy, one afternoon on television. The academic goes so far to check archived local newspapers to work out which day of the week that screening might have taken place. In the present day, he could've used BBC Genome.
The story does not have a happy ending of course but I was reminded of my recent experience with Google. For many years, I suspected my childhood memory of a Victorian adventurer with a balding German nemesis might have been Adam Adamant Lives! Even earlier, I wondered if I was confused by Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and Arte "Verry Intereztink" Johnson.
But ebay actually directed me, completely accidentally, to the answer:
Robert Virgin, a rather stuffy Victorian hero, aided by his escapologist batman Doublet- a former music hall artiste- and plucky photographer Virginia Cortez, travels throughout the empire to defeat Karl Von Brauner, a sadistic German schemer and insurrectionist.
The scene I remembered was of Virgin and Mrs. Cortez being menaced by a poisonous spider. Von Brauner employed some of his catchphrases : " A plen of ze utmost simplicity...I like it, I like it!" And he also said "very interesting" like Johnson! My memory didn't cheat! It turned out to be from an episode from 23/5/68, "Across the Silver Pass of Gusri Song".
It's amazing that I had recalled this ITV series so well at four years old but then again, from the same period, I had vague memories of Dr. Who's Fury from the Deep and The Wheel in Space and later that year of The Avengers Forget Me Knot and Game.
It's not a series that I've ever seen discussed in any publication on cult tv. Having watched all 13 episodes, I'm reminded most of The Wild, Wild West. Clinton Greyn has none of Robert Conrad's pugnacious energy and he's not (often) objectified in quite the way Conrad was. Von Brauner has none of the bizarre quirks of Dr. Loveless and his ubiquity is tiresome. Virgin's adventures is never as fancifully high concept as those of James West.
In fact, the problem with the series is that it's never sexy nor silly nor scary enough. There are lots of faces familiar from the Troughton Years of Doctor Who but thirteen episodes are quite enough. To get a taste of the tone of the series, I would recommend The Amazons, Persuasion of a Million Drops and especially Wings Over Glencraig with the great John Grieve. While it's very much a response to Batman '66 I think and to the 60s fad for Victoriana, attitudes to race and to racial casting are very 1960s.
Speaking of Batman' 66, in the next post we'll look at Showcase presents Batman vol. 6 for the last time
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