Listen in terror: British horror radio from the advent of broadcasting to the digital age 9781526102560

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Listen in terror

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Listen in terror British horror radio from the advent of ­broadcasting to the digital age

Richard J. Hand

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Richard J. Hand 2014

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The right of Richard J. Hand to be identified as the author of this work has been ­asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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978 0 7190 8148 4 hardback

First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not ­guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or ­appropriate.

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Dedicated to My Mother (who made me a radio listener) and to Sadiyah, Shara, Danya and Jimahl (who continue to listen with me)

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction – Listening in terror

1

1 Are you sitting (un)comfortably? Sound, horror and radio

8

2 The quintessence of British horror radio: Appointment with Fear

50

3 ‘This is your story-teller, The Man in Black’: hosting horror

97

4 Horror radio in the 1950s

119

5 The 1960s and 1970s: parodies and Price

128

6 The Man in Black returns: Fear on Four 138 7 Terror tales for the twenty-first century: The Man in Black

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8 Adaptation and twenty-first-century horror radio

167

9 Multifarious terrors: horror audio in the digital age

179



Conclusion – Closing thoughts

201



Appendix 1 – Appointment with Fear listings

205



Appendix 2 – Mystery and Imagination listings

208



Appendix 3 – Music in Appointment with Fear 209

Bibliography

211

Index

217

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Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Fellowship award to assist in the research and writing of this monograph. The following audio writers and producers answered all my questions with much generosity: Carl Amari, Louise Blackwell, Jack Bowman (‘Gareth Parker’), Bert Coules, Oliver Emanuel, Stephen Gallagher, C ­ hristopher Golden, Lucy Gough, Richard Holt, Hannah Kerr, David Lemon, Alice Massey, Kate McGrath, Jenny Paton, Stuart Man Price, Graham Reznick, Marty Ross, Mariele Runacre Temple, Matthew Wilkie. I should also like to thank Mary Traynor, Ben Challis, Geraint D’Arcy, Robert Dean, Professor Stephen Lacey, Lyndon Jones and other colleagues at the University of South Wales; Roger Bickerton and the Vintage Radio Programmes Collectors’ Circle; and Professor Mark Jancovich at the University of East Anglia.

Introduction

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Listening in terror

My mother was ten years old when the Second World War began and sixteen when it came to an end. She was raised in the East Midlands of England in the cathedral city of Peterborough. It was the brick-making capital of Britain, and some of its other industries – such as the Perkins Engines Company – threatened to make the city a target for German bombing raids. My mother had the chance to be evacuated, but she stayed with her family. Fortunately, the bombing of Peterborough proved to be limited. My mother remembers the uncertainty and austerity of the times, her cousins Fred and Jim joining the army and the navy respectively, and Italian prisoners-of-war. It was an era of terror and my mother had one particular moment of horror. It wasn’t the bomb that hit Peterborough Cathedral, the rumour of invasion or the close shave with an escapee prisoner-of-war. It was the BBC. At 9.45 pm on 13 January 1944, my fourteen-year-old mother listened to Appointment with Fear. The episode that night was ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. For decades, my mother would recall that radio broadcast with a shudder. In more recent times, BBC Radio can still be ‘dangerous’. An episode of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam (18 December 1997) was hurriedly faded out by BBC Radio 1 after approximately fifteen minutes because of a satirical re-edit of Princess Diana’s funeral (6 September 1997). The media furore caused by BBC Radio 2’s The Russell Brand Show (18 October 2008), when prank messages were left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone by the show’s host and Jonathan Ross, was instrumental in ending the BBC careers of two extremely popular radio personalities. These were pre-recorded sequences that ‘misfired’ on broadcast. News and current affairs broadcasting is frequently live, and this has led to unforeseen faux pas: on 6 November 2010, the BBC Radio 4 Today presenter James Naughtie accidently called Jeremy Hunt, the government Culture Secretary, ‘Jeremy Cunt’ live on air. Later that morning, another veteran BBC presenter made precisely the same error on Start the Week when Andrew Marr, in discussing Naughtie’s embarrassing mistake and Freudian slips with the journalist David Aaronovitch and psychotherapist Jane Haynes, made exactly the same error. The BBC iPlayer discreetly edited out the offending misnomers for ‘Listen Again’ reruns of both shows. At the other end of the spectrum, on the very

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same day, the 2010 Turner Prize was awarded to Susan Philipsz for an aural installation, the first time a sound artist had won this influential art prize. Our culture may seem visually dominated, but audio can be relevant, prescient – and risky. The focus of this study is audio drama, a cultural form that not only makes use of sound, but has no choice but to privilege it entirely. Audio drama is a cultural form that is entirely non-visual at the point of reception. Sound is invisible, and in a visually dominated culture this is not just in a literal sense. In the broad field of cultural studies, radio studies has been almost entirely eclipsed by screen studies. For Allen S. Weiss, ‘the history of mainstream radio is a suppressed field’ and ‘the history of experimental radio is utterly repressed’ (Weiss, 1995: 3). Radio drama is a comparatively new art, a few decades younger than cinema, and, in its history, many notable examples are experimental, trying to make sense of this new medium or optimising its potential. The neglect of radio is compounded by another problem: available material. Broadcasts during the early days of radio were usually live, and hardly any recordings were made or have survived. Likewise with scripts, these works of radio drama were produced literally ‘for the moment’, with no view to the future, and most scripts were simply discarded immediately after broadcast. To this end, newspaper listings are sometimes the only clue to what was aired and when. However, even if the BBC has been notorious in the past for creating shelf space by destroying recordings, their written archives at Caversham are a priceless resource with examples of scripts and other documentation. The problem affects not just historical material: it is very unusual for radio plays to be released commercially and radio scripts are hardly ever published. However, in recent times there have been concerted efforts (many web-based) by aficionados and academics to locate and share digitised recordings, and also to categorise and chronicle the schedules and repertoire of broadcast drama. These endeavours help to expand available resources and ‘fill the gaps’ in the history of radio drama. In addition, the digital world has created a renaissance for spoken-word performance with downloadable or streaming plays and a new and prolific generation of podcast drama. There are many genres and subgenres of radio drama: soap operas, sitcoms, spoof comedies, sketch shows, literary adaptations, biographical dramas, science fiction serials and crime thrillers. The topic of this book is closely affiliated with the last two categories and concerns a similarly popular genre of perennial importance throughout the history of audio drama: horror. There have been countless attempts to define the characteristics of horror and its effects and uses. However we may care to define horror, it has always had a special place on radio. This has frequently been most evident in crossovers with literary adaptation: the BBC has produced numerous radio interpretations of the classic forebears of horror literature, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

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Introduction

3

These have included many audio readings of the novels through to, in recent years, frequently inventive adaptations by distinctive dramatists such as Nick McCarty’s seven-part (2004) and Liz Lochhead’s two-part (2007) versions of Dracula; Nick Stafford’s two-part Frankenstein (2003); Robert Forrest’s (1993) and Yvonne Antrobus’s versions of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (2007). At the time of writing this book, BBC Radio 4 had run a whole season titled The Gothic Imagination (October–November 2012) which featured impressive two-part adaptations of Dracula by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Frankenstein by Lucy Catherine, as well as relevant documentaries and works of original drama. Radio has also presented adaptations of playfully inventive fiction such as Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula (1981), Glyn Dearman’s major ninetyminute version of Loren D. Estleman’s 1978 novel. As Seán Street implies, on the most fundamental level, radio is particularly well-suited to the supernatural: The use of montage, shifting perspective, changing acoustics and voice over sound and music have been used through the history of radio to create effects relating to the uncanny, the unearthly and the ghostly. It is because of the suggestibility of sound to the imagination that the medium has excelled in creating pictures and images out of darkness. A key part of this power is the non-specificity of sound, its capacity to act upon the imagination of individuals in different ways. (Street, 2012: 29–30)

Street’s observation links closely with the sense of fantasy. As Rosemary Horstmann observes, ‘Radio lends itself particularly well to fantasy’ (Horstmann, 1997: 36). The use and concept of ‘dreams’ is recurrent in radio, partly because the radio medium has the potential to step effortlessly and seamlessly between fantasy and reality.1 At the same time as its ethereal nature (in part literal), radio can be formidably real, not least in the way it can draw on our imagination in creating an ultimate, even uncontrollable, conception of horror. As Jack Bowman explains: The ultimate strength of audio is the lack of visuals – a lot of horror movies can start to think showing more blood, more gore, more screams, more wounds is the way to go. After a while the audience ends up – to use the cliché – desensitised to it all. However, take away the visuals, and with some good acting and the right sound design to match it, suddenly with audio it’s your imagination that makes it only as horrible as you yourself can imagine it. You’re responsible for your own mental imagery and in a way, not able to control that imagery, especially if you don’t like it. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

Bowman is one of many contemporary audio practitioners interviewed for this book. The passion he reveals is detectable in other writers who have created works of audio horror and have found the form liberating or have discovered a way to optimise its effect, as these statements make clear:

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I think radio’s strength is one of intimacy. If someone’s listening on headphones, it’s like they’re whispering in their ear. Like theatre, it’s a bit more demanding of its audience, forcing them to use their imagination to ‘fill in the gaps’. You need to concentrate more, but the rewards can be immense. Long scenes and internal monologues – both of which often fall flat on TV or film can be mesmerising on radio. As a medium for horror, these are clearly strengths as you can really get inside a character’s mind. There is also an ‘unlimited’ budget as a story set in a distant post-apocalyptic future costs the same on radio as one that’s set in a caravan. (David Lemon, 2012) The idea of trying to script out horror for a theatrical audience never worked for me until I started working in radio format. I was set free. Apart from The Woman in Black any stage production that tried to be scary was anything but, however radio allowed the best way of scaring someone – use their own mind against them. The visuals are suggested – you say spooky house and add some gravel footstep Foley and suddenly each individual audience member is transported to the spooky house that scared them as a child. (Stuart Man Price, 2011) The disappointing man-in-a-rubber-suit movie monster, the fearsome TV chill that simply doesn’t look the way you imagined it would, the stage shock that neither surprises nor horrifies – these problems are all neatly sidestepped in a medium where every listener can create an intensely personal visual experience in the privacy of their own mind. But there’s more to it than that. Radio is just about the most intimate of all performance media. When everything’s working well there’s a glorious feeling that the story is being told not only to you, but for you, and only for you. Audio drama can get deeper and more affectingly inside your head than almost anything else, and of course the more personal the experience, the more unsettling the horror. (Bert Coules, 2011) The obvious advantages of radio horror are the ways in which it drags the imagination of the individual audience member into the creative process: ‘I’ll provide the story, the voices, the sounds, but I need you to do the cinematography’. A lot of modern horror film makers are basically like axe murderers – the audience sits there passively while the artist thwacks them over the head as hard as he can. The radio horror artist has to be more your seductive vampire, teasing that audience member into a kind of intimate bond – and only then doing horrible things to them. (Marty Ross, 2011) Audio horror certainly has an advantage, in that we’re unsettled by incomplete information. Who’s outside? What’s making that noise? The moment you switch the lights on to see, that entire little universe of uncertainty collapses into something quantified. But with audio horror there’s always something legitimately withheld. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011) Radio has to be more ambiguous. We have to leave questions open. The more questions you leave open in a radio play, the scarier it becomes. There is a cliché that radio is ‘the most visual medium’, but I think that when you’re doing something genuinely horrifying, you really do have to work

Introduction

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the audience’s imagination. There is an exact void, an empty space that can really terrify the listener if you get it right. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

The writers quoted above (whose plays will be examined in this book) can be seen to compare radio favourably with television, film and theatre. For all of these writers, who range in age and experience, audio has proved to be consummately effective for the genre of horror. Their perspectives and attitudes may vary, but overall, audio works for them as a medium for horror in the way that it is intimate, limitless and yet advantageously ‘incomplete’ and ‘open’: these traits allow audio drama to tap deeply into our subconscious, our memories and our anxieties. The advantages notwithstanding, artists who regard radio as ‘easy’ do so at their peril. This is because it is easy to be confused or distracted when listening to audio. The ‘exact void’ so aptly described by Oliver Emanuel can become a deadly vacuum. As Hugh Chignell explains, radio is typically defined by ‘secondariness’ wherein a ‘listener can easily perform some other activity (work, drive and so on) while listening and paying attention to the radio’ (Chignell, 2009: 70). However, it is easy not to ‘pay attention’: unless a play can ‘hook’ the listeners and get them to ‘hold’ the concept and trajectory of an audio narrative in their minds, the radio becomes background noise and even soporific. Listening attentively (even when it is ‘secondary’) to spoken-word audio is definitely a learned skill, but the failings of audio drama cannot be simply levelled at the listener. As Bert Coules (2011) states, ‘just as it’s very hard to write well for radio, it’s distressingly easy to write badly’. Radio drama has always been a tremendous medium for playwrights, as this book will reveal, but there is always a risk of over-narration and over-description in clumsy – even patronising – attempts to compensate for the perceived ‘lack’ of visuals and anxiety about radio’s ‘blindness’.2 When it comes to the genre of horror there are other problems. As a popular genre, horror can sometimes be seen – especially by its detractors – as being trapped in its conventions and formulas: horror radio is no exception. Writing in The Listener in the 1940s, Philip Hope-Wallace complains that with certain examples of radio drama – above all the uncanny – he has ‘the dread faculty of foreseeing the end of the radio play before it had been launched three minutes’ (13 December 1945). However, despite this sense of predictability, Hope-Wallace will have to admit that certain works of horror radio can hit their mark: six months later Hope-Wallace is astonished by a work of uncanny drama. Listening to E. J. King-Bull’s radio adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s unperformed stage play The Fight for Mr. Lapraik: The House of Fear (15 May 1946), Hope-Wallace describes how in the play there are three simultaneous manifestations of Mr Lapraik (Bernard Miles) in his house: These moments which tighten the scalp are hard to analyse or explain, even when you can reproduce them, as with a film or gramophone record. Was this merely a matter of stage-craft? (Barrie was never writing better than in

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1916.) Or some chance reference of the kind which just does the trick in radio, to ‘moonlight shining on the wet pavements seen through the front door’ which jumped the whole scene in the dark hall before our eyes? Or an effect of timing, or the incidental music (Anthony Hopkins)? At any rate there was that nasty little shock which swings open the door in the mind we prefer to hurry past. (The Listener, 23 May 1946)

Hope-Wallace reveals that it was only when the resolution became clear that ‘the creeps began to wear off and we relaxed’. It was a play that had a ‘nightmare quality’ and made the listener ‘see ghosts’, but the greatest praise Hope-Wallace gives is that ‘It might have been written for radio’. Barrie’s pre-radio play proved unperformable until the BBC demonstrated how this work of the uncanny could be realised. This book will endeavour to explore examples of audio drama that ‘swing open the door in the mind’ to give us ‘nasty shocks’ and ‘nightmares’. Initially, we will look at sound and radio technology and its links with the uncanny and then embark on a survey of British audio horror from the beginnings of broadcasting through to the digital age. Central to this will be a figure synonymous with British horror radio: ‘The Man in Black’, the host of Appointment with Fear, Fear on Four and the eponymous series The Man in Black. Through and around this most famous, long-lived yet scarcely examined figure, we will look at other series and standalone plays that explore the uncanny, the supernatural or the gruesome to disturb, fascinate and even amuse us.

Notes 1 The word ‘dream’ and its variants is one of the most commonly used in the history of British radio drama. In the 1930s, the BBC aired The Dreaming Man: A Fantastic Comedy for the Microphone (6 March 1936) by Leonard Crabtree and Dream Faces: A Dramatic Comedy (15 May 1936) by Wynn Miller. The Dream is the title of different radio plays by Francis Foster (31 July 1946) and Paolo Levi (21 April 1959); Dreams is the title of plays by Kenneth Alexander (24 March 1947) and Janet Grey (4 March 1964), while Max Koster wrote Dreams Limited (7 February 1944). The Dreamers is the title of plays by Gillian Reynolds (18 December 1955) and Sean Walsh (31 July 1974), while, R. E. T. Lamb wrote Dreamers Awake (5 February 1975) and Nick McCarty wrote Dreamers and Liars (3 January 1990). In 1963 James Hanley wrote A Dream, a drama about ships, and a decade later A Dream Journey (3 December 1974), a completely different play with which adapts his own wartime novel No Directions (1943). Radio listeners also heard Derek Hoddinott’s Wilkie Collins adaptation The Dream Woman (19 July 1961), Alun Richards’s Dream Girl (16 October 1978) and J. MacLaren-Ross’s Dream Man (12 April 1960). Interestingly, these many ‘dream’ plays cross genres: Vernon Scannell’s A Dream of Guilt (20 April 1963) and J. C. W. Brook’s A Dream of Murder (6 December 1979) are both crime plays, while The Dream of Andreana (14 March 1955) is Sasha Moorson and Rayner Heppenstall’s adaptation of Boccaccio, and Colin Style’s A Dream of

Introduction

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Ophir (6 December 1986) is a script compiling ‘Glimpses of War and Peace in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe 1886–1986’. R. F. Delderfield’s The Dreaming Suburb (October to December 1959) was a sweeping twelve-part epic about a suburban neighbourhood based on his own novel, while radio also presented enigmatically titled works such as Harold Rogers’ Dream of a Chinese Student (2 June 1947) and Peter Myers’ Dream of Tigers (19 January 1998). 2 For a detailed account – and dismantling – of the ‘blind’ myth that surrounds radio see Crook (1999a: 53–70).

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Are you sitting (un)comfortably? Sound, horror and radio

The power of sound What is sound? Sound exists in waves, consisting of vibrating molecules. It is literally invisible, and when it arrives in the forum of human perception – hearing – it can seem elusive by comparison with other senses such as vision, touch or taste. Yet the perception and impact of sound can have a profound effect. The power of sound in relation to emotion, memory and imagination can be immense and sometimes startling. Contrary to expectations, music or a particular voice or auditory ambience can conjure up a memory or feeling more profoundly than a snapshot image of – or object from – a time and place. This is the concept of anamnesis, a phenomenon defined by JeanFrançois Augoyard and Henri Torgue as: An effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener’s consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context. Anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is the often involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds. ­(Augoyard and Torgue, 2005: 21)

By implication, anamnesis can create a channel into our memory and consciousness that can take us by surprise (the ‘involuntary’ aspect that Augoyard and Torgue emphasise). Sound can also invisibly manipulate our mood, making us feel relaxed or ill at ease, most obviously in the form of music, but through other subtler means as well. Sound is also extremely hard to avoid. We might keep our mouths closed to refuse to taste something, we might shut our eyes to block out something we do not want to behold, but we cannot shut our ears. For most people, putting our fingers in our ears, or using earplugs or noise-reducing headphones, can never completely obliterate noise. Sound can creep and permeate like nothing else. Just as an alarm clock or fire alarm can wake us up, the dripping tap, buzzing mosquito or ticking clock can unnerve us; and a cacophony outside the window or noisy ‘neighbours from hell’ is a social problem that can drive people to complete despair and acts of murder.1 Sound can be literal torture: the theme tune to the children’s television programme Barney & Friends (1992–2010) and other music has been used to enforce sleep deprivation on internees in the ‘Global War on Terror’ (Cusick, 2008). By the same token, the deprivation

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of sound can be similarly tortuous: when not listening to maddening tunes on a loop, ‘terror’ suspects have also been forced to wear sound-excluding headphones. After all, noiselessness – total silence – can be equally alienating. This is evident in the anechoic chamber, an environment that ‘halts all sound reflection’ (Crook, 2012: 194), and is a realm of total silence which can only be endured for a brief period of time. As Mark Z. Danielewski writes in The House of Leaves: When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. (Danielewski, 2000: 46)

Given the immense power of sound, it is no surprise that there is an authentic phobia relating to sound: ligyrophobia (also known as phonophobia or acousticophobia) is a ‘fear of sound’ in which an individual develops a decreased sound tolerance for noises, whether these are music, voices or other auditory signals. A ligyrophobic person might become anxious about phones ringing, balloons bursting and other sudden sounds; they might also become obsessed about recurrent sounds, no matter how slight; and, in extreme cases, they live in fear of speaking aloud and social contact in general. Between anamnesis and ligyrophobia, it is clear that sound can have an exceptional potency. Sound can also be immensely uncanny: the alienating phenomenon of the echo (one’s own voice momentarily detached from the self) and other forms of reverberation; noises (whether familiar or unearthly) that are heard but remain unseen; sounds beyond the door; things that go bump in the night.

Sounds frightening: the auditory in horror culture Horror fiction and horror cinema often foreground the image: authors make us ‘see’; and filmmakers determine our point-of-view. In remembering or describing an example of horror that we have consumed, we tend to recount what we saw. Nevertheless, in the realm of the uncanny in culture, sound has a particularly important role. As Robert Spadoni writes, when it comes to ‘Unseen bumps and audible screams […] no one would deny that such sounds are ingredients of the horror film as we know it’ (Spadoni, 2007: 2). Certainly in horror cinema, there are countless examples of atmospheric sounds or indistinct ‘noises’ outside a room or a window as a device to build suspense and foreboding: a film like The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) is in many respects a film that demonstrates the power of horror sound through its ‘noises off’ and terrifying sounds that fill the air or are heard behind closed doors. Sometimes in the horror film genre, sounds may even have a practical function for exposition: in fact, the enigmatic sound that lures a victim into peril has become a cliché. Sound in the form of music is indispensable in horror screen culture from films to digital games. Subgenres of action-adventure games such as ‘survival horror’ make ubiquitous use of

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in-depth soundscape and atmospheric music, while the iPhone game Soul Trapper (2009) is a stereo audio-game that primarily tests the player’s skills of aural – not visual – perception. In horror cinema, we might think of the music in John Carpenter’s early movies such as his self-scored Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) or the Ennio Morricone-scored The Thing (1982) in which the minimalist and cyclical synthesised music creates an inexorable unease. Nondiegetic music is invaluable to enhance the impact of a ‘jump’ moment on screen, but it can also be immensely effective in creating a profound sense of atmosphere through subtlety. In Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) the appearance of the demonic Sadako (Rie Ino’o) is heralded and accompanied by the unnerving yet subtle screeching of the strings of a musical instrument. A well-loved test of the importance of music in horror film is to watch sequences of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) with the volume first turned on and then turned off. Watching in silence, we realise how important Bernard Herrmann’s music is in creating the tension and exacerbating the horror of the film: without it, key moments of the film (on a freeway or in a bathroom) become just a montage of images devoid of edgy suspense or sheer terror. However, it is also worth mentioning how ‘silence’ can also be carefully deployed as ‘sound’. In Psycho itself, we might look at the scene in which Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbs the stairs looking for Norman Bates’s mother. After he has called out her name we are in complete silence for a few moments until a door swings open and Herrmann’s music ‘bursts’ into our hearing like a jack-in-a-box effect. Silence in horror films can build tremendous suspense as we wait for the inevitable sound. The importance of sound in horror film continues to the present day: in fact, not only has sound technology advanced as exponentially as visual technology, it has become an invaluable resource in creating effect and impact. Graham Reznick is a sound designer for film, notable for his work on Ti West’s horror movies The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009) and The Innkeepers (Ti West, 2011).2 In discussing the place of sound in contemporary horror film, Reznick reveals: The most exciting thing about sound, to me, is that it’s most effective as an intangible modifier of any narrative or visual that it’s accompanying. Sound can be at the forefront, most obviously in dialogue or overt thematic scoring, but good sound design is more often than not felt rather than noticed. This puts it in the realm of emotion – creating a direct link between the storyteller and the audience. It may seem manipulative when revealed as such, but that’s the real task of any good storyteller: to manipulate the audience down a path while allowing them to feel like they are getting there on their own. (Graham Reznick, 2012)

As Reznick indicates, the ‘intangible’ essence of sound – in other words, its invisibility – gives it a fluid and emotional quality that enables its usage to shift from the blatant to the latent. Reznick goes on to stress that sound design in film remains largely free of the contemporary audience’s knowing-

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ness and cynicism (a challenge for any filmmaker, particularly when working in a popular genre such as horror): Great picture editing, camera direction, and mise-en-scène can likewise affect a scene without drawing too much attention, but awareness of the tools of visual filmmaking has grown to the point where viewers are much savvier to the usual tricks, and a little more wary. Luckily, sound is still a bit of a black art. It can live in that emotional space and warp reality in a way that similar visual tricks would have viewers crying foul. Because of that power, sound design has the great ability to unwrite and rewrite reality at any time. Combine these techniques with the framework of horror, and you can bring viewers to a very vulnerable place. (Graham Reznick, 2012)

In Reznick’s opinion, sound design is evidently one of the most potent weapons in a horror filmmaker’s arsenal. In particular, the manipulative ability to unwrite and rewrite reality is a formidable power and is one that reveals the potential of sound as a whole to create a sense of the uncanny. In theatre, sound has an extraordinary, albeit not always blatantly evident, ability to create the dramatic intensity and verisimilitude of certain situations. Milly S. Barranger outlines the functions that can be achieved by sound in theatre: Establishment of locale Foghorns Time of day Chimes on the hour Time of year Birds in springtime Weather conditions Rain or thunder Street sounds Car horns, screeching brakes Realism Ambulance siren, toilet flushing,   television sounds Mood Ominous sounds for scary moments (Barranger, 2005: 285)

Along with sound options that have a function in creating a sense of location, time or realism, Barranger mentions ‘ominous sounds for scary moments’ as an example of ‘mood’, an aspect that can imbue a sense of psychological atmosphere to a performance. Barranger also mentions ‘thunder’ and elsewhere cites specific technologies developed from the days of the Elizabethan stage – such as ‘thunder machines’, ‘thunder-sheets’ and ‘thunder runs’ (Barranger, 2005: 284) – that were used to create tremendous effects and atmosphere. The role of such off-stage sound has a particular significance in horror theatre. The theatre most synonymous with horror – the Théâtre du GrandGuignol, which existed in Paris from 1897 to 1962 – has acquired a legendary status for its repertoire of short, sensationalist plays which featured special effects such as trick knives, guillotines and stage blood which would congeal under stage lighting. These effects were highly visual, often deploying what was essentially the technology associated with magicians’ tricks into narrative contexts. If the Grand-Guignol’s renown (and its

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entry into the language as a phrase for over-the-top horror) rests on its (in) famous set pieces of eye-gouging, throat-slitting and the like, the execution of the plays in production relied on a more careful creation of atmosphere and subtly paced development through its well crafted scripts and measured performances. An important part of this journey was the use of sound. As Hand and Wilson write: Sound effects as a whole were treated with great seriousness at the GrandGuignol. It is remarkable how many of the plays include significant use of off-stage sound (which helps) to establish the context, environment and mood of the plays, and substantial time and resources were invested in perfecting such sound effects. (Hand and Wilson, 2002: 64)

The off-stage sounds in the Grand-Guignol repertoire include storms (inevitably), tolling bells (of churches or boats), seagulls (in plays set in lighthouses) and so on: these serve to paint a picture of the world beyond the confines of the Grand-Guignol’s tiny, claustrophobic stage as well as enhancing the mood of the story. Paul Ratineau was the most celebrated technician at the Grand-Guignol and led the theatre’s innovation of special effects. When it came to using sound Ratineau, according to Mel Gordon, ‘discovered the further away the sound source was from the audience, the more effective (or chilling) it was’ (Gordon, 1997: 44). The aforementioned seagull effect was used in Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin’s Gardiens de phare (1905) in which the screeching birds hammer their beaks against the windows of the lighthouse. According to Agnès Pierron, this aural effect became legendary in the history of the genre (Pierron, 1995: 118). In the early 1920s, a GrandGuignol experiment opened in London with the central involvement of Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson. The genre’s heady mix of horror and titillation would inevitably lead to an awkward relationship with the British theatre censors at the time. Interestingly, one of the British Grand-Guignol’s most notorious furores was not about its visual displays but about a sound effect. The 1921 production of Maurice Level’s The Kill (adapted by W. H. Harris) featured off-stage howling dogs which were so realistic that a formal investigation into animal cruelty ensued. According to Lewis Casson: The R.S.P.C.A. inspector saw the show and demanded to be allowed back stage at the next performance. ‘Nothing could make the dogs howl in this way,’ he declared, ‘except the most vicious cruelty’. I was there that night and I well remember his discomfiture. When the moment came he was shown Lewis dressed only in his underclothes (he was also making up for the next play) and the stage manager standing in the wings baying like the hounds of hell into lamp glasses! (Casson, 1972: 71–72)

This technical ingenuity is a good example of the kind of effect that was adopted by radio drama: lamp glasses and the like were used to create a variety of hound, lion and elephant sounds on air. Also in the 1920s, other plays that revealed a significant interest in sound include Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train (1925). This play might

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be a conventional comedy in many respects, but in the appendices to the script Ridley provides a highly detailed account of the devices to be used in creating the sound of the phantom locomotive and how they should be deployed. The numerous instruments and gadgets range from a variety of tubular bells, drums and whistles to garden rollers, air cylinders and milk churns; and Ridley describes, with the utmost precision, how the sounds are to be coordinated in the creation of the three different trains in the play (Ridley, 1959: 64–65). Although it belongs to a very different tradition, Ridley’s extraordinary sonic inventiveness is reminiscent of the work of Luigi Rossolo and The Art of Noise (1913), a Futurist manifesto which strove to define and categorise the widest variety of sounds as art and, as Allen S. Weiss sums up, advocate ‘the replacement of music by noise’ (Weiss, 1995: 4). A more recent example of sound in horror theatre is Stephen Mallatratt’s popular 1989 stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black (1983). The play may feature the eponymous figure silently appearing in the auditorium and on stage, but the terror of the production is underpinned with a carefully orchestrated use of pre-recorded sound. The deliberately minimalist staging of the play is richly embellished with a discreet use of soundscape. Along with amplified screams and eerie noises in the empty house and its environs, key narrative events (namely the accidents) are presented on a solely aural basis. The Woman in Black has also been adapted to the screen with the Nigel Kneale-scripted Granada Television version directed by Herbert Wise which was shown on Christmas Eve, 1989; and the Jane Goldman-scripted version directed by James Watkins which re-launched the cinematic outreach of Hammer Films in 2012. In both screen adaptations, sound is immensely important in creating atmosphere. Perhaps the most chilling scene in the television version is when the protagonist Arthur (Adrian Rawlins) lies in bed and discovers a toy soldier beneath his pillow: the ghostly voice of a child talks to Arthur before it abruptly culminates in a vision of the woman in black looming towards him, screaming. The 2012 film utilises character actors, location filming and a meticulously Gothic mise-en-scène in creating a quintessential British ghost story (albeit with a distinct influence of Japanese horror films such as the Ringu cycle). Interestingly, the film was granted a 12A certificate for UK cinema release by the British Board of Film Classification, thus making this horror film available to cinema audience of all ages (subject to the presence of an accompanying adult): there is only one blatant instance of ‘blood’ (a child who has drunk lye chokes up blood); but the film relies on atmosphere and the occasional ‘jump’ moment. In particular, although boldly different from the stage adaptation in many respects, it follows the aural precedent of the Mallatratt version with an evocative soundscape, including distantly pounding rocking chairs, disembodied voices and, of course, blood-curdling screams. A Gothic stage adaptation partly in the tradition of Mallatratt’s Woman

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in Black, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2013 dramatisation of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), also reveals an acute usage of sound and, more emphatically, silence. When staged at the Almeida Theatre in London, the broken grandeur of the Bly estate was accompanied by a detailed soundscape of the remote English countryside in day and night (including the eerie sound of mating foxes). However, Lenkiewicz emphasises in the script that when the supernatural apparitions of Peter Quint or Miss Jessel appear ‘everything goes quiet’ (Lenkiewicz, 2013: 35), or ‘then all sounds stop’ (Lenkiewicz, 2013: 49). On stage, this was used to arresting effect. It is evident how traditional and contemporary theatre and screen culture has assimilated the visual with the auditory for practical, technical and aesthetic reasons, but sound is a highly significant component in horror fiction. A writer such as H. P. Lovecraft reveals an understanding of the power of sound to create abject and terrifying effect in literature. For Michel Houellebecq, Lovecraft’s careful orchestration of sound is a key element in his most successful horror stories: ‘The maniacal precision with which HPL organizes the soundtrack to his tales certainly plays an important part in the success of the most frightening of them’ (Houellebecq, 2005: 70). The place of sound is inherently important in the work of the most influential of Gothic writers. At the beginning of Bram Stoker’s ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’ (1903), it is sound which rouses the narrator from the comfort of sleep and launches him into his tale of horror: ‘All at once the gates of Sleep were thrown wide open, and my waking ears took in the cause of the disturbing sounds’ (Stoker, 1912: 2–3). In the opening chapter of Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jonathan Harker’s journal describes how the single howl of a farm dog spreads into something disturbing and ominous: Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. (Stoker, 1979: 20)

In Chapter 3 of Dracula, Harker’s encounter with the three ‘brides’ of Dracula may abound with highly erotic imagery, but for all the visual power of the ‘brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips’ (Stoker, 1979: 44), the most potent sense of the erotic-uncanny is evident in the sound of ‘the intolerable, tingling sweetness’ of their ‘silvery, musical laugh’ and the prone Harker’s description of ‘the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips’ (Stoker, 1979: 45) as one of the vampires looms over his neck. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) follows in the tradition of the dogs in Dracula in creating an eerie soundscape through the cry of an animal:

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A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. It filled the whole air, and yet it was impossible to say whence it came. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again. (Conan Doyle, 1996: 73)

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The cry of the hound evolves from melancholy to menace the next time it is heard. In Chapter 9 we are told: It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. (Conan Doyle, 1996: 100–101)

The beast in The Hound of the Baskervilles best encapsulates the uncanny auditory dimension of the novel – a work that crosses from detective literature to horror (and back again), and also a work that explores sound more broadly. This is the most celebrated of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes works, and it demonstrates the place of sound in creating a sense of nervewracking mystery so integral to the detective genre. This is evident in the following episode before the hound has even been heard: I found myself weary and yet wakeful, tossing restlessly from side to side, seeking for the sleep which would not come. Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house. And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow. I sat up in bed and listened intently. The noise could not have been far away and was certainly in the house. For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall. (Conan Doyle, 1996: 66).

The passage is structured by the language of sound, making us hear and thus feel the environment. The monster’s roar, the victim’s screams and the sound-induced ‘jump’ moments on screen, the baying of a hound, the sob of a woman, and even the licking tongue of a vampire in fiction, may now be seen as clichés, but sometimes sound can still surprise us. In Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Trick’ (1980), the protagonist Debbie recalls a face she saw at her window when she was a child: […] the face that had looked in her bedroom window once, when she was ill: a face like a wrinkled monkey’s, whose jaw drooped as if melting, lower and lower; a face that had spoken to her in a voice that sagged as the face did – a voice that must have been a car’s engine struggling to start. (Campbell, 1991: 44)

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Admittedly, it is a narrative sequence dominated by the visual – the morphing face – but the most powerful aspect of the description is the final, auditory aspect and the way it turns something very mundane and familiar, which we can instantly hear in our ‘mind’s ear’, into something surprising and frightening. However, when it comes to classic horror literature, the master of sound has to be Edgar Allan Poe. In his short stories, Poe recurrently presents us with the widest variety of noise. Poe’s writings frequently include descriptions of sound, not least to enhance the suspense and terror of the work. A key example – for obvious reasons – is ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1850), but throughout Poe’s work, the description of sound creates atmosphere or is an important plot device, as in the mishearing of the orangutan in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) which witnesses construe to be a variety of foreign languages. We might also consider ‘The Raven’ (1845) and the haunting, repeated utterance of the bird. Even though the very first sentence of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) may describe ‘a dull, dark, and soundless day’ (Poe, 1979: 111), the tale becomes compelled by sound, whether it is the ‘unusually sharp grating sound’ of the immense door to the vault where Madeline Usher is interred or the ‘imaginary sound’ that increasingly transfixes Roderick Usher. The latter’s final (and longest) speech is an expression of mounting terror and is thoroughly defined by the auditory: ‘Not hear it? – yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long – long – long – many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it – yet I dared not – oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! – I dared not – I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them – many, many days ago – yet I dared not – I dared not speak! And now – to-night – Ethelred – ha! ha! – the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield! –say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!’ here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul – ‘MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!’ (Poe, 1979: 125–126)

Usher’s abject, shrieking terror is consistently defined by hearing, sound and noise, which tap into his guilt and (well-founded) paranoia. To return, briefly, to theatre, the ‘coda’ at the beginning of Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (1974) strives to encapsulate the terror of Poe’s tale with a sequence in which the doctor character walks in silent slow motion towards the still body of Madeleine:

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As he puts the stethoscope on her body a scream suddenly tears out of her mouth. The effect is shocking after the slow walk which normally takes five minutes to cross twenty feet, and if successful should terminate the life of one member of the audience. (Berkoff, 1977: 88)

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The effect, the potentially lethal moment, is the sudden burst of noise after the painfully slow sequence. We can never close our ears and sound has the ability to infiltrate our minds and take us by surprise.

Sound technologies Prior to the invention of recording technology, sound was elusive: musical notation may have developed to ‘capture’ composition, but noise could only be described in terms of language. This is one reason that, for example, the ‘Rebel Yell’ war cry of Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War (1861–65) has become the stuff of legend: because later recordings and first-hand accounts of it vary considerably, it remains potent and evocative, all the more enhanced by its unfathomable essence of mystery. Although the invention of photography made the American Civil War the first photographically documented war, the ‘Rebel Yell’ was too early for sound recording – but only by a few years. Photography and phonography as devices to capture the physical world through visual and aural means were both inventions of the nineteenth century. Although the elusive quality of noise would be diminished by the development of technologies which enabled the capturing of sound, the ability to ‘record’, or the creation of inventions with which to convey sound across inconceivable distances, far from lessening the uncanny aspect of sound, in some ways increased it. Before we explore this and its implications for a particular form of horror culture, we need to place sound technology into context. The first successful experiments to record sound took place in the 1850s. The French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the ‘phonautograph’ in 1857, a device which used a horn to channel sound through a stylus which engraved its vibrations onto a lampblack-encrusted cylinder. The process produced captured sound waves in a visual form and playback was impossible, although recent experiments (undertaken by Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in 2009) have used laser technology to ‘play’ these earliest sound recordings. The key development that permitted recording and playback came in the 1870s with the experiments of Thomas Alva Edison. Edison patented the ‘phonograph’ in 1878, a device which could record sound onto wax cylinders and play it back. The invention was a commercial success with a significant number of consumers interested in purchasing pre-recorded cylinders of music and the spoken word or in making their own recordings. The mass market appeal of recorded sound that Edison discovered in the last decades of the nineteenth century has never diminished, although it evolved in its mechanical and technical form. The medium of recorded sound has developed through a series of

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superseding popularities and technical advancements: the wax cylinder was overtaken by the disc (which through various improvements and materials ranging from shellac to vinyl dominated the twentieth century); magnetic tape, so important in studio recording processes in the mid-twentieth century onwards, took on mass commercial popularity in the form of the compact cassette (1970s onwards); the optical disc technology of the compact disc or ‘CD’ (1980s onwards); and into the digital age of the ‘download’. The ability to record sound was put to use with music at its earliest stage: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s experiments in the 1850s and 1860s included the recording of sung vocal scales and popular song extracts. However, it is the human voice which is at the centre of these experiments. The development of record and playback technology by Edison famously begins with his recitation of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in 1877. Towards the end of the next decade, when Edison has made his phonograph commercially viable, wax cylinders of recorded music become extremely important, but the spoken word still has significance in the form of poetry recitations and speeches. This is why remarkable recordings of Florence Nightingale and Alfred Lord Tennyson were made and still exist. After the demise of wax cylinders, spoken-word recordings remain a genre on 78 rpm discs. This would sometimes include the recording of short scenes from theatrical works. For example, in 1908 the Columbia Graphophone Company released the transformation scene from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring Len Spencer, a vaudeville star best known for musical comedy and a significant catalogue of popular song recordings. However, in this recording of an adaptation of Stevenson’s novel, Spencer takes on a very different role. Accompanied by organ music and church bells, we hear Spencer speaking with a heightened and lilting voice and a refined Scots accent. His delivery is in the tradition of Victorian melodrama, locating the rhythm and sentimentality of each line. When the moment of transformation arrives, Spencer chokes and splutters into Hyde, who speaks with a rough and snarling Irish accent, laughing vulgarly. The recording is highly revealing in its presentation of Jekyll as refined and Hyde as lower class. Although the most demanding test of any actor performing both Jekyll and Hyde is in the visual transformation, this archive recording of a classic moment in uncanny culture is a fascinating example of vocal transformation, a mutation that reveals a great deal about the perception and prejudices of its age. If early dramatic recordings have their basis in stage drama, Tim Crook identifies a 1917 recording as ‘the earliest surviving audiophonic play’ (Crook, 1999a: 34) which uses available technology to create a work which is not a documentation of a stage performance but an example of pioneering audio drama in its own right. This play ‘presents remarkable evidence of an ability to present complex, sophisticated and highly entertaining performance by a large cast with a range of synthesised sound effects that create a clear sound design’ (Crook, 1999a: 33). Crook explains:

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‘In the Trenches’ by Major A. E. Rees is 3 minutes 28 seconds long. It begins with a background of machine-gun and whiz-bang shelling sounds and a well articulated dialogue. There is clear evidence of the company being directed by Major Rees to bring performances to the foreground of the microphone pick-up field in order to focus on the central dialogue. A balance between the foreground dialogue and background sound of larger numbers of soldiers and atmospheric and spot effects has been clearly arranged. The result is that here is a propagandist and popular drama being communicated with clarity on a wax phonograph and predating production techniques which were to become standard five to six years later. (Crook, 1999a: 33)

The recording is a remarkable artefact of pioneering audio drama, a work that demonstrates the power of dramatic sound and leads the way for a century of drama expressly written for audio form. It is also, significantly, a work that is suspenseful, tense and dramatic. Sound could be captured and played back by the invention of the phonograph, and at the same time other major advances in sound technologies were developed. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, a device which built on the technology of the electric telegraph and used a transmitter and receiver system to enable communication through electrical signals sent via wires. This permitted the conveying of the human voice in real time across potentially great distances. Although Bell is synonymous with the invention of the telephone, it is important to stress that the technology emerged out of a number of preceding developments, and the full story of its evolution remains complicated and even contested. It is a similar story with the invention of the technology that is central to this study: radio. If the electrical telegraph and the telephone relied on wires, radio was to be a ‘wireless’ technology. Amongst the names of many inventors and scientists involved in the development of radio as we understand it, it is worth highlighting James Clerk Maxwell whose pioneering work in the theory of electromagnetism and radio waves would be advanced through practical experimentation by the physicist Heinrich Hertz and, subsequently, the inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The first practical radio systems in the 1880s and 1890s were commonly described as ‘wireless telegraphy’ as they conveyed signals, most famously in the form of Morse Code. The technology became commonly known as ‘wireless’ until it was officially replaced by the word ‘radio’ at an international conference in Berlin in 1906 (Coe, 1996: 3): nevertheless, many people continued to use the word ‘wireless’ (especially in Britain) to mean radio until it became quite antiquated. Somewhat ironically, the word wireless returned with invigorated currency with the explosion of mobile phone and internet technology. As we have seen, the commercial appeal of Edison’s phonograph was almost immediately apparent, but what was the ‘use’ of early radio? In 1899, Marconi demonstrated the potential of ‘wireless telegraphy’ when he broadcast the America’s Cup yacht race (Merrill Squier, 2003: 10–11) and

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in December 1901 managed to send a signal that spanned the Atlantic. In its early decades, the greatest benefit that the transmission of radio waves was seen to offer was not so much in conveying sport or news, but in regard to shipping. Gradually, ships adopted radio as a device for communication while at sea. The value of wireless communications to shipping was demonstrated in curiously macabre ways as a result of a notorious murder and an appalling maritime disaster. Because of the wireless telegram, in July 1910 the fugitive Dr Crippen was apprehended when the captain of the ship recognised him and contacted the British authorities: this marked the first use of its kind in wireless communications. Soon after this, a major catastrophe in twentieth-century history led to the stricter adoption of equipment and regulations. In April 1912, the Titanic sank in the north Atlantic with a loss of over 1,500 lives. Significantly, the ship was equipped with radio, and the number of deaths would have been even greater if it had not been for the Titanic’s radio operators and their distress signal. An immediate consequence of the disaster was that all ships were required to be equipped with radio and trained operators. Although the wireless communication of signals had a predominantly practical relevance for shipping, it was the experiments of Nikola Tesla at the end of the nineteenth century that would pave the way for radio to be used as a conduit for the human voice. In the early years of the twentieth century, Reginald Fessenden succeeded in broadcasting the human voice and in independent enterprises Marconi achieved similarly successful results. Once the communication of the human voice had been proved practicable, the future of radio as a cultural medium was assured, even if its potential was not, at first, universally recognised.

Sound technology and the uncanny The great theoretical and technological advances that enabled sound recording and playback, telegraphic and telephonic communication, and wireless broadcasting occurred in the nineteenth century. The mechanical inventions that emerged at this time were continually refined and developed through the subsequent decades. Although these achievements were grounded in physics, mathematics and technical ingenuity, many people must have felt that they were living in an age of miracles. For others, these advances were greeted with anxiety and, one could aptly say, disquiet. Although we may well be inured to the concept of disembodied voices talking to us on our radios, computers, phones and iPods, it is not difficult to remind ourselves how extraordinarily uncanny this is. Although some people considered them to be miracles, not all sonic inventions were greeted favourably. A case in point is Horace L. Short’s curious, if not downright bizarre, experiments which took place at the same time as many of the breakthroughs in sound technology and wireless communication. Short invented what was essentially a colossal megaphone.

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A newspaper report in the Hawera and Normanby Star from 1899 – tellingly titled ‘Trouble Ahead’ – recounted Short’s progress:

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Short has perfected a ‘phonographic voice-trumpet,’ the results of which to the world quiet people at least will be inclined to regard as appalling. This new voice-trumpet will receive a message in a whisper and reproduce it in a stentorian roar which will be audible over an entire suburb. (7 February 1899)

It reveals that Short’s ‘torturous infliction’ has been designed with shipping in mind, but takes a very dim view of its creation. Short gave a practical demonstration of the ‘Howling Terror’ (as some newspapers dubbed the contraption) at Devil’s Dyke near Brighton in July 1900. In a radio documentary about the experiment, Patrick Feaster explains the significance of the experiment by placing it in context: There had certainly been this idea that all kinds of artificial voice production were a little bit suspect. The phonograph was potentially reproducing the voices of the dead and people were not entirely sure of what they thought about that but Short’s device really pushed that to another level in which people fear that they will be tortured by sounds. (Dein, 2005)

It is interesting that Feaster links Short’s invention to, in essence, a form of ligyrophobia emerging in response to technological developments: an unease about how a recording could play back the voice of someone deceased; and how the technological manipulation of sound suddenly threatened an extremely sinister future.3 If there was a popular anxiety about sound technology, an interesting facet to the ‘uncanny’ side of mechanically captured or conveyed sound is how even those involved in its development perceived it. Douglas Kahn points out how, as part of his experiments in sound technology, Thomas Edison experimented with the idea of a ‘spirit catcher’ that could contact the dead: although this was seen as ‘occultist’ by many of his peers, Edison explained it in quasi-scientific terms, arguing that after death infinitesimal ‘life units’ continue to reverberate, and all it would take is the right invention to ‘harvest’ these signals (Kahn, 1999: 212–218). This marks the beginning of an interpretation of sound technology as a vehicle or conduit to the supernatural, the other-worldly and the paranormal. Seán Street describes Reginald Fessenden’s 1906 experiment in broadcasting a Bible reading and choral work: wireless operators outside of Fessenden’s team who heard the resulting sounds ‘believed the source was supernatural; the timing, the content and the apparent technical “miracle” of the whole thing was overwhelming’ (Street, 2012: 24). Another notable instance of the ‘supernatural’ dimension to sound technology includes ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’ (EVP). Friedrich Jürgenson made nature recordings but was convinced he could detect mysterious

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human voices on playback. This inspired his associate Konstantin Raudive to develop a theory and practice of EVP, which included recording empty spaces or the ‘white noise’ of out-of-tune radios and listening back to hear what might be voices from beyond the grave. As Gregory Whitehead puts it, Raudive believed the ‘between-zones’ of radio to be ‘assembly halls for the voices of the dead’ (Whitehead, 1996: 97). Other followers include the pioneer of EVP in Britain, Raymond Cass. Devotees within parapsychology and spiritualism continue to explore EVP, detecting and deciphering enigmatic voices, utterances and sounds in the static. Regardless of whether one thinks that EVP is genuine, it reveals how arresting the notion of disembodiment can be, how uncanny is radio and the technology of sound. EVP reflects the power of radio as, simultaneously, a technological achievement in modern science and yet something that continues to seem uncanny and ‘unexplained’. After all, if we look at radio like Whitehead does, the medium becomes a world of the living dead, inherently uncanny on its own terms: When I turn my radio on, I hear a whole chorus of death rattles: from stone cold, hard fact larynxes frozen in every stage of physical decomposition; from talk show golden throats cut with a scalpel, transected, then taped back together and beamed across the airwaves; from voices that have been severed from the body for so long that none can remember who they belong to, or whether they belong to anybody at all. (Whitehead, 1990: 145)

Radio can be something simultaneously vivacious and deathly. The uncanny nature of radio existed even before the form was invented, at least if we accept R. Murray Schafer’s statement that ‘Radio existed long before it was invented, it existed whenever there were invisible voices in the wind, in thunder, in the dream’ (Quoted in Whitehead, 1984: 3).

Radio stations and content As we can see, the stepwise development of sound technologies by numerous scientists eventually permitted the possibility of ‘radio’ to become a reality. However, as with other milestones in the history of communication media (such as the cinematograph or the internet), radio was not necessarily an invention that had been ‘dreamed of’ and the realisation of its potential involves an inspiration on the part of its pioneering users equal to the theoreticians and experimental scientists who created the technology itself. Initially, the potential of broadcasting the human voice was of interest only to amateurs. One of the early writers about radio, Filson Young, reveals the prevailing attitude towards radio broadcasting: Hardly anybody took it seriously; it was regarded either as a hobby or a science […] and it was difficult for anyone to believe that it would come to have any place in the social life of the country. (Young, 1933: 1)

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It was primarily in the USA that the potential of radio broadcasting beyond the ‘hobbyist’ was recognised. In 1916, the American Marconi Company employee David Sarnoff announced that he wanted to make the wireless receiver a ‘household utility’ as ubiquitous as the piano or the phonograph (Maltin, 2000: 2). Around the same time, Frank Conrad, an amateur enthusiast, began to broadcast music and the spoken word from a self-made station in Pennsylvania. He was employed by the Westinghouse Electric Company, which noticed the success of Conrad’s labour-of-love enterprise and formally established KDKA, arguably (even contentiously) the world’s first licensed radio station, in 1920. The 1920s was a boom decade for radio. Radio stations sprung up throughout the USA and across the world. In the United Kingdom, the British Broadcasting Company started broadcasting in November 1922 and in 1926 it evolved into the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). If the amateur world of radio gradually became formalised and institutionalised, what was the content? In the earliest days of radio broadcasting, stations were ‘on air’ only for a few hours a day. Gradually, the broadcasters responded to audience demand and this determined the hours and the content. The broadcasting of music was important from an early time and spoken-word content was used for news and sports results (initially newspapers being read out aloud). As Hand and Traynor write: The impact of radio was felt through a cultural shift. Isolated communities could at last be ‘in the loop’; news of current affairs and other events could be spread instantaneously; thousands of miles and disparate voices could be connected in an instant. The immediacy of radio broadcasting meant, perhaps, that everything had the potential to be ‘dramatic’ – not just the obviously dramatic genres. (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 9)

The immediacy of ‘breaking news’, political and sports broadcasting could place the listener ‘in the action’ like a witness at the event or a spectator in the stadium. In the USA, some events have become the stuff of legend thanks, in large part, to their mediation via radio: Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 Transatlantic flight; Joe Louis and Max Schmeling’s heavyweight boxing bouts in 1936 and 1938; and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Fireside Chats’ (1933 onwards). Another key event was Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness account of the Hindenburg airship disaster in May 1937: Morrison is overcome with emotion (‘Oh, the humanity!’) but keeps talking to the listeners and it remains an acute demonstration of the compelling power and immediacy of radio broadcasting. Broadcast radio could spread information and veracity with a unique and unprecedented rapidity. Ian Rodger emphasises how the creation of public radio in the 1920s resulted in broadly the same type of output across the world inasmuch as it shared the function of radio to ‘broadcast news and information’ (Rodger, 1982: 2). It could also be conducive for pleasure, escape and even fantasy. However, what nations chose to broadcast around

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the core function of news and information varied according to national taste. Hence, Italy broadcast opera, Austria broadcast Strauss and Mozart, and in the USA, the Country and Western music on the Grand Ole Opry (1925 to the present) has proved one of the longest-running series in the history of radio. Aside from music, the New York-based WGY opted to broadcast radio drama very early, and the similar metropolitan ‘cultural bias’ (Rodger: 1982, 2) of the London-based BBC would seek to promote radio drama alongside the more populist British tradition of music hall songs. From its start in the 1920s, radio was astonishingly innovative in developing new genres of entertainment. As we have seen, the medium was very adept at adapting pre-existing cultural forms: the theatrical forms of vaudeville (in the USA), music hall (in the UK) and variety shows had the potential to work effectively on radio. However, this was not without contention. Leonard Maltin points out the challenges of repetition: a variety artiste may have been ‘accustomed to providing the same entertainment to a different audience every day’ (Maltin: 2000, 12), but a regular slot on radio would compel an expansion of their repertoire. Moreover, many theatres felt that radio threatened their livelihood and, for this reason, live broadcasts of performances in British theatres were banned between 1923 and 1925 and many artists had contracts that prohibited them from performing on radio (see Briggs, 1965: 77). As well as adapting pre-existing genres to its own ends, radio also invented many formats and types of programme: quiz shows, soap operas (the very phrase emerging from soap companies’ sponsorship of serialised family radio drama), situation comedies (‘sitcoms’), crime drama and serialised drama.

Radio drama Just as it is challenging to locate the precise point of origin of broadcasting and even radio itself, it is the same with radio drama. As Hand and Traynor stress: In finding material to satisfy the avid and ever-growing audience for radio, stations had to harvest and develop whatever they could and whatever might work. In this respect, it is a compelling example of technology determining culture: a new medium is developed and material is needed to supply it. (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 14)

Radio historians such as Leonard Maltin privilege the importance of book readings, especially the reading of children’s stories around a typical bedtime slot, which Maltin contends is the first radio ‘institution’ (Maltin, 2000: 13). The reading of stories on radio and the affiliated ‘audio book’ culture has continued to the present day as a significant example of spoken-word audio culture. When it comes to radio drama, as opposed to audio readings, the earliest examples are essentially broadcasts of stage productions. In Britain, Tim

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Crook cites a broadcasting experiment on 17 October 1922 when an extract from Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was put on the air (Crook, 1999a: 4). The BBC broadcast Shakespeare extracts on 16 February 1923, followed by a full-length radio version of Twelfth Night on 28 May 1923. The BBC would gradually broaden out from stage sources and develop the art of adaptation by dramatising fiction such as its radio version of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim in February 1927. The development of radio drama in Britain is predated by broadcasts from the USA. Indeed, John Schneider mentions the live broadcast of a stage play from a Californian college as early as 1914 (cited in Crook, 1999a: 4–5). Some broadcasting historians cite Eugene Walter’s The Wolf, broadcast on WGY (Schenectady, New York) in August 1922, as ‘the first “on-air” drama’ (Blue, 2002: 1). This melodrama, set in a Canadian forest, was a stage play which was adapted for radio broadcast and was so successful that it led to over forty subsequent play broadcasts on the station. At a certain point in the play, a character emits a scream which allegedly caused a sensation on broadcast. Howard Blue reveals that a policeman, hearing the scream through an open window, was so convinced by its realism that he came bursting into the house to stop the ‘assault.’ (Blue, 2002: 1–2)

This is a demonstration of radio’s uncanny power. The scream of a character in peril was a mainstay of stage melodrama and safely contained within the proscenium stage of the theatre. However, in August 1922 the radio unleashed this scream of terror not only into the domestic environment but, according to this anecdote, into the street outside. Radio’s ability to infiltrate the living space of the listener and even to catch the audience unawares will continue to be a potential of the form, most famously in The Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ (30 October 1938). Additionally, it is interesting that such a heightened melodrama as The Wolf was the choice for this landmark broadcast. A similar decision was made in Australia: according to Tim Crook, the first radio play broadcast in Australia was ‘a melodramatic production of the myth of Sweeney Todd, The Barbarous Barber, on the Melbourne station 3LO, which went out on 21 March 1925’ (Crook, 1999a: 6). A contested line of enquiry for broadcasting historians is the first play written expressly for radio. Some suggest the short American pedagogical play ‘A Rural Line on Education’ broadcast on KDKA in 1921, which featured two ‘farmers’ talking on the telephone and interrupted by an ‘operator’ character (Jaker, 2010). It may be a slight work, but is significant for its attempt to create a ‘radio fiction’. Moreover, it is interesting that it centrally uses the telephone: one audio medium (radio) uses another (the telephone) within it. Less contentious is the first specific radio play in Britain: A Comedy of Danger written by Richard Hughes and broadcast by the BBC on 15 January 1924.

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Richard Hughes’s A Comedy of Danger Richard Hughes was a young writer (only twenty-three years old) but was already experienced in theatre writing when he was commissioned by the BBC to write a ‘Listening-Play’. He had written the stage play The Sisters’ Tragedy while still an Oxford undergraduate: in 1921, John Masefield read the play and was so enthusiastic he staged a private performance of it in January 1922. Masefield then sent the play to Sybil Thorndike (without Hughes’s knowledge) who was at that time a central player in the GrandGuignol ‘horror theatre’ experiment at the Little Theatre in London. The short play concerns the euthanasia of the mentally retarded brother of the sisters of the title. For all its brevity, it is a profoundly serious and ambitious play, almost an early example of social realism in its depiction of a dysfunctional Welsh family. Hughes would always seem unhappy with the placing of the work in the repertoire of the populist and sensationalistic Grand-Guignol and he subsequently warned in the published version of the play that The Sisters’ Tragedy ‘should not be acted in the Grand-Guignol manner; and unless it is well acted it will be a complete failure’ (Hughes, 1928: 3). In contrast, while The Sisters’ Tragedy may have been ‘forced into’ the Grand-Guignol repertoire, with the BBC commission Hughes had more freedom inasmuch as he was to write something all-new: the first play written specifically for broadcast on British airwaves. A Comedy of Danger was produced by Nigel Playfair, another figure from the theatre drawn to the BBC and the new medium of radio. The play consciously exploits the potential of the radio form. It is set in a Welsh coal mine, and although there is no recording the extant script reveals how Hughes is thinking in radio terms. He explains that sound effects are needed: ‘an explosion, the rush of water, footsteps, and the sound of a pick. There must be an echo, to give the effect of the tunnel.’ Tim Crook cites the Daily Mail coverage of the play (16 January 1924) which gives a fascinating insight into the performance practice of the actors (‘Miss Joyce Kennedy, Mr. Kenneth Kent, and Mr H. R. Hignett’) and the production team: In a brightly lit room a young woman in evening dress and two men holding sheets of paper in their hands declaimed to a microphone their horror at being imprisoned in the mine. Outside the room a young man sat crosslegged on the floor, with telephone receivers on his ears, and as he heard through the receivers the progress of the piece he signalled to two assistants on a lower landing to make noises to represent the action of the play. In a passage stood five men singing through a partly opened door leading to the broadcasting room. They were a group of ‘miners’ singing in another passage of the mine. (Crook, 1999a: 4).

The opening exchanges of dialogue reveal how Hughes is determined to think of the full potential of the radio drama form, even if it was only just beginning to come into existence:

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mary: [Sharply] Hello! What’s happened? jack: The lights have gone out! mary: Where are you? jack: Here. [Pause. Steps stumbling.] mary: Where? I can’t find you. jack: Here. I’m holding my hand out. mary: I can’t find it. jack: Why, here! [Pause.] mary: [Startled] Oh! What’s that? jack: It’s all right: it’s only me. mary: You did frighten me, touching me suddenly like that in the dark. I’d no idea you were so close.

These lines immediately make it clear to the listener that there has been a power cut. The visual dimension – the most pre-eminently important aspect in the theatre and the cinema – is an irrelevancy on the radio. Hughes understood that radio permitted him to set a complete play in total darkness. Having established this, Hughes develops a physical sense of the space by making the characters fumble in the dark, plausibly guiding each other as they do so. It also builds up suspense: Mary is frightened and then alarmed by the sudden touch of her companion. Hughes continues to build the anxiety of the characters, emphasising the setting and increasingly claustrophobic experience: mary: Oh, Jack, I hate the dark! jack: Cheer up, darling! It’ll be all right in a minute or two. mary: It’s so frightfully dark down here. jack: No wonder! There must be nearly a thousand feet between us and the daylight. It’s not surprising it’s a bit dusky! mary: I didn’t know there could be such utter blackness as this, ever. It’s so dark, it’s as if there never was such a thing as light anywhere. Oh, Jack, it’s like being blind!

Interestingly, Mary’s mood shifts and she locates something exciting – even titillating – in the emergency and demands role-play: mary: Let’s pretend it’s serious. jack: What do you mean? mary: Let’s pretend it’s a real disaster, and we’re cooped up here for ever and will never be able to get out. jack: Don’t joke about it. mary: Why not? There’s no real danger, is there? Let’s get all the thrills we can. […] I love thrills! – Let’s pretend the roof has fallen in, and they can’t get at us. jack: [uncomfortably] Very well; but what a baby you are! [In mock solemnity:] Here we are, my dear, buried alive! […] mary: I’m so frightened! jack: What at? mary: About the roof having fallen in.

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jack: But it hasn’t; it’s only pretence. mary: Yes, but when I pretend, it seems so real. jack: Then don’t pretend. mary: But I want to pretend! I want to be frightened! Only hold my hand tight, won’t you? – Go on.

As well as the ironic comedy of the scene, there is a surprising eroticism (a somewhat Grand-Guignol trait of mixing eroticism with the suspenseful and potentially horrific) to Mary’s attitude here, not least as the third principal character, Mr Bax, is present. Bax is a foil to the young lovers, undercutting their sense of excitement with his mordant attitude: ‘Call this a coal-mine! A damned, dark rabbit-hole I call it, a rotten rat-hole, a dratted, wet smelly drain-pipe’. This emphasises the setting, de-glamourising the locale: it is oppressive and unsanitary. Despite Mr Bax, Mary continues to be partly scared, partly delighted: ‘Oh, this is fun! I wouldn’t have missed this for anything. Won’t I make daddie’s flesh creep!’ Immediately after this is an explosion: mary: Oh, Jack! Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack! jack: Quiet, you little fool! Let go! you’re throttling me! Let go of me! mary: Oooooh! [Another explosion nearer, followed by the hiss of water.] mary: Oh, the dust! It’s choking me! I can’t breathe! Oh! jack: Stop screaming, you! How can you expect to be able to breathe if you’re screaming all the breath out of your body? Quiet!

Hughes enjoys exploiting the sound effects of explosions and hissing water and also ratchets up the tension with Jack’s impatience. Hughes also places emphasis on the visceral, the breath and the body. When death eventually seems inevitable, Hughes reinforces the claustrophobic darkness by having Mary declare: ‘Oh, the dark! I do hate the dark! I think I could go more easily if I could see light just once before it happened.’ A long section follows with the characters speculating on the desire to live and then the nature and enigma of death. Bax angrily states: What do you know of death? I tell you death isn’t heaven and it isn’t hell. Death’s dying, you young dolts. Death’s being nothing – not even a dratted ghost clanking its chains on the staircase.

Hughes resists clichés of death and horror and develops a sense of total negation. The twist at the end of the play is that although Bax comes across as arrogant and stubborn, even valuing his life greater than Mary and Jack’s (‘it’s as hard for me to die as you – or worse, by Gad! A thousand times worse!’), in the end he refuses to be rescued before the young lovers and sacrifices himself in the process. Hughes’s play is short (a little over 3,000 words), but it is highly effective in the way it straddles comedy, feasible horror and melodrama, made all the more impressive by its inaugural significance. Hughes is extremely

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disciplined in maintaining a clear sense of location with stark but successfully realised characters. Moreover, the extreme setting and the fact that one character does not survive ‘demonstrates how suspense is not merely a generic choice in radio drama, but it was there from the form’s inauguration’ (Hand, 2006a: 9). Hughes would write other plays for radio, such as ‘The Man with the Green Face’ (20 February 1928), ‘Congo Night’ (23 March 1925) and the adaptation of his 1938 ship in a hurricane novel In Hazard, which was aired on 4 November 1940, but it is no surprise that none of these radio works would be as significant as A Comedy of Danger. However, although A Comedy of Danger is a landmark, it is not without precedent. In this regard, Alan Beck pays particular attention to Five Birds in a Cage, a 1915 stage play by Gertrude Jennings which was broadcast as a radio play on 29 November 1923. The play is a satirical comedy about five characters from a variety of social classes trapped in an elevator in the London Underground. The play is evidently in the tradition of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902) inasmuch as it is a comic play about how the traditional hierarchy of class and authority is challenged in a desperate situation. The situation of Five Birds in a Cage made it an exciting choice for radio adaptation. As Beck writes: The script offers many opportunities in aural scenery, or wireless ‘mise en scène’, as I term it. There is the lift ambience, the surround-sound of effects and echoing in the lift shaft, and there is perspective as rescuers shout ‘off’. Characters should not inhabit a neutral acoustic but rather they are placed in a challenging sound environment. (Beck, 2001)

The fact that the play opens in a blackout makes it ideal for radio (perhaps even better than on stage). At the beginning of the play one of the characters exclaims: ‘Oh, the lights have gone out! We’ve stopped. Why have we stopped?’ (Beck, 2001). As Beck points out, the similarity to the opening lines of A Comedy of Danger (‘Hello! What’s happened?’ – ‘The lights have gone out!’) is unmistakable. Hughes’s play was broadcast only a few weeks after Five Birds in a Cage and, as Beck argues, not only would the allusion be recognised by many listeners but ‘its structure, setting, theme and production were the template (for Hughes)’ (Beck, 2001).

Radio drama before Val Gielgud Alan Beck’s ‘The Invisible Play’ B.B.C. Radio Drama 1922–1928 (2001) succeeds in redressing our understanding of the history of the foundation of British broadcasting by documenting the earliest phase of radio drama. Part of the value of this scholarship is that it permits an exploration of radio drama broadcasting before the era of Val Gielgud, a dominant figure in the history of British radio drama. Heading production of radio drama for the BBC from 1929 (when he was in his late twenties) until 1963, his vision shaped decades of audio drama. He has been held up for criticism

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with, for example, Tim Crook likening him to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover for exercising a ‘personal hegemony’ (Crook, 1999a: 153), partly at the expense of the reputation of his predecessor R. E. Jeffrey. The result of Gielgud’s dominance has had a major impact when it comes to the recounting of radio drama history. Gielgud states in his autobiography: ‘I saw the broadcasting of plays grow from an indifferent joke to professional maturity’ (Gielgud, 1957: 8). This statement was taken as incontrovertible for many years until scholars like Alan Beck undertook extensive research into the ‘indifferent joke’. Beck confronts one of the problems that face anyone researching radio drama (especially of the earliest days): the paucity of surviving material. Early radio drama was broadcast live and not recorded, and most scripts are not extant. By using the Radio Times, newspaper listings, articles and autobiographical documents, Beck pieces together the fragments of 1920s radio drama. Beck discovers: The total of broadcast plays (including some sketches) for 1923–1928 is some 1,300, of which only about fifty-five were originations (or plays written originally for radio). (Beck, 2001)

It is clear that in the earliest days of radio, original radio drama is vastly outweighed by adaptations (especially from the stage and, gradually, literary dramatisation) but we must not let this overshadow the fact that, whatever the source, British radio did host a vast amount of dramatic performances. A major challenge facing the BBC when it came to drama was the question of audience and its disparate nature. In this regard, Ian Rodger indicates one of the most important differences between early radio listeners and audiences for other cultural forms (most obviously cinema, theatre and fiction): ‘writers wrestled with the problems of writing for this random audience’ (Rodger, 1982: 11). While most audiences choose the play, the film or the book they want to consume, radio audiences might well have tuned in to listen to whatever happens to be on. They thus needed to be ‘hooked’ or ‘pleased’, ideally not offended or alienated. Certainly, as Asa Briggs writes, ‘By the mid-1930s listeners to BBC programmes constituted a representative cross-section of the British public’ (Briggs, 1965: 253). Already in the 1920s, the BBC and its staff needed to consider the potential breadth of audience. Convincingly, Beck observes that ‘research into both plays and practitioners leads me to emphasise the links between wireless drama and popular performance’ (Beck, 2001). In this respect, it becomes clear that much of the drama output reflects what was popular on stage at the time. In striving to fill the schedules of this new medium, radio looked at what ‘worked’ on the stage and drew on this talent and repertoire. We may not have recordings or many scripts, but if we trawl through Beck’s exhaustive lists of early British radio drama we can see how frequently thrillers, mysteries and the uncanny would have entertained the audience in the 1920s. This is partly because of their conduciveness, as Seán Street states. ‘Mystery and expectation [are] two areas that radio would quickly learn to use to major effect’ (Street, 2012: 38). The recurrence of these linked genres

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is evident in the titles of the plays (in addition, we are sometimes fortunate enough to have short descriptions of them). Ernest Hope’s ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ (1 June 1926) and Hilda Chamberlain’s ‘Ghostly Fingers’ (23 August 1926) are both ‘Mystery Plays’ written ‘specially for broadcasting’. Some plays are historical in setting, such as F. W. Bradley’s ‘The Executioner’ (7 October 1925), which is set in the fourteenth century. J. A. W. Shepherd’s ‘The Test’ (24 January 1928) is about the punishment meted out to a Spanish conquistador who violates a sacred altar. This formed a double-bill with ‘WitchWife’ by Michael Hogan and Mabel Constanduros, another historical play, this time set in seventeenth-century Devon. The following month, another double-bill presented ‘The Ghost of Glastonbury Tunnel’ (28 February 1928) by Geoffrey Bevan, a play set in an express train carriage, and Sea Silence: A Play of Terror on the High Seas by Edwin Lewis, a two-hander play set on-board a ship in the midst of a pitch-black night. Another mystery play set at sea is H. E. W. Gay’s one-act play ‘The Ghost Ship’ (27 September 1927), specially written for broadcasting. E. F. Parr’s ‘Escape’ (16 January 1925) is set in a cottage on Dartmoor in winter; and Gerald H. Grace’s Fogbound (28 August 1928) which is also set in a Dartmoor cottage and was presumably a thriller (whether dramatic or comic), given its setting and the fact that its dramatis personae comprise two sisters, an ‘Intruder’ and a police inspector. John Drinkwater’s ‘The Storm’ (11 January 1928) features three women and two male strangers: A mountain cottage on a midwinter night. Outside a snowstorm rages. Alice is looking through the window, while Joan, her younger sister, and Sarah, an old neighbour woman, are sitting over the fire. Alice’s husband has failed to return home at his usual hour, and owing to the croakings of old Sarah, the foreboding of some terrible happening is fretting the younger woman. The story gives her hopes and fears. (Quoted in Beck, 2001)

In addition to these mysteries and thrillers, the same genre can stretch into comedy as well: L. du Garde Peach’s ‘The Séance’ (8 May 1928) is a twohander ‘comedy’ and William Donaldson Smith’s ‘The Fatal Mistake’ (2 February 1928) is a ‘comedy-drama’ which the listings describe as: To be awakened at midnight and discover that strangers have entered your house is fortunately a rare occurrence. In the play, however, Mr. Anderson finds that nocturnal visitations, although rare, can provide sufficient thrill and excitement in twenty minutes to satisfy the average person for a lifetime. (Quoted in Beck, 2001)

If we direct our attention to the British theatre, the 1920s saw the rise of the ‘thriller’ genre on the popular stage. This is most evident in the phenomenal success of Gerald du Maurier’s stage adaptation of H. C. McNeile’s novel Bull-Dog Drummond (1920). Du Maurier’s 1921 dramatisation was emblematic of the 1920s trend for the crime and thriller genre on the British stage. Affiliated to this, we might again consider the London Grand-Guignol

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(1920–22) and its thrilling mix of horror and mystery plays. It is clear that these modes of popular performance had a direct influence on the newfangled form of drama on the British airwaves. Some of the radio plays mentioned above correlate very closely with examples from the GrandGuignol repertoire. For example, Gladys Unger’s suspenseful ‘intruder’ comedy A Man in Mary’s Room (1920), Mille and C. de Vylars’ spiritualist terror play The Medium (1920) and Victor MacClure’s ship-bound horror play Latitude 15°S (1921) are all one-act plays that sound like forerunners to some of the later radio plays already mentioned. We have already seen the link between Richard Hughes and the GrandGuignol. BBC radio would also present other London Grand-Guignol writers, such as the theatre’s most prolific British writer H. F. Maltby with a radio adaptation of his stage play ‘The Laughter of Fools’ (27 February 1928). The theatre critic St. John Ervine wrote ‘Progress’ (1922) for the GrandGuignol, and his short play ‘She Was No Lady’ was adapted for radio and broadcast on 21 June 1928. A popular comedy at London’s Grand-Guignol, Reginald Arkell and Russell Thorndike’s ‘The Tragedy of Mr Punch’ (1920), which saw well over one hundred performances in the theatre, was adapted for radio broadcast on 19 February 1924. Similarly, Reginald Arkell’s solowritten work ‘Columbine’ – a verse ‘Fantasy of Summertime’ which enjoyed over sixty performances at London’s Grand-Guignol in 1922 – was adapted for radio and broadcast in June 1928 and revived in October that same year. Interestingly, as Beck reveals, Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike (the celebrated wife of Casson and sister of Russell Thorndike) were central in enabling the broadcasts of ‘The Tragedy of Mr Punch’ and ‘Columbine’. Casson and Sybil Thorndike were the most prominent figures in London’s Grand-Guignol and were invaluable to the theatre producer Jose Levy’s enterprise. As Beck writes, Casson and Thorndike fulfilled a role that was ‘crucial in sustaining play broadcasting from the London Station in 1924 and 1925, during the B.B.C. Boycott’ (Beck 2001). It is evident that, to a degree, it was industrial action that compelled a significant moment of crossover between theatre and radio, in this instance drawing upon the veterans of the Grand-Guignol horror theatre in London (which, we may recall, closed in 1922). Russell Thorndike may well have co-written ‘The Tragedy of Mr Punch’ and would go on to write the novel Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh (1915) and its numerous sequels, but in the 1920s he was more renowned as an actor, not least at the Grand-Guignol. He would occasionally appear as a radio actor including in a leading role in Cecil Lewis’s history play Montezuma (28–29 December 1928). Another actor associated with the Grand-Guignol is James Whale (soon to emigrate to the USA to direct Frankenstein (1931) and other horror classics), who featured in the May 1928 attempt to revive the Grand-Guignol form at the Little Theatre, playing the re-animated head of a guillotine victim in Virginia and Frank Vernon’s After Death (an adaptation of René Berton’s L’homme qui a tué

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la mort (1928)). In the same month as this stage production, Whale is on radio playing Demetrius in Maurice Baring’s adaption of Euripides’ Electra. However, the use of stage actors on radio was not without problems due to the difference between the media and the novelty of radio drama as a form. Ian Rodger spells out the difficulties that, until around 1930, some actors had with radio drama: It is likely that they feared that if they were heard speaking in a more natural form, their performances would not commend themselves to theatre producers, who generally believed that it would be better to record performances on the stage and broadcast. It was also thought that radio was not worth the trouble, requiring, it seemed, a naturalistic style which was anathema to the stage at that time. (Rodger, 1982: 12–13)

This reveals how the skills of a stage actor at the time were more heightened (including post-melodramatic) and that the radio had compelled a more natural, intimate style. A particularly interesting case regarding a veteran writer from London’s Grand-Guignol is Reginald Berkeley. Berkeley served as a soldier and was decorated in the First World War. He would also become a Member of Parliament. His play Eight O’Clock (1920) was one of the most celebrated at the Grand-Guignol, enjoying well over 100 performances. It was a particularly intense drama, featuring Russell Thorndike as a condemned man in his prison cell in the last moments before his execution. The play captures the claustrophobic suspense befitting a horror play but also retains a powerful social message (when the central character reveals his life of hardship and impoverishment, his grim end seems tragically and horribly inevitable). The playwright would go on to write a number of other successful works and eventually moved to Hollywood where he developed a number of screenplays (including Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933), based on Noël Coward’s 1931 stage play, and Carolina (Henry King, 1934) based on the play The House of Connelly by Paul Green). After the Grand-Guignol and before Hollywood, Berkeley’s work featured on radio. His play ‘The Dweller in the Darkness: a play of the unknown in one act’ was broadcast in April 1925. The play centres on a séance in which the evil spirit of a dead criminal punishes the cynical disbelievers. The play led to a degree of controversy as the BBC was anxious about what might be perceived as spiritualist propaganda. Alan Beck quotes Berkeley on his enthusiasm to create an effective, even innovative, soundscape, a ‘“background” of weird rappings and noises’ to enhance the uncanny drama. Berkeley also outlines the resulting furore: To my utter astonishment I found the B.B.C. aghast. The ManagingDirector, the Director of Education, the director of Publicity had all bombarded the Dramatic Department with their opinions. Something had to be done at once […] The last line of the play was wrong. It must be changed. It must be made innocuous. They adjured me to consent […] I consented. But I warned the Dramatic Producer he was pickling a rod for his own back. (Quoted in Beck, 2001)

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Beck, quite convincingly, sees this incident as being something of a landmark, being the first instance of censorship to confront R. E. Jeffrey. As Beck argues, ‘The Dweller in the Darkness’ was probably prominent in Jeffrey’s mind when he wrote an article for the Radio Times in July 1925 about the regulation of plays: As to the actual nature of the plays, they will not follow the trend of the present stage play, with its predominating sex, or, rather, sexual, interest. They will set a new standard, rather than adopt an existing one. It must be remembered that radio plays are presented at the family fireside. Their ethics, must be unquestionable. (Quoted in Beck, 2001)

London’s Grand-Guignol had an extremely prickly relationship with theatre censorship in the form of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Indeed, it can be argued that it was censorship that played a key role in the demise of the form in Britain. It is interesting that with Berkeley’s play for radio, a similar furore is stirred up: the sensationalism of the Grand-Guignol translates onto the airwaves. Despite Val Gielgud’s dismissal of early radio drama as a ‘joke’, Alan Beck’s archival research reveals plays that were evidently experimental and adventurously so. For example, the BBC experimented with playful endeavours such as ‘What Would You Do’? (10 May 1926), a show in which four short plays were presented, each with an ambiguous ending: the best solutions sent in by listeners would win ‘prizes to the value of £100’ (Beck, 2001). Beck also documents more serious works such as George Crayton’s X (29 October 1928), a full-length science fiction radio play (performed exactly ten years before Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’) that, from its description in the listings, seems to use the concept and form of radio itself in an innovative way: ‘X’ was the name given by three wireless enthusiasts in England to an unknown station that seemed to broadcast the same programme every night – until the one occasion when it was interrupted by a desperate cry for help. Behind the enigma of the mystery station lies a tale of machinery run riot; of men imprisoned in a fortress of steel; of a City ruled by semihuman machines, crushing the men who made them in their metallic grasp. No stranger, more thrilling story was ever written by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. And underlying it all is the hint of that unknown quantity – that dangerous, incalculable ‘X’ – that lurks in the machinery made by men. (Quoted in Beck, 2001)

Similarly experimental are plays like Valerie Hardwood’s ‘Shadows’ (15 December 1927; revived 13 February 1928) and Hermann Kesser’s ‘Nurse Henrietta’ (31 May 1928) which presented innovative and highly intimate approaches to script, placing their listeners inside the heads of the protagonists.4 Other plays would also seem to use the intensely personal nature of radio, such as Cecil Lewis’s ‘The Night Fighters’ (26 March 1928)

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and Mannin Crane’s ‘The Howling Silence’ (10 November 1928) both of which attempt to capture and recreate personal experiences of the First World War. The aforementioned Cecil Lewis had already written the radio play ‘Pursuit’ (6–7 January 1928), which Beck singles out for particular praise. Beck convincingly argues that, for its time, the opening use of six telephone monologues is ‘unparallelled’ (Beck, 2001). Beck also praises the play’s daring and radical use of location, which includes a car chase (and car crash) as well as a pursuit across sea and air, complete with an airplane’s emergency landing onto the ocean. Particularly interesting in relation to the topic of this book, Beck uncovers two early radio adaptations that would continue to be favourites for horror radio adaptation: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Markheim’ (24 May 1928) and W. W. Jacobs’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (17 July 1928). Stevenson’s supernatural short story would occasionally be adapted again for British and American horror audio: examples include the BBC’s The Man in Black (31 January 1949) and, in the USA, The Weird Circle (20 May 1945) and a podcast dramatisation by Chatterbox Audio Theater (2011). W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 masterpiece of the uncanny would remain a firm favourite for audio adaptation. As a short story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is an ideal source text for radio adaptation: the petty bourgeois, somewhat claustrophobic, setting of the White family and ‘the dirty, shrivelled little paw’ (Jacobs, 2004: 392) dismembered from a monkey that twitches when a wish is made are themselves ideal material for a short radio play, but the dénouement of the story – with its terrors that rely entirely upon the unseen and imagined – is perfect for audio. Herbert, the son of Mr and Mrs White, is killed in a factory accident and his mother uses the enchanted paw to summon her dead child back from the grave. Mr White realises that his wife’s ‘I wish my son alive again’ will bring no good: his body was too hideously injured for her to see at the time and it has now been in the grave for ten days. When something pounds on the front door, Mrs White struggles to reach the bolt and her husband takes desperate action:   ‘The bolt,’ she cried, loudly. ‘Come down. I can’t reach it.’   But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.   The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road. (Jacobs, 2004: 396)

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As with some of the examples of supernatural literature earlier, we can see how these final paragraphs exploit the power of sound: the voice of the mother; the almost explosion-like pounding on the door; the scraping chair; the creaking bolt; the frantically breathed wish; the echoes; the wintery wind; the miserable cry of the mother; the silence of the road. All these are perfect source-material for a terrifying finale to a radio play. Moreover, the way Jacobs has constructed his story creates enormous tension through what is not seen: by hiding the vision of the re-animated corpse, he exploits our imagination as to what stands behind the door. By the same token, this is ideal for the ‘non-visual’ world of radio. This first radio adaptation of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ was directly based on the 1910 stage dramatisation written by the dramatist Louis N. Parker. A film version of Parker’s play was directed by Sydney Northcote in 1915; H. Manning Haynes directed it in 1923 (with a writer credit additionally going to Lydia Hayward), starring Moore Marriott and Marie Ault (who, incidentally, would go on to have a lead role in the aforementioned radio play ‘Witch-Wife’); it was directed by Wesley Ruggles and Ernest B. Schoedsack in 1933 with Graham John credited as screenwriter; and in 1939 it was an early example of British television drama produced by Moultrie Kelsall. Appointment with Fear would revive the radio script on 28 May 1946. ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ was performed as a Thirty-Minute Theatre radio play on 16 December 1958, starring Carleton Hobbs and Gladys Young. These are just examples of versions based on Parker’s adaptation: Jacobs’s story has an extraordinary lifespan, in adaptations both direct and allusive. To give a few other noteworthy examples, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series Nightfall would feature ‘The Monkeys Paw’ on 11 July 1980; and, later in the decade, the BBC presented Patrick Galvin’s adaptation on Fear on Four (17 January 1988) which it would revive as a Halloween ‘special’ (i.e. not as part of Fear on Four) on 31 October 1993; most recently, Australian-based The Drama Pod dramatised the story as part of its 2011 Halloween Stories. Of the many ‘straight’ audio readings of the story, the BBC’s Fireside Tales (2004), featuring Christopher Lee, is worth mentioning. As a final example of pioneering 1920s radio drama, on 16 January 1926, the BBC aired Ronald Knox’s ‘Broadcasting the Barricades’. This short play (presented as a 12-minute ‘report’) presented, in seeming verisimilitude, the account of an insurrection in central London. The programme commenced with a lecture on eighteenth-century literature which was suddenly interrupted by what we now could call ‘breaking news’. As Tim Crook explains: Father Knox’s script told the story of a mob of unemployed people assembling in Trafalgar Square and being incited to sack the National Gallery. Having sacked the National Gallery, it surged down Whitehall, attacked government offices, destroyed wildfowl in St James’s Park with empty bottles and then blew up the Houses of Parliament using trench mortars. As Big Ben had fallen to the ground, listeners were informed that in future the BBC time signals would be sent out from Edinburgh. The burlesque became

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a representation of reality because the talk was deliberately infected with human fallibility. A report that Mr Wutherspoon, the Minister of Transport, had been captured and hanged from a lamp-post was later corrected. He had in fact been hanged from a tramway post. (Crook, 1999a: 124)

Although the programme is characterised by an obvious sense of ironic humour and satire, its style – including deliberate errors and confusion – was convincing enough to make many confused and concerned listeners contact the authorities, newspapers and the BBC itself to find out what was happening (Crook, 1999a, 124). Although Knox’s experimental broadcast (which does not exist as a recording) provides us with an amusing anecdote from the days of early radio, its significance is extremely important. Perhaps most obviously, the fact that it happened twelve years before Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ is the most remarkable aspect. However, it is also an early demonstration of the power of radio. The broadcast entered the homes of thousands of listeners and created a startling and, for some, convincing virtual world in which social order had collapsed. Radio’s ability to invade the domestic realm instantaneously was, in its day, an extraordinary power, a power that hinges on what Allen S. Weiss describes as ‘the paradox of radio: a universally public transmission is heard in the most private of circumstances’ (Weiss, 1995: 6). This paradox can arguably be interpreted in relation to another feature that radio can achieve particularly well: the conflation of ‘reality’ and fiction. Throughout its history radio has created some of the finest examples of docudrama. For example, The Man from Belsen (12 April 1946) was written and produced by Leonard Cottrell and adapted the experiences of the Jersey schoolteacher Harold Le Druillenec, the only British survivor of the Belsen concentration camp. In the Radio Times (5 April 1946), Cottrell explains: The Man from Belsen reconstructs his experiences in dramatic form. I would like to assure listeners that the story they will hear is a faithful record. Nothing has been added. All that I have done is to reconstruct the incidents as Mr. Le Druillenec described them to me.

The work remains a powerful example of radio, a fast-moving play with a compelling sense of soundscape which steps back and forth between narrated testimony and dramatic action, as this extract demonstrates: [Music up and out behind:] le druillenec: Sixth day. [Fade up large crowd noise] german guard: Zu fuenfen antreten! Schnell, schnell!  [Murmuring and shuffling of men. Cross-fade to shuffling march. Fade in crowd noise again behind] german guard: […] Lagerstrasse! Schnell!

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le druillenec: The crematorium has stopped working. The corpses are to be buried in great pits at the far end of the camp. We are ordered to drag the dead from the mortuary to the pits, tying strips of blanket around their ankles.

However, some contemporary reviewers were not convinced by this mixing of the fact and the fictionalised. Writing in The Listener (18 April 1946), Philip Hope-Wallace complains that in ‘the mixture of eye-witness account (so interesting in one way) and figged-up dramatic illustration […] One always kills the other. If you are to have drama at all, total artificiality is far more likely to succeed.’ As a genre of radio, docudrama has continued to the present day, including the BBC’s Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster (11 March 2011), produced by Susan Roberts, in which the tragic story of the young woman murdered by a gang of teenagers in 2007 is told through the memories of the victim’s mother and a series of poems written by Simon Armitage. The poems give a voice to Sophie (Rachel Austin) in what is a complex and highly emotive work: like The Man from Belsen, it is audio documentary at its most dramatic. Ronald Knox’s ‘Broadcasting the Barricades’ and Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ are not docudramas but are radio plays that pretend to be documenting reality. The extraordinary achievement and phenomenon of ‘War of the Worlds’ has been well documented (Cantril, 1940; Crook, 1999a; Hand, 2006a; Hand and Traynor, 2011). At the heart of the production’s achievement is its success in verisimilitude: the play sounds real. This is partly because of the play’s ‘breaking news’ style and also the performances of actors such as Frank Readick who allegedly analysed recordings of Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness account of the Hindenburg airship disaster (6 May 1937) for his performance (Crook, 1999a: 109). These works reveal the uncanny power of radio, its ability to transform our perception of the world we think we are in and enter our consciousness with alarming immediacy. This potential of radio continues to be extremely effective, as we shall see in our exploration of contemporary digital audio towards the end of this study.

Gielgud and the 1930s There is no doubt that the 1930s were an exciting epoch for radio drama. Radio itself was becoming ubiquitous, as Asa Briggs’s statistics make clear: By 1935 98 per cent of the population could listen – on a cheap wireless set – to one BBC programme, and 85 per cent could choose between two. By September 1939 there were seventy-three licences for every hundred households in the United Kingdom. (Briggs, 1965: 253)

This vast audience would have been hungry for information and entertainment. Although Val Gielgud’s dismissal of radio drama during the period before 1929 as an ‘indifferent joke’ may have been unduly harsh, it is in the

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1930s that radio drama ‘comes of age’: its close link with, even dependence upon, theatre loosens and the full potential of the form begins to be understood and exploited. As Hand and Traynor write, ‘the unique qualities of radio drama were not apparent at the outset’ (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 33): it is at the very end of the 1920s that these begin to be understood. A key problem with early radio drama was that it attempted to mitigate for a lack of a visual dimension. Writing in the 1931 BBC Handbook, Tyrone Guthrie terms this as a drive towards creating ‘mind pictures’: Writers for broadcasting have up to the present concentrated most of their energies on conveying to the audience a series of mind pictures; but it is doubtful whether the future of broadcast drama lies in this direction and whether it would not be more profitable to explore the purely symphonic possibilities of the medium; to make more use of rhythm in the writing and speaking; more deliberate use of contrasting vocal colour, changing tempo, varying pitch. One feels that it is only by attacking the subject from a symphonic angle is it possible to rid the mind of unwanted literary and artistic conventions. (Quoted in Rodger, 1982: 22)

As can be seen, Guthrie is calling for the liberation of radio drama so that it moves away from finding the equivalence of scenery, description and physical movement to being about the possibilities of sound itself. Guthrie’s hopes may not have taken hold as much as he desired. Nevertheless, there are some notable examples, including by Guthrie himself. A theatre director and writer, Guthrie began to work for the BBC in the mid-1920s and by late 1929 had written The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick – a landmark production in British radio – which Crook describes thus: [This play] demonstrated that cinematic methods of montage, cross-fading and representing past, present, future, inner and outer consciousness had a place in the sound medium. The play exploited radio’s novelistic ability to dramatise the inner lives of people. Guthrie’s play is all in the mind of its central character, who as a drowning man in the middle of an ocean is located realistically in a position unrealisable in the theatre, except in a highly stylised way. (Crook, 1999b)

We have already seen that some radio plays in the 1920s were audacious in setting with works set on ships, trains and airplanes as well as plays that explored the intimate realms of telephones, fantasy and inner consciousness, a feature Guthrie develops to the limit. The spoken word is just one of the available audio languages of radio drama, the others being music, silence and sound effects. Radio drama rapidly developed specialist technology, and the evolution of sound effect technology has a fascinating history (Mott, 1993). In regard to the BBC, Briggs writes: [In] the early 1930s the BBC revealed that Studio 6D at Broadcasting House ‘was equipped with machines for the production of every conceivable noise, including a large tank for water noises, a wind machine, suspended sheets

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for thunder, and even a barrel organ’ while another studio had ‘elaborate electrical controls, contained six gramophone turntables to be used for “mixing” a variety of noises’ (Briggs, 1965: 96)

The most potent sound effects create a sense of location or action unambiguously in a way that is completely conducive to the exposition of the play being broadcast. In this respect, many sound effects work on suggestion rather than fidelity. Indeed, numerous spot sound effects (i.e. physically created live) were refined through experimentation and some surprising discoveries: for instance, it was found that ‘real ice being thrown into a glass does not sound as real as two metal bolts being dropped into glass’ and that ‘gunshots were sometimes less effective (or reliable) when fired from a stage gun than when they were created by smacking a metal rod against a leather seat’ (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 145–146). Writing in The Listener, Herbert Farjeon reveals that in a radio adaptation of The Canterville Ghost, ‘the best things in this production were the ghost noises […] for which Oscar Wilde could claim none of the credit’ (3 August 1944). Inventive and imaginative sound effects can make a tremendous contribution in the creation of a powerful radio play. Some listeners, however, may listen with an assiduous ear and be unimpressed by what they are hearing, especially when it is at odds with their personal experience or professional knowledge. For instance, the Radio Times publishes one letter of complaint from a RAF Wing Commander: Why is it that the sound of a modern ship’s boat is represented on the radio by the horrible rhythmical creaking of old-fashioned wooden thole-pins instead of the smarter clicking modern rowlocks? (24 November 1944)

The BBC of the 1930–40s used recorded sound more than US radio of the same period. The BBC’s stock of atmospheric and location soundtracks and specific sound effects was a valuable resource for its drama output. However, there are risks associated with overuse: elsewhere in the aforementioned article in The Listener, Herbert Farjeon reveals that ‘we come to see through or even tire of the old sounds, laughing, now, even at the gulls, which are first-rate of their kind’ (3 August 1944). The BBC’s seagull recording is undoubtedly effective but had already become a cliché in the 1940s, not dissimilar to, in our own time, the overuse of the ‘Wilhelm Scream’ in film sound design (i.e. highly amusing to the initiated, merely an effective or unremarkable sonic moment to everyone else).5 As in the inaugural decade of radio drama, thrillers and uncanny drama can be seen as having a significant place, albeit with a notable shift away from the dependence on theatre. To this end, let us look at two examples from the 1930s: one a successfully conceived play for the essence of radio form (Patrick Hamilton’s Money with Menaces); and the other an adaptation of a classic of horror cinema (T. E. Mayer and Duncan Melvin’s radio adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari).

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Patrick Hamilton’s Money with Menaces (1937) Patrick Hamilton established himself as a young novelist in the 1920s and achieved great success when he turned to the stage with his disturbing thriller Rope (1929) in which two young intellectuals kill an acquaintance and host a party for his friends and family while his corpse lies in a chest in the centre of the room. Towards the end of the next decade, he would eclipse the success of Rope with his melodramatic thriller Gas Light (1938). Both of these classic stage thrillers would be successfully adapted: Alfred Hitchcock created a film version of Rope (1948), and Gas Light – as Gaslight – was directed by Thorold Dickinson (1940) and George Cukor (1944). In January 1932 Rope was adapted for radio, and the broadcast stirred up controversy, as is evident in this anonymous letter in the Morning Post: Surely we have enough horrors already in the daily papers – outrages and murders of little girls – and the broadcasting of this sort of thing only encourages the morbid tendency which leads to these crimes. I submit that the BBC is making a gross misuse of its powers. (16 January 1932)

Impact is never a bad thing and even an outraged, nameless listener reflects that thousands more were listening. After all, Rope had been a popular and acclaimed play in the West End and the BBC production evidently fuelled a new lifespan for the work, enabling a whole new audience to be shocked by Hamilton’s macabre work. In fact, Rope became a favourite source for audio adaptation, with subsequent radio productions on 25 July 1945, 16 June 1947, 21 January 1953, 12 January 1966 and 3 December 1983. To return to the 1930s, if a Hamilton story could cause a reaction, then perhaps more of his work would be welcome, and in the 1939 foreword to the published edition of Money with Menaces Val Gielgud explains how he persuaded Hamilton to try writing an original play for radio. The effort paid off and Hamilton’s first play for radio, broadcast on 4 January 1937 and produced by Lance Sieveking was, in Amnon Kabatchnik’s words, nothing short of a ‘smash hit’ (Kabatchnik, 2009: 250). The success – and significance – of Money with Menaces is evident in the audio revival of the play as recently as 2 March 2006. With Money with Menaces, Hamilton is determined to explore radio form. In a preview to the broadcast, the Radio Pictorial (1 January 1937) announces: Patrick Hamilton, the novelist and author of that gripping stage play ‘Rope,’ has turned his attention to writing radio plays, and to-night his first effort in this sphere will be broadcast. One would expect it to be a thriller and ‘Money with Menaces,’ as it is called, is indeed highly sinister. Blackmail might seem a worn-out subject for thriller writers, but in this story Hamilton has provided a twist that will give you a fair-sized shock just before the end.

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At the heart of the play is the telephone. On a hot summer’s afternoon in his office in Fleet Street, Andrew Carruthers, a wealthy businessman, is blackmailed by ‘Mr Poland’, a man who claims to have kidnapped his eleven-year-old daughter, Jennifer. The intimate nature of the phone call is used for Poland’s menacing tone and an unnerving level of detail: he can describe Jennifer’s dress and the body of this ‘attractive little girl’ in closeup detail, including ‘the small scar in the shape of a horseshoe on her left cheek’. Carruthers is sworn to secrecy, but the listener is in the earpiece of the telephone: we are complicit in the crime. The device works highly effectively, and our intimate eavesdropping allows for numerous examples of dramatic irony: Carruthers attempts to make progress but needs to keep his purpose and actions a secret. One particularly effective ironic moment is when Carruthers receives a phone call from a policeman who turns out to be the blackmailer disguising his voice to check that Carruthers is keeping the abduction of his daughter secret. After this, there is a sense of paranoia to the work: the mundane conversations with salesmen, bank clerks and old acquaintances seem imbued with suggestive resonance or painful irony. Money with Menaces succeeds in using the dynamics of radio in terms of its pace and sense of time: the play is structured by the received – or missed – phone calls from Mr Poland, Carruthers’s family, employees, business acquaintances or wrong numbers. The movement of the play is dramatic and urgent as the hero frantically attempts to raise money to save his daughter. Rather like in the film Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998), this imparts a tremendous focus and pace to the action. Hamilton carefully crafts the dialogue to develop and reflect a sense of time passing rapidly: after Carruthers’s early statement that he will give Poland ‘exactly sixty seconds’ to state his business or he will ring off, Poland seizes control of the temporal: Poland compels a sense of time, beginning with his knowledge of the departure time of Jennifer from the family home and his ultimatum to receive £1,000 within two hours. Poland sends Carruthers across London to different locations at different times on foot, by cab or by train, such as when he demands that he gets to Piccadilly Circus within a time limit of fifteen minutes. The sequence is reminiscent of a pivotal scene in Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) in which Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) is sent on a similarly frantic journey to deliver a ransom across San Francisco. In Money with Menaces, Poland has an omniscient knowledge of the immediate past, a control of the present and a dictation of the future. In the dénouement to the play, this control of time and action is explained by a long-term sense of the past. Carruthers’s tormentor is revealed as a fellow pupil he used to bully as a child who has vowed revenge. In a further twist, it is revealed that Jennifer is unharmed, happily playing at her friend’s house. The play ends with a final phone call: Carruthers receives a wrong number and his relieved laughter turns wilder before degenerating into hysterical sobs: Carruthers has reached breaking point. Money with Menaces remains an outstanding example of radio drama

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at its ‘purest’. Hamilton has clearly written the play with a consideration of radio and its advantages at the forefront of his mind. The result is a fast moving and extremely well-structured play in which we are privy to the intimacy and urgency of Caruthers’s terrible crisis and the twists, turns and irony of the situation. Patrick Hamilton’s next radio play – To the Public Danger (25 February 1939 and frequently revived) – is also a thriller that understands and exploits the potential of radio form, this time with a setpiece involving a car accident caused by a drunk driver. Money with Menaces is all the more impressive for the fact it was written five years before one of the greatest examples of suspense radio, Lucille Fletcher’s ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’, which was performed on CBS’s Suspense eight times from 1943 to 1960. Like Money with Menaces, ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ is a work for radio about the telephone. The story centres on Mrs Stevenson, a bedridden woman, who overhears a murder plot on a crossed line on her telephone and gradually realises that she is the intended victim. The thirty-minute play unfurls in real time as she makes numerous phone calls attempting to prevent the crime. The dramatic power of the play resides in the inexorable pace, the woman’s mounting desperation and the impotence – or indifference – of everyone at the other end of her telephone, culminating in her scream of utter terror as she is murdered. On Suspense, Mrs Stevenson was played on each occasion by Agnes Moorehead in what can only be described as virtuosic performances (Hand, 2006a: 65–68). After the opening phone calls in the oppressively hot London office in Money with Menaces, Hamilton uses radio to permit a rapid exploration of a variety of locations, whereas Fletcher creates a sense of powerlessness and entrapment. Moreover, while Money with Menaces ends with a defusing of the situation (Jennifer was safe all along and Mr Poland has finished proving his point), ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ is thoroughly uncompromising and the play ends with her murder. The laughter that degenerates into sobs at the end of Money with Menaces becomes a death-scream in ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’. Money with Menaces was a ‘home grown’ masterpiece of telephonic, technophobic suspense. Interestingly, the script of ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ was imported by the BBC and performed on 31 December 1948 (with a rebroadcast of the recording on 15 March 1949) with Flora Robson in the lead role. Despite its home on the Suspense series (on which it had already been broadcast some five times by this time), Fletcher’s play was emphatically a standalone broadcast on the BBC and not part of Appointment with Fear or any other series. The fact that the play was given a prime New Year’s Eve slot and a subsequent repeat reveals the prominence of the broadcast. Certainly it was favourably received. Writing in The Listener, Philip HopeWallace compares Robson’s performance in ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ with her appearance as Lady Macbeth in the BBC radio broadcast of Macbeth (6 March 1949) just a few days before:

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I enjoyed Miss Flora Robson more as murderee than murderess. If her Lady Macbeth fell short, her panic-stricken hypochondriac in ‘Sorry – Wrong Number’ was a wonderful exercise in mounting hysteria; Lucille Fletcher’s clever little radio shocker has been made into a film, which I had seen between first and second hearings, though this did not spoil the much simpler radio version for at least one pair of ears. (24 March 1949)

It is interesting that the thirty-minute thrill-ride of ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ works better for Hope-Wallace (who, as we shall see, could be dismissive of popular radio genre) than the classical drama adaptation. Additionally, Hope-Wallace indicates that the radio play works better than the Hollywood film noir version Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak 1948), also scripted by Lucille Fletcher: indeed, the film version cannot match the intensity, concision and claustrophobia of the original radio play. The archived BBC script of ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ adheres very closely to Fletcher’s superbly crafted work. In this regard, it is significant that the BBC production decides to retain the New York City location of the play. Although it would have been perfectly feasible, in theory, to relocate the play to London, one cannot help feeling that the American urban setting of the play with its sense of paranoia, helplessness and pitiless violence was made more palatable for the English audience by being set abroad. However, it is noteworthy that the script stresses that the First Man’s Voice is ‘American’ and that the Second Man’s Voice – Mrs Stevenson’s husband – is described in the BBC script as having a ‘foreign accent’ presumably American too. Taking these directions into account, it seems plausible that Flora Robson – who is merely described in the script is having a ‘querulous’ voice – spoke with a ‘natural’, British English accent in the broadcast. If anything, the BBC version heightens the horror of New York City. One key line in the play as broadcast on Suspense is when Mrs Stevenson speaks to the police sergeant who says to her ‘A lot of murders are plotted in this city every day, ma’am. We manage to prevent almost all of ’em.’ In the BBC version this is written as ‘A lot of murders are committed in this city every day, ma’am. If we could do something to stop ’em, we would.’ The BBC takes the notion of foiled plots and transforms it into a more deadly sense of unpreventable homicide.

T. E. Mayer and Duncan Melvin’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1938) In 1938, Felix Felton produced T. E. Mayer and Duncan Melvin’s radio adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) for the BBC. This celebrated film, scripted by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, features a carefully crafted ‘framed narrative’: a Gothic tradition but here used for one of the paradigms of Expressionist culture. In the film, the narrator, Francis (Friedrich Feher), recounts the story of the travelling carnival act of Dr Caligari (Emil Jennings) and his somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) who

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predicts the future. Caligari controls the mysterious Cesare and is behind the murder of Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) and abduction of Francis’s fiancée Jane (Lil Dagover). Eventually, Cesare dies and Caligari escapes. Francis then reveals that he has located Caligari: he is the director of a lunatic asylum. In a tremendous and ambiguous twist, we discover that Francis is himself an inmate of the asylum in the care of Dr Caligari along with fellow patients Jane and Cesare. Although the ending seems to offer a clear-cut explanation, the spectator can still be left feeling doubtful and unnerved. Wiene’s film achieved critical and popular success at the time of its release and it remains a landmark in cinema history. This is evident in the 1938 radio version, the script of which states that this is ‘an adaptation for broadcasting from the famous German classic film of the same name’. Despite the ingenuity in the narrative of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the film’s enormous influence on subsequent film and other culture has predominantly been in regard to the visual dimensions of cinematography and design. With this in mind, the endeavour to turn the film into an example of radio drama is by default an extremely radical challenge. The radio play aired on 12 April 1938 as part of the Experimental Hour series. Aside from the use of intertitles, the film is an example of ‘silent’ cinema. In order to turn this into an example of pure audio, the scriptwriters need to put a great deal into dialogue. To this end, Mayer and Melvin adhere to both the core exposition and the framing narrative but embellish the story with sequences – and language – that capture the eerie nature of the original film. For instance, in the radio version we are witness to Caligari’s showmanship as he rouses Cesare: caligari: Thank you sir, will you please stand here for a moment while I open Cesare’s Cabinet and present him to these good people? Ladies and gentlemen … Cesare! [A door-handle rattles, the hinges creak and then a strange wail is heard, which is swamped by the expressions of horror of the audience] There he is, ladies and gentlemen. Pray don’t be alarmed. He is not beautiful I know, but he is most charming when you know him. […] Now, sir, will you please take this pin and stick it into him? alan: Stick a pin into him? caligari: Certainly. If he was alive you see, he would make some movement as a result of your action. alan: Well, I suppose it’s all right if you say so. [The tent is quiet, except for occasional murmurs – ‘He didn’t move!’ ‘It’s uncanny!’ ‘Is he really dead, do you think?’ ‘Horrible I call it!’] caligari: Thank you, sir. You see? He made no movement at all. And now, ladies and gentlemen … I shall bring Cesare to life. Watch now … I slowly pass my hands over his eyes … So … [The wail is heard again]

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caligari:  That is the spirit of life passing into Cesare. Wake slowly, Cesare … slowly … that’s right … open your eyes … slowly … more … more. Now speak to me, Cesare, speak to me. [A curious noise, as of a deaf mute, comes from Cesare’s mouth and gradually resolves into the words ‘Master, I am awake’.] There, ladies and gentlemen, you have now seen one of the wonders of the world … The awakening of Cesare …

The sequence develops a sense of showmanship, drawing the audience (in the play and at home) into the rhetoric and pace of the carnival ‘routine’. Acutely important in the creation of the uncanny atmosphere is the place of utterance: the ‘expressions of horror’ by the crowd and the wailing and curious noises of Cesare until he locates coherent, obedient form. The radio version develops the mysterious figure of Caligari into a disconcerting figure partly by others’ reaction to him and partly by his own statements introduced into this adaptation. Early in the film one of the characters discusses Caligari and says: ‘You might ask the old horror to come and do it for you.’ The evil doctor comes out with troubling statements such as, when quizzed about the screams that have been heard, ‘I expect it is only some woman who objects to her husband beating her.’ Similarly, the short scene in the film where Alan’s maid announces he has been murdered is expanded in the radio version: [The piano is crossfaded to quiet music. Then a clock strikes seven. Early morning sounds are heard dreamily, as by one half asleep. Then a woman’s voice is heard in the distance shouting ‘Mr. Francis! Mr. Francis!’ The door bursts open] woman: Mr. Francis! Mr. Francis! francis: [Sleepily] What’s the matter? What happened? woman: It’s Mr. Alan, sir, he’s been murdered! francis: Murdered? woman: Yes, I went to call him, sir, and there he was – stabbed! He’d be late I thought, and I shook him … there’s blood. It’s horrible, sir, it’s horrible! I thought he was asleep sir, but his eyes – oh, sir, it’s horrible!…

This is something of a histrionic exchange. However, the soundscape is more interesting than this implies. The shift in music, the time register and the early morning sounds are an efficient way to shift scene and locale, but the fact that they are emphatically dreamy is an interesting device in order to ascertain that the point of view is coming from Francis. Shortly afterwards, Francis’s narrative brings us closer to the horror of the crime and the corpse: ‘She was right about his eyes. I’ve never seen such terror. I can see them now – and that terrible wound.’ After the murder, and just over a third of the way through the play, the expressionistic distortion develops. For instance, we are told that ‘Fair noises are faded up, this time much distorted’. The effect of this distortion is that it complicates issues of reality and subjectivity: is this story reliable or is it told by a madman?

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Later in the play, Cesare’s miserable condition labouring under the control of his master is put into dramatic dialogue. When he breaks into Jane’s bedroom, we hear: [Fade to night music, through which can be heard Jane’s regular breathing as she sleeps. Then the latch of the window is opened, and Cesare is heard muttering. He comes nearer and his muttering articulates into a ghastly laugh. Jane wakes. She screams and her scream is smothered. Cesare’s laugh changes to a groan] cesare: Oh my God, I can’t Caligari – not this time – I can’t! I can’t! jane: Don’t stare at me like that – kill me – anything – but – cesare: I can’t hurt you – please believe me – I don’t want to hurt you – jane: But you’ve got a knife in your hand – how can I believe you won’t hurt me? cesare: It’s true, I was sent to murder you – but you are so beautiful – I love you – madly – I must take you away with me – come – come. [Jane shrieks as Cesare carries her out into the storm]. [The storm is heard for a time, then Cesare’s voice is heard through it]  [Voices are heard in the distance – ‘There he is’ – ‘Catch him’ – ‘Quicker, quicker’ – ‘He’s staggering’]

Mayer and Melvin’s script develops Cesare’s paradoxical character, and the heightened dialogue is enhanced with the precise direction of breathing, muttering, laughing, screaming, groaning, shrieking and the rolling storm. It also creates a sense of depth and scale with the sound of the crowd. As well as fully deploying the arsenal of sounds, the script strives to make us see. For example, here is Jane’s description of Cesare: ‘He was the most awful-looking man – it was horrible – all grey and strange – and his clothes looked like – almost a mummy’s wrappings.’ This description paints a slightly different picture from the iconic image of Conrad Veidt in the 1920 film. By likening the character to an Egyptian mummy, the BBC version creates an image more like Boris Karloff in the Universal Picture The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932). The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was made before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, an event that re­ignited popular interest in Egyptology, mummies and legends of curses: films like The Mummy exploited this and it is possible that the BBC radio version of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari also draws on this iconography and folklore, conflating Expressionism with Egyptology. In many respects, the radio adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari creates a fairly straightforward thriller narrative, even something of a melodrama. However, one of the key elements of the radio adaptation is the use of music, as in this description: In the distance a piano is being played and the pianist is playing some passage over and over again and always failing to find a satisfactory resolution which gives at once an atmosphere of unrest and nightmare. As the pianist plays the men are talking.

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This principle of the nightmarish and the dreamy lends the script the potential to be quite distinctive in production. Elsewhere, the script emphasises the use of cross-fade to shift from piano or fairground music to dialogue – or screams – and back again. Sometimes sounds are ‘gradually faded into the distance’, creating a sense of aural depth. The death of Cesare strives to create a sense of depth and dramatic environment: ‘He gives a long groan as he falls into the ravine. The storm comes up to full and is then faded away’. In addition to the significance of the music and the soundscape in creating an aural equivalent of cinematic Expressionism, the radio play adheres to the ending of the film. The closing scene makes it clear that Francis is an inmate in the asylum: The piano is gradually brought up to full. The other sounds reveal the scene is an asylum – a man sings insanely, another talks incoherently.

At the very end of the play, we are left with the insane Francis, the would-be hero of the play, as wretched as Cesare: The mad whinings of Francis in the distance are crossfaded to calm music which ends the play.

US horror radio While British radio up to the 1930s dabbled with one-off examples of horror drama, it was in the USA that the specific, closely linked genres of suspense and horror radio came into their own. In 1920s USA, there were a few isolated examples of suspense and horror drama, but in the following decade the first fully fledged horror series, The Witch’s Tale (1931–38) premièred in May 1931. The writer-producer of the programme was Alonzo Deen Cole who met the huge demand of his audience with many original works and adaptations of horror literature, ranging from classics such as Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde through to more obscure uncanny works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Prosper Mérimée, Théophile Gautier and many others. The success of The Witch’s Tale and its formula of eerie host (Old Nancy the Salem witch) and well-crafted, usually self-contained (as opposed to serial) episodes led to a number of other long-running horror and mystery series such as Lights Out (1934–47), The Hermit’s Cave (1935–44), Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941–52), The Mysterious Traveler (1943–52), The Hall of Fantasy (1947–53), and The Mollé Mystery Theatre (1943–51). In addition to these popular and prolific programmes, shorter lived but no less noteworthy US horror radio shows include The Haunting Hour (1944–46), Quiet, Please (1947–49), Dark Fantasy (1941–42) and the Peter Lorre vehicle Mystery in the Air (1947).6 Martin Grams Jr. reveals that by the late 1930s, the genres of the thriller and horror had become more popular than comedy (Grams, 2002: 26) and by the end of the following decade, US radio ‘fired at least 80 programs

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of horror and bloodcurdling adventure at its listeners every week’ (Grams 2002: 34) and it remains one of the richest eras in popular horror culture. While US radio attempted to satiate its audience with dozens of competing horror and suspense series, in Britain there was a resistance to the development of such ‘American-style’ programmes. However, the Second World War and the alliance of the US and Britain led to a change in attitude and practice, and the wartime British audience would have its own horror radio series: Appointment with Fear presented by ‘The Man in Black’.

Notes 1 To give one recent example, the BBC reported that ‘St Helens man “stabbed noisy neighbour” to death’ (10 January 2012) www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-merseyside-16497319. 2 Graham Reznick has also become involved in US audio horror drama for the web-based Tales from Beyond the Pale (2010 onwards) Reznick is credited as ‘writer/director/sound design/music’ on ‘The Grandfather’ (14 December 2010), a terrifying family drama that unfurls with great subtlety – and sound. 3 As bizarre as Short’s invention may seem, it was nonetheless the forerunner to the ‘long-range acoustic device’ (LRAD), an ear-splitting weapon (which can also be used as a loudhailer) developed by the US military for crowd dispersal. 4 Beck (2001) quotes plot summaries of the plays drawn from radio listings: ‘It is not dialogue, which you will hear [in ‘Nurse Henrietta’], but rather the thoughts, made audible, of the girl who is actually the only character in the scene. Imagine that you are the invisible observer of the dramatic incident’. In ‘Shadows’: ‘In this remarkable monodrama, there are many characters but only one voice (Lilian Harrison). There is almost no action, for incident loses itself in soliloquy; nevertheless, suspense, love, hate, jealousy, death, a trial scene are all vividly depicted. The story of “Nurse Henrietta” may be regarded as either phantasy or as reality. Life, after all, is made up of both, although contained in each. Here is a paradox of which the art of the writer aims at providing a solution. The reproduction of this curiously intimate kind of drama by means of the microphone marks another advance in the technique of radio play-writing.’ 5 The ‘Wilhelm Scream’ was first used in Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, 1951) and has become a stock sound effect in countless films since. 6 For a detailed overview of 1930–50s US horror radio see Hand (2006a).

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The quintessence of British horror radio: Appointment with Fear

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Val Gielgud’s drama department was moved out of London (to Evesham) and drama programmes were limited to a maximum of thirty minutes in duration. Gielgud complains that ‘Few aspects of broadcasting can have been more seriously handicapped’ (quoted in Briggs, 1970: 112). Insult was evidently added to injury when Gielgud was encouraged to avoid anything too ‘highbrow’ and urged to make material ideally suited for Children’s Hour (Briggs, 1970: 112). However, within a few weeks the BBC came around to recognising the value of popular entertainment: the British radio listeners did not want relentless news and information at this most dispiriting of times. The BBC realised that music, comedy and light entertainment had an essential role to play in the war effort – and so did drama. Val Gielgud and his department not only found themselves given a freer rein, they found themselves busier than ever. Part of this activity would be devoted to exploring a wide range of approaches to radio drama, including the presentation of plays longer than thirty minutes and so-called ‘highbrow’ art such as Shakespeare (Briggs, 1970: 113), as well as ‘lighter’ works. The BBC’s ‘lighter’ dramatic output featured suspense and horror plays: on Halloween 1939, W. Graeme-Holder’s The Wraith (31 October 1939), produced by Howard Rose, was broadcast. By the time of the second year of the War, the trend became more noticeable. To mention a few examples from around Halloween 1940: Scottish Half-Hour (29 October 1940) presented J. A. Ferguson’s The Scarecrow: a Hallowe’en Fantasy, produced by Christine Orr, a play about ‘a young Highland girl who hid her sailor lover in a barrel and used local superstitions to frighten off a policeman’ (Radio Times, 25 October 1940). The next night, the BBC aired Val Gielgud’s production of The Defeated (30 October 1940), Marianne Helweg’s adaptation of Maupassant’s Franco-Prussian War story ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’, featuring Valentine Dyall as The Major. The next night featured Patrick Hamilton’s thriller To the Public Danger (1 November 1940), again featuring Dyall, a revival of the première from 25 February 1939. A few days later, In Hazard by Richard Hughes (4 November 1940) and A Recluse (9 November 1940), based on the ghost story by Walter de la Mare, entertained the British listener.

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For Tim Crook, BBC drama under Val Gielgud was guilty of what he terms ‘the pompous paradigm’ (Crook, 1999a: 153), a deep-seated elitism which held a bias against popular forms, especially genres developed by other organisations or nations. Central to this prejudice, Crook contends, is the BBC’s awkward relationship with soap operas, which is ironic given the subsequent status of The Archers as a national institution (1951 onwards). Gielgud – and the BBC’s senior management – evidently regarded soaps as a ‘vulgar and bastard form of drama from the USA’ (Crook, 1999a: 153). The first soap to be broadcast on the BBC was The Robinsons during the Second World War. The series commenced in 1942 and was, in fact, an import, written by the Canadian writer Alan Melville for the BBC North American Service. As Crook reveals, the series enjoyed great popularity on the BBC Home Service, yet Gielgud warned actors that their appearance in a soap opera would be ‘a breach of contract’ (Crook, 1999a: 153). Although Gielgud’s ‘prejudice, pomposity and elitist discrimination [was] responsible for holding back the tide of one of the most significant radio programming forms of the twentieth century’ (Crook, 1999a: 153), the head of BBC Radio Drama was surprisingly more relaxed when it came to importing another distinctly American form of popular culture: horror and suspense radio. However, the introduction of Appointment with Fear and, ultimately, the institutionalisation of the ‘Man in Black’ was thanks in large part to another figure associated with the BBC, the writer John Dickson Carr.

John Dickson Carr As part of the war effort, writers, poets and other personalities became familiar voices on the airwaves. For example, J. B. Priestley broadcast a celebrated series of Sunday evening radio talks between June 1940 and March 1941 called Postscripts to the News. Priestley was a well-known literary figure with numerous novels from the late 1920s and plays from the early 1930s. With the radio talks, he suddenly became ‘probably the most famous voice on the BBC and second in popularity only to Churchill’ (Nicholas, 1995: 247). Another popular writer who would bring his services to the BBC as a broadcaster and writer was John Dickson Carr, an American but a committed Anglophile who had settled in England in 1932. Carr was a prolific writer of crime fiction who had since the late 1920s published many novels which developed a speciality within the genre of the ‘whodunit’: the ‘impossible crime’. This subgenre presents ingenious (and, it must be said, sometimes infuriating) plots in which seemingly ‘impossible crimes’ are perpetrated and explained through bizarre coincidence or masterminded through elaborately calculated stratagems. The ‘impossible crime’ genre is also known as the ‘locked-room mystery’, a term which neatly encapsulates plots wherein a crime, usually a murder, has been committed in a room which has been locked from the inside. For John C. Tibbetts, Carr is ‘the undisputed master of the locked room mystery’ (Tibbetts, 1999: 56–57).

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The sleuths that John Dickson Carr created in his novels and short stories include the French detective Henri Bencolin of the Sûreté in Paris, the English aristocrat Sir Henry Merrivale, and his most notable hero the amateur (and once again English) investigator, the eccentric and obese Dr Gideon Fell. Carr’s oeuvre of ‘impossible crime’ fiction is a landmark in the history of popular crime literature. Arguably, many examples of these works have not aged well: they reflect an era in popular culture that saw a truly phenomenal popularity of crime fiction, but for a contemporary reader some of the plot twists and resolutions stretch plausibility to breaking point. Although some of Carr’s plots and solutions struggle to be convincing, his fiction has a mood and atmosphere that makes some of his works hybrid examples of crime and horror. S. T. Joshi discusses the Henri Bencolin fiction: That Bencolin made his first major entrance in a work called Grand Guignol is only fitting; for all the Bencolin novels radiate an atmosphere of scarcely controlled hysteria and of horrors around the corner that distinguishes them in detective literature. (Joshi, 1990: 18)

Grand Guignol was a novella, and Carr reworked and expanded the work into his first full-length novel, It Walks By Night (1930). Douglas Greene’s reading of the novel confirms that, if anything, Carr’s development of the Bencolin story further enhances the qualities that Joshi detects in Grand Guignol: It Walks By Night is told like a horror story. The mood is claustrophobic, with madness at the heart of the events, and the book is filled with tight, tense, loaded language, grotesque scenes, incongruous images, and references to Poe. (Greene, 1995: 70)

Greene further sums the novel up as ‘a puzzle story in the form of a Poeesque fantasy, set in a Poe-esque France’ (Greene, 1995: 70). The young Carr is clearly influenced by the distinctive fictions of Edgar Allan Poe in his creation of heightened mood, atmosphere and grotesquery. We should also remember that Poe is often considered the inventor of detective fiction with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), which features his sleuth Auguste Dupin. Carr develops to find his own voice and, in the long run, it is Poe’s contribution to the detective genre that is most influential on Carr and his prolific output of detective novels and short stories. Although Carr’s other fiction might not have quite the same intense tone that he created in his early Bencolin novels, the Gideon Fell novels have their fair share of gruesome acts and unsettling atmospheres. Michael Dirda aptly sums up the Fell fiction as ‘a carnival fun house, supplying equal mea­sures of dizziness, illusion, marvels, and laughter’ (Dirda, 1998: 115). Dirda contends that the ‘fun house’ essence to some of Carr’s works combines with a ‘slightly tongue-in-cheek Gothic atmosphere’ (Dirda, 1998: 115). The result is a hybrid of romanticism, magic act and hazy supernatural

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suggestion which typically offsets the rational explanation to the ‘impossible crimes’ that a sleuth like Dr Fell unravels (Dirda, 1998: 115). We could argue that the influence of Carr can be detected in children’s culture, including The Three Investigators detective books (1964–87) created by Robert Arthur (himself an important radio writer and co-creator with David Kogan of The Mysterious Traveler and Murder by Experts (1949–51)); and a landmark of television, Hanna-Barbera’s phenomenally successful cartoon series – and global franchise – Scooby Doo (1969 onwards). The Three Investigators and Scooby Doo typically present situations of heightened and seemingly irrefutable Gothic horror which are subsequently ‘unmasked’ as having rational explanations and criminal, material motivations. During his residence in Britain during the 1930s, Carr enjoyed consistent popularity with his fiction and by 1940 he had begun to write for the BBC. Carr had a specific purpose in writing for the radio: he felt that it might enable him to ‘make some contribution to the war-effort’ (Gielgud, 1957: 103). As well as his numerous official writing credits, Carr was also busy for the BBC as a radio personality, featuring as a guest celebrity and even as a contestant or question master on quiz shows (Greene, 1995: 285), as well as in a ‘ghost’ role ‘editing and rewriting scripts by other writers’ (Greene, 1995: 285). In terms of radio drama, Carr’s first radio play was the three-part detective drama Who Killed Matthew Corbin? (27 December 1939, 7 January 1940, and 14 January 1940). The production was highly successful and, for Douglas G. Greene, was an instant demonstration of Carr’s ‘mastery’ of radio drama (Greene, 1995: 235). Carr was still a young writer in his early thirties: like so many of the other young talents who had, in its brief history, been drawn to the comparatively new medium of radio drama, Carr seemed to ‘understand’ the potential of the form. Greene argues that Carr had ‘an ear for the rhythm of language’ (Greene, 1995: 233) and, in addition: His combination of creepy atmosphere with rational solutions, his sense of pace, his gift for creating vivid characters with a few deft descriptions – all were perfectly suited for a listening audience. Carr not only knew how far an audience’s imagination could range; he counted on it. Many of his plays, in fact, depend on listeners’ fooling themselves by means of their own imagination. (Greene, 1995: 233)

In our own time of post-Scooby Doo cynicism, some of the plots in Carr’s narrative fiction may be exasperating to all but the most devoted fan. However, there is a case to argue that Carr’s typical storylines are beautifully suited to the form of the thirty-minute thriller on radio, as demonstrated above all – as we shall see – on Suspense and Appointment with Fear. S. T. Joshi argues that Carr’s radio plays ‘are some of the most vivid and thrilling works in his entire oeuvre’ (Joshi, 1990: 80). Certainly, the extant scripts and the very few recordings that have survived reveal Carr’s consummate grasp of the potential of live radio drama.

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Carr’s other early radio plays include Speak of the Devil (February to March 1941), an eight-part serialised historical drama set in England in 1816. Despite its specific Regency setting and swashbuckling escapades, the drama is another example of a Carr locked-room mystery which features some distinctly supernatural elements: the hero meets a beautiful woman only to learn that she was apparently hanged for murder over a year before. Interestingly, the ghostly lady is accompanied by a mysterious ‘man in black’: this ominous, visually characterised figure is an intriguing forerunner to the most important ‘Man in Black’ in the history of British radio, also invented by Carr: the host of Appointment with Fear. Another early Carr play for the BBC is ‘The Black Minute’ (18 October 1941), another crime conundrum about a murder that takes place during a séance. A few weeks after the broadcast of ‘The Black Minute’, the Second World War took a dramatic turn with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Carr may have been a committed Anglophile, but he immediately sought to help the war effort of his native country by offering his services to the US military (Grams, 1997: 15). While waiting to be deployed in some capacity, Carr used the skills learned as a BBC writer and began to write radio plays for CBS. Carr’s most important contribution to the US airwaves was his integral role in the development of the long-running radio series Suspense.

Suspense (1942–62) Suspense broadcast some 945 episodes over a twenty-year period from the early 1940s to the early 1960s. It remains one of the most significant institutions of ‘Golden Age’ American radio, with a rich repertoire of original writing and the ability to secure many ‘big name’ actors to perform as voice actors in the series’ all-live, thirty-minute plays. Suspense also enabled, or persuaded, major stars to benefit from the rare opportunity to play ‘against type’, with fascinating implications (Hand, 2006a: 48–50). The repertoire of Suspense can be startlingly gruesome and even horrific. Although it was usually less explicitly Gothic than the heightened radio horrors of series like The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave or Lights Out, Suspense very occasionally ventured into more concerted horror and/or Gothic worlds with its classic example of lycanthropic terror ‘The House in Cypress Canyon’ (5 December 1946) and its adaptations of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1 November 1945), ‘Donovan’s Brain’ (18–25 May 1945 and 7 February 1948) and ‘Frankenstein’ (3 November 1952 and 7 June 1955). Even an ostensible crime thriller, ‘The Ten Years’ (2 June 1949), becomes a work of extraordinary and intense Gothicism, a tale of psychological terror framed (like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) amidst the sound of the screaming inmates of a lunatic asylum. Joan Crawford plays a woman tormented by her insane sister – years before Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962) – prior to becoming driven insane herself (Hand, 2013). To

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return to adaptation, Suspense’s version of Frankenstein is a fine example of radio concision: updated to include telephones and flashlights, it makes the decision to use an inarticulate monster. Boris Karloff’s interpretation of the creature in the 1931 film of Frankenstein was, of course, a ‘speechless’ monster but remains a highly powerful visual and physical icon. The Witch’s Tale ‘Frankenstein’ (3 August 1931; with revivals on 7 March 1932 and 17 July 1935) and the 1974 BBC dramatisation both return to Mary Shelley’s novel and have an articulate creature, a decision highly (even ideally) realisable on radio. However, in using a non-speaking monster Suspense develops a highly effective soundscape: we hear the chink and clunk of laboratory equipment, the screeching metal of mechanical lamps, and the lumbering, heavy-breathing creature and his destructive power. Although the monster cannot speak, the audio play captures the chilling presence of the abject creature: if horror radio proves anything, it is that spoken words are not everything, and the shuffling, heaving ferocity of Suspense’s monster is terrifying in its sheer speechlessness. Another Suspense play more forthrightly in the horror and supernatural realm is its adaptation of Herbert Russell Wakefield’s short story ‘Ghost Hunt’ in June 1949. Wakefield’s short story was published in the popular pulp magazine Weird Tales in March 1948 and is written as a first-person presenter investigating a haunted house. The story charts the narrator’s descent into insanity until he is compelled by spectral figures to kill himself, which he does, laughing. It is a short, efficient horror story, placing us inside the head of a protagonist as he loses his mind – and life. Clearly in the Gothic tradition of Poe, it has the potential for radio adaptation, not least with Wakefield’s use of a radio narrator as protagonist and his tight adherence to an unfurling chronology, narrative decisions that compelled adaptation in this, the radio age. It therefore comes as no surprise that Suspense chooses to adapt Wakefield’s story a year later. In Walter Brown Newman’s adaptation of ‘Ghost Hunt’ (23 June 1949), Joseph Kearns plays the professor, and the lead role of Smiley Smith is played by Ralph Edwards. The character of Smith is a disc jockey, who is recording a night in a haunted house as a playful radio feature. It was something of a coup to get Edwards to play the part: Edwards was not an actor but a major radio star as the creator and presenter of Truth or Consequences, which ran for many decades from 1940. In 1952, Edwards would also create and present another hugely popular programme: This Is Your Life. The radio version of ‘Ghost Hunt’ is set in America, and Edwards uses his own ‘radio host’ persona impeccably. Newman’s adaptation begins with the discovery – and replay – of the central character’s wire recorder. After this, the play follows Wakefield’s original very closely, but if anything, it is enhanced by being located on radio itself, the medium, after all, that Wakefield strives to inhabit in his story. Edwards captures the descent into mania extremely well, mixing despair with hilarity, and the end of the recording reveals that the disc jockey leapt

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to his death from the edge of a nearby cliff. In playing with the conventions of documentary and verisimilitude, ‘Ghost Hunt’ could be seen as following in the tradition of Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’. In using the device of the discovered recording, the play straddles two traditions: the Gothic tradition of the discovered manuscript and the discovered recordings in films such as Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) and its sequels. Probably the most impressive achievement of Suspense’s ‘Ghost Hunt’ is to be found in the use of the voice of a celebrity non-actor in the lead role, his journey to self-annihilation challenging the ‘cosy’ stability of a well-known voice. In this respect, this 1949 play is a precursor to the BBC’s Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992) and its use of well-known television personalities in a carefully crafted horror script. It also looks forward to radio plays such as ‘The Ditch’ (2010) by Paul Evans, which we will analyse later. The most famous Suspense play is ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’, which we looked at in detail in Chapter 1. While Lucille Fletcher’s play succeeds partly because of its claustrophobic setting, there are a number of plays in the Suspense repertoire which are more agoraphobic, including a number that capture the terror of cars and the open road (in the tradition of Patrick Hamilton’s To the Public Danger), not least Fletcher’s own play ‘The HitchHiker’ (2 September 1942), starring Orson Welles as a long-distance driver pursued by an ominous traveller. In Walter Bazarr’s ‘On a Country Road’ (16 November 1950), Cary Grant plays a man whose car breaks down in a remote area just as the news has issued a warning about an escaped madwoman who has decapitated several people with a meat cleaver. In Larry Marcus’s ‘No Escape’ (16 December 1948), James Cagney plays a hit-and-run driver who causes a fatal accident and discovers at the end of the play that the victims are well known to him. This play actually won an award for raising the profile of road safety. A few months later, Suspense broadcasts Sam Blas and Herb Meadow’s hard-hitting play ‘Nightmare’ (1 September 1949) – an adaptation of Blas’s 1947 short story ‘Revenge’ – in which Gregory Peck plays a character whose son is killed by a hit-and-run driver and follows his traumatised wife’s description of the drunk driver in exacting his murderous (but mistaken) revenge.1 ‘Nightmare’ uses the sounds of the road and driving – the sound of cars (interior and exterior) – to extremely unnerving effect. Moreover, it is during the intermission of this broadcast that the aforementioned ‘No Escape’ is given the road safety award; the decision to present ‘Nightmare’, another tale of the road, is an effective one. The sense of intimacy of being inside a car can determine acting style, and it can also be effective if the audience is listening to a car radio. The contemporary writer Oliver Emanuel, whose disturbing radio adaptation The Vanishing (2010) features a number of important scenes in cars, states:

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When it comes to a good radio actor, I think radio drama should sound realistic, it should sound naturalistic. When you’re driving along in a car listening to people talking in a car it should sound exactly like they’re in the car with you. (Emanuel 2011)

The Vanishing (which we will look at later) is very much a contemporary play, and yet Emanuel’s insistence on intimate naturalism is a principle that applies to the car-themed Suspense plays. Suspense tended to specialise in thrillers of all kinds, whether crimes, mysteries or adventures: it’s an awkward term, but ‘radio noir’ (Hand, 2006a: 10) or ‘audio noir’ (Crook, 2012: 195) captures the feel of the show. There are works in the repertoire which provide an interesting reflection of the social context and anxieties of the era. In ‘A Plane Case of Murder’ (10 October 1946) a former (Pacific) concentration camp inmate Randy (John Lund) – who worked for a civilian aviation company – survived three years of captivity by holding on to the memories and fantasies of his ‘dream girl’ Marianne (Cathy Lewis). On returning to freedom in the USA after the war, Randy finds that Marianne is a ‘just a dirty little gold-digger’ who has moved on and married a wealthy businessman. Exploiting Marianne’s obsession with materialism, Randy pretends to be a ‘big, rich, famous man’ even more prosperous and influential than her husband. Marianne immediately shows her willingness to embark on an affair with Randy. Randy is merely attempting to win her back in order to destroy her, which is given brutal irony by the fact that Randy is, himself, involved with a new woman: this is a ruse not to ‘win Marianne back’ but to annihilate her, in cold blood. Inevitably, the plan to frame Marianne for the murder of her husband backfires and Marianne proves herself to be more cunning and ruthless than Randy himself. Randy strangles Marianne in full view of witnesses and suffers horrendous, ultimately fatal, injuries in his failed attempt to escape in a small airplane (the ironic ‘Plane’ of the title). Although Randy’s vengeful psychosis is disturbing, he is ultimately a tragic, alienated figure: broken by the war and feeling disenfranchised, he is unable to ‘take flight’ (a metaphor that becomes literal) in the dynamic and affluent world of the new America, a materialistic post-war world where victory is characterised by Marianne’s cynical expediency and Randy’s spurious entrepreneurialism. Suspense thrillers like ‘Ghost Hunt’, ‘Nightmare’ and ‘A Plane Case of Murder’ are all very different in story and style and yet together provide a startling challenge to the stability of contemporary America, bringing to the surface the anxieties and fault-lines of the age. Despite the diversity of their content, these thirty-minute dramas are all a kind of ‘thrill ride’. Indeed, Suspense and its precursory and contemporaneous shows in the genres of suspense and horror gave its listeners the equivalent of a roller­ coaster ride: an experience hooking and compelling the listener into an adrenaline-charged world that could be thrilling and occasionally chilling, always escapist and yet never sugar-coated. Earlier, we saw Michael Dirda’s

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definition of Carr’s fiction as ‘carnival fun house’, which is an apt term for much of horror radio as a whole. Although Suspense evidently builds on the format, style and repertoire of a range of pre-existing series, it successfully created a distinctive identity and niche which would result in nearly a thousand episodes over two decades. Suspense developed a reputation for the quality of its acting (including the big-name draws), its production values (including music by Bernard Herrmann) and its writers (including Lucille Fletcher). A significant credit is owed to another writer whose writing had an incalculably important effect in the earliest days of Suspense: John Dickson Carr. Suspense came into being after a try-out appearance on a series called Forecast in which listeners heard pilot episodes of proposed series and, if response was favourable, a commission might follow. On 22 July 1940, Forecast presented an adaptation of Marie Adelaïde Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.2 This was the first time Hitchcock directed a radio play, but the success of the production led to Suspense being launched by CBS, albeit just short of two years later (June 1942). According to Martin Grams Jr., Suspense was intended to be ‘a short-run mystery series’ and its success surprised everyone involved in it (Grams, 1997: 5). It is worth noting that Suspense launched just one month after another CBS series, The Whistler. This was a thirty-minute drama series which would also enjoy great success, running from 16 May 1942 until 8 September 1955. The eponymous character of The Whistler was a man who told the listeners tales of crime, and in addition to framing the play as a host would frequently step into the stories himself to challenge or goad the criminal at the centre of a tale. In the words of John Dunning, the Whistler ‘was a voice of fate, baiting the guilty with his smiling malevolence’ (Dunning, 1998: 720). There are broad parallels between Suspense and The Whistler, although the latter show was consistently a crime show with an underpinning moral message that can be summed up as ‘crime does not pay’. The first official episode of Suspense – ‘The Burning Court’ (17 June 1942) – was Harold Medford’s adaptation of Carr’s 1937 novel of the same title. Interestingly, this locked-room murder mystery is Carr at his most supernatural, with the twist in the conclusion that the murders have involved the ghost of a woman burnt for witchcraft reaping revenge on the family that wronged her. A few months later, in October 1942, Carr himself begins to write plays for Suspense, starting with eleven consecutive episodes (an achievement unparalleled by any other Suspense writer) between October and January 1943 and then several others after that interspersed amongst the work of other writers. The experience of writing plays for the BBC was obviously beneficial for Carr. In discussing ‘The Lord of the Witchdoctors’ (27 October 1942), Martin Grams Jr. explains: [Carr’s] premiere story was ‘The Lord of the Witchdoctors,’ which was originally heard on the BBC, where many of Carr’s scripts came from. He found it easy to adapt his previous BBC dramas for the new mystery

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program, and this provided him time to write a few originals. (Grams, 1997: 15)

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The following week, Carr’s second script for Suspense, ‘The Devil in the Summer House’ (3 November 1942), was broadcast. This too was an adaptation of a radio play he had written for the BBC, which was broadcast on 14 October 1940. As Grams explains: The second episode written by Carr, ‘The Devil in the Summer House,’ also came from a BBC radio script. When adapting the story for Suspense, he shortened the running length from sixty to thirty minutes, the original title was ‘The Devil in the Summer House, a Problem in Detection,’ which he shortened as well. (Grams, 1997: 15)

The slot that Suspense occupied in the schedules (a thirty-minute slot at 9.30 pm during this phase of its run) demanded the radical shortening of the play, but this enforced concision enhanced the work. The thirty-minute form is a classic for radio drama, and as William Nadel remarks, the ‘anthology series was (ideal) for presenting the great crime and mystery classics in abridged half hour form’ and he contends that Suspense was ‘the finest of all’. (Nadel, 1999: 370).

Appointment with Fear With the efforts of the team behind Suspense, including Carr, the series rapidly consolidated its primetime evening slot and its success was unequivocal. Of course, the Second World War still raged, and Carr had not forgotten his attachment to Britain. The success of Suspense inspires Carr to propose one of the most fascinating initiatives in the history of popular culture during the Second World War: he suggests that the BBC uses some of his Suspense scripts in order to produce its own Suspense-style show and thus creates Appointment with Fear. In fact, the manoeuvre was not difficult to execute, even though it would not be, in the first instance, financially beneficial to Carr, as Douglas Greene explains: ‘CBS and the BBC had a working arrangement by which they could use each other’s scripts without payment, a situation that, as Carr remarked, “pleases everybody except the author.”’ (Greene, 1995: 286). The first play in the series was ‘Cabin B-13’ broadcast by the BBC on 11 September 1943, some fifteen months after Suspense’s official launch on CBS with ‘The Burning Court’. In his personal account of British radio drama, Val Gielgud reveals: Appointment with Fear owed everything to its creator and author, John Dickson Carr. [… He] suggested that there might be a place in English programmes for a series of thrillers handled in the American manner, with all the trimmings of atmospheric bass-voiced narrator, knife-chords and other specially composed musical effects, and a regular length of half an hour timed to the split second. (Gielgud, 1957: 103–104)

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Many of the scripts for Appointment with Fear are simply recycled from Suspense. Yet to describe them as ‘simply recycled’ is a somewhat misleading phrase and a comparative appraisal of Appointment with Fear and Suspense provides a remarkable if not unique case study that is revelatory about transatlantic cultural exchange, adaptation and performance practice in the 1940s, not least, as we shall see later, with the use of a character-host. After all, the ultra-prolific Carr produced many original plays for radio, but he is also a complex figure in adaptation inasmuch as he often reused not just the characters, themes and motifs but also the titles or entire plots of preexisting examples of his own fiction. Carr wrote all the scripts for the first five series of Appointment with Fear (over forty broadcasts), consisting of original radio plays and adaptations of his own – and occasionally other writers’ – fiction. To explain in more detail, the eleven episodes of the first series of Appointment with Fear were all original Carr stories with the exception of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (18 September 1943) by Carr’s early influence Edgar Allan Poe and dramatised by Carr himself. A significant number of the plays were reused Suspense scripts. To tabulate this transatlantic genealogy can also reveal the nature of the Appointment with Fear universe. •

• •

•

•

‘Cabin B-13’ (11 September 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 16 March 1943, in which the man in a newlywed couple disappears without trace from a cruise liner. On investigation, the wife finds that even their cabin has disappeared. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (18 September 1943) broadcast on Suspense on 12 January 1943, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story. ‘The Body Snatchers’ (30 September 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 24 November 1942, is an historical drama set in the nineteenthcentury world of Burke and Hare, grave-robbing and murder. This gruesome historical phenomenon is a significant dramatic subgenre in its own right, and James Bridie’s stage play The Anatomist (1930) will be adapted by the BBC into a seventy-five minute radio play starring Alistair Sim on 13 May 1944, shortly after Carr’s Suspense/ Appointment with Fear versions. ‘The Customers like Murder’ (7 October 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 23 March 1943, is a rather playful story in which a thriller writer and his secretary are held at gunpoint in a case of mistaken identity. The writer and his assistant use their knowledge of the crime genre and its clichés to turn the tables on the criminals. The play is an ironic reflection on genre, even meta-theatrical in places. ‘Will You Make a Bet with Death?’ (14 October 1943) was first performed on Suspense on 10 November 1942. In this play, evocatively framed in a funfair a few years before the similarly effective opening of Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947), we learn that a

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•

•

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devious uncle made a bet with his nephew that he would kill him within six months. When the period of time comes to an end, the nephew starts to lose his mind in anxiety and his redemption is a typical Carr plot twist. In ‘The Devil’s Saint’ (21 October 1943), first broadcast on Suspense starring Peter Lorre on 19 January 1943, a man falls in love with an aristocrat’s daughter. Her father seems oppressive but the young man comes to discover, just in time, that it is to protect him from this dangerous young woman. ‘Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble’ (28 October 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 6 April 1943, is a whodunit evocatively set in a theatre in which a female member of the audience is murdered during a performance of Macbeth. The victim is stabbed through the eye and it seems as if it is a supernatural effect of the ‘Scottish play’. In fact, the cause is very much a Carr contraption – booby-trapped opera glasses – but the stepping back and forth between a heightened 1940s production of Macbeth and the murder mystery works very effectively. ‘The Phantom Archer’ (4 November 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 9 March 1943, is a classic example of a locked-room mystery featuring the murder of a woman alone in a room with a statue that held an arrow. ‘Menace in Wax’ (18 November 1943), broadcast on Suspense on 17 November 1942, is significant for being set in the direct context of the Second World War. The play has uncanny beginning, with strange occurrences at a waxwork museum in London whereby one of the mannequins is unaccountably holding different playing cards each night. Two journalists solve the mystery when they work out that it is a code planted by German spies in relation to bombing raids on London.

As we can see from this selection of the repertoire, the opening series of Appointment with Fear was very much about suspense and mystery. Plays like ‘The Phantom Archer’, ‘Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble’ and ‘Menace in Wax’ may establish the seemingly supernatural, but they proceed to give a rational explanation. Other works in that first series can be seen as belonging to the Edgar Allan Poe tradition: the Gothic worlds of ‘The Devil’s Saint’, the heightened historical-macabre of ‘The Body Snatchers’ and, most emphatically, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, which we will look at in detail in due course. ‘Cabin B-13’ was the very first episode of Appointment with Fear, and although no recording is extant the surviving BBC script can be compared to the recording of the March 1943 Suspense broadcast. Carr deliberately chose ‘Cabin B-13’ as he felt it was his best Suspense play and would be an effective opening for this British series in the American style. Carr’s partic-

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ular fondness for the work is also reflected in the fact that, back in the USA, he later created an entire radio series for CBS called Cabin B-13 (1948–49), which featured a narrator-host called Dr Fabian (Albert Moss/Alan Hewitt), a ship’s doctor who told – and occasionally solved – mystery stories as the ship cruised the ocean (Dunning, 1998: 130). Carr’s original play ‘Cabin B-13’ is in the tradition of the ‘disappearance’ thriller.3 In rewriting the play for a British audience, Carr makes several minor changes to the language, but also implements some changes which arguably alter the ‘feel’ of the play. For example, let us compare a dialogue exchange between Dr Heinrich and Second Officer Mr Marshall: heinrich: Take a good look at this young lady and tell me, have you seen her before? mr marshall: Seen her before? Haha, well my dear chap, if I had overlooked, er, the young lady will pardon me I know, a passenger as charming as this lady is I would be less of the gentleman than I think of myself. 

(Transcript from broadcast recording of Suspense)

heinrich: Take a good look at this young lady. Have you seen her before? mr marshall: [surprised]: Seen her before? As a bloke once said to me at a pub in New York, I should hope to kiss a pig I have! Any passenger as pretty as that gets special attention from the old Marshall eye. 

(From broadcast script of Appointment with Fear)

The British version is more colloquial and more menacing, with a predatory rather than charming crew member. At the end of the play, when the villain falls to his death off the ocean liner, we have this difference: anne: The propellers! The ship’s propellers! heinrich: Yes, they suck you under. [Suspense] anne: The propellers! The ship’s propellers! heinrich: They have very sharp blades, Miss Thornton. (Appointment with Fear)

The fate of the villain is clear in either version – death – but the British version is perhaps rather more sadistic and gruesome with the victim being minced. Carr may have introduced subtle changes like this, but he also found a greater liberty at the BBC. Douglas G. Greene reveals that Carr ‘found some of CBS’s requirements irksome. Above all he objected to the network’s fear of offending certain ethnic groups’ (Carr, 1983: 7), which restricted the nationality of his villains: British, American or German for a villain was fine, but any other nationality was forbidden as it might risk offence to ethnic communities. Greene argues that the extant recordings of Appointment with Fear

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reveal that ‘Gielgud had indeed mastered American radio drama. All the atmospheric sound effects, the knife-chords to emphasize moments of suspense, and the split-second timing are present’ (Greene, 1995: 286). The programmes’ rehearsals certainly adhered to a similar pattern. US writerproducer David Kogan recounts the typical practice during the heyday of live American radio drama: On the day of broadcast, the cast and I would gather around a table in the studio. We would read through the script. After this we would have a first-time read through on microphone with myself and the engineer in the control booth. After this, there would be a second run-through with sound and music with numerous pauses for level settings, sound balance and directorial notes on interpretation. After a short break, the announcer would arrive and we would do a complete dress rehearsal. (Hand, 2006a: 2)

Extant BBC documents (including notes on broadcast scripts) reveal a similar pattern for rehearsal schedules. For example, on Thursday 28 October 1943, ‘Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble’ had a read-through from 10.30 am until 1.00 pm, and rehearsals from 2.30 pm onwards, culminating in the live broadcast from 9.40–10.10 pm. Plays like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (13 January 1943) and the revival of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (4 May 1944) had slightly shorter read-throughs, from 11.00 am to 1.00 pm, but otherwise adhered to an identical schedule. A key difference between the performance practice of Suspense and Appointment with Fear is in regard to music. On Suspense, as in much of the American radio industry of the time, music was immensely important to the identity and output of dramatic broadcasting. In the USA, it was not until after the Second World War that music was pre-recorded. In the case of Suspense, in its early years some of the music was composed and conducted by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked closely with Orson Welles in the Mercury Theater on the Air series and would become one of the most celebrated composers of film music, producing scores for works as diverse in epoch and style as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976). In contrast to the live music aesthetic of American radio, the BBC opted to pre-record the music for Appointment with Fear. From 1925 to 1931, Walter Goehr was a composer and conductor for Radio Berlin, but, with the rise of the Nazis, he emigrated to the UK in 1933 and became known professionally as ‘George Walter’ and worked as a conductor for orchestral recordings and live concerts including, from 1945 to 1948, the BBC Theatre Orchestra. A BBC memorandum (22 July 1943) states that Goehr has been commissioned to record ‘signature tune, interlude, and finale’ for Appointment with Fear for a fee of £150, and the recording will be used in each episode. A further memorandum (5 August 1943) suggests that the opening and closing should be two minutes

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maximum, and approximately twelve ‘Incidental Mood’ flashes should be around fifteen seconds each. In December 1943 Goehr was re-commissioned to compose and record some new tracks.4 ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ It is very disappointing that the vast majority of Appointment with Fear episodes were not recorded. However, we are fortunate that we do have a recording of the September 1943 ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ on Appointment with Fear, as well as all the versions of the same play broadcast on Suspense. Here are all the broadcasts of John Dickson Carr’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ adaptation on Suspense and Appointment with Fear: • • • • • •

Suspense ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (12 January 1943) starring Henry Hull Appointment with Fear  ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (18 September 1943) starring Marius Goring Appointment with Fear  ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (4 May 1944) starring Marius Goring Suspense  ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (28 November 1947) starring Jose Ferrer Suspense  ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (10 November 1957) starring Vincent Price Suspense ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (7 June 1959) starring Raymond Burr

The number of broadcasts of the play reveals the success and popularity of the work. Although the versions all adhere to Carr’s script, it is interesting to see how the work subtly evolves over the years. For instance, Poe makes no direct reference to Napoleon Bonaparte (although the French historical figure General Lasalle is mentioned) in his story of the Spanish Inquisition, and neither does he name the protagonist of this intense, first-person account of torture. Carr fleshes out the historical context in his adaptation, naming the French officer as ‘D’Albret’ and detailing the inquisitors’ interrogation of this ‘soldier and creature of the arch-fiend, Napoleon Bonaparte!’ This key line is replicated in each version, but by the time of the Vincent Price and Raymond Burr versions in the 1950s, the line has become a more heightened ‘soldier and creature of the arch-fiend, the anti-Christ Napoleon Bonaparte!’ In Poe’s tale, we have a visceral account of the victim in the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, the story beginning with him being condemned to death and collapsing. Soon afterwards, the narrator awakes, and we very gradually learn, as he does, that he is strapped in a torture chamber at the mercy of the pendulum, the swinging blade that excruciatingly lowers itself down to its victim. Carr’s adaptation of Poe makes a major addition: Beatrice, the wife of D’Albret. In 1943 the role was played by Sehri Saklatvala and in the 1944

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revival by Lucille Lisle. This decision is not just a romantic component, compelling D’Albret’s desperation to survive. It also permits dialogic exposition. Beatrice appears as a self-conscious illusion and D’Albret engages her in dialogue to describe the experience and the surroundings. The device creates a fantasy world for D’Albret, emphasising the desperate nature of his situation. Technically, Carr’s decision also permits a shift away from the risk of being trapped in monologue or over-narration. For example, let us compare a sequence from the story and the adaptive equivalent: A slight noise attracted my notice, and, looking to the floor, I saw several enormous rats traversing it. They had issued from the well, which lay just within view to my right. Even then, while I gazed, they came up in troops, hurriedly, with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat. From this it required much effort and attention to scare them away. (Poe, 1979: 90)

In the play script – and broadcasts – this becomes: d’albret: Take care of the rats. The rats from the pit! [A scampering and scratching noise, which continues] beatrice: I see them! d’albret: They’re swarming out in dozens! You can see their eyes glitter! One of them ran across the hem of your dress! beatrice: Did it, Jean? d’albret: What do they want? beatrice: They have caught the scent of the meat in the dish beside you. d’albret: But they’ll not get it. Scat, you vermin!

In the performances, Beatrice, as a self-aware fantasy, is detached but not dispassionate while we hear D’Albret’s increasing desperation. The to-andfro between the characters, their dialogue developing the exposition of the play, creates a vivid sense of the setting and situation, made all the more effective with the third ‘character’ in the dénouement, the swishing pendulum, a tremendously powerful and focal sound effect. According to Douglas Greene, Carr was passionately involved in the BBC production of the play, including its key sound effect: He took a boyish delight in trying to get the proper sound for the pendulum, which during the last part of the play sweeps closer and closer to the helpless victim. Carr wrote to [his friend the writer and editor Frederic] Dannay that ‘a conscientious soundman had nearly worn himself out swinging a damned golf-club in front of a microphone, hoping to get the proper whush. But we shall have to use the air-hose after all.’ (Greene, 1995: 286)

The sound effect evidently works in what was a widely heard, but not uncontroversial, play. Indeed, it may have only been the second Appointment with Fear play, but listeners were eager to complain. The Radio Times publishes a letter from a very distressed listener in Maldon, Essex:

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I have always thought that the author of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ story had a streak of fiendish sadism, and I have known of some sensitive people who have physically suffered by reason of reading his work. I think that the recent broadcast is on a par with horrors that might be perpetrated by the Nazi régime, or certainly – perhaps more so – by the Japanese. Not the British. Its effect on an imaginative, sensitive person might be disastrous. (8 October 1943)

It is interesting that this listener cannot divorce the play from the context of the on-going war. This is ironic given that Appointment with Fear was presented as something ‘escapist’, a half-hour respite from the grim ‘real’ world. A month before this angry letter, John Dickson Carr wrote an article titled ‘It’s a Dare’ in the Radio Times promoting the forthcoming series: Now these plays are, frankly, forms of escapism. The present war is seldom or never mentioned; the action takes place against a peacetime security. That, we felt, is the only atmosphere in which a listener can bother about being scared by shadows. (3 September 1943)

In other words, Appointment with Fear is a once-weekly cathartic thrill in a world of daily, all-too-real horrors, even if the listener from Essex would beg to differ. Interestingly, there were soon to be exceptions to Carr’s principle. His aforementioned play ‘Menace in Wax’ (18 November 1943), is set in London’s Madame Tussauds waxworks museum in the context of the war and concludes with a long, dramatic sequence during a bombing raid that includes close blasts and attacks:

suzy: [loud] Bert! One of the Junkers is hit! He burn like a neon light – [Thin distant whistle of bomb] rogers: He’s unloading his bombs. Keep your head down! [Closer bomb] suzy: I want to see … rogers: Put your arms over your face! If the glass in this windscreen flies … suzy: I scrunch down! I do the best I can! rogers: Get ready, Susie, here they come. [The whush of one still closer. Car stops. Pause] suzy: [in a small voice] I … I don’t feel hurt. rogers: You’re not hurt. This is a dirt road. The bomb sank too deeply before it exploded, and we didn’t catch the blast. But McAllister … you’d better not look. [Slight pause] suzy: A Nazi bomb? rogers: Yes, Susie. A Nazi bomb. He’ll never strike that match now. [Rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire, plane noises fading into music and …] man in black: That is the end of the story ‘Menace in Wax’.

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Although the Blitz may have been over by now, the war still raged and this vivid play about German espionage in Britain and the real-world horror of bomb raids cannot be seen as escapist. Indeed, as time progressed, numerous episodes of Appointment with Fear were about the war, especially paranoid plots about undercover Nazi spies who infiltrate British society or masquerade as Englishmen. Sometimes the plays are set in peacetime days but suggest the approaching conflict. For instance, in ‘The Room of the Suicides’ (20 January 1944) the ‘gruff, hearty … opinionated but essentially friendly’ Major Boyce on a pre-war holiday in Switzerland turns out to be a German agent who wants to kill a Swiss scientist helping the British develop ‘radiolocation’ (this was changed on the day of broadcast, as the extant script reveals, to ‘the jet propelled plane’). The wicked spy ‘Boyce’ attempts to make it look like an accident (to avoid an international incident) by causing an avalanche but kills himself in the process. ‘The Room of the Suicides’ finds the roots of conflict – and dastardly Germans – in pre-war Europe, and just as this play uses the past in a play about the anxieties of the present, other examples of BBC drama output at this time are similarly non-escapist, certainly when aiming at a non-UK audience. Peter Sutherland’s Black Out was produced by Peter Watts, recorded in February 1944 and broadcast on the BBC North American Service, African Service and Pacific Service the following month. The announcer describes it as ‘a radio picture of London in wartime’ (on the extant script, the word ‘picture’ replaces ‘cartoon’ which was presumably deemed too light in tone, despite the importance of humour in the subsequent half-hour). This piece was aimed specifically at the Allies (above all the Americans) with a propaganda function. It may remind us of US broadcaster Ed Murrow’s vivid – and courageous – eyewitness accounts of the London Blitz broadcast to his home audience or celebrated propaganda films such as London Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt, 1940), about the Blitz on London, which the Ministry of Information commissioned with an eye on audiences in the USA (not yet involved in the war, of course). Just as London Can Take It! makes a shrewd decision in focusing on the ordinary people of London and their day-to-day existence in the face of adversity, Black Out creates a canvas of everyday life and characters in London. By now, the USA was centrally involved in the war (this broadcast was a little over two months before D-Day in June 1944), but Black Out endeavours to create a vivid picture of the realities of a night in wartime London. The Narrator talks to the listener personally, establishing an intimate relationship accompanying us on a walk through London: narrator: Of course, you won’t have seen our London blackout yet. Well, you might almost say you don’t know what real darkness is! Look – if you’ll come out with me, I’ll show you what I mean. Got your overcoat? Good. effects (spot): [door handle]

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narrator: [shouting] Steady! What a minute; don’t open the front door yet! I must put this hall light out first … it shows right into the street. effects (spot): [Click] narrator: That’s better. I forgot you weren’t used to our blackout regulations. [Going] All right, open the door now. effects: [Door opens. Slight traffic. Motor horn]

As befits the original ‘cartoon’ intention excised from the production script, the script has frequent comic moments. For example, the Narrator leads the listener down the London street: They advise us to wait on the doorstep, after we come out of the light, and shut our eyes and count to ten before we move. As you’re new here, you’d better do it, or you’ll bump into people. [Going] Of course, I’m used to it, I … [Bump] Oh, I’m sorry, sir … I really do beg your pardon. Are you all right? It’s this awful blackout.

It is a moment of slapstick comedy and a playful undermining of the Narrator’s authority, but it also has a serious message: no one should be blasé about blackout regulations. The play also paints an interesting picture of the eccentricity of the times, how the war has changed the way of life (‘shops close at 4.0 p.m. in the winter … even at Christmas time’) and led to entrepreneurial opportunism (salesman characters peddle luminous buttons and umbrellas with illuminated handles which require black-market torch batteries). The play captures the pitch darkness of wartime Britain which, in contrast to A Comedy of Danger, is not driven by suspense and menace but a wide array of quirky characters and the irony of the bizarre circumstances people have become used to living in. In keeping with the ‘upbeat’ mood in the face of adversity that proved so successful with a propaganda film like London Can Take It!, Blackout concludes with sincere optimism: Yes, but in spite of it all, we get along all right. Some of us loathe it, some of us don’t mind so much. But there’s one thing we’re all agreed on: the night this war ends, we’ll all open those curtains wide, and make bonfires of the screens, and the glow from London will be visible again in the sky from fifty miles away!

But even the playfulness and optimism is compelled by the sense of darkness. In fact, it is interesting that towards the end of the play and the life-affirming sentiment of its conclusion, the value and presence of light is emphasised. There is a lyrical speech – the longest in the play – which paints a vivid picture of glimmers, glimpses and flashes: Well, that’s our London blackout … not completely dark … there’s the faint glow of the starlighting … here and there a blue light that means Air Raid Shelter … the coloured traffic lights, that look so alarmingly bright till you realise that they’re screened so as to be invisible from the air. Then there are the headlamps of the cars … though there isn’t much traffic these days …

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they suddenly shine into your eyes as you get level with their hoods; there’s the flicker of little hand-torches, and here and there, the splutter and flare of a lighted match …

The celebration of light extends into a final joke: one voice emerging out of the (not so very) dark is a burglar who complains that he has to find legitimate work now that there is so much light; 1939 was pitch black compared to this so-called blackout. To return to Appointment with Fear, if some listeners were upset by the output of the programme, others were delighted. In adhering to a principle of balance, the Radio Times offsets the opinions of the listener who likened Appointment with Fear to German-Japanese atrocities by publishing another letter, from ‘Eighteen-year-old’ in Manchester, who declares: After listening to the second of the series ‘Appointment with Fear’ all I can say is, why didn’t somebody think of the idea before? Marius Goring absolutely made my flesh creep with the horror he managed to communicate through his voice. I shall definitely keep my ‘Appointment with Fear’. (8 October 1943)

The British actor Marius Goring was a versatile stage and radio actor who would be famous for his film roles in A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946) and The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948). His fluency in French and German made him valued by the BBC during the Second World War. The recording of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ reveals Goring as being able to deliver radio performances as intense as those of any of his American counterparts. The voice actor is the most obvious ‘component’ in a work of audio drama, and it is a form that permits a focus on endeavour, which can make it extremely pleasurable for a performer. As Jack Bowman explains: Well, any actor will tell you the joys of audio work is that you don’t have to learn your lines which allows you, as an actor, to simply concentrate on performing vocally to the microphone and listening to your fellow actors in a scene. It’s a joy; just listen, respond, react and read – fluffs are minimal which allows dialogue to flow incredibly naturally. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

For the actor Richard Holt, audio drama gives the performer a curious kind of freedom: The main strength for an actor is the feeling that you are somehow protected from the audience and so you’re free to be bold with your choices. I tend to liken it to wearing a mask – you feel that nobody knows who’s under here so I can do anything. (Richard Holt, 2011)

At the same time, regardless of an actor’s ability, effective casting is all important in this most time-economic mode of performance. As Marty Ross asserts: I’ve been in no doubt since my first BBC production that good casting is

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almost the most important factor when it comes to getting good performances, especially in radio where the actors simply don’t have weeks’ worth of rehearsal in which they can grow into parts they perhaps weren’t ideally suited to in the first place. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Even if radio acting is pleasurable and casting-dependent, it still requires particular skills, and often actors more experienced in screen or stage acting can find it a difficult form to master. A key aspect to this is microphone position: if an actor moves from the optimum position in relation to the microphone it will sound like they are moving a great distance away. At the same time as maintaining a constant distance or, if moving, being aware of the effect of this, the actor needs to be ‘physical’. In other words, while newsreaders and announcers may wish to sound in stasis, an actor portraying an active person in a real-life situation needs to introduce dynamism to their vocal performance. In a 1940s practical handbook for the American radio industry, Waldo Abbot stresses that the ‘physical exertion of acting for the radio is just as great as that expended by the stage actor’ (Abbot, 1941: 157). Abbot’s handbook was pioneering – radio drama was still fairly new in the early 1940s – but the challenge of audio acting continues to the present day. Carl Amari, the producer behind The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas (2002 onwards) and Fangoria’s Dreadtime Stories (2011 onwards), has secured high-profile actors from cinema and television to act in the audio dramas. He reveals that although many actors like the idea of doing audio performance, they do not always find it easy: A lot of actors love the challenge of creating a character with just their voice. But it’s not easy to do. It really isn’t. A lot of actors rely on their physicality and with audio drama you do not have physicality, you only have your vocal talent. Some actors find it very difficult to create a character and convey emotion with just their voices. (Carl Amari, 2012)

Back in the 1940s, when he began directing some Appointment with Fear plays himself, John Dickson Carr found himself frustrated by the actors’ inability to understand how he intended the dialogue to be delivered, as a letter from July 1944 reveals: What you want to say, through clenched teeth, is this: ‘Listen. Couldn’t a little golden-haired child understand THAT THAT LINE IS TO BE DELIVERED LIKE THIS? HAVEN’T YOU GOT ANY BRAINS AT ALL IN YOUR ENTIRE GOD-DAMNED HEAD?’ Instead you say, ‘Now just try it again, old man. Try it again.’ All the same, I wouldn’t have any other work. (Quoted in Greene, 1995: 233–234)

The success – and controversy – of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ would encourage Carr to return to Poe in the next series with ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (13 January 1944).

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‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ Carr’s adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ was uniquely written for Appointment with Fear. Even if Suspense never broadcast a version of this story, it was a particular favourite elsewhere on American radio. As Jim Harmon argues, although it was decades before the technology was even invented, in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ Poe wrote ‘a beautiful radio script’ (Harmon, 1967: 75). In the same spirit, sound artist Gregory Whitehead asserts: I have always thought of Poe as America’s first radio artist, in theme, certainly, but also in style and in thought, the way so many narratives drop off into dark holes, and never really recover, or the characters who speak quite calmly and naturally and then the reader finds out they are post­humous, or the voices that drift in from other worlds, invisible and unnamed. (Whitehead, 1999)

A radio version of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ had appeared on Inner Sanctum Mysteries (3 August 1941) written by Robert Newman as a vehicle for Boris Karloff who, in January 1938, had caused controversy when he read out a vivid adaptation of the story on the Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show (Hand, 2006a: 51). Other readings of the short story would include, on BBC radio, versions by Michael MacLiammoir (11 March 1959) and James Stewart (28 September 1973). Dramatic adaptations of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ also appeared on The Weird Circle (18 December 1943); Mystery in the Air (3 July 1947), performed by Peter Lorre; The Hall of Fantasy (1 June 1953); the CBS Radio Mystery Theater (11 January 1975); and CBC’s Nightfall (1 August 1980). These versions vary in approach, some adhering closely to Poe’s narrative, others far more radical in presentation. Carr’s adaptation for Appointment with Fear is an example of the latter. Although there is no extant recording, a script used in the broadcast has survived. Carr’s play begins with a substantial monologue drawing precisely on Poe’s original. Here is Poe’s opening: TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? (Poe, 1979: 17)

Here is Carr’s radio play: blaydon: True! Nervous! Very, dreadfully nervous I had been and am. But why will they say I am mad? [Slight pause] This disease has sharpened my senses; not dulled them. Above all … this is what I must tell you … my sense of hearing is acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I hear many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?

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It is a subtle revision with a view to optimising the work for live radio performance: Carr trims some of the lines, changes the tense and adds punctuation for the sake of the performer. Poe opens his third paragraph with ‘You fancy me mad’ and Carr extrapolates this into narrative that implicates and draws the listener into the story: ‘You fancy me mad. Oh, yes you do! You shake your head, and you look at me over your spectacles; but there’s doubt at the corner of your eyes. And yet … except for this thing that follows me…’ It moulds the listener, fixing us with a sentiment of doubt but also giving us spectacles. The precision develops further: Look at the calendar on your desk! February 12th, 1898. Do you remember where you were last September 10th? I’ll tell you. You were at Aunt Clara’s place in the country: my house now. Do you remember the green lawns, and the oak-trees, and the croquet ground? But it’s always dark inside that house. I was waiting for you in the downstairs hall, by the staircase. There’s a coloured-glass window on the landing, and it turns red like blood when the sun strikes it. I remember you coming downstairs against that red-lit window, buttoned up in your black frockcoat, with a top-hat in one hand a medicine-case in the other.

Carr creates a strong sense of place, using reference to colour merging with darkness: a Gothic red, black and obscurity. Carr also decides to use a very precise date, placing the tale after Poe but neatly in the era of Dracula (1897) and Turn of the Screw (1898). Along with this precision comes the detail of character: the listener is a doctor, ‘Dr Forrest’. After this, the play flashes back to 10 September 1897 and the story unravels. Dr Forrest warns Blaydon about his aunt’s health: how she must avoid alcohol, intense heat and confined spaces. Attention is drawn to the attic – mapping out again for the listener this Gothic house. The fact that Aunt Clara – a former actress in the theatre – likes to look through her memorabilia in the attic is risky: forrest: She’s walking into a death-trap, my boy. blaydon: [sharply] A death-trap? How? forrest: A timbered attic? Old, dry wood under a metal roof? Have you any idea of the heat generated up there by the effect of the sun on the roof? Look at the sun on that window now! blaydon: I see it. Red as blood. Yes.

The death of the aunt is being signposted, and more precisely, the way to kill the aunt is being signposted. The blood-red light and death-trap attic are an evocation of the stark mood of the play, almost Symbolistic or Expressionistic. Interestingly, the script offers directorial advice. When Sylvia appears, Carr includes this description: Sylvia Brent is about twenty-five, with a pleasant voice. Her manner, on the surface, is a little reserved. Don’t play her as unsympathetic; her intentions, unfortunately, are good.

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We have learnt that Blaydon appointed Sylvia to be his aunt’s companion. The very first exchange of dialogue between Blaydon and Sylvia reveals a conflict of agenda: sylvia: Did you call, Mr. Blaydon? blaydon: Yes. Come here. sylvia: [fading up] Just as you like, Mr. Blaydon. blaydon: Come closer! [under his breath, changing tone] Now give me a kiss. sylvia: [changing tone] I daren’t! It’s too dangerous! blaydon: [under his breath] Give me a kiss, damn you! [Slight pause] sylvia: Eric! Let me go! You’re hurting my arms! blaydon: I want to hurt your arms. I want to hurt you. I want to make you love me. [suddenly] Why are you laughing at me? sylvia: [sincerely] I wasn’t laughing at you! Truly I wasn’t! blaydon: Oh, yes, you were. Everybody does.

Sexual menace and harassment turn into ridicule and humiliation. The play is fast-moving and intense: a horror tale underpinned with sexual desire, menace and humiliation, a precursor to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater version in the mid-1970s which will make the protagonist’s (Fred Gwynne) uncle a sexual pest, preying on his nephew’s wife. Despite Blaydon’s actions, Sylvia describes him as ‘awfully nice’ but ‘such a child’. Immediately after the encounter with Sylvia, Blaydon takes us to see the other woman in his life: Aunt Clara. Carr gives us a description of the characters, once again succinct yet highly instructive for the director and performers. The actors are informed that Blaydon’s ‘manner is on edge, but of an arch and jocose gallantry’. This is the first time we will meet Aunt Clara, and the sixty-five year old lady is described as having a ‘strong voice, yet pleasant and not aggressive’. Significantly, Carr emphasises ‘There is nothing of the tyrant about her’. It is evident that Clara will be the victim and clearly Carr does not want to make this easy for the listener. Appointment with Fear belongs to the tradition of the melodramatic thriller, yet Carr does not want to make this narrative less disturbing with the mechanism of a tyrannical and thus ‘deserving’ victim. Indeed, far from being a dominating tyrant, our first encounter with Blaydon and his aunt together reveals a relationship that is surprising in its playfulness, even childishness: blaydon: Now, now! Mustn’t tell fibs! clara: It’s true, Eric! And I’m in ever such a good humour. [gleefully] I’ve just played a trick on Dr. Forrest! blaydon: [a little scandalised] A joke? On Dr. Forrest! How? clara: [laughs] He left his stethoscope behind. And I hid it.

It is no surprise that the stethoscope will become the all-important prop in this version of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, but how it is brought into the plot is surprising – if not disturbing – for its erotic register:

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Listen in terror blaydon: […] What on earth do you want with the doctor’s stethoscope? clara: [quiet] Come here, Eric. Come closer. blaydon: Yes, Aunt Clara? clara: I want you to hear my heart beating. [pause: more quickly] Yes! I do want that! Take the stethoscope, Eric! And indulge an old woman. Put the ends of it to your ears. There! Now I put the other end just over my heart, and … [The sound of the heart, rather heavy and drum-like, goes on for a second or two] clara: What’s wrong? Why do you jump back? blaydon: I don’t like it. It … worries me. clara: [fervently] That’s my heart beating, Eric. It beats for you.

It seems that Clara is as predatory towards Blaydon as Blaydon is towards Sylvia. This dark house that glows blood-red on the occasions the sunlight catches the window is oppressive with frustrated desire. The world Carr creates here is not dissimilar to Emlyn Williams’s play Night Must Fall (1935) and the complex, three-way relationship between the bullying Mrs Bramson, her subservient niece Olivia and the opportunistic and lethal Dan. Carr’s play, in its tortured, vicious circle of desire, is also like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944).5 It becomes clear, however, that Clara’s desire has a maternal dimension: ‘You won’t leave me until I die? I’ve been afraid of that. If ever I lost my little boy …’ Blaydon’s fury is sparked: ‘Why must everyone call me their little boy?’. Clara demands to know who else, concluding with scorn that it must be ‘Some girl’. Blaydon knows how to provoke his aunt and does so through issues of desire. He claims that Dr Forrest believes that in her heyday Clara was not as beautiful as her contemporary in the theatre, Ada Isaacs Menken.6 Incensed, Aunt Clara decides to show Blaydon a particular batch of photographs – suggestively hidden away in the dark and dangerous loft – that will prove who was more beautiful: Clara or ‘That trollop’. After a moment’s anxiety, Blaydon encourages his aunt to unearth the photographs. He also takes advantage of the situation, ‘while we’re all alone’, to ask her what she would do if he ‘had fallen in love with someone’. Clara replies: ‘I shouldn’t allow it, do you hear? (voice rising) If it took my last penny and my last breath of life, I shouldn’t allow it!’. After this, Carr creates a meticulously crafted and efficient sequence: laydon: [softly] Come on, Aunt Clara. Only five more steps to the top. b clara: You were just joking, weren’t you? blaydon: [tenderly] Of course I was. Five more steps, now, and we’re there! clara: [rather dizzily] Can I … do you think I can manage it? blaydon: You can manage it, Aunt Clara. Here, take my arm! One step … [sounds follow] Two steps … three … four … five. And here’s the door. It’s a badly fitting door, if you remember. Scrapes the floor every time

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you push it open. But we’ll just give it a good shove, like this … [Rasping scrape of bottom of door on floor] … and open it goes. Will you go first? clara: I … I suppose this is all right. At least there’s light from the window to see by. [fading a little off] But you’d better come with me and give me your arm, because … [Long scraping noise of door being closed. Clara’s voice is now muffled, as though heard through the closed door] [alarmed] Eric! What are you doing? [Slight pause] You’ve closed this door from the outside! Eric! [Slight pause: noise of key in lock] clara: That was a key in the lock. I heard it! You’ve locked me in! Eric! [Muffled hammering of fists on door; then slight pause]

Carr creates the dimensions and sounds of the house, the five steps, the scraping door. We also acquire a visual sense of the darkness and the tiny attic window. Blaydon waits in the dark for his aunt to be stifled – adopting a Poe premature burial theme – before we are taken back closer to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ source with its sense of distorted time: blaydon: [to himself, muttering] Easy now, old man! … Keep your head … Not a sound out of that room for … Strike a match. [Match struck] Five minutes? I thought it must be half an hour. This watch has stopped! No, it hasn’t.

Blaydon cannot stop himself opening the door to check if she has died. The door screeches open and he steps in and speaks in monologue: blaydon: You’ve got to look down at her. Just one look! … the dust of the floor on her face, and her mouth open. Dead clay … Bend over and touch her, now. Touch her heart. She said it was beating for you. But it’s not beating any longer. Horribly lonely feeling when you know she won’t speak to you ever again. Horribly lonely feeling, to be out in a great silence … [In the background, the noise of the beating heart begins. It continues, growing slightly louder] [terrified] What’s that?

There is the sense of the tactile here, with Blaydon handling the dead woman’s body – the heart, of course, beneath the breast. There is something necrophilic about this encounter and his sudden melancholic – almost postcoital – reflection, a sense of existential loss before the inevitable guilt. The sound of the heartbeat is ‘like a watch muffled in cotton-wool. Like a madman on a drum’ – a description which seems contradictory – but the listener can hear what they want to hear. Most importantly, it is clear in the script that, like Blaydon, we hear the heart beating. As in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, the audience will hear a precise and unremitting sound effect. Writing in the early days of broadcasting, Filson Young describes an incident in which the BBC used a ‘rhythmic ticking signal […] to indicate that a

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pause in the programme was intentional’: I object to it just because it is rhythmic, and rhythm in this naked form is far from the peaceful and negative thing that we connect with the ideas of silence. The ticking sound, especially as slow as this, is to some people an unpleasant reminder that the seconds of their lives are beating away. […] I regard this particular signal as too reminiscent of a pulse pumping one’s life blood (which Time in a sense is) through constricted and unwilling arteries, to be at all tolerable. In my case it defeats its purpose because I have to get up and switch it off, instead of being able to enjoy the interval of silence until it is broken by the resumed programme. (Young, 1931: 257–258)

By the time of Appointment with Fear, Carr is fully exploiting the ‘unpleasant’ impact of rhythm in a ‘naked form’. To return to the script of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, Sylvia arrives and we are taken back to Clara’s body: sylvia: [beginning to realise] There’s a key outside in this door. There’s blood under her fingernails where she scraped at the door. Her face is twisted up with agony, under all the paint … blaydon: Why must the old hag paint her face? I always loathed it!

Carr returns us to the actuality of the corpse. This is the first we have heard of Clara’s heavy make-up, the fact that we learn of this after her death is a grotesque touch, emphasising her vanity and her state now as a painted corpse. Sylvia rounds on Blaydon and her accusation draws on the culinary: ‘You brought her up here. You smothered her in this oven. You were all honey and butter until …’ There is a sense of the cannibalistic and ghoulish at this moment. Later, Blydon describes giving evidence to the coroner – and his guilt becomes entwined in his language as the heart ‘thumped and thumped behind every word I said’. Here is Blaydon’s final speech: blaydon: All torture I know, of the mind and the body and the immortal soul. I know how the condemned feel, when the tramp of the jailers comes closer to their cell. I know how the damned feel, when the fire approaches their skin and the lord of the Pit is waiting. I know what it is to do murder on a body that won’t die. Help me, Dr. Forrest. She’s outside the door now!

Carr’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a fine example of radio adaptation and, arguably, is superior to some of Carr’s original scripts. The play captures a Poesque mood of sin and punishment with a hellish sense of self-torture. Blaydon is a flawed man, tangled in frustration, in a tale of criminal madness, not for material gain but out of resentment and contradictory desires. Interestingly, Carr cannot resist wrapping up the plot with a dose of the rational. Blaydon is, it is explained, suffering from a ‘form of valvular heart-disease’ in which the patient constantly hears his own heartbeat. Carr felt the need to explain the story beyond the madness in Poe. It reveals something about Carr as crime writer and the aspect of the Appointment with Fear repertoire as a

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whodunit genre. It also looks forward to the ‘rationalising explanations’ of an insane killer’s actions in films such as the ventriloquist dummy episode in the film Dead of Night (Cavalcanti et al., 1945) and Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960). Subsequent series After the first series, Carr waited to see if the BBC would commission a second series and passed the time by contributing to Here’s Wishing You Well Again, a variety show aimed at convalescing military personnel. It featured six-minute mystery and whodunit plays which Carr introduced and challenged the listener to solve for cash prizes (Greene, 1995: 287). The BBC soon commissioned a second series of Appointment with Fear, which aired in January 1944, a little over two months after the first series finished. In a much shorter run, the six plays that comprised the second series were also predominantly original plays by Carr, with the two exceptions being his radical adaptations of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (13 January 1944) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door’ (27 January 1944). Carr’s original plays for this series include ‘Dragon in the Pool’ (3 February 1944), which, despite a title that suggests fantasy, is about a seemingly inexplicable death in a swimming pool. This is later explained by a ‘long, narrow stake of glass’, invisible in water, which pierces its victim: I’ve never forgotten the look of Tony’s back-muscles when he dived on it, and the glass point ran through his stomach, and he tried to twist round and look up at us through the pink water just after the blood came out of his mouth.

This gruesome description is typical of many of Carr’s Appointment with Fear plays, giving the listeners vivid mental pictures with an explicitness unthinkable in the contemporaneous cinema and yet possible in radio, fiction and in the violent reality of the on-going war. The third series of Appointment with Fear began broadcasting in April 1944, once again two months after the previous series ended. It adhered to the now familiar pattern of writing, namely six episodes written by Carr including two adaptations: one based on Ambrose Bierce’s ‘A Watcher by the Dead’ (27 April 1944) and a revival broadcast of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (4 May 1944). The opening episode – ‘The Speaking Clock’ (13 April 1944) – was an adaptation of Suspense’s ‘Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer’ (11 May 1943). Similarly, the final episode of the series, ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ (18 May 1944), was an adaptation of Suspense’s ‘The Hangman Won’t Wait’ (9 February 1943). In this story, an amnesiac woman, Helen Barton (Grizelda Hervey), finds herself in prison. The moment she realises she is on death row is a classic moment of horror radio and is handled differently on each side of the Atlantic. In Suspense, her shock is given dramatic interpretation by music from the studio orchestra. In the British version, Grizelda Hervey releases a blood-curdling scream and then the recorded music swells

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up (Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bare Mountain’, famous as theme tune to the Suspense ‘sister’ show Escape). The fourth series was the longest thus far – twelve plays – all by Carr including the customary two dramatisations: ‘The Purple Wig’ (26 October 1944), adapted from G. K. Chesterton and ‘The Great Cipher’ (16 November 1944) after Melville Davisson Post. ‘The Great Cipher’ is perfect Carr material: the week before it was broadcast, Carr’s original play ‘The Curse of the Bronze Lamp’ (9 November 1944) was aired. This play is set in Egypt. It establishes an ancient curse which is later debunked, and The Man in Black warns us to ‘think twice when the terror-mongers whisper directly behind turnip ghosts’. With ‘The Great Cipher’ the listener is taken to the Congo in a play that establishes the tale of a dreadful monster with this sworn account: It paused for a moment after it had entered, remaining for some seconds quite motionless. In proportion to the other parts of the creature’s body, its head was enormous. That head was square in shape, and almost without features. Its limbs were long, narrow, and jointed. The whole creature was of a repulsive reddish colour. Its body seemed to be made of some hard red substance … frozen and polished flesh, after the skin had been removed …

This creature, which fills the characters was such terror, is eventually revealed to be the common red ant (the account omitting any reference to size). The following month, Carr’s ‘Lair of the Devil Fish’ (21 December 1944) plays a similar game: this sea play establishes the myth of a ‘giant octopus, with its eight moving tentacles, and its huge eyes winking in the green depths of the water’. In fact, there is a much more human – and criminal – reason as to why people have been frightened away from a horde of sunken treasure. The series concluded with ‘The Oath of Rolling Thunder’ (28 December 1944), a consciously different type of story (after all, The Man in Black has promised ‘tales … as varied as we could make them’), being set in the Wild West. The play is set in the USA of 1871, and Carr presents a nation still traumatised by ‘the bloodiest Civil War in history’ and in conflict with the ‘Indians’. The play is a sweeping epic in Hollywood style with characters such as President Ulysses Grant (Tommy Duggan) and chief Rolling Thunder (Frank Cochrane) as well as Cheyenne warriors riding across open planes on horseback and, in the dénouement, a steam train driven over a bridge on fire. The play was offered as ‘a melodrama for the Christmas season’ and was a colourful finale to the series. The six episodes of the fifth series, which commenced in September 1945 soon after the end of the Second World War, were entirely Carr’s original plays, but all of them were revivals of earlier broadcasts, mainly from the first series. It is possible that Carr was, at this time, more interested in the production side: according to Greene, by the time of this series Carr was not only the writer but had become Martyn Webster’s co-producer, although the ‘BBC decided that it would be “excessive” to mention him

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more than [being] the author’ (Greene, 1995: 288). This is possibly why in the sixth series – which followed immediately on the back of the fifth – Carr began to share the repertoire with other scriptwriters. This series was much more fluid, commencing with Carr’s Ambrose Bierce adaptation ‘He Wasn’t Superstitious’ (23 October 1945) and then two of his original works – ‘The Man With Two Heads’ (6 November 1945) and ‘The Case of the Five Canaries’ (13 November 1945) – before concluding with three plays by playwrights new to Appointment with Fear: Monckton Hoffe’s ‘And The Deep Shuddered’ (20 November 1945), John Slater and Roy Plomley’s ‘The Case’ (27 November 1945) and Robert Barr’s ‘Death at Midnight’ (4 December 1945). Slater and Plomley’s play is in many ways different from a Carr play. The play takes place with a precise attention to time; it opens stressing that it is ‘November 27th 1945. 9.30pm’, which was the actual time of broadcast. In the tale, Charles (played by co-author John Slater) steals a large piece of luggage and gets drunk at a pub before lugging the case to his apartment. The case begins to seep with blood in ‘a red frill, spreading out like one of those Japanese flowers in a glass of water’. The play ends at the moment Charles is about to force open the locks. It is not a Carr whodunit or action thriller, but rather an eerie and introspective experiential narrative that ends in ambiguity, resisting the Carr habit of tying up any loose ends. Robert Barr’s play is equally notable but for different reasons. ‘Death at Midnight’ is a direct treatment of the Second World War. In his introduction to the play, The Man in Black states: Most of our stories of terror have their beginnings in darkness – in the darkness of the dungeon or the torture chamber. This happened in a darkened street. Some of our stories had their beginnings in the darkness of the tyranny like the Spanish Inquisition. So had this – but it happened just over a year ago.

The Man in Black alludes to ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, but this is a play set in Holland about a female Nazi collaborator and the revenge meted out to her. In the play, Lala (Thea Wells) hopes she has kept her identity and activities secret, and the play culminates in this fast-paced sequence which gives The Man in Black an unusual, less distant role in describing the detailed actions of the woman: an in black: At last – the doorway. The key. Where was the key? Ah … m [Click of key and lock: door opens: her steps on floor: door closes] Upstairs – quickly. [Footsteps hurry upstairs] Now – the light. Should she? No. Yes … It would be quicker. YES. [Click of light switch] lala: [quick intake of breath] hans: [Clear, cold, slow] Good evening, Mlle. We’ve waited a

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long time for you. lala: No … NO. [She screams: shot: scream: shot: sob] man in black: That is the end of the story. Mlle Jolson … alias Hansen … that wasn’t her real name. But the crime was real enough. So was her death. She could not escape the vengeance of her own people.

The seventh series is a long run of twelve plays, only one of which involved Carr (that being a revival of his Ambrose Bierce adaptation ‘A Watcher by the Dead’ (16 April 1946)). The series mixes original plays with adaptations, affording exciting opportunities for new Appointment with Fear blood. The opening episode was ‘The Nutcracker Suite’ (26 March 1946), J. Leslie Dodd’s adaptation of Eliot Crawshay-Williams’s horror play staged at the London Grand-Guignol in 1922. In promoting the new series, Val Gielgud draws attention to the popular horror pedigree to the work when he mentions that ‘This shocker was, in its stage form, one of the repertory of plays performed in the famous Grand-Guignol season at the Little Theatre’ (Radio Times, 22 March 1946). In the play an adulterous couple are murdered by a crushing ceiling invented by a jealous husband. The radio version follows the original very closely. However, the plot is ideal for radio, and the thirty-minute radio form streamlines the script and the climactic horror works effectively as something purely aural. When the wife of the jealous husband first notices the ceiling move, Dodd’s adaptation emphasises: From this point the tempo of the production should be quickened. Rosalie’s voice should adopt a harsh, strained tone, and everything possible should be done to instil into the listeners a sense of impending horror.

Interestingly, the role of Nicolas (the jealous husband) in the original 1920s Grand-Guignol stage version was played by Franklin Dyall, the father of Valentine Dyall (‘The Man in Black’ host of Appointment with Fear). In the second series, when Valentine Dyall was unable to play ‘The Man in Black’, he was replaced by his father: apart from ‘keeping it in the family’, Franklin Dyall’s experiences acting at the London Grand-Guignol must have equipped him most suitably to play the role of British radio’s greatest horror host. The seventh series of Appointment with Fear featured another Poe adaptation: ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (9 April 1946) by Laidman Browne who also played the lead role. According to the Radio Times (5 April 1946), Browne had experimented with adapting ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for over twenty years for both stage and radio. While he enjoyed some theatrical success, the audio drama attempts came to nothing – including Val Gielgud’s rejection of the script in the 1920s for ‘lacking in dramatic motive’. With the arrival of Appointment with Fear Browne realised that the perfect genre had arrived:

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He forgot about ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ until, quite recently, he heard it mentioned at a session of the Brains Trust. It suddenly occurred to him that the framework of the Appointment with Fear series would allow him to meet the objections that had been raised to his previous adaptations. (Radio Times, 5 April 1946)

Subsequent to Appointment with Fear’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, the BBC would use the same script – with a much more intricate use of sound effects and soundscape – for an experiment in stereophonic broadcasting recorded in October 1959.7 ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ Some of the all-new plays in the seventh series take Appointment with Fear into particularly morbid directions. ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ (30 April 1946) was adapted by Charles Hatton from Richard Fisher’s short story about an unethical orthodontist’s experiments with the teeth of unwilling patients and executed prisoners. The broadcast script reveals the changes made for the sensibilities of the audience. A key character in the story is the African-American Frank, played by the Irish-born – and non-black – Tommy Duggan.8 The archived BBC copy of the script reveals that Frank is described by other characters with the word ‘nigger’, which is amended to ‘black trash’, ‘negro’ and ‘darkie’ and is only retained for two usages towards the end of the play. The play is set in the USA, and it is significant that the British character Fabian (Kenneth Morgan), a dentist visiting the country to catch up on dental research and meet up with military comrades from the Second World War, does not use any pejorative words. Clearly, in adapting the story Hatton has decided to use racist language to capture the language of the rest of the American characters. Another key character in the play is Professor Vorsloff (Alexander Sarner), a dental scientist who trained in Vienna but emigrated to the USA via Russia. The script tells us that the professor speaks with ‘a faintly sinister intonation’: the fact that he is the villain of the piece is immediately obvious, and he is indeed a perpetrator of orthodontic terror like Szell (Laurence Olivier) in Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976). Fabian works with Vorsloff, who reveals the vast collection of human teeth he has amassed: although the teeth have been acquired from death-row victims and funeral parlours, there is clearly an allusion to the horrors of the Holocaust in Vorsloff’s ‘pioneering’ research in a play broadcast one year after the Allied victory in Europe. At a filling station, Frank is beaten up by two criminals on the run, the script describing the ‘Sickening thud of tyre jack on human flesh’ and Frank’s ‘screams’. The assault leaves Frank with all his teeth destroyed and gives Vorsloff a chance to undertake an experiment and transplant a full set of teeth taken from a victim of the electric chair. What seems like Vorsloff’s humanitarian act is questioned when we learn that the anaesthetic he deliberately used (Neropan) would not prevent the dulled but fully conscious Frank from feeling the excruciating pain of the procedure. In this respect, the play is an

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example of the subgenre of the ‘intra operative experience’ which we will encounter again in audio horror plays on Fear on Four and in the work of 3DHorrorfi. Sometime later, Frank exacts his revenge on the unethical professor, in a sequence that is highly dependent on music to create a sense of uncertain reality, location and atmosphere: [Fade in weird music to suggest a nightmare. Cross-fade to sound of Fabian sleeping. More music. Then fade in slowly the sound of Vorsloff groaning] vorsloff: Leave me alone … leave me alone … frank: I got you at last, Professor, where you had me … right here in this chair … vorsloff: No – no – don’t touch me – put down that needle. frank: [now very sinister] I ain’t goin’ to hurt you, Professor … not much! vorsloff: No, no. [Jab] Oh – Neropan. frank: Why don’t you move – [grams] because you can’t Mr. Professor. Now an eye for an eye – a tooth for a tooth. [Vorsloff’s groans rise in intensity, fading into music. This stops abruptly. Then a girl’s screams are heard, faintly at first, then louder. Fabian wakes]

It is not a dream, and Fabian and Leslie (Vivienne Chatterton) find the professor with all his teeth removed and his throat cut. When captured, Frank is manically unrepentant and the reason is given, in the tradition of Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac (most famously adapted to the screen as Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)), that the teeth he acquired were from the executed psychopath who assaulted him at the filling station. At the end of the play, although Vorsloff’s work is undeniably pioneering, Fabian burns all the scientist’s notes and journals to protect the world from his unethical methods and discoveries. The day of Frank’s execution plays with the medium of radio itself: in the middle of their conversation, two death-row prison guards are listening to dance band music on the radio. The script states that it is ‘hot dance music’ – an ironic frame for the situation as they await the call to take Frank to his execution: joe:  He’s got to take what’s comin’ to him. Can’t go round slittin’ people’s throats – [Radio makes a prolonged scratching noise] Hey, what’s wrong with the radio? mike: They’re switching on more juice for the chair. [Distant sound of Frank singing hymns] joe: [shudders] There he goes again – singing hymns fit to bust himself. […] [Phone buzzes] mike: Hello – yes, sir – very good, sir. We’ll bring him right now. [rings off]

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Come on, Joe – let’s get goin’. [Door opens. Frank singing grows slowly louder as they approach his cell. Door unlocked and opened. Almost immediately, Frank stops singing in the middle of a word. Appreciable pause]

Hatton’s script mixes the technically mediated sounds of dance music, radio static and telephones with the sounds of Frank’s hymn singing, the somewhat anxious guards and the lock and key of the cell. The sequence draws the audience into the suspense and tension of the situation, perhaps above all the static on the radio: the preparation for the execution seems, at that moment, to affect the listeners in the comfort of their own homes. ‘Experiment with Death’ At the end of ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’, The Man in Black announces that the following week’s episode will broadcast ‘a tale of a very different kind – our first venture with the supernatural’. ‘Experiment with Death’ (7 May 1946) by Harry Bunton (intriguingly, the name ‘C. Murray’ is deleted as author on the BBC broadcast script). This play may be an example of the supernatural, but just as ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ features dentistry, ‘Experiment with Death’ commences with the ‘real world’ science of hypnotism. While Vorsloff was thoroughly evil in his experimentation, Dr Birckett (James Dale) probably is a classic example of what Noël Carroll terms ‘overreachers’ (Carroll, 1990: 118). Birckett has enjoyed success with clinical hypnotism and has extended his research to investigate the power of ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’ and ‘astral wandering’, taking a consciousness outside of its body. The play captures some fascinating examples of hypnotic process with long journalstyle speeches by Birckett about his investigations and examples of the actual rhetoric with which he sends someone ‘under’. With the assistance of his gifted young student Jim (Dudley Rolph), Birckett decides to explore the world beyond the grave with Jim’s open consciousness. Jim enters a shadowy realm where amorphous, chattering ‘things’ acquire human shape when they behold Jim and threaten him. Birckett struggles to bring Jim back: dr birckett: [brusquely] I said: Come back. COME BACK. jim: [weakly] I can’t. They’re all around me. They’re hideous. They’re horrible. They’re MAD. dr birckett: [shouts] Come back. I tell you – COME BACK. [Pause: then Jim begins to gibber in fright] jim: [gibbers] dr birckett: [angrily] What are you saying? jim: They’re dragging me out of your control. They’re screaming and pushing. They’re keeping me here. They’re horrible. They’re tearing at me … dr birckett: Try hard, Jim. Try hard. COME BACK.

The experiment seems to open a gateway into the corporeal world: furniture and ornaments smash around the room while the ‘gibbering voices become

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stronger and gleeful’ and surround the struggling doctor and the ‘slowly dying’ body of Jim. In the finale, Jim’s disembodied voice is distorted while the ‘Mad voices drown him out’, the temperature plummets and Birckett abandons the science of hypnotism and thrusts the Bible into Jim’s hand and starts to pray before screaming aloud, ‘In the name of God I command you: come back. Cast them aside. In the name of God: COME BACK.’ Birckett succeeds and Jim returns, but with a warning that the shadowy things beyond the grave will be waiting if Birckett tries the experiment again. What began as a detailed exploration of the science of hypnotism ends as a tale of exorcism and the power of Christian faith. Appointment with Fear broadcast a one-off episode for Christmas 1946 with Mileson Horton’s ‘Escape to Death’ (25 December 1946), a tale set on Dartmoor in which an escaped prisoner Tony (Allan McClelland) descends on a lonely old lady Susan (Grizelda Hervey) in her isolated house and holds her hostage. In this respect, the work is partly reminiscent of the Suspense play ‘To Find Help’ (18 January 1945) by Mel Dinelli. Susan is kindly, having sympathy for anything – human or otherwise – that is locked in a cage. Tony hides with the lady in the house’s ‘priest’s hole’ but the psychopathic and misogynist convict kills the woman only to discover that the tiny, secret hole cannot be opened from within. The play opened with The Man in Black bringing us the season’s greetings and trusting that we might be ready for a story: at the end he explains that no-one has ever found the convict or the old lady and the house has been empty for years. However, a family with three children have moved in and are having their first Christmas party this very evening. The Man in Black wonders if this ‘delightful’ family will discover their own ‘Appointment with Fear’ this evening. The eighth series concentrated entirely on adaptation, none of which involved Carr, whose input did not return until the one-episode ninth series (a revival of ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ (14 January 1948)) and who returned as the sole writer in the final Appointment with Fear series in the summer of 1955. In the interim, however, a single series of The Man in Black aired in 1949, a programme that we will explore in due course. However, the impact of Appointment with Fear was more immediately felt with one-off plays and short-lived series such as Is There Anything In It? (1945–46) and Mystery and Imagination (1945–46).

Horror radio aside from Appointment with Fear The one-off half-hour drama ‘Black Magic’ (21 September 1948) by B. A. Young is a good example of a play influenced by Appointment with Fear. The play avoids using a narrator but exploits other stereotypes of midtwentieth century popular horror. The play is set amongst British settlers in Kenya, principally the married couple Tom (Rolf Lebebure) and Brenda (Thelma Hughes), and is concerned with the use of ‘hoodoo’ curses. In particular, with a salacious theme unusual for the era, we are told how a

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Kenyan man buried a charm beneath the threshold of his hut which would afflict anyone who entered the home with ‘designs on his wife’. When a man does visit the woman – quite possibly with no ulterior motive – the visitor descends into ‘extreme agony’: he is a ‘horrible sight’ as he dies, having been ‘beating his head on the floor because the pain was so bad he couldn’t stand it’. The dénouement is that the jealous Tom makes it clear that, to Brenda’s horror, he believes that there is no reason why native curses should not work for non-Kenyans, and the play ends with her frantically trying to prevent her admirer Martin (Derek Guyler) from entering the building as we hear the native drums ‘fade up gradually until they dominate everything’. Although the play definitely exploits clichés of African witchdoctors and the like, the theme of potential adultery and sexual anxiety is interesting. Because it comes so soon after the Second World War we are reminded of a contemporaneous US radio play like Suspense’s masterful ‘The House in Cypress Canyon’ (5 December 1946) about a young couple moving into their first home which, although ostensibly about lycanthropy (the woman turns into a savage monster), is a powerful metaphor of American post-war anxieties: in a context of peace and stability, the traditional concept of the marital relationship is challenged, and women have become empowered, threatening and unruly. ‘Black Magic’ can be seen as sharing similar themes, although Brenda is a much-wronged and melodramatic damsel rather than the ravenous and homicidal werewolf that the seemingly innocuous Ellen turns into in ‘The House in Cypress Canyon’. However, despite its exploitation of cliché in terms of setting, the location of the BBC play in colonial Africa perhaps reflects an anxiety about the role of Britain as a post-imperial power wherein the traditional resilience and moral superiority of the British settlers is seen to tear them apart. Is There Anything In It? was a series of documentaries in dramatic form. The extant production file reveals that extensive research was undertaken by the principal writer-producer Rayner Heppenstall into subjects such as witchcraft and lycanthropy. In the case of palmistry and telepathy, a number of practising mediums and psychics were contacted. The programme strove to strike a balance between the supernatural and the rational with a stronger leaning towards the latter. This emphasis was demanded by the BBC in appraising one of the scripts. The episode on ‘Witchcraft’ (25 November 1945) begins with a comic sequence which shifts from the scientific into the fantastic: after observing the constellations, the narrator notices ‘a small dark object passing through the Milky Way’. The object is revealed to be ‘a BBC recording van’ and the listeners are taken on an interstellar adventure several years before the BBC’s Journey Into Space (1953–58). We find ourselves in a celestial afterlife in which we witness a witches’ Sabbath. Before the presenters have a chance to interview any of the witches, they encounter two Inquisitors. The fact that these men are German is significant. We are informed how their systematic persecution of witches left thousands dead across Europe. The programme stresses that although the popular percep-

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tion of witchcraft and its suppression is in relation to the medieval period, the purges were largely a Renaissance phenomenon. Despite the association of the Renaissance with cultural accomplishment, this fact seems to resonate in 1945 in relation to the recent tragedy of fascism in Germany, the land of the Enlightenment. Indeed, despite the sense of fantasy and playfulness in the series, such parallels were often drawn. For example, in the Radio Times article previewing the Is There Anything In It? episode on ‘The Werewolf’ (17 April 1946), the episode’s author Paul Dehn tells us: In every part of the globe there are legends of men and women transformed into beasts – usually wolves, but where there are no wolves we find the were-serpent or the were-leopard, and since the wolf became extinct in England our own witches and warlocks have apparently preferred to take the shape of hares and cats. Where does legend stop and fact begin? In the plague and famine-stricken Middle Ages, human nature suffered degradation to which a modern counterpart was revealed last year when the armies of liberation reached Belsen. (Radio Times, 12 April 1946)

Mystery and Imagination ‘Golden Dragon City’ The same post-war era also saw the single series of Mystery and Imagination – ‘radio plays on fantastic and imaginative themes’ (Radio Times, 26 October 1945) – a series of half-hour radio plays which explored the uncanny, predominantly featuring adaptations of classic and/or popular literature. The first episode was ‘Golden Dragon City’ (1 November 1945) at the ‘adult’ listening time of 9.30 pm, a radio dramatisation of Lord Dunsany’s ‘The Wonderful Window’ a short story from the author’s collection of fantasy tales The Book of Wonder (1912). The radio adaptation was written by Lord Dunsany himself and produced by Felix Felton.9 In his review for The Listener, Philip Hope-Wallace (not always a fan of ‘uncanny’ radio drama) mentions the new series and comments that ‘Golden Dragon City’ was ‘finely done’ (The Listener, 8 November 1945). The broadcast opens with this Narrator’s speech: In this series of plays we ask you to listen, and as you listen, to imagine. The play tonight, which starts the series, is ‘Golden Dragon City’ by Lord Dunsany. […] Superficially, the play is about a rather strange window somebody bought on an impulse, but that window is really a symbol of an experience which widened three people’s lives, which made them conscious of further horizons, which made them ask questions which they could not answer. The best description I have heard of this play was given to me the other day by a friend of mine who is blind. He said: ‘I hear you’re going to do “Golden Dragon City.” Good. I’m blind, and I’ve got my own “Golden Dragon City”’.

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The short story centres on the character of Mr Sladden, a lowly shop worker in London who rents a small, bare-boarded room. He purchases an antique window from a mysterious ‘Oriental’ salesman – a recurrent theme from the old fakir in W. W. Jacobs’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ to the Chinese salesman in Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) – and uses it to replace the wooden door on the small cupboard where he keeps his tea things. Looking through the window, he is greeted with the view of a medieval city in a distant land, emblazoned with the flag of golden dragons on a white background. When not working in the shop, Sladden spends his time gazing at the fantastical city he sees through the window, watching the cobbled streets and the towers, the pikemen and archers on the battlements, the jackdaws taking flight when the bells of the city chime (although Sladden never hears a sound through the window). Sladden loves this secret world ‘as a sick man might love swallows when he cannot easily live to see another spring’ (Dunsany, 2004: 48). The magical realm fills Sladden with pride: although he can only watch passively and silently, it is his world. It is a deeply personal vision and Sladden keeps it a complete secret, living in paranoia that his employers may find out. After many months, he sees an unusual hubbub in the city and realises that Golden Dragon City is under siege by the troops of the Red Bear flag. To save his beloved citizens, Sladden smashes the glass panes. He is greeted by a mysterious smell of spices, and just as he is about to cast a poker down onto the Red Bear warriors he sees nothing but the inside of his tea cupboard – and he will never see Golden Dragon City, that object so desired, again. Dunsany’s short story is a simple but compelling exploration of the nature of personal fantasy. When Sladden goes to work, the customers merely see a shop attendant, not a man who regards himself as the custodian of a kingdom whose greatest wish is to live as a warrior in the land beyond the magic window. In this regard, Dunsany’s 1912 story is curiously prophetic. Although Sladden’s view is like that afforded by a camera obscura (not least in its silence), it is also like a webcam or television screen: the ‘screen’ that is the window takes over Sladden’s time as he passively watches the ‘reality show’ that is Golden Dragon City. The tone of medieval fantasy is also precursive to the immersive world of computer role-playing games. Either way, when Sladden smashes the glass he finds that there is nothing beyond the screen. There is no extant recording of the 1945 radio broadcast, but the ‘script as broadcast’ still exists in the BBC archives and it gives a valuable insight into the adaptation and production. In order to dramatise the short story in a dynamic way, Dunsany opts against a monologic approach (that might befit the personal nature of the story) and makes the episode an experience that affects three people: Bill (Ivan Brandt), his friend Lily (Vivienne Chatterton) and his landlady Mrs Lumley (Moira Lister). Bill buys the window and asks the landlady’s permission to replace his cupboard door. This permits an account of the mysterious man who sold it to him (and for a degree of xenophobic stereotyping on the part of Mrs Lumley). After it is installed,

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Bill and the visiting Lily take a first look and see the fantasy city. Interestingly, although the script does include descriptions of the window and the salesman with his strange clothes and a ‘beard like a piece of the night … A night without stars’, these are deleted from the broadcast script. Although they furnish the play with evocative detail, their omission saves time but also allows the listeners more scope to imagine things for themselves. What is retained in the script is great detail about the city itself. This is built into the dialogue – the characters describing what they see to each other – and it also allows for some humour, in contrast to the intense intimacy of Sladden’s visions and fantasy: mrs. lumley: With battlements on it and all, and a doorway with spikes over it. bill: A portcullis, Mrs. Lumley. mrs. lumley: Shouldn’t think they pay much taxes with a gate like that? bill: Why, Mrs. Lumley? mrs. lumley: Well, they’d shut it when the man came round from Somerset House. Nor rates neither. And they’ve a bit of a walk at the top all under the battlements, and acrobats walking along it. bill: Archers, Mrs. Lumley. mrs. lumley: Yes, with their bows and arrows. bill: Thank you so much for the tea, Mrs. Lumley. lily: Yes, thank you very much. mrs. lumley: I like their little flags. […] And the archers’ green jackets and their tight pinkish trousers. I like that little town. bill: Well, part of it’s yours, I think.

The humour lies in Mrs Lumley’s malapropism – ‘acrobats’ – and also the teatime discussion, the characters sipping tea as the watch the city, possibly teasing the radio audience itself listening, passively, to the drama on the air. This section of dialogue also signposts an interesting subplot in the radio play: the question of ‘ownership’. While Sladden ‘owns’ the Golden Dragon City as a realm of all-important fantasy, the radio play develops the idea that the landlady must have rights of ownership over the city as it lies beneath her property. The fact that the play is dialogue-driven also permits more detailed specu­ lation on the location of the city: Lily looks at the constellation of the stars and, having an amateur interest in astronomy, realises that it is not one that can be seen from earth and that the window might be affording a vista into another universe. As in the short story, Golden Dragon City is besieged by the Red Bear troops, and the three characters rally to its defence, gathering objects to cast down. Again, when the glass is smashed, there is a ‘queer scent’, which seems to be not so much magical as Bill’s tea-things. The city disappears, a melancholy moment for Lily (‘All gone, Golden Dragon City’), but permitting humorous bathos from Mrs Lumley: ‘I should never have known what to have done with it’. After this, ‘Oriental’ music suggestive of

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‘war’ then ‘sad departure’ is played. While the original short story explores themes of personal fantasy, desire and self-image, the radio version opens this up into a group dynamic. Although the three characters see the same city, their interpretations are slightly different. Appropriately enough, Bill is most like Sladden inasmuch as he is adamant to keep the city a secret (between himself, Lily and the landlady) and is paranoid about what will happen if the newspapers hear about it. He is also the most obsessive of the three: he makes Lily agree to cancel their cinema engagement so that they can stay in and watch the city (evidently, this domestic ‘screen’ is better than the movie screen); he suggests that they meet at lunchtime to stand on chairs and eat sandwiches as they look through the magic window. Lily endeavours to piece together the city’s location (‘astronomers say that there’s more than one universe’), and Mrs Lumley is preoccupied by her various boarding-house duties and associates Bill’s assertion that she must be the ‘owner’ of the mysterious city with her unhappy experience of speculating in stocks and shares (‘I once bought some shares in a gold mine in Paraguay. I wouldn’t do it now.’). However, despite their different characters, all three come to adore the ‘little town’. When Golden Dragon City vanishes, so is lost Bill’s object of desire and Lily’s window into an alternate universe, while for Mrs Lumley the episode has proved itself to be like her fiftieth share of a gold mine: too good to be true. ‘The Picture’ The theme established by the opening episode of Mystery and Imagination recurs in other episodes of the series: a sense of fantasy and the uncanny, exploring issues of desire through metaphor. The second episode was Leonard Cottrell’s adaptation of ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ (8 November 1945), E. M. Forster’s short story about the adventure of a young boy who sees a curious signpost, ‘To Heaven’. It is a tale of the power of imagination and literary culture at odds with the over-rational and prosaic world of middle-class suburbia. The following week presented Walter de la Mare’s ‘phantasy for broadcasting’, ‘Music from the Sea’ (15 November 1945) with original music composed by C. Armstrong Gibbs. The next broadcast returned to the adaptation of short, uncanny fiction with Paul Dehn and Felix Felton’s dramatisation of ‘The Rosewood Door’ (22 November 1945), the 1929 ghost story by Oliver Onions. The last Mystery and Imagination show in November 1945 was a doublebill of two short adaptations: Felix Felton’s adaptation of ‘The Picture’ by Gwendoline Foyle; and Cecil Lewis’s dramatisation of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ (29 November 1945). ‘The Picture’ is a short but effective example of horror radio. The Storyteller – a character called Hugh Bentley – is implicated in the action, and after an extremely short introduction (‘It’s a most mysterious thing. I still don’t quite understand it. I was calling on Jim Spurgess …’) we are thrown directly into the action.

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Spurgess has acquired a painting which is so vivid it holds ‘a curious fascination’ to all who lay eyes upon it. The Storyteller sees the picture as being an extraordinarily realistic portrait of a monk: he no longer listens to Spurgess he is so fascinated by it. However, it seems that the picture is a gift from Spurgess’s sister with a covering letter that seems to describe a completely different painting: the portrait of a young woman. As well as being perceived as a monk or a woman, the artwork is seen by a mother of young children as perfect for the nursery: in her eyes, it portrays a hen and chickens. For her husband, however, the picture is so disturbing that he cannot consider keeping it in a house with young children and sends it off to a jumble sale. The key dramatic twist to the narrative – the moment of horror which reveals the power of the picture – is the experience that Arthur Pierce has. Pierce is a businessman – ‘one of those super stockbrokers and makes thousands of pounds a day’ – who visits Spurgess and revels in his latest business success: You know those shares, Jim, that you were talking about the other day? Well, I did a little speculation. You remember what happened last March? Awful business. Chairman committed suicide – shares went to blazes. Everyone assumed that the whole concern was finished. Except me! I had a wee bit of information that made all the difference. I waited till the shares reached rock bottom, then I bought heavily.

Soon after this he perceives the painting. In the brief moments of looking at the picture, Pierce sees a painting of pieces of gold along with a figure: Didn’t you see the greed in those eyes? The appalling avarice, the … the … They haunt me. [Shudders] It’s turned cold, hasn’t it?

He leaves and we are informed that a few days later Pierce committed suicide: he ‘gassed himself in his flat’. The play ends with the picture’s latest owner, a vicar, remarking that although he does not like satyrs, he is fascinated and amused by the portrait: ‘Those horns and that funny little goatskin. Isn’t he a roguish, mocking fellow?’ The play poses questions about what determines each character’s vision. Is it a taunting reflection of their deepest essence? The businessman as a miser who exploited a dead man’s tragedy; the housewife as a brooding hen; and the Storyteller as ‘a genial old monk’. Perhaps it is a direct provocation: the Vicar and his religion goaded by a vulgar pagan god? It seems, sooner or later, to drive each viewer to despair. Spurgess wants to ‘scrap it’ or ‘burn it’ before the painting is ‘saved’ by its next owner. In the closing speech (deleted from the 1945 broadcast script), the Storyteller declares: Is the whole story a fact about the picture, or a fact about the people who saw it? That is the old question of subjective and objective.

The story is in the tradition of other uncanny tales of ‘haunted’ pictures like M. R. James’s ‘The Mezzotint’ (1904). More profoundly, ‘The Picture’

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is in the tradition of horror tales about the subjective/objective, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) through to films like The Hole (Joe Dante, 2010) in which a shuttered abyss in a cellar ­materialises one’s most personal fears. ‘Evening Primrose’ The first Mystery and Imagination episode of 1946 was a version of John Collier’s short story ‘Evening Primrose’ (3 January 1946) adapted and produced by Douglas Cleverdon, and featuring Marius Goring. The Radio Times advertised the play thus: The strange story of persons in straitened circumstances who, by day, sleep in Bracey’s Universal Stores, and live their pale lives only by night; and of the poet who falls among them. (28 December 1945)

‘Evening Primrose’ was first published in 1940 and it remains a chilling and disturbing tale of terror. It is also a remarkable and original example of modern Gothic: a horror story set entirely in the world of a department store. ‘Evening Primrose’ concerns a conceited poet, Charles Snell, who abandons conventional existence to live inside a vast department store. Collier’s story is structured as entries in a journal, which was found tucked inside a pad of stationery by a customer. In his diary, Snell explains that having abandoned ‘the bourgeois world that hates a poet’ (Collier, 1961: 16), he finds nooks and crannies to sleep in during the day and uses the nights to write poetry. He reveals a sense of complete liberty, relishing in the irony of his nocturnal existence, scavenging and fulfilling his human needs at the expense of this labyrinthine and monumental temple of capitalism. This entry demonstrates Snell’s conceitedness: Creeping along the transverse aisles, which were in deeper darkness, I felt like a wandering thought in the dreaming brain of a chorus girl down on her luck. Only, of course, their brains are not as big as Bracey’s Giant Emporium. And there was no man there. (Collier, 1961: 17)

However, Snell is not the superior being he assumes himself to be when he discovers that he is not the first to have this idea: not only is there an entire subculture living inside Bracey’s Giant Emporium, but he learns that, for decades, all the city’s department stores have similar communities. Significantly, Collier directly links these undetected squatters to the financial depressions of the 1880s, 1907 and 1929. As one inhabitant reveals: ‘It seemed to me terrible that I should not be able to come here in the ordinary way. So I came here for good’ (Collier, 1961: 20). Like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978; Zach Snyder, 2004) whose deep-seated impulse makes them stagger in hordes to the shopping mall, Collier’s victims of capitalism take up permanent residence inside an icon of the system. Far from the freedom he had hoped to attain, Snell discovers an

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oppressive regime: the tribe at Bracey’s is presided over by the ghastly Mrs Vanderpant, an elderly woman ‘almost entirely transparent’ (Collier, 1961: 19). The inhabitants have developed large eyes like nocturnal creatures, some with no colour to their irises at all, some with hands like ‘trailing, transparent fins, or wisps of chiffon’ (Collier, 1961: 18). Their lives have trans­formed their voices into ‘whistling sibilant utterance’ (Collier, 1961: 18) and their night-to-night existence is subject to ‘intricate laws of silence and camouflage’ (Collier, 1961: 20). Although the inhabitants are as pallid as creatures that lurk beneath a rock or ‘polyps’ (Collier, 1961: 20), in a grotesque parody of the class system they see themselves as ‘quite nice here’ (Collier, 1961: 20) and are disdainful of the ‘wrong sort’ of people and shops. However, this world is far from being a paradise, as the inhabitants live in fear of the ‘Dark Men’, terrifying figures from an undertakers who ‘deal’ with foolhardy burglars, detectives or anyone who tries to leave. The Dark Men take offenders to the medical supplies department and, with surgical instruments and wax, turn them into shop mannequins that are easily hidden amongst the others in the retail environment. Snell falls in love with Ella, the ‘foundling’ who got lost in the store when a child, and is now Mrs Vanderpant’s abused maid (her name clearly alludes to ‘Cinderella’). Snell – evidently seeing himself as a heroic prince – dreams of taking Ella, so desperate to see daylight and the open world, away from Bracey’s. However, Ella falls in love with the store’s night-watchman who ‘reeks of the coarse sun’ (Collier, 1961: 20), and in a pique of jealousy, Snell tells a resident, in confidence, who informs the rest of the tribe who are seized with a ‘frightened sadistic exaltation’ (Collier, 1961: 26) and, like a pack of ants, bear Ella away to be turned into a shop dummy. The short story ends with Snell heading off to find the night-watchman who can help him rescue Ella, telling the readers who might find his journal to look out for three new mannequins in the store. Collier was a British writer, but ‘Evening Primrose’ is a story emphatically set in New York City: Bracey’s is fictional, although it alludes to the genuine store Macy’s and reference is made to other shops, including Bloomingdale’s. Certainly, New York befits the story, being at the time the acme of mercantile capitalism. The BBC version sets the play in London and Snell’s fantasy of taking Ella to live in Central Park in the short story becomes London Zoo. Other lines of dialogue serve to ‘map’ out a sense of London: ella: […] But Charles, he said – he said – ‘Say, honey, I wish they made ’em like you in Camden Town.’ Charles wasn’t that a lovely thing to say? charles: Personally, I should have said Kensington.

In the original short story this is:   ‘But Charles, he said – he said – ‘Say, honey, I wish they made ’em like you on Eighth Avenue.’ Charles wasn’t that a lovely thing to say?’

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  ‘Personally, I should have said Park Avenue.’ (Collier, 1961: 25)

The play replaces Snell’s journal with recordings (‘There is an apparatus here on which customers can perpetuate their voices on gramophone records’): the script specifies that the sound accompanying Snell’s narrative needs to sound like a ‘scratched record’. Snell’s monologues are interspersed with dialogue. This is an engaging example of ‘audio within audio’. The adaptation remains a critique of capitalism: the dispossessed turned into colourless and nocturnal creatures, hiding inside the walls of a capitalist shrine, with all its emblems and artefacts of affluence. Snell’s desire to escape the oppressive banality of bourgeois society by becoming an ironic parasite living for free in a world of plenitude sends him into a deadly and stifling tribal realm. While the story has an open ending (although we expect that the worst has happened), the play leaves us in no doubt: Fade up sibilant whispering of many voices: a choking gasp: sound of needle on a gramophone record, running down and stopping

There is no recording of the BBC broadcast, and we can only imagine what Marius Goring, so compelling as a horror performer in Appointment with Fear’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, did with the central role of Charles Snell in this intensely powerful script. ‘Evening Primrose’ would become a particular favourite on the US radio series Escape in John Dunkel’s adaptation and was performed live on three occasions: 5 November 1947, 12 September 1948 and 25 August 1949. The US adaptation turns the brief note that prefaces the story, explaining that the journal was discovered in a pad of stationery, into a device to frame the play. Two characters – Sadie and Sam – with broad New York accents start to read the journal aloud. It then merges into the diary of Charles Snell. While the BBC version ends with the lynching of Snell, the Escape version concludes with a return to the framing characters Sam and Sadie. They manage to laugh off the journal as a joke until Sadie remembers that she saw a wax dummy fitting the description of Ella in Bracey’s window. After the Escape adaptation, a looser variation appeared as The Twilight Zone television episode ‘The After Hours’ (10 June 1960), itself admirably turned into a richly soundscaped audio drama on The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas (2002). ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ In February 1946, Mystery and Imagination presented a double-bill of ‘The Boy Who Saw Through’ by John Pudney and a version of H. R. Wakefield’s short story ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ (14 February 1946) adapted and produced by Felix Felton. ‘The Boy Who Saw Through’ is an effective comic piece about a young boy who has the ability to see great distances and through walls. The gift is regarded as irrational by the hectoring specialist the boy is sent to see. The child eventually denies his ability but speaks, mischievously, to the listener at the end of the piece: ‘I think it’s going to be useful, don’t you?

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[Laughs]’. The script of the second piece – very short given that it is for a ten-minute play – makes a strong basis for an intense piece of horror drama to counterbalance the frivolity of ‘The Boy Who Saw Through’. The play relies on ambience and this is made particularly apparent in the production note at the beginning of the script: ‘The hall of Lorn Manor should have a reverberant, and the narrow passage a deadish acoustic.’ The play begins with a short exchange between Mr Cort (Ivan Brandt) and an estate agent (Charles Maunsell): Cort is seeking to buy a property, and an historic manor house in the Chilterns overlooking Aylesbury – ‘a real bargain’ at seven thousand pounds – seems ideal. After this nine-line exchange, we join Cort on his car journey, attempting to find Lorn Manor in a rainstorm. When he stops to ask a local, Mr Runt (Stanley Groome), the script gives us some pleasing examples of 1940s BBC ‘phonetic’ writing: ‘Where did ’ee want to git to?’ The situation of the automobile driver lost in a storm – so familiar in cinematic works from The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) –– develops in ominous tone. The local explains that ‘Us knows Lorn Manor. None of us goes to Manor after sundown.’ Cort says to himself that the weather is as ‘cold as a penny in a dead man’s eye’. Cort eventually finds Lorn Manor, and once he is inside, the door slams shut and he is lost in the darkness: ‘I can’t see a thing. Hadn’t time to notice where the switch is.’ The play is dominated by the voice of Cort, talking to himself as he desperately tries to escape from the house. Along with Cort’s tone of increasing panic before he is killed by the entity in the house, we are informed by the sound directions that we repeatedly hear a ‘slithery noise’ which ultimately turns into ‘whispering’. Cort tries to find the door but recurrently finds himself back in the same narrow corridor. The play builds in tension and the script provides interesting clues to performance with notes that Cort ‘Forces himself to laugh’, ‘Suddenly winces’ and ‘Whistles a snatch of a tune’. The script also endeavours to articulate a soundscape. The aforementioned whistle ‘echoes back’, and we have already seen how the acoustic dimension of the hall and the passage are starkly contrasting (agoraphobic and claustrophobic) but equally unnerving in relation to Felton’s carefully yet economically crafted dialogue. This extract from the script demonstrates the carefully orchestrated pace of the script: [A train whistle in the distance] cort: [Reassured] Ah! Now that’s a help. The Wendover–Aylesbury line runs half-left from the front door, so it must be about here. [A pause] No, this is the passage. I must get back to base. [The slithery… noise] Damn! There’s a pin in that brocade. Talk about a maze – it’s nothing to this. [Under his breath] Curse this vile god-forsaken place! Steady! That’s as bad as shouting out loud. Well, it’s no use trying to find the door, I can’t – can’t. I’ll have to sit in this chair till the light comes. [A pause] How silent it is!

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[A faint noise of whispering] Except for that sort of whispering sound. What can it be? The caretaker’s away. [The whispering continues] It’s almost as if several people were whispering together. You get curious sounds in old houses. How absurd it all is! This chair can’t be more than three or four yards from the door. There’s no doubt about that. It must be slightly to one side or the other. [The slithery… noise] [Shouting for the first time] Is anyone there? Who touched me? Who’s whispering? Where’s the door? [Quieter] What a fool I am to shout! But someone outside might have heard me.

‘Blind Man’s Buff’ as a play is in the tradition of other examples of radio drama that establish simple but powerful situations which are predominantly set in complete darkness: once again, we are reminded of Hughes’s A Comedy of Danger but also the US radio play ‘The Vampire’s Desire’, an episode from the The Hermit’s Cave (1935–44). ‘The Vampire’s Desire’ – of which there is an extant recording of uncertain date – is a masterpiece of Gothic audio, with its heightened atmosphere and sense of environment, about two men who take refuge from a storm inside a pitch-black house (Hand, 2006a, 114–116). In having two principal characters, ‘The Vampire’s Desire’ permits dialogic exposition. Although ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ over-relies on monologue, it is characterised by a similar sense of location and the experientially intense. ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ is also like the radio play ‘The Dark’ (29 December 1937) from the US horror series Lights Out, in which two medics answer an emergency call and find themselves in a house in which an unidentifiable ‘darkness’ creeps up from the floor like ‘black smoke’ and literally turns its victims inside out when it reaches them. This became one of the most famous – not to say gruesome – sound effects in the history of US radio drama (Dunning, 1998: 399). The BBC horror plays of the same era would not go as far as this: in ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ Cort dies with ‘screams’ that fade out, and in the final scene the Coroner (Victor Fairley) concludes that Cort died of a ‘seizure of some sort’. Overall, Mystery and Imagination and Is There Anything In It? may be forgotten series, but they offered a diverse repertoire and, judging from production scripts, an inventive approach to dramatic interpretation. Ironically, both series offered more horrors to the listeners than the legendary horror series Appointment with Fear. The standalone series The Man in Black will seem, in some ways, to draw on the Mystery and Imagination style. In terms of popular performance, highly accomplished programmes like Mystery and Imagination may have since disappeared into the ether partly because it lacked one distinctive feature which characterised a horror and mystery series such as Appointment with Fear and made it so memorable: a character-host. With this in mind, we will now turn our attention to one of the greatest fictitious personalities constructed for British radio: The Man in Black.

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Notes 1 Interestingly, the same short story is the source for the very first episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. ‘Revenge’ (2 October 1955), directed by Hitchcock himself, features a husband exacting revenge against the intruder who violently assaulted his wife in their trailer park. It is interesting how the radio version exploits the dangers of the road, drunk driving and the horror of child mortality, while the 1950s interpretation returns to the original tale and the brutal violation of sexual assault. This was presumably not an issue of censorship, Suspense was perfectly capable of presenting sexual violence, but was more of a decision regarding the potential of radio. 2 This was a significant work in Hitchcock’s career: his film version of The Lodger (1926), starring Ivor Novello, is one of his most celebrated early films. 3 The ‘disappearance’ thrillers are works inspired by urban legends and real-life mysteries, such as Alexander Woollcott’s short story ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ (1929) about the disappearance of a lady and her hotel room, and Ethel Lina White’s novel The Wheel Spins (1936), better known in the film version The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938); through to works like Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) and Peter Weir’s 1975 film version; and Tim Krabbé’s novel Het Gouden Ei (1984) and George Sluizer’s screen adaptations of it, Spoorloos (1984) and The Vanishing (1988). 4 For further detail on music in Appointment with Fear, see Appendix 3. 5 Sartre’s classic play was adapted to the radio on 4 October 1946 featuring the cast from the recent English stage version (directed by Peter Brook): Alec Guinness, Donald Pleasance, Beatrix Lehmann and Betty Ann Davies. Anticipating the broadcast, Philip Hope-Wallace said the play was ‘a fool-proof bit of dramatic carpentry’ (The Listener, 3 October 1946) which was bound to be a triumph on radio. He was, however, forced to eat his words: ‘I said last week that “Huis Clos” should go well on the air. Quite wrong. It turned out to depend far too much on the look of the situation. […] How sort out self-communings from remarks addressed to others? Above all, how see the third person (not talking but watching)? […] This triangle of lust and remorse, so firm on the stage and on paper, was the merest sketch on the air. I hate to say it but I thought the excellent cast wasted their time and ours’ (The Listener, 10 October 1946). Although one would expect the claustrophobia and economy of Sartre’s play to be ideal for radio, even a stage work such as that relies greatly on a visual dimension and non-verbal communication. 6 Interestingly, Carr chose a genuine American actress, Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–68). 7 Other audio versions of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ include Nick Fisher’s free adaptation (4 December 1982) and 3DHorrorfi’s binaural version (2010). 8 Tommy Duggan was a stalwart character actor whose long and diverse career would also include screen appearances in The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and the television sitcom Father Ted (1995). 9 Lord Dunsany’s works had already lent themselves well to radio: back in the 1920s, the BBC in Cardiff broadcast ‘A Dunsany Night’ (5 June 1928), which was a double-bill of two of Lord Dunsany’s 1923 stage plays ‘The Flight of the Queen’ and ‘Fame and the Poet’.

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‘This is your story-teller, The Man in Black’: hosting horror

That Appointment with Fear would run to ten series spanning, intermittently, some twelve years and spawning a spinoff series The Man in Black bears testimony to its success. However, at the time of its instigation this American-style drama series was perceived as something of a gamble. As Val Gielgud recalls: At first the unabashed histrionicism of the presentation proved something of a shock for the British domestic hearth. We were told we would scarify the children. We were rebuked for treating horror with levity. (Gielgud, 1957: 103–104)

We have already seen how one outraged listener likened ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ radio adaptation to contemporaneous Nazi and Japanese atrocities. More formally, certain reviewers took issue with horror radio more generally. In an article titled ‘Broadcast Drama: Over-Production’ in The Listener in January 1944, Herbert Farjeon reviews the new year’s first week of radio drama output. He reveals there were ‘five straight radio plays’ of which two were from theatre, two were adapted from fiction and only one was ‘specifically conceived for broadcasting’. The sole original radio play was ‘Vex Not His Ghost’ (6 January 1944), the first episode in the second series of Appointment with Fear. The title may allude to Shakespeare’s King Lear, but Farjeon was not impressed by Carr’s tale of murder and execution: Unfortunately, however, the crude and deplorable quality of the material rendered me, personally, incapable of assessing its purely technical merits. There is, of course, a place in art for horror – provided always that a place is found in horror for art. But [now] the B.B.C., our One-and-Only-andPractically-National-Theatre, competes with the columns of the less reputable Sunday newspapers by dwelling with bald relish on realistic details connected with the ritual of the electric chair. (The Listener, 13 January 1944)

For Farjeon, the play was offensive in story, theme and treatment in such a way that any practical achievements in the work – as a play written purely for radio – were obscured and the resulting work is a ‘dumbing down’ of radio to meet an appetite akin to sensationalistic journalism. Such sentiments were shared by some behind the closed doors of the BBC too.

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Shortly into the first series of Appointment with Fear, one BBC executive reveals in an internal memorandum that although they are pleased with the ‘complimentary’ feedback that Appointment with Fear was receiving, there is a creeping sense of misgiving: ‘quite frankly I am now very apprehensive about it, because it will inevitably follow that there will be a whole rush of complaints!’ (October 1943). He suggests that the BBC needs to be prepared to ‘mollify’ unhappy listeners with ‘a suitable apology’. In another memorandum circulated a few days later (25 October 1943), Mr Nicolls (the BBC Controller of Programmes) expresses the opinion that ‘the actual title was sufficient warning to the listener’ as it cannot possibly leave anyone ‘under any illusions as to its nature’. Interestingly, he also stresses that a good number of Appointment with Fear broadcasts are in fact ‘quite ordinary crime stories without anything very fearful in them’. Indeed, the only complaint that some listeners had was in relation to the ‘locked-room’ genre as they were ‘confused by Carr’s complex solutions to the mysteries’ (Greene, 1995: 287). Overall, as Asa Briggs recounts, Appointment with Fear was ‘an immediate success from the evening of its first broadcast’, and he mentions that ‘newspapers began to use the title Appointment with Fear as a caption under cartoons on quite different subjects’ (Briggs, 1970: 587). This popular success and the adoption of the phrase in the media for all kinds of topical discussion and commentary in the wartime context are interesting given Carr’s claim that the plays are to be ‘forms of escapism’ (Radio Times, 3 September 1943). Although Appointment with Fear remains an iconic series of wartime broadcasting, it continued, with ease, into the post-war world. The controversy, however, would continue within the BBC, as revealed in a memorandum of 12 March 1947 from John Gough (BBC Pacific Programme Organiser) stating that ‘The Last Pilgrimage’ (11 March 1947) in the eighth series of Appointment with Fear, was ‘the grossest piece of bad taste’, presenting the listeners with ‘sheer inexcusable horror. No.’ In ‘The Last Pilgrimage’, written by T. J. Waldron, two journalists – one man, one woman – visit the Pilgrim, a ship scheduled to be broken up the next day. The journalists are advised against it due to the eccentricity of the captain. A remaining crewmate laments the arrival of a woman – unlucky in seafaring lore – and explains how a woman was murdered on-board the ship and how he himself lost his own leg in an accident caused by this ‘evil’ ship. What may seem like a tale of a cursed vessel like Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Brute’ (adapted exactly a month later – 11 April 1947 – on US radio’s Escape (Hand, 2006b)) or Ghost Ship (Steve Beck, 2002) becomes a sea horror tale more like Dead Calm (Phillip Noyce, 1989) or Donkey Punch (Oliver Blackburn, 2008). The captain murders the crewmate and traps the journalists in the chain room where, upon release, the anchor chain tears the two people apart. The captain then scuttles the Pilgrim and drowns with it. This is no locked-room mystery or tale of the supernatural but a brutal tale of murder and madness with no survivors. What infuriated the BBC’s John

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Gough is that he voiced his concerns when he first saw the script and was furious when it was broadcast without any changes. He states:

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Have we really got an audience of sadistic morons for whom it is our duty to cater (or are we merely trying to develop one)?

Whether or not its audience was a group of sadistic morons, Appointment with Fear became a radio institution. The success of the series can also be detected in ‘spin-off’ culture such as, in 1948, the publication of an Appointment with Fear short story collection which included a number of short stories adapted for the series, including works by Poe, Ambrose Bierce and W. W. Jacobs – but none by John Dickson Carr. The pre-eminent ingredient in the identity and success of Appointment with Fear was the host of the radio programme: ‘The Man in Black’. As Val Gielgud recalls: Valentine Dyall as ‘The Man in Black’ became a particular favourite among schoolboys, and [… a] large number of grown-ups proved that they retained the lovable childishness of their youngers and betters. (Gielgud, 1957: 103–104)

The cult status that came to surround Valentine Dyall as The Man in Black in many respects defines the identity and legacy of Appointment with Fear. Dyall’s carefully constructed persona provided an ironic view of the play we are about to hear, lending a morbid humour to a story-world which is usually fearful, doomed and lethal. As Denis Gifford states, ‘The sepulchral tones of Valentine Dyall generally sent more chills up wartime listeners’ spines than the ensuing play’ (Gifford, 1985: 164). This is reminiscent of the US horror radio show Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941–52) in which the status of the ‘Host’ (Raymond Edward Johnson and latterly Paul McGrath) often exceeded the appreciation of the plays themselves, as is evident in a fan letter quoted by Martin Grams Jr.: ‘I get such a kick out of Raymond and his squeaking door – more than I do out of the programs themselves’ (Grams, 2002: 37). A wartime letter in the Radio Times gives an interesting insight into Appointment with Fear, ‘The Man in Black’ and its scheduling. The letter is titled ‘Appointment Regularly Kept’ and its author, a correspondent from Rochester, Kent, writes: Being country folk and war-workers, we go to bed early. But on Thursday nights I always stay up alone to listen to Appointment with Fear. I really do find myself frightened and find cold shivers running down my back, and yet I must listen to it. I find, also, the Storyteller himself very often tells his talk with a note that suggests that he is scared stiff too – which helps the programme to be more frightening still. Why can’t the programme be broadcast a little bit earlier in the evening? Or is it thought that it won’t have the same effect on listeners? (Radio Times, 3 November 1944)

The letter gives us an interesting insight into the daily habits of war-workers,

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but even more significant is what it reveals about the perception of The Man in Black. Although he used a sardonically humorous register, he could evidently also deploy a calculated tone of fear, framing the plays with a certain mood in order to make the following stories all the more frightening. Radio is all about scheduling, adhering to a strictly accurate timetable. This was acutely important in the early days of radio when all broadcasting was live. Dramatic broadcasts needed to follow their time slot with precision. A work of live theatre might see some discrepancy in the duration of the performance, slightly shorter or longer on successive evenings. Live radio drama would have no such luxury: a play scheduled for a thirtyminute slot would have to start, and finish, on time. Much of the director and producer’s role when it came to a live radio broadcast would be to moderate time, controlling the pace of the performers’ delivery. In addition, music could be an invaluable resource to provide a safety net to allow a performance to get ‘back on track’ or, on occasion, to fill the gaps or ‘round off’ a performance that ended prematurely. The framing of a radio show could be all-important. To the present day, announcers and continuity are essential to broadcasting. The announcers between programmes can inform us on what we are about to listen to and, also, what programme is on the schedules afterwards. In regard to Appointment with Fear, let us look at the evening schedule on its first-ever broadcast on Saturday 11 September 1943: 8.30 pm Yankee-Doodle-Doo! A recorded ‘Anglo-American show’ with ‘guests from both sides of the Atlantic’ 9.00 pm News 9.30 pm Russian Commentary from Alexander Werth (Sunday Times correspondent in Moscow) 9.35 pm A concert of light music 10.15 pm Lighten Our Darkness: evening prayers 10.30 pm Appointment with Fear ‘Cabin B-13’ 11.00 pm Russian piano music 11.20 pm Ivy Benson and her Girls Band 12.00 am News 12.20 am Closedown

We can see that the evening presented a mixture of music-based light entertainment with news, journalistic commentary and religious broadcasting: Appointment with Fear stands out as pure drama in the midst of this. The opening of a radio show can fulfil two functions: ‘demarcation and access’ (Hand, 2006a: 23), whereby a programme can demarcate itself within the schedule and also create a point of access into the ‘dramatic universe’ of the show: ‘in other words, a way into not just the story that the play will tell, but the program’s own “take” on the chosen story and a self-reflexive and self-conscious stance on itself as a thirty-minute “show”’ (Hand, 2006a: 23). As well as the framing provided by continuity and a programme’s announcer, some examples of radio drama employ the use of a narrator. The overuse of narration can, of course, be one of the problems

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in radio drama wherein writers make up for the loss of a visual dynamic by trying to ‘show us’ everything through descriptive means. As Ian Rodger writes, ‘story-telling designed as a bridge between the dramatic action and the listener could of itself become a barrier’ (Rodger, 1982: 150). However, the strategic use of the narrator can be extremely effective and beneficial. This is particularly the case when it comes to character-narrators, sometimes very clearly hosts. The most successful hosts do not fall prey to becoming an obstacle: they ‘frame’ the stories rather than intervene in them and succeed in setting the appropriate tone for the works and prepare us for the ideal mood in which to listen. Some radio plays which have made the decision not to use a narrator can seem weakened by a lack of an opening narrative or narrator, at least when the play exploits the characteristics and clichés of the horror yarn. The use of the host is especially important in some examples of generic drama, above all horror radio. In the great era of live American broadcasting from the 1930s to the 1950s there are numerous examples of hosts, figures who introduce us to the story that makes up the play we listen to. Some of these hosts are playful and macabre, others are arrestingly sombre. The ancient Salem witch Old Nancy in The Witch’s Tale and the cave-dwelling Hermit in The Hermit’s Cave would cackle at their listeners, luring us into their tales of terror with delight. The hosts of Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Mysterious Traveler were more refined than these horror archetypes but equally sardonic in their humour. In contrast, the hosts of The Weird Circle (1943–47) and The Sealed Book (1945) were somewhat sterner figures, compelling us with authority rather than bating us with grim humour (even if their framing narration can border on self-parody). Writer-producer Arch Oboler developed a particularly interesting persona as host of Lights Out: he functions as a highly personable confidant, and yet this is a calculated guise with which to let us know the ‘authenticity’ of the horrors he will tell us. Oboler gives us the chance to switch off our radios if we are of a nervous disposition; and, if we stand the course, he sometimes authenticates the stories by evidencing true cases of supernatural phenomena or by equating the fantastical monsters in the stories with contemporaneous ‘monsters’ such as Hitler (see Hand, 2006a: 101). It is important to acknowledge the broad significance of framing devices in literature and even theatre, not least when it comes to Gothic culture. Many ghost stories and examples of uncanny fiction use narration to frame and contextualise the central story. This can fulfil a dual function of establishing the parameters of the tale we are about to hear in order to build suspense and anticipation; but it can also create a sense of distance, objectifying the frequently intense subjectivity in many tales of horror. This potential is certainly exploited to the full by writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, whose respective novels Turn of the Screw (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899) ironically use framing narration to create in the reader an acute sense of who is telling us the central story and oblige us

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to observe the recounted dramatic experiences of their protagonists at a distance. Similarly, we might think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) a hundred years earlier, wherein a protagonist is accosted on his way to a wedding and is awestruck (perhaps even cursed) by the old sailor’s tale of doom. In theatre, the use of a chorus to provide context and exposition can be found in classical Greek and Japanese drama as well as the Elizabethan– Jacobean stage. A landmark moment when it comes to horror theatre is when Oscar Méténier, the founder of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, arrives, dressed all in black, and recounts the lurid details of recent crimes to the audience waiting outside his theatre (Deák, 1974: 36). It could be argued that this moment establishes the beginnings of the horror host in popular performance: a figure who will have a key role in horror radio as well as in the form of Edward van Sloan warning the viewers at the beginning of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931); William Castle’s pre-show devices in the cinemas of the 1950s; television horror hosts (Watson, 1991) and Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. The host will also be important in a form such as horror comics – most famously EC’s Tales from the Crypt – which was directly influenced by the Grand-Guignol (Hand and Wilson, 2012) and the many horror hosts of classic US radio.

Suspense’s Man in Black In creating an American-style horror programme, the BBC needed a host, and the creation of a deliberately styled ‘character-host’ in 1943 was a technique as ‘American’ as the show’s use of atmospheric sound effects and knife-chords. The host was, after all, part of the Suspense ‘package’ and crossed the Atlantic when CBS gave the BBC selections from the repertoire. Thus The Man in Black came into being and became a horror radio ‘legend’. This is evident in an interview with David Lemon, one of the writers on the most recent incarnation of The Man in Black, who implies that this legacy was at the forefront of his awareness when he was commissioned to write an episode: ‘“The Man in Black” is a mantle Mark Gatiss inherited from Edward de Souza and Valentine Dyall’ (David Lemon, 2012). The ‘mantle’ itself was in its own right imported from the US before it became a British institution. However, if we investigate the Suspense host as precursor to Appointment with Fear’s Man in Black, we discover that, somewhat surprisingly, he is not as prominent a figure as one would expect. In its earliest days, Suspense had a host, but he was not a ‘named’ one until, in its twenty-fourth episode, Carr’s adaptation of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (12 January 1943), the host suddenly describes himself as ‘The Man in Black’, thus creating a persona to join the pantheon of classic American radio hosts. As distinctive as he is, however, The Man in Black is never as over-the-top as some of his contemporaries. We mentioned the contemporaneous series The Whistler earlier, and if there was a broad

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parallel between the two CBS shows this was consolidated when the host introduced himself as ‘The Man in Black’. According to Martin Grams, Jr.:

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Some listeners wondered if CBS was attempting to create another Whistler. Both narrators were nameless except for an alias. Both introduced and narrated mystery tales, with a ‘know-it-all’ attitude in their voice; they knew the ending of the story before the listeners (Grams, 1997: 17)

The host of Suspense was initially played by Barry Kroeger1 who, after a little over a dozen episodes, was replaced by Joseph Kearns.2 Kearns had a strong, forceful voice and he imbues the narrative frame of Suspense with gravitas and foreboding, consummately accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s Suspense theme. Kearns successfully establishes himself as The Man in Black for well over 100 episodes (more than the entire number of broadcasts in Appointment with Fear), yet in a fascinating alteration, in March 1945, Kearns continues to present Suspense with the same ominous intonations but no longer describes himself as The Man in Black. It is difficult to ascertain why, after more than two years of solid success for the series, the character-host was abandoned. It was certainly not out of vogue: strong personas continued to frame The Mysterious Traveler and, of course, The Whistler. It may be that Kearns’s voice did enough to frame the diverse stories on the series: unlike some character-hosts, his was not a role implicit in the narrative of the plays. The American Man in Black tended not to comment on the tale he presented; indeed, in embellishing his opening and closing speeches, he was more likely to talk about the voice actors themselves than to comment on the characters in the stories or the morality of the play. He was, in effect, more of an announcer than a host, albeit one who did a tremendously effective job in setting the atmosphere of the programme and hooking the listener. He could also be quite colourful, as in the opening of his first full Suspense episode (Carr’s ‘The Lord of the Witchdoctors’ in November 1942) where we find him looking in a dictionary: Now let’s see … suspect, suspectant, suspend … Ah, here we are … suspense. The condition of mental uncertainty usually accompanied by apprehension or anxiety. Fear of something which is about to occur as … do not keep me any longer in – Suspense!

However, the decision to keep the frame of the show generic as opposed to implicated in the narrative itself probably implies that it may have proved to be an artificial and even pretentious device to have what would have been a character-host. In contrast, the construction of the host persona in Appointment with Fear was highly successful in a context of British radio broadcasting that seems quite ‘dry’ compared with contemporaneous US radio. Nevertheless, the BBC of the time was evidently not short of its own eccentricity: according to Douglas G. Greene, even Val Gielgud himself was ‘a supremely theatrical character in his public life, often wearing a cloak and carrying a sword-cane’ (Greene, 1995: 234).

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Let us look at an example of a Carr script to establish the difference between the American and British hosts. In the title of the Suspense play ‘Will You Walk into My Parlor?’ (23 February 1943) Carr alludes to the first line of Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (1829): ‘“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the Spider to the Fly.’ Carr’s play is about a man who is led to believe that his fiancée, far from being the innocent young woman she seems to be, has had numerous suitors all of whom died in mysterious circumstances but not before they have amended their wills in her favour. Carr would borrow this plot for his novel Till Death Do Us Part (1944) and, in the same year, reused the same script for Appointment with Fear but with yet another – startlingly different – title: ‘Vampire Tower’ (11 May 1944). According to Greene, Carr had evidently been keen to ‘call something “Vampire Tower”’(Greene, 1995: 281) since the mid-1930s when he used it as the working title for the novel The Three Coffins (1935). As a title, ‘Vampire Tower’ clearly has a Gothic connotation, especially to the contemporary reader. It is interesting that Carr felt that the British incarnation of the play was the right forum to at last use this title for his tale of a serial-killing femme fatale. There is no recording of the BBC version, but the script exists and this can be combined with the fifteen-minute extant fragment of the Suspense broadcast. The contrast between the two openings is such that one would be forgiven for anticipating completely unrelated plays. First of all, this is a transcription of the opening of the Suspense recording: Suspense! This is The Man in Black here again to introduce Columbia’s program, Suspense. Two of Hollywood’s most deft players are here with us tonight: Miss Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Miss Fitzgerald and Sir Cedric are here to match wits in a suspenseful tale by John Dickson Carr called ‘Will You Walk into My Parlor?’. If you’ve been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution until the last possible moment. And so with ‘Will You Walk into My Parlor?’ and the performances of Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, we again hope to keep you in … Suspense! [Music up] Just how far does any man trust his wife? Or his fiancée either, for that matter? [Music up. Thunder.] An English bazaar, a garden party in the grounds of Layton Hall in Kent, one fine summer afternoon before the war. Layton Hall is the home of Major and Mrs Grant, always ready in the cause of charity. There’s the stern, red brick of the Hall, rising above oak-trees …

Over a year later, here is the opening on Appointment with Fear from the copy of the broadcast script: Appointment with Fear! This is your storyteller, The Man in Black, here

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again to bring you another story in our series, Appointment with Fear. The vampire, according to legend, is a monster who feeds on the blood of the living. But there are many kinds of vampires, aren’t there? I remember one such case, not many years ago, which has kept me chuckling ever since. And so, while you are asking yourself how the poison was administered we trust we shall keep our promise to bring you … [Knife-chord] An Appointment with Fear! Vampire Tower, by John Dickson Carr, produced by Martyn C. Webster. [Music up and backing] Come now, on a drowsy summer afternoon before the war, to a charity bazaar in the grounds of a country-house in Kent. Layton Hall is the home of Sir Harvey Drake, always ready in the cause of charity. There’s the dark red brick of the Hall, rising above oak-trees …

Despite his nomenclature, the American Man in Black is more of an announcer here, while the British version is a character-host. On CBS, Kearns foregrounds the actors, emphasising the ‘star quality’ of the cast (and mentioning the author) before providing a generic description of Suspense. After a characteristic swell of music, Kearns provides a highly succinct ‘teaser’ which encapsulates the plot. This characterises the story as being about trust within marriage or relationships: the play promises to be a film noiresque study of adultery, certainly not a horror play. In stark contrast, on the BBC Dyall launches into horror by discussing vampires and further developing our sense of intrigue about the ‘many kinds’ of such monsters. The fact that he explains he has been ‘chuckling’ captures the macabre humour of The Man in Black and (although it is overall a much shorter speech) is an excellent example of a character-host’s tone and idiosyncrasy. Dyall’s suggestion of supernatural horror is further enhanced by the heightened Gothic title of the work which continues to suggest a full-blooded horror play. After this, both versions move into the story itself, but there are still subtle differences: the CBS version is blunt and factual, almost establishing the scene in a cinematic way. In contrast, the BBC version continues to have a sense of The Man in Black’s control as he lures us in with his evocative ‘Come now …’. In addition, the US version presents the military figure Major Grant and his wife on a ‘fine summer afternoon’ while the British version focuses on the knight and his estate. Although the stories will proceed in a similar way after this, Suspense perhaps creates a less obscurely patrician image for its listeners than the reference to ‘Sir Harvey’ does. It is worth noting that both versions are set in England. As Grams notes, ‘The majority of settings in Carr’s early scripts either took place in England, or involved English characters’ (Grams, 1997: 15). There is no doubt how important was the character-host in establishing the mood and flow of each episode of Appointment with Fear. In an internal memorandum, BBC executive T. W. Chalmers complains about the structuring of the opening, which moves from The Man in Black’s introduction through to the orchestra and then a ‘completely prosaic announcement from

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a BBC announcer’ (5 October 1945) which proves that nothing could ‘kill atmosphere more quickly’. In all likelihood, Chalmers is referring to ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ (2 October 1945), which still exists as a recording. If we listen to it, it is certainly the case that after a typically sardonic introduction by The Man in Black – describing Carr’s sleuth Dr Gideon Fell (‘there sits Dr Fell himself, all twenty stone of him, with his four chins’) – with the brooding theme music in the background, the music stops for the dry announcement: ‘“The Clock Strikes Eight” by John Dickson Carr, produced by Martyn C. Webster’. After this, a new mystery music theme is introduced for the story proper. For Chalmers, this hiatus destroyed the mood. It is worth noting, however, that the ‘prosaic’ BBC announcer Chalmers mentions is actually Dyall himself: he is still playing The Man in Black, but by divorcing his voice from the brooding background music to deliver a merely factual announcement (as opposed to using the kind of morbid or grotesque embellishment typical of The Man in Black) he seems to transform the characterful host into a bland announcer. Valentine Dyall’s sonorous voice made him a valued radio actor. Although he did perform on stage and would later appear in films such as Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1945), his greatest achievements were on BBC radio and television. On radio, Dyall featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978–80) as Gargravarr, the characteristically sonorous disembodied mind and custodian of the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’, a mind-annihilating torture device which momentarily reveals the (in)significance of its victim in relation to the full extent of the universe. In the album versions (1979, 1980) and television adaptation (1981) of the programme, Dyall also played the voice of Deep Thought, the computer created to solve the ultimate answer to ‘the question of life, the universe and everything’. In his television work, Dyall was cast as dependable, authoritative figures such as Dr Livesey in an early adaptation of Treasure Island (BBC, 1951) or Dr Keldermans in the television drama Secret Army (BBC, 1977–79). However, he was also adept at playing more villainous figures, such as the Black Guardian in several episodes of Doctor Who primarily in 1983. He could also appear in comedies, including a couple of Tony Hancock shows in the 1950s and Marty Feldman shows in the 1970s. Towards the end of his life he appeared as Lord Angus in the first series of the BBC television comedy The Black Adder (1983). However, it is as The Man in Black that Dyall’s most celebrated achievement abides. It is interesting to note that The Man in Black’s persona was not clearly established before the start of the first series. In the copy of the broadcast script of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ – the second episode of Appointment with Fear – there is a very revealing amendment on the script, in Dyall’s handwriting. The typescript states ‘This is your story-teller, the Man Who Laughs …’. On Dyall’s script, the last two words are scribbled out and handwritten above them are the words ‘in Black’, which is what Dyall utters on the recording of the broadcast. In fact, the BBC archive copy of ‘Cabin

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B-13’, the first-ever Appointment with Fear broadcast from the week before, opens with ‘the Man Who Laughs’: as there is no recording, we cannot be sure if Dyall uttered this or the decision had already be made to use The Man in Black as on Suspense.

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The Man in Black (1949) The success of the host in Appointment with Fear was such that it led to a fascinating offshoot: the standalone series on BBC radio, The Man in Black. This single series was not successful enough to command a second series and it comprised a mere eight episodes, unlike the dozens of dramas featured over the years on Appointment with Fear. However, what The Man in Black establishes is more clearly the progenitor of the more recent incarnations of British horror radio and the abiding ‘legend’ of horror radio. Indeed, the fact that some of the scripts from The Man in Black are revived for performance in Fear on Four in the 1980–90s bears testimony to their importance and the achievement of the writer who steered this short-lived series. This was not John Dickson Carr but John Keir Cross, a writer far less prominent but who has a noteworthy place in the history of popular horror and fantasy culture. The Scottish writer Cross worked for the BBC from 1937 to 1946, writing, adapting and producing radio plays and features for radio broadcast. After 1946 he became a freelance writer and short-story anthologist, as well as returning as one of the writers on The Archers from 1962 until 1967. Cross’s short story ‘The Glass Eye’ (1944) – a particularly well-crafted ventriloquist horror tale – would find a lifespan when adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (6 October 1957) and, according to Martin Grams Jr., for ‘Hitchcock fans all over the world’ (Grams, 2001: 193) it remains one of the two most popular episodes ever produced on this longrunning programme.3 Gary Westfahl, somewhat unkindly, describes John Keir Cross as ‘tormented by the grander ambitions he never revealed and could never fulfil’ (Westfahl, 1998: 159), and yet he does concede that Cross produces some respectable radio adaptations. Other figures more generous include Arthur C. Clarke, who pays tribute to Cross as a mentor: Another man I liked and admired, and who died at a tragically early age, and is now almost forgotten, was the British writer John Keir Cross, who wrote a number of science-fiction and fantasy stories in the ’40s and ’50s, and did a lot of radio plays, and also adapted some science fiction for radio. He was the first, I think, professional writer I got to know. He lived not far from me when I moved to north London, and he had quite an influence on me, and encouraged me, I think, to become a pro. (Clarke, 2008)

Another major writer, Ramsey Campbell, also cites Cross as a key influence on his formative years, albeit less as a writer in his own right than as an anthologist:

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Cross’s anthologies include, for Faber & Faber, Best Horror Stories (1956), Best Horror Stories 2 (1965) and Best Black Magic Stories (1960). The principles Campbell has indicated extend to the other collections, and the anthologies are fine examples of the form in which Cross assembles wellknown and obscure short fictions in a way that complements the pieces within the collections as a whole. In addition, it is worth mentioning Cross’s stylish introductions and commentaries. Not only do these put the diverse tales in context, they also contain engaging prose including, in Best Black Magic Stories, Cross’s account of how he ‘once invited the Devil to broadcast’ (Cross, 1960: 9) as part of a live broadcast from a BBC radio studio in Scotland for Halloween 1953. The Halloween broadcast was apparently a documentary discussion focusing on the occult in history. It considered the legends surrounding the ‘vampiric’ Elizabeth Bathory and the rumours that circulated around Oliver Cromwell – before speculating on ‘the possibility of present-day Black Magic activities’ (Cross, 1960: 9). Cross recounts: It seemed a reasonable conceit to conclude the programme with what these days would be called a gimmick, of some pre-publicity value; and so, at the end of it, a genuine magic circle was drawn round the microphone, an actor (a volunteer) was handed a sealed envelope containing an authentic medieval incantation for summoning the Prince himself, and all the rest of us withdrew.   The actor read the words of the incantation and then retired from the studio himself, switching out all the lights as he did so. And we left the microphone open and alive, there in the darkness, for a space of two full minutes – open and alive to whatever cared to take advantage of the invitation to utter through it. (Cross, 1960: 9–10)

Cross notes that nothing seemed to happen, although ‘some curious letters’ (Cross, 1960: 10) did arrive over the next few days, perhaps suggesting that some listeners reported experiences of electronic voice phenomena in the ‘dead air’. However, in an uncanny coda to this true story, which demonstrates the ‘colour’ John Keir Cross brings to his editing role, he reveals that later the same night his six-month old baby was viciously attacked by an enormous rat which had mysteriously gained entry to the child’s ‘impregnable little room’ (Cross, 1960: 266), an incident which Cross himself can

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‘almost believe’ was a direct consequence of offering the Devil a guest slot on BBC Scotland. Cross’s account reveals his aptitude to serve as a ‘host’ as much as editor to his short-story collections. If we return to the 1949 BBC radio series The Man in Black, Cross was the freelance writer and/or adaptor of the eight broadcast episodes: •

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• • • • • • •

‘Markheim’ (31 January 1949) based on the Robert Louis Stevenson short story. ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ (7 February 1949) after M. R. James. ‘The Middle Toe of the Right Foot’ (14 February 1949) after Ambrose Bierce. ‘Our Feathered Friends’ and ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ (21 February 1949) after short stories by Philip MacDonald and John Collier, respectively. ‘The Judge’s House’ (28 February 1949) based on the Bram Stoker short story. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (7 March 1949) after Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ (14 March 1949) based on W. F. Harvey’s short story. ‘The Little House’ (21 March 1949) an original work by John Keir Cross.

Two of the short stories he chose to adapt for the series (‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ and ‘Our Feathered Friends’) were to be included in Cross’s 1956 Best Horror Stories anthology, and it is fair to say that many of the works are classics of horror fiction, including works that had been or would be adapted for radio at other times. These include the following: ‘Markheim’, as we have already seen, would feature on US horror radio (The Weird Circle, 20 May 1945) through to podcast dramas (Chatterbox Audio Theater, 2011); ‘The Judge’s House’ would be adapted on The Witch’s Tale (as ‘Hangman’s Roost’, 4 July 1932) and CBS Radio Mystery Theater (25 September 1981); ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ would feature on Suspense (29 July 1948) and Vanishing Point (10 May 1985); and there are countless more. Closer to home, Fear on Four would use Cross’s adaptations of ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ (31 January 1988), ‘The Judge’s House’ (9 April 1989) and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (27 December 1990). It is testament to Cross’s achievement that the 1940s scripts are used, effectively and with little change, decades later. Indeed, although John Dickson Carr ostensibly created the British horror radio series, none of his scripts are used in more recent British horror radio. There are no extant recordings of the 1949 The Man in Black, but the archival scripts give us an invaluable insight into Cross’s writings as well as the performance practice of the programme. Cross evidently approached ‘The Man in Black’ and his universe slightly differently from his creator.

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Indeed, the uncanny and neo-Gothic repertoire and style of Cross’s The Man in Black owes more to Mystery and Imagination than to Carr’s Appointment with Fear. In many of the scripts, Cross permits The Man in Black much longer narration (frequently speeches are over a page in length), a decision that must have afforded Dyall exciting opportunities to develop character and atmosphere. In some examples, Cross also brings The Man in Black into the stories themselves. In his scripts, Cross reveals a sophisticated attempt to exploit the potential of sound. For example, near the beginning of ‘Markheim’ we hear: [Music again. Merging into the ticking of many clocks – brisk small ticking, slow measured ticking, all mingling together in a varying pattern. Hold] man in black: Listen … Just for a moment, listen … [Effects up a little, then fade and almost lose behind] man in black: These are the voices of time …

As we can see, Cross suggests the development of a soundscape and also affords The Man in Black an almost lyrical turn of phrase. Similarly, in ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ Cross wants to optimise the dramatic effects of sound: A small natural pause. During it, we grow aware of the almost imperceptible sound of the wind creeping in to build the atmosphere. It continues, always rising, in a desolate soft moan.

Of course, this M. R. James story is a fine example of auditory horror with the little bronze whistle that summons a malevolent spirit. Cross suggests these options: On a low – an extremely low – flute register – or possibly the ‘off’ tone of a wooden recorder might be better? – played stumblingly and at half tempo …

Cross’s question shows a willingness to experiment to ensure that the sound is realised most effectively. The eerie sound is used again to end the play when The Man in Black tells us to ‘remember, my friends – remember’ and the ‘whistle’ plays and fades to ‘absolute silence’. ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ As a case study we will look at the seventh episode: ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, an adaptation of W. F. Harvey’s 1919 short story ‘arranged for the microphone’ (as the script has it) by John Keir Cross. Harvey’s story about a vengeful human hand is probably best remembered in the film version The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946), starring Peter Lorre. The extant copy of the script is David H. Godfrey’s production script. Godfrey, who would have a long career as a producer at the BBC radio, co-produced The Man in Black series with the key Appointment with Fear

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producer Martyn C. Webster. The production script is fascinating for the insight it gives into rehearsal process. Godfrey’s notes provide evidence of the intensive nature of radio drama rehearsal. Scribbled on the front page is the ‘Day’s Routine’ for Monday 14 March 1949: 10.30–11.15 Read through. Coffee. 11.30–13.00 Read through on mics. Lunch. 14.30–15.30 Run through + notes. Tea. 16.00–17.00 Run through + notes. 17.00–18.00 Final run through + notes. 18.00–18.30 Any tricky sections. Supper. 20.30–21.00 Transmission.

There are extensive notes in the margins indicating last minute changes in casting and the standard production practice of footnoting each page with a note of the precise running time. However, some of Godfrey’s notes give a fascinating insight into his endeavour to bring the production ‘to life’. Valentine Dyall may have been well-seasoned by now – The Man in Black was ‘his’ series after all – but Godfrey’s marginalia shows he is determined for Dyall to get the measure of his performance right. On the very first page of script, Godfrey scribbles that Dyall is ‘too quick’ and needs to ‘dwell more’, that he should be ‘lighter & a little slower’, which a note in parenthesis emphasises is ‘for listeners’ benefit’. The Man in Black’s opening narration includes four consecutive questions: And how does it begin? What was the Beast with Five Fingers? Where did it come from? – what was its power?

Godfrey comments that this should be ‘possibly downwards’ in the margin: presumably suggesting that Dyall needed to keep the tone of these rhetorical questions in line with his trademark sardonic gravitas and resist raising his tone of voice increasingly higher. When we come to the opening dialogue between Eustace and Saunders, John Keir Cross’s script states that Saunders’ first line is ‘(close – yawning) All right, Eustace – it’s me …’. Godfrey notes to Lionel Stevens (the actor playing Saunders) that there should be ‘no yawns first’ and that he must ‘project more’. As the dialogue progresses, Godfrey notes that the exchange is ‘too static’ and its ‘perspective bad’ and some lines are delivered ‘too quickly’. As the play proceeds, Godfrey streamlines certain lines for the sake of fluidity and scribbles that one actor needs to have ‘the fast light speech of one who is on edge’. He informs the actors to include ‘drink’ sounds within or between lines. There are interesting clues regarding intonation. On one of Saunders’ lines, Godfrey inserts arrows:

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saunders:  Not uncommon, I believe ↗ – there are lots of cases. ↘

This was evidently an effort to give life to a line that risked being static. Sometimes Godfrey’s notes emphasise the actors’ journey within a single speech: in one of Eustace’s speeches Godfrey inserts a nervous ‘gulp’ near the beginning and yet goes on to stress that, by the end of the speech, the mood is one of ‘tension relieved’. Sometimes Godfrey notes the purposes or potential of sound effects: when there is a ‘sudden soft tapping at the door’ he notes that this is ‘a misleading noise to momentarily terrify’. Godfrey also suggests helpful sound effects – ‘noise of bottle glass etc.’, or a ‘slight paper sound’ when the character examines a piece of paper, or a ‘rustle’ when a letter is opened or destroyed with a ‘crumple’. At one point Godfrey writes that in addition to the ‘crash – loud – close’ that the script suggests, a more pronounced ‘noise of “beast”’ is required. Godfrey writes again the criticism about the ‘perspective’, evidently meaning the aural picture lacks depth. His suggestion at this point is that the sound of the dismembered hand on the piano needs to be in the ‘foreground’, which will enhance Cross’s script: Irregular discords down the piano keyboard from treble to base. Followed by a large crash discord and a slither on the keys.

When Saunders and Eustace manage to hammer the hand down onto a lid – the sound effect in the script stating ‘A blow from the hammer – several’ – Godfrey inserts an additional sound effect that the beast ‘scrapes’. This adds emphasis to the script in which, after all, Eustace exclaims at ‘the length of its nails – they must have gone on growing after – look at them’. The climactic scene is certainly the most ironic and is signposted in the opening narration: I hope you will only know – that you will never see for yourself […]: that going quietly into your bathroom, for instance, and looking over the edge of the bath, you will never find It – the Beast itself – dumb, blind and maimed, crawling, staggering, trying to creep up the slippery sides only fall back again, until the dreadful moment when – But no; I leap too far ahead …

The beast is trapped in a bath like a spider which the audience hears thus: saunders: There – look – there it is – in the bath! eustace: It must have slipped in somehow – it’s trapped – it can’t get out. [Background effect if possible – the hand slipping and slithering on the hollow metal. Build up pace and movement] saunders: It keeps falling back. I can’t bear it – I’ll be sick!

At the end of this dramatic sequence, Godfrey writes ‘Slow a little’, and over the top of that during another run-through inscribes ‘Slower end’. Clearly the actors had the tendency to move too fast during that sequence.

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As we have seen, John Keir Cross tries to be as helpful as possible in his scripts. In one sequence in ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ he spells out an idea for the end of a scene, to come in as the character Morton is speaking:

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Crossfade him with music, rising now in a brief interlude. Lose echo acoustic. Then down and lose behind The Man in Black. Or again a simple fade-out without music – whichever is more effective – and the Man speaking over it.

Godfrey scribbles in the margin that ‘Possible tremolo violins effects disc’ is an option at this point. It is significant that Cross suggests ‘whichever is more effective’. This is a drama of thrills that are to be optimised, and Godfrey himself understands this. The play ends thus: saunders: [running – panic] Morton! Morton! Fire – fire! eustace: [a high dreadful gasp, then:] Saunders, it’s here – look – look! Saunders! [A scream – a long hideous scream. And immediately a great swelling burst of music. It rises to a climax, then fades. And, as it does so, The Man …]

Godfrey spells out the importance of control in this scene. Prior to the sound direction, he inserts ‘careful of last line’: it is an important finale of horror but has to be carefully paced and Godfrey scribbles down a suggestion for disc music at this point: ‘Columbia DX 1377 “The Loves of Joanna Godden”’.4 One feature in the writing of The Man in Black version of ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ is how the eponymous narrator is implicated in the story. Unlike the detached, cold humour of the Appointment with Fear narrator, Cross’s Man in Black can even be featured within the stories themselves. In the case of ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, this means that at the traditional midway point of the play The Man in Black can tell us: The rest of the day was miserable – I know, because it was on that particular afternoon that I happened to call on Eustace Bolsover. I had known both him and Saunders for some time, and when I found myself in that part of the country I took the chance to visit them. I found them both reserved and nervous.

It is a curious speech inasmuch as by the end of it The Man in Black explains that he has decided: ‘since they were plainly in no mood for visitors, I very soon took my departure.’ However, what the speech affords is a third perspective on the ‘beast’ articulated in The Man in Black’s sombre tones: It was while I was walking down the drive away from the old house – for the last time, incidentally – that I saw, or thought I saw, scuttling suddenly from under my very feet, what I took to be, I remember, a large clammywhite toad – an albino toad, if such a thing could ever be possible.

The monologue effectively builds a sense of the ominous: ‘for the last time,

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incidentally’ permits doubt as to the fate of Eustace, Saunders and even the ‘old house’ itself. Then The Man in Black encounters the beast itself. Interestingly, the description permits scepticism (he ‘thought’ he saw) and the description of a ‘large clammy-white toad’ may be grotesque, but it is still not the dismembered yet animated hand: it remains ambiguous even for our omniscient host who always seems in ‘control’ of our horror experience. Radio can probably play with ambiguity more effectively than any other form, and this is nowhere more evident than in ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’. The reanimated, dismembered hand is seen in the film version of The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) and it is also a moment of horror used in films as diverse Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (Hideshi Hino, 1985), Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987), and The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991). Such films have variously used stage-magician trickery, puppetry or computer-generated images to create a convincing illusion of living hands. However, radio plays can play with the issue of subjectivity/objectivity without a need for absolute resolution: the dismembered hand that torments its victims in ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ may be real or it may just be a figment of the imagination or a deformed albino toad. ‘Our Feathered Friends’ and ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ The Man in Black presented only one double-bill (never done on Appointment with Fear but used on Mystery and Imagination) with John Keir Cross’s adaptations of Philip MacDonald’s ‘Our Feathered Friends’ and John Collier’s ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ (21 February 1949) coupled into a single thirty-minute episode. They are simple ‘playlets’ which work with rapid pace and culminate in horrific climax. Significantly, the two plays are prefaced with a remarkably long narration from The Man in Black. He welcomes the listeners – especially any new guests – to the latest of his ‘little weekly séances’. He recaps the plays the series has broadcast so far and then whets the appetite for the double-bill: Tonight if you are agreeable, I would like to tell you two tales – two brief anecdotes, almost, that are in some measure different. I warn you that although one of them may be in what I shall call the lighter vein, the other is a story that some of you may find a little shocking to the sensibilities. It is a tale of dark and unexplained – unexplainable – malignancies of evil that may linger just below the surface of the world as we know it. Indeed […] an unusual tale – yet behind its strangeness there is, I feel, a particularly bitter corner of truth. I have said before that it is the familiar thing grown suddenly unfamiliar that drives a man mad – the lovely thing that becomes, in an inexplicable moment, intolerably unlovely.

In this speech, we gather The Man in Black’s typical politeness and the careful manipulation of suspense, luring us in to the tales. It is also interesting for its definition of defamiliarisation as, in effect, a key ingredient of horror. ‘Our Feathered Friends’ is ostensibly a precursor to Daphne du Maurier’s

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novella ‘The Birds’, first published in her collection The Apple Tree (1952). In the play, a couple walk in an idyllic forest and are gradually tormented and destroyed by a massing group of birds. The simple script is efficient and fast-moving, and the production would have relied on the development of sound for its effect: the steadily increasing sound of birds in the woodland culminating in the terror of the victims, which mixes bird sounds with ‘horrid, screeching music’. The second half of the double-bill is an adaptation of John Collier’s ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’. Collier’s very short tale is a classic horror story. It is the story of a boy – called by his family ‘Small Simon’ – who has an imaginary friend ‘Mr Beelzy’, but his rational, dentist father (‘Big Simon’) decides that this nonsense has to stop and sends his son up to his room to be thrashed. Small Simon is unfazed, declaring that Beelzy has promised to protect him by devouring anyone that tries to hurt him, like ‘a lion, with wings on’ (Collier, 1961: 232). After his father has gone upstairs a terrifying noise is heard and the rest of the family run upstairs to find a shoe with ‘the man’s foot still in it’, like the discarded remains of a mouse beside a cat. ‘Beelzy’ is clearly allusive to ‘Beelzebub’. Even Small Simon is described as having a triangular face with a pointed chin – perhaps something diabolically goat-like. The 1949 radio script makes Collier’s allusion explicit with The Man in Black explaining: The title – an unusual one – is: Thus I Refute Beelzy. Beelzy – B – E – E – L – Z – Y. Short, as you might say, for … well … Beelzebub, perhaps …

Collier’s story is in the tradition of uncanny literature wherein children have a central role and there is speculation about the (non-)existence of the supernatural. Henry James’s Turn of the Screw is a prominent classic in this subgenre, and the Mystery and Imagination’s adaptations of ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, ‘The Boy Who Saw Through’ and ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ demonstrated its viability as radio drama. More widely, the theme is also in the Romantic tradition of the juxtaposition of innocence and experience. As in William Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song’ or William Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’, we are presented with adults oppressing the imagination and happiness of children with a somewhat sadistic rationalism and cynicism. The keyword in the story is hidden away in a seemingly innocuous sentence: before going upstairs to thrash his son, the dentist father washes his hands ‘with his invisible soap and water’ (Collier, 1961: 232). Just because something is invisible, it does not mean it does not exist. The title alludes to a famous literary anecdote in which James Boswell and Samuel Johnson discussed ‘Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter’: I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – ‘I refute it thus.’ (Boswell, 1906: 292)

Collier’s story proved popular. A version was presented on the US radio

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series Sleep No More (6 March 1957), forming a double-bill with Nelson S. Bond’s ‘The Book Shop’ in a reading (enhanced with selected sound effects and music) by Nelson Olmsted. ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ is a precursor to Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘Zero Hour’ – collected in The Illustrated Man (1951) – in which the nation’s children suddenly have the same imaginary friend which turns out to be an alien invasion. ‘Zero Hour’ would become a particularly fine episode of Suspense (5 April 1955). The Man in Black’s ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ is a succinct adaptation, framed and interpolated with The Man in Black’s narration. The version hinges on the fraught relationship between the two ‘Simons’. Mr Carter has only just arrived home when he engages his son in conversation: mr carter: […] Small Simon, are you sorry to see me at tea with you? simon: No, Daddy. mr carter: No what? simon: No – Big Simon. mr carter: That’s right – that’s very much better! Big Simon and Small Simon. That sounds more like friends, doesn’t it? At one time little boys had to call their father ‘sir’, and if they forgot – a good spanking. On the bottom, Small Simon – on the bottom.

The lines are taken from Collier, but they take on a greater brutality by being, essentially, our introduction to the father. Moreover, the conversation soon turns to the father interrogating Simon about why he is ‘dazed and nervy’ whenever he comes in from the garden and then bullying him over ‘Mr Beelzy’. Although the father can rationalise ‘the fantasy stage’ of childhood development, he insists that Small Simon must learn the difference between ‘day-dreams and real-things, or your brain will never grow’. Deciding on punishment, Big Simon explains: mr carter: [shouting] You’ll learn how real he is! If you can’t learn at one end you shall learn at the other! I’ll have your breeches down! Go up, do you hear? – go up the stairs! I shall finish this cup of tea, and then you’re for it, my lad – you’re for it!

Although largely taken from Collier, the last phrase is John Keir Cross’s addition, the original story having the father state ‘I shall finish my cup of tea first, however’ (Collier, 1961: 232). Collier’s Big Simon is perhaps colder and more calculated than his audiophonic counterpart, but the radio version is more energetic. After this speech, The Man in Black takes over for the remainder of the play. Cross provides a very interesting direction for the actor: Dead silence for a moment, then The Man in Black speaks, very quietly – almost detachedly – close to the mike

This captures the tone of the sardonic Man in Black – detached and yet close and compelling. For the final sentence – the discovery of Big Simon’s severed foot – the narrator becomes even closer: ‘A pause. Then, very close’.

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The final broadcast of The Man in Black was ‘The Little House’ (21 March 1949), the only non-adaptation in the series. Although written by John Keir Cross, it is presented as a ‘personal adventure told by Valentine Dyall’. Throughout the series, Dyall was afforded long monologues in framing the narrative, but in the case of this final play, the monologues are exceptionally long. It gives an opportunity for Cross to develop aspects of The Man in Black’s ‘worldview’. The Man in Black recounts a story of when he took a holiday in Scotland. It was a busy holiday time, and when his car breaks down in a seaside town he is forced to search for accommodation. Everywhere is fully booked and finally, in desperation, he begs a room from a strange couple (Duncan McIntyre and Olga Dickie) and their little girl Marjorie (Audrey Blair) who stares at him in a ‘serious shy way’. The Man in Black steps in and out of dialogue as well as telling us the tale through monologue. The family are reluctant but eventually charge an exorbitant rate, which The Man in Black has no choice but to agree to. The bedroom is damp and miserable but at least it is a roof over his head. He befriends the delightful Marjorie who says she has a younger sister Janet who is nowhere to be seen, but her father is making a house for her to play in. Eventually Marjorie takes him to see her sister, and even the macabre Man in Black is utterly appalled to see a dead child. The little house of the title was not a Wendy-house but a coffin, and the bed he slept in had just held her body until the parents shifted the corpse to the shed for a desperate tourist’s ‘pound’. Unlike the preceding tales in the series, this is not a tale of the supernatural, but something chillingly prosaic, a true horror story all the more powerful for its simplicity. The Man in Black is shocked by the values of the unscrupulous parents. When he sees the corpse he turns, walks and never looks back. There are tales of dead bodies in the bed, such as William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930) or Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Schalken the Painter’ (1839), but those tales of frustrated sexuality and anxiety are very different from Cross’s simple and pitiful tragedy. Although this was the final episode in the series, it is clear that there were hopes for more. The Man in Black tells us he has found more stories including one about an ‘Abominable Snowman’: … not the famous Abominable Snowman of the Himalaya Mountains – no; but such a snowman as you yourselves might find one winter’s morning in your own front garden: a Snowman even more real than his famous namesake, and also, perhaps, even more … abominable … Goodnight again – and, as I said, au revoir.

Nearly forty years later, when The Man in Black returns in Fear on Four, the first episode is J. C. W. Brook’s ‘The Snowman Killing’ (3 January 1988), a play which could be described in the same terms as those The Man in Black had proposed for a plot in 1949. In the shorter term, The Man in Black’s ‘au revoir’ would be for a not insignificant six years, a lengthy hiatus after

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ten runs of Appointment with Fear and The Man in Black between 1943 and 1949.

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Notes 1 Barry Kroeger worked extensively on radio and would find a career playing ‘bad guys’ in television dramas and making cameo appearances in horror movies such as Chamber of Horrors (Hy Averback, 1966), Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977). 2 Joseph Kearns was a highly active radio actor and played Professor Moriarty to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939–47). He would go on to be the voice of the Doorknob in Disney’s film of Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, 1951). 3 Grams cites ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ (13 April 1958), adapted by Roald Dahl from his own short story, as the other favourite episode. 4 This refers to the film The Loves of Joanna Godden (Charles Frend, 1947) and, more specifically, the score by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The film was a tearjerking romance starring Googie Withers set in Edwardian England, scripted by H. E. Bates and Angus McPhail and based on Sheila Kaye-Smith’s 1920s novel. It is interesting that the music from a romantic film was chosen for near the conclusion of the play.

4

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Horror radio in the 1950s

There may not have been Appointment with Fear or The Man in Black in the early 1950s, but the BBC still had examples of macabre output. Do You Believe in Ghosts? (1952–53) was a series of thirty-minute programmes featuring first-hand accounts of, as a BBC memorandum of 30 July 1953 expresses it, ‘authentic and personal experiences which apparently had no rational explanation’. The storytellers were paid a guinea per minute and the contributions ranged from less than two minutes to over ten minutes in duration. A BBC memorandum of 16 June 1953 reveals that Brandon Acton-Bond (Head of Features) urged that families were contacted again immediately prior to broadcast in case any contributors had died since the recordings were made and ‘their relatives may not wish to hear the deceased’s voice in this context’. In terms of drama, broadcasts included one-off uncanny plays such as ‘The Black Cabinet’ (11 July 1950) by Aubrey Feist. This play is in the Appointment with Fear tradition, mixing the features of the supernatural with rational happenstance. The play concerns touring music-hall performers who stay at the bed and breakfast of Mrs Grindle (Patience Collier), a setting clearly established by a purely functional narrator. In one of the rooms is a magician’s cabinet and screen, which was left at the lodging house following a tragedy in which a routine went wrong: landlady: […] The sword went in with a sickening sort of noise, and that girl screeched fit to wake the dead. But the great Ramazan didn’t ’oller. Oh, no! ’E didn’t holler! ’E just fell down in a dead faint when ’e saw the blood trickling down the blade. [A long, tense pause. Mrs Grindle opens the door; and when she speaks again it is in almost a whisper] And that’s what ’appened, if you want to know, and that’s why I can’t bear the sight o’ the Black Cabinet.

The ill-fated screen and cabinet looming ominously in the corner of the bedroom that the music-hall double-act the ‘Ravals’ – Tony (David Peel) and Rita (Dorothy Smith) – have rented has a malevolent effect. As in the ‘haunted mirror’ episode in the film Dead of Night (Cavalcanti et al., 1945), the sinister effect is evident only on the male who is lured to the cabinet.

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rita: [screaming in genuine terror] DON’T TONY! Don’t get inside! tony: Why, Rita – darling! What’s the matter? rita: [in a tense whisper] It’s horrible! I know it is. tony: Rita! Pull yourself together! rita: [her voice rising] When you went near it, you seemed out of touch with all ordinary, decent, everyday things. I – I could feel it drawing you away from me. If I hadn’t screamed …

Tony laughs it off, blaming the ‘Irish superstition’ in Rita’s family background and explaining that if he discovers that he has ‘wife with the willies’ he will leave her. Eventually, the Ravals escape the lodging house and its evil trick cabinet, but not before the couple have a time-bending experience and meet Adams (David Kossoff) as he deposits the black cabinet in the room. Other one-off dramas include A Recluse (5 May 1954), Ivan Brandt’s adaptation of Walter de la Mare’s short story from the collection On the Edge (1930). In this half-hour adaptation, Mr Dash (Alan Wheatley) visits Mr Bloom (Esme Percy), the reclusive man of the title. Despite the objectlessons of writing for radio with Caligari, Appointment with Fear or The Man in Black, Brandt’s script is burdened with an unwieldy amount of narration, with Dash recounting what happened during his night in the mysterious house. In effect, the play is virtually a reading of the story with some dialogic scenes and effects – such as the ‘sound of whispering voices’ as Dash heads towards his shocking revelation that his host – with his ‘soaplike stagnant features’ – has been long dead.

The final Appointment with Fear In 1955, Appointment with Fear made a belated return for a tenth series with six scripts by John Dickson Carr. In a Radio Times article evocatively titled ‘Date with Darkness’ promoting the revival of Appointment with Fear after seven years (and six years after The Man in Black), we capture a sense of the ‘cult’ surrounding the returning host: Tall and lean, with a voice in the lower register that has a compelling, almost mesmeric effect upon listeners, Valentine is nevertheless by no means as sinister as his Man in Black would have us believe, though he admits he has always been interested in the para-normal. ‘I once spent a night in a supposedly haunted graveyard,’ he told us, ‘but nothing materialised.’ (22 July 1955)

The article plays a game here, insisting that Dyall is not sinister although his interest in the supernatural lends him an appropriate aura. This is re-enforced when Dyall reveals in the same article: ‘I have even been stopped in the street and told by a man that I had frightened his wife, and that if I continued with the series there’d be trouble.’ There is interesting evidence regarding the development of The Man in Black’s character for the final series. Dyall’s working copy of the script for

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the opening episode – ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed’ (26 July 1955) – has survived, and some of the amendments made to the script are revealing in the way that they construct character. In the original script we are told: This is your story-teller, The Man in Black, returning after many years with a new series of tales in our fascinating little program, Appointment with Fear. I must tell you that a few of these tales will be … somewhat different, in a sense. And yet, in greeting my many friends after so long an absence, I feel that it would be ungracious to welcome you with any story except one of the old school: one to … [Amused] … soothe you, amuse you, and send you happily to bed. For instance, do you believe in the power of witchcraft?

Dyall crosses out ‘fascinating’ and replaces it with the word ‘intimate’, which brings the host much closer to the listener. Dyall’s script also deletes the word ‘many’ to create a tighter, again more intimate and less rhetorical, ‘my friends’. He also re-emphasises himself as storyteller when he changes ‘one to …’ to ‘tales to …’. ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed’ is a classic example of a Carr plot: the promised ‘witchcraft’ in the introduction is given a rational explanation, in that the dread of the camera that comes to obsess the vain central character Ransom (Roderick Lovell) is explained by the fact that smallpox spots can be seen on a photographic image of a person days before they are detectable by the naked eye. Interestingly, on Dyall’s script a slip of paper is attached to the final page to embellish the closing monologue: I have before me a copy of Dr. Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation, still the bible of all police forces; and on page 174, third edition, you will find the account of just such a case as I have narrated here. Indeed, I would not mislead you – except at the beginning of a mystery.

The speech is intriguingly defensive, going an extra mile to justify the explanation of the mystery. The well-loved Man in Black may be back, but one gets the sense that he is aware of a very different audience: an audience less naïve than the listeners of the 1940s. This defensiveness feels like it is aimed at the doubtful spectator who might consider that Carr’s explanation stretches plausibility or is a downright cheat. In the 1950s reincarnation of The Man in Black, there is also something nostalgic. The last-ever Appointment with Fear episode was Carr’s ‘Till Great Armadas Come’ (30 August 1955), a play which manages to look back with nostalgia to the Second World War as The Man in Black’s opening narration makes clear: It is fitting that tonight this story should be of old days, of war-time days we all remember. I would not, by any word, bring back unhappy memories. Yet it is good and heartening now to think sometimes of those who, in black days, stood fast and would not falter; of times long gone, but remembered without dishonour. And so, as I tell you the story of the Führer’s plot

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to stamp his mark forever on London, we hope we shall keep our promise to bring you … [knife chord …] An Appointment with Fear!

The Nazi plot is to drop bombs in the pattern of a huge swastika onto London and paralyse the city. The title of the play alludes to the patriotic myth of Sir Francis Drake’s sangfroid in the face of the Spanish invasion, and in Carr’s play the related values of the British stiff upper lip and humility win through. The closing narration makes it clear that it is the final episode but not the necessarily the final series: The Man in Black hints at other stories he has in his ‘notebook’, which is, ‘as always, at your service’. Nevertheless, there is a degree of unmistakable finality to his closing sentences: If you have enjoyed these little nightmares we shall all be more than satisfied. And so, until the future, this is your storyteller, The Man in Black, saying goodnight and goodbye.

Horror parody: The Goon Show Appointment with Fear was finally over, and it would be more than three decades before The Man in Black was on the airwaves again. It is evident that in 1955, there is a mixture of the defensive and the nostalgic. After all, The Man in Black had become a well-loved institution in the 1940s (even having a particular importance for some fans during the grim days of the Second World War), but by the 1950s this is something antiquated or even self-parodying. The latter is reinforced by the fact that The Man in Black did not entirely disappear from the airwaves between the late 1940s and the 1955 revival. A few months before his return on Appointment with Fear in July 1955, Valentine Dyall made a cameo appearance on The Goon Show (2 November 1954) in a skit of his most famous role: harry secombe: […] To commence this night of debauchery, we present the world’s mixed bathing champion of 1931: The Man in Black – Mr Valentine Dyall! fx: [Vibrant giant gong] valentine dyall: Allow me to correct you, little pygmy man … I am no longer The Man in Black. I am now The Man in Grey. harry secombe: What brought about this change? valentine dyall: A very cheap drycleaner. harry secombe: Very well. Mr Dyall, the floor is yours but remember the roof is ours! valentine dyall:  Thank you, Barbara Kelly. Ladies and Gentlepong. This is The Man in Black speaking. A funny thing happened to me on my way to the theatre tonight – a steam roller ran over my head. So much for humour. And now pray allow me to tell the story of … spike milligan: [Screams] fx: [Deep resonant splash] valentine dyall: ‘The Canal’, ha haha [goes off laughing into echo] orchestra: [Sinister horror theme]

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What follows is a fully Goonesque parody of a typical Appointment with Fear episode, including Dyall playing a sinisterly Gothic character within the tale. Dyall will appear on other episodes of The Goon Show, usually presenting an over-the-top self-parody of sinister menace. As in the above extract, the ingredients of horror broadcasting – storyteller, sound effects, evocative music – assimilate in sustained pastiche. In The Goon Show of 31 January 1956, this extends into the title of the horror play presented within the show: ‘The jolly Goons present a play entitled … [fx: Loud female scream] in three parts. Part one is entitled … [Wallop on back of head, pop of large pop gun, set of false teeth hitting inside of bucket, scream]’. The ‘title’ may be absurd and ironic, but it inadvertently captures the importance of sound effects in horror radio, above all the place of the scream within the genre. Many years later, Dyall’s persona still steps back and forth between the sombre and the comic. In July 1973, Dyall took part as a reader in a radio programme featuring poems on ‘patriotic and imperial themes’, and in an accompanying interview in the Radio Times he states: We must not play down the horror of war […] All the same, if there has to be war, there’s nothing contemptible about behaving well in it. Behaving courageously. And chivalrously. In fact, it’s very agreeable … Oh dear, I sound like a Conservative lady in a hat. (28 July 1973)

The voice is classic Dyall, partly the mordant rhetorician from Appointment with Fear but also the macabre self-parodist on The Goon Show, the commanding words undercut with bathos, taking us from the horror of war to the absurdly comic (‘The Man in Black’ becomes ‘A Lady in a Hat’) in a few lines.

Horror Drama in the 1950s: single plays and Uncanny Stories Aside from comedy, ‘straight’ horror radio would continue after the final Appointment with Fear with standalone plays and one-off series. Notable plays include the bleak thriller ‘The Dark House’ (25 September 1956) by Evan Morgan, a thirty-minute drama about an oppressive Welsh family, not dissimilar in setting to Richard Hughes’s Grand-Guignol stage play The Sisters’ Tragedy (1922). The depiction of a tyrannical father makes the play a precursor to Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine (1965), although ‘The Dark House’ is grimmer in theme and storyline. The play focuses on Dan (Brinley Jenkins), who is on trial for the murder of his father (Jack James) who tormented Dan’s sister Gwen (Peggy Holmes) and her would-be suitor Edwin (Eric Ellis). Gwen murders their father with brandy laced with sleeping pills and yet it is her brother Dan who is arrested and found guilty of the murder. In a sentimental finale, the jury recommends mercy and Dan is content in the knowledge that his beloved sister is ‘a free woman at last’. Other plays include Glyn Frewer’s ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ (4 December 1957),

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which concerns a lorry driver and his mate in Devon who pick up three hitch-hikers who are going to London. They hear on the radio that the police are looking for a murderer on the loose on Dartmoor. The play uses the claustrophobia of the moving lorry’s cabin and the terror of the remote open road to build up a sense of suspense and movement, even if the play ends with bathos (they have not picked up the killer but a deserter from the army (with two accomplices) who sees the error of his ways and returns to the camp). An attempt at a fully-fledged horror series can be found in Uncanny Stories (1958), a six-part series written by Edward J. Mason and produced by Archie Campbell. The programme used the premise of the editorial office of a magazine which looked at accounts and stories of the ‘unexplained’. At the beginning of the first episode (‘The Fascinating Hobby of Mr. Cranberry Parfitt’ (10 November 1958)), Mr Levine (Allan Jeayes), editor of ‘Uncanny Stories Magazine’, answers the phone and explains that he is not interested in ‘crime stuff’ but ‘unusual’ stories for which he will pay ‘unusual’ prices. All the plays follow a standard pattern in which a visitor comes to the office, and as he begins to recount his story it is dramatised. The series uses a ‘Storyteller’ host to frame the plays. The Storyteller frequently opens the narration with familiar (if not clichéd) quotations. The first episode opens with this speech: storyteller: [On echo] ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Hamlet was referring to strange, weird, unaccountable happenings. And tonight we bring you a story that is out of the usual run. The uncanny story which tells you about ‘The Fascinating Hobby of Mr. Cranberry Parfitt.’ Here are the facts. Make of them what you will.

Following the Shakespearian allusion, the second episode of Uncanny Stories is titled ‘Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on’ (17 November 1958), a quotation from The Tempest which the Storyteller elaborates in his opening monologue. Although the host is designed to fulfil the same role as The Man in Black, he is a pale imitation, a merely functionary character who lacks the humour or engagement that the original commanded. It is impossible to imagine The Man in Black dealing in such clichés or telling us to ‘make what you will’ of bare facts. The shallow construction of the host is also evident in the fact that there was no fixed actor in the role, with Ronald Baddiley and John Boddington taking turns in playing the part. The plays in the repertoire of Uncanny Stories are largely predictable: psychic contact with someone who turns out to be dead (‘Things That Go Bump’, 8 December 1958); a vivid nightmare in which a man witnesses a murder which turns out to be a fully accurate description of a crime that did take place (‘Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on’); or an eerie voice that haunts a man with a deadly but ambiguous prophecy (‘A Still Small Voice’

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(15 December 1958)). The most interesting play is ‘An Ear for Music’ (1 December 1958) in which a conceited pianist Charles Mornay (Rolf ­Lefebvre) is cursed by the mysterious Ramset Sawardi who prophesies that Mornay’s ‘life will end’ at 7.30 pm on a certain day. Mornay awaits ‘zero hour’ with Levine and is relieved when they hear Big Ben strike the halfhour.1 In a euphoric mood, Mornay exclaims: mornay: So much for Mr. Ramset Sawardi and his threats … [Laughs] Looks as though there’s no ‘Uncanny Story’ for you this time, Mr. Levine. Now … what to celebrate, eh? A defiant Polonaise, I think … And to the devil with Ramset Sawardi …  [Pause. Then he starts to play. A Polonaise (Chopin). He plays the most appalling discords] levine: Mr. Mornay … please … mornay: You don’t like it? Perhaps something light and gay, then – a waltz! I’ve never felt more confident … never played better … I feel a surge of virtuosity running through me. Listen … [He plays again (the Minute Waltz). Even worse. Stopping] It’s wonderful, Mr. Levine … to have this gift … to feel one’s power. And Ramset Sawardi said that at half past seven my life would end. [Laughs] levine: But you said Music was your life. mornay: It is … it is … listen … [He continues to play discords] levine: Then Ramset Sawardi was right. It has ended! [Fade out on discords. The end]

The curse of Mornay losing his ‘ear’ for music and yet still convinced of his genius works effectively as horror radio, the familiar narrative of a lunatic unaware of their madness working well with the use of the discordant piano. If Uncanny Stories is somewhat unimaginative compared to vintage episodes of Appointment with Fear and most of The Man in Black and Mystery and Imagination, we should not consider the 1950s to be a barren time. Landmark accomplishments in radio writing include Under Milk Wood (1954), Dylan Thomas’s lyrical construction of a Welsh community, seamlessly exploring reality/fantasy, the conscious/unconscious, interiority and public face, and the dreams, desires and nightmares of the inhabitants of Llareggub. Technological advances allowed for some radical experiments and developments, making us think of Gregory Whitehead’s assertion: ‘Successive generations of technology do not so much displace as digest each other’ (Whitehead, 1990: 142). Ian Rodger mentions the importance of the portable tape-recorder in the 1950s as an invention which enhanced writers’ understanding of normal speech and changed ‘the manner of dialogue’ (Rodger, 1982: 97). Another technological impact can be seen in the BBC’s 1958 ‘Experiment in Stereophony’, which, rather than using an all-new work, opted to have the experienced radio director Raymond Raikes produce an adaptation of William Gillette’s nineteenth-century stage

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play Sherlock Holmes (which assimilates a number of Holmes stories) that he wrote in close consultation with Arthur Conan Doyle himself. The stereo Sherlock Holmes was a thirty-minute play, but it required a day to install and test the equipment before two full days of rehearsal and recording. Another landmark technologically-driven radio drama is ‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares: a Radiophonic Poem’ (7 October 1957). Written by Frederick Bradnum and produced by Donald McWhinnie, the play is a complex and multi-processed manipulation of sound using techniques that will be formalised and further explored by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (1958–98). McWhinnie himself introduces the play as an example of ‘modern magic’. In explaining the technology, McWhinnie announces: There are any number of ways of using these new techniques, they’ve already applied in a modest way in thrillers and science fiction plays. Indeed, the broad effects are the easiest to achieve: horror, hysterical comedy. It’s much more difficult to manage tenderness, local duty, sweetness and light. Perhaps because of the inhuman element in the actual process of manufacture.

Despite McWhinnie’s explanation that the play is a novel attempt at radiophonic poetry, he admits how radiophonic technology has been used already in a range of popular dramatic genres. Significantly, McWhinnie reveals that this experimentation has already been used in the areas of comedy and horror. The type of ‘hysterical comedy’ McWhinnie alludes to is probably The Goon Show (1951–60) which used the Radiophonic Workshop to create celebrated sound effects such as the over-the-top indigestion of ‘Major Bloodnok’s stomach’. As McWhinnie suggests, the ‘inhuman element’ to the sounds’ creation lends itself very well to hilarity or horror. Indeed, the play certainly lives up to the ‘Nightmare’ mentioned in the title. The play features three actors – Frederick Treves, Joan Sanderson and Andrew Sachs – and an extremely complex soundscape. The play’s beginning is defined by movement, evident in the opening lines of the play with the female voice stating ‘Round and round like a wind in the ground …’ soon followed by a whispering male voice describing his fall: I fall through nothing vast empty spaces and the pulses of my life bound intertwined with the pulse of the dark world … Still falling, falling but slower now like music the way down is slow defined gravity almost to a stop. Almost.

All the words are framed and accompanied by the distorted sounds and rhythms of the radiophonic soundscape, which enhances or is in juxtaposition to what is being said. If there is a perceived hierarchy that separates the voice from the sounds early in the play, eventually this is obscured when radiophonic techniques are applied to the human voices. The sense of nightmare is further emphasised when a sound reminiscent of distorted breathing is accompanied by the lines: ‘Waiting for you is fear … Beneath the blanket

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of your sleep, in the back of the brain, now and always here.’ It is a world of ‘cities falling’ and ‘savage beasts’ growling in the jungle, a head crowned with thorns and black stones: ‘that bodiless head sunk into the landscape and desert sand […] that is your fear! Your crown is waiting!’ We hear the dreamer stating that if he awoke now the nightmare would end, but his subconscious voice also dreads what might follow if he does decide to wake up. The play is in the tradition of modernist poetry in its mixture of Christian symbolism and arcane imagery (especially reminiscent of a poet like W. B. Yeats) and its sense of ‘the hate and hunger, the desire and the despair’ (like T. S. Eliot). In addition, the play develops an apocalyptic sense of sound, with atomic bombs, speeded-up laughter or voices counting numbers, into which cacophony a balance is struck between the comic (‘chipmunk’ voices) and the disorientating and disturbing. Albeit more coherent in narrative, James Hanley’s Gobbet (6 October 1959) is another milestone in 1950s radio drama. The tradition of ventriloquist dummy stories is a significant subgenre within horror. The storyline in most examples of the subgenre tends to be that the ventriloquist begins to lose control and the doll ‘takes over’ its owner (as in Dead of Night (1945) and Magic (Richard Attenborough, 1978)) or that the doll is unambiguously a supernatural monster (Goosebumps’ ‘Night of the Living Dummy’ (1996) and its sequels). Hanley’s Gobbet takes the genre into another realm, however. It is an experimental and arresting work that is a deeply unsettling exploration of themes of identity and relationships. For Ian Rodger, this disturbing play is one of the finest demonstrations of what radio drama can achieve: Hanley presents a ventriloquist who employs his dwarf son as a dummy. After a grotesque scene in a hospital he knows that he must kill his son and while the secret that the son is not a dummy is kept from the stage audience, the listener is made aware of the truth … When the father finally kills his son on stage, half the audience roars with laughter because they think the figure on stage is only a dummy while the rest scream with horror because they know the truth. The device which is employed here, a character who is presented both as dummy and as living, could not be employed on the stage or in film with the same success and though the work is structured to display other voices it hangs entirely upon the voice of the father in the style of interior monologue. (Rodger, 1982: 137)

Notes 1 To be doubly sure that the time is correct, Mornay dials the speaking clock in a passage excised from the production script.

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In the 1960s, there were isolated examples of horror radio, such as J. L. Galloway’s ‘The Dark’ (29 July 1962) produced by John Tydeman. This is a thirty-minute drama which presents, from the perspective of a ship, a storm that has raged for six weeks and, centrally, a lighthouse in which the two stranded keepers’ irritation with each other grows into murderous contempt. The play uses sound effectively – the tempest, rain beating against the lighthouse and the grinding sounds of the lighthouse mechanism. It is in the tradition of Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin’s Grand-Guignol lighthouse horror play Gardiens de phare (1905) and of US radio drama such as the lighthouse horror play ‘Three Skeleton Key’ (Escape, 17 March 1950) or the ‘stir crazy’ thriller ‘A Study in Wax’ (Escape, 1 February 1953). Despite its merits, ‘The Dark’ is emphatically in the Appointment with Fear style and yet it lacks a host: this may free the play from any risk of over-narration, but it also lacks a ‘frame’. Tydeman also adapted and produced Henry James’s Turn of the Screw as an eighty-minute drama (28 February 1966) which adheres closely to the original novel’s narrative, albeit streamlining some of James’s more complex syntax. Overall, horror radio was out of vogue in the 1960s, although it remained important within the context of comedy. This is why Stephen Gallagher, the writer of several horror plays for Fear on Four, ‘cannot remember any distinctive radio horror from [his] growing-up years in the 1960s’, but nevertheless had meaningful radio memories of ‘traditional and radical’ comedy: Ken Dodd, The Navy Lark and The Clitheroe Kid alongside I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and Round the Horne. Actually, in retrospect I’d move Ken Dodd into the radicals’ camp. These days he’s usually thought of as the last of the traditional variety performers, but on radio I remember him as a demented surrealist. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

When it came to ‘straight’ drama, Gallagher remembers the 1967 Sexton Blake radio adaptations by Donald Stuart starring William Franklyn as the intrepid detective. For Gallagher the series demonstrated the rich potential of radio drama: William Franklyn was terrific in the lead. In form and pacing they were almost cinematic, way more so than the TV of the time, where you were

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very limited in sets, staging, and coverage. Stuart had been writing Blake for story papers and pulps since the 20s but there was nothing dusty about his radio technique. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

Even if Gallagher did not encounter horror radio as such, the traditional and radical genres he encountered were instrumental in learning the craft of audio writing. In the 1960s, some comedy series continued to follow The Goon Show example in using horror for parody despite the many years since Appointment with Fear had aired: the genre and its conventions, including a Man in Black-style host, had become firmly embedded in the cultural memory of the British listener. Time and again in British radio the caricature of horror radio is a ‘safe’ option for comic purposes. Round the Horne (1965–68) will turn, time and again, to the horror genre in the creation of comic set-pieces. For a while, Round the Horne established a horror drama parody within the show, complete with a spoof of horror narration. On the episode of 1 May 1966 Hugh Paddick announces: Somewhere between waking and sleeping, between the conscious and the unconscious, between Hounslow and Hammersmith Broadway lies an area of the mind where strange things happen. Come with us now through the gateway of the supernatural, up the eerie passage of fantasy, into the area we call [long evil laugh] the Twilight Sanctum!

Interestingly, the speech alludes to Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Twilight Zone, both American examples of popular horror rather than British ones. The following week (8 May 1966) another speech is delivered by Paddick: Come exploring with us into the hinterland of the imagination, across the wasteland of superstition, through the bog of taboo, through the backdoor of the libido, and you will find yourself in the … hahaha … Twilight Sanctum-m-m-m-m-m …

As we can see from the reference to ‘libido’, Round the Horne will exploit the potential innuendo that abound in horror cliché. On 15 May 1968 Hugh Paddick announces: There are many things we cannot explain. What is extrasensory perception? How does telepathy work? What was I doing behind a bush on Clapham Common … with a pair of binoculars and a pair of stockings over my face? These are just some of the things I cannot explain … but come with us on a journey into the supernatural … up the eerie passage of the inexplicable …

On 10 March 1968 we are told that Baron Frankenstein ‘is notorious round here: he’s got the biggest Schloss in this part of the country’. As well as using innuendo, Round the Horne ridicules the titles of horror – Frankenstein’s Monster meets Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy and the Creature from 20,000 Fathoms (10 March 1968) – and the genre’s mock-heroism, with Kenneth Horne describing his Gothic adventures:

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I myself had struggled up the mountain track fending off werewolves with my amulet, zombies with my talisman and encyclopaedia salesmen with my credit rating. (10 March 1968)

The long-running comedy series I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again (1964–73) frequently used the horror genre to similar ends. In a play within the show called ‘Doctor Heckle and Mr. Jibe’ (11 April 1966), a line that ‘Dr Heckle left this note’ is followed by a loud, sustained knife chord on the Hammond organ: the sequence mixes the spoken and musical languages of horror to humorous effect. One later episode (12 April 1970) develops a particularly sustained subversion of the languages of horror:

jo kendall: This week’s play is a shock horror drama full of terror, suspense and fear and we should we warn it is unsuitable for children and those of a nervous disposition and people with something better to do. So, stand by to be terrified out of your wits as we present – [Hammond organ begins] graeme garden:  The Return of the Son of Bride of Dracula’s Cousin Frankenstein’s Wife’s Lover’s Hairdresser’s Gibbon’s Mummy Deborah … [Hammond organ stops followed by a crash of thunder]

The play – about a newly wed English couple on honeymoon in Transylvania – is stacked with clichés from the horror genre, not least the classic horrorradio organ chords. As with Round the Horne, the comedy often functions by establishing the rhetorical patterning of horror before subverting it. This is demonstrated in lines like ‘and from the depths of the castle came a sound which set her teeth on edge, made her spine tingle, her flesh creep, her hair stand on end and her nose do press-ups on top of the wardrobe’. It also occurs in the closing announcement along with numerous horror words and rephrasing: david hatch:  And that is the end of our story. Arthur and his wife returned to England. But as for Frank Frankenstein and Count Dracula, they joined the legions of the living dead … They became chartered accountants. [Theme tune] The programme you have just heard was designed to chill the marrow and to give you the creeps … And the creeps were Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graeme Garden, David Hatch, Jo Kendall and Bill Oddie. The producers were Count Peter Titherage and Baron David Hatch. The song was composed by Graeme Garden and was sung by Bill Oddie and was given a spirited rendering by Dave Lee and his ghouls. The music was composed by Beethoven and decomposed by Leon Cohen. And here is the British vampire the sun never sets on to say … john cleese: Stop groaning!

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The 1970s: The Price of Fear Horror radio in the 1970s began with audio readings on Tales of the Supernatural (1970), six stories produced by David Davis for broadcast in the afternoon. Davis chose the stories himself and, rather like Alonzo Deen Cole and The Witch’s Tale in the 1930s, opted for less familiar works: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Apple Tree’ (21 April 1970); Hugh Walpole’s ‘Mrs Lunt’ (28 April 1970); Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Spooner’ (5 May 1970); Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Guardian’ (12 May 1970); Margaret Lane’s ‘The Day of the Funeral’ (19 May 1970); and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Stranger’ (26 May 1970). Later in the decade, the BBC broadcast the film actor James Stewart reading out abridged versions of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (28 September 1973) and ‘The Black Cat’ (29 September 1973); David Neal reading out ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (3 December 1976); and Anna Massey reading Neville Teller’s five-part adaptation of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (December 1977). The tradition of broadcast readings can be traced back to before radio drama itself and over the decades, in the area of horror, has included Algernon Blackwood reading out his own tales in the 1940s. In terms of horror radio drama, the most important series since the last series of Appointment with Fear in 1955 was The Price of Fear (1973–74, 1983), starring Vincent Price. Price first appeared on US radio in the 1930s and through to the 1950s was much in demand to play a diverse range of roles, including notable performances in suspense and horror plays that would come to characterise his later film career (Hand, 2006a: 63). In his autobiography, Price recalls his radio career with nostalgia (Price, 1978: 72) and in 1973 Price was delighted when the BBC gave him the opportunity to return to the genre. Price was in Britain for several months in 1973, the year that saw the release of the British-made film Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973). Around the same time Price also made regular appearances as a team captain on the BBC television panel show The Movie Quiz, which started in June 1973. As well as his film and television work, Price also appeared on radio, including as the host of the radio horror series The Price of Fear. The first series of The Price of Fear was broadcast in 1973 and was followed by another in 1974. The series returned again in 1983. The oeuvre amounts to over twenty episodes of thirty-minute horror plays. The repertoire featured a mixture of original plays – many written by William Ingram – and adaptations of classic uncanny fiction: Roald Dahl’s ‘William and Mary’; R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s ‘The Ninth Removal’; and Stanley Ellin’s ‘Speciality of the House’. The producer was John Dyas, who also produced the radio version of Dad’s Army (1974–76). The BBC aired the first series of The Price of Fear on the BBC World Service on a weekly basis from 1 September 1973 but packaged the five plays that comprised the series as nightly broadcasts on national radio in December 1973. The plays went out at 11 pm on BBC Radio 2 – a channel

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more usually associated with music and light entertainment than drama – showcased as a nightly dose of ‘pre-Christmas’ horror. Earlier on the same evening as the first broadcast of The Price of Fear, BBC Radio 4 offered its own listeners a dose of the supernatural with David Buck’s ninety-minute radio play The Ballad of Cock Lane (17 December 1973), a ‘ghost mystery’ set in the eighteenth century. The opening episode of The Price of Fear on BBC Radio 2 was ‘Remains to be Seen’ (17 December 1973) featuring the veteran actor Mervyn Johns (who had starred in the notable examples of British uncanny cinema The Halfway House (Basil Dearden, 1944) and Dead of Night (Cavalcanti et al., 1945)) and the British character actor Clive Swift, who in the year before had featured in two classic examples of BBC television horror ‘The Exorcism’ (Dead of Night, 1972) and the M. R. James adaptation ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (A Ghost Story for Christmas, 1972). In William Ingram’s adaptation of Jack Ritchie’s 1961 short story, Johns and Swift play henpecked neighbours who exact revenge on their wives (Avril Angers and Diana Bishop) in an attempt to enjoy a peaceful retirement. The plays on The Price of Fear are strong examples of horror radio, using the form and conventions of the genre whether in its original scripts or in some extremely well realised adaptations of well-known or obscure works. However, as with The Man in Black, the host is all-important. In the case of The Price of Fear, not only is the drama mediated by Vincent Price in the role of host and narrator, the episodes are about Vincent Price. Price plays himself, drawing on his status as an experienced actor in general and his well-known reputation as a gourmet and art collector and, above all, as an icon of horror movies. As the writer David Lemon sums it up, in The Price of Fear ‘Vincent Price is forever bumping into friends with grisly tales to tell’ (David Lemon, 2012). This – and the raison d’être of the series – is made most explicit in Price’s opening narration for ‘Remains to Be Seen’: Hello there. You might be aware that as an actor I’ve become associated almost entirely with what are known as horror movies. Frankly, I don’t think that description is quite adequate. I prefer to think of them, purely and simply, as fantasies. Because they are you know. They just couldn’t happen, however vivid your imagination might be. In fact, there are far more macabre or even horrific events happening all around us every day of our lives but we’re just not aware of them. On my travels making movies in all parts of the world, men and women from various walks of life somehow always seem to manage to seek me out and tell me their own strange experiences and sometimes, even, I’ve been present when some of these frightening events have actually occurred. And now, here I am, with an opportunity to tell you the stories: sometimes horrific, sometimes with a macabre sense of humour but always, I promise you, containing the element of fear. And I have titled them, if you’ll pardon the liberty, The Price of Fear.

In his inimitable style, Price is affable and fluent, painting an evocative

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picture of the stories he tells in which, in the world constructed in the series, he plays a major part. The effect is to create a world which, as mediated through Vincent Price, steps back and forth between reality and fantasy: in so doing, Price challenges the ‘fantasy’ of horror films and shows us glimpses of ‘macabre’ reality. Let us consider one particular example as a case study: ‘Cat’s Cradle’ (19 December 1973), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s ‘The Squaw’ (1914). After a discussion about cats and their personalities, Price tells us about a time when he was filming in Germany. There is nothing glamorous here: the success of the narrative is that Price captures the reality of production experience, including a disruption of filming (‘a tiresome and boring state of affairs that happens all too often’); and the difficult individual personalities in the industry, primarily the chance encounter with a producer who tries to persuade Price to take part in the horror film he is going to make. The producer invites himself along with Price and his friends to look at a German castle which he intends to use as a horror location. The castle – with its Torture Tower and implements of torment – is central to Stoker’s story, but in the radio adaptation it becomes not just a tourist attraction but a suitable location for a horror movie, a horror movie that becomes real. In a misaimed throw of a stone, the producer kills a kitten which ‘shattered out its little brains’ (Price’s line of narration is directly lifted from the original story). Price angrily tells the producer that he now has his horror movie and there is ‘real blood, not vegetable dye’. This creates an interesting interrelationship between the world of Stoker’s tale and the world of filmmaking: just as it mixes real blood and stage blood, this work of horror radio conflates Gothic fiction and horror film. In the subsequent exposition the line blurs further as the dead kitten’s mother gets her revenge on the ignorant producer and he himself is killed, impaled and crushed by the iron spikes of a heavy iron door, after which Price confesses that he broke the cat’s neck. As with so many examples in the repertoire of The Price of Fear, Vincent Price is a ‘real’ person who is led into the unreal world of horror, and retains the same voice of authenticity throughout. We are not supposed to believe that Price witnessed the gruesome demise of a film producer or that he himself murdered a cat, but we accept the authenticity of his voice and persona and the ‘truth’ of his storytelling, but not the truth of the event. In a particularly playful episode of The Price of Fear, William Ingram’s adaptation of Robert Arthur’s ‘The Man Who Hated Scenes’ (21 December 1973), Price reluctantly shares a train journey with a stranger who, to many listeners, is instantly recognisable as another icon of popular horror cinema, Peter Cushing. As usual, Price plays Price, but Cushing plays an unassuming gentleman who tells Price how he was manipulated by a younger wife and took his revenge by draining the water out of his swimming pool on an evening when he knew that she and her lover would enjoy a midnight swim together. In the darkness, the couple dived from a high board into the empty pool (this is reminiscent of the sabotaged swimming pool in Appointment

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with Fear’s ‘Dragon in the Pool’). The play is dominated by the well-paced dialogue between Price and Cushing, with the latter using his skills of charm, patience and sudden, broken emotion before his glee when he delivers the plot twist by confession at the end of the story. At the same time, the play is a delightfully long dialogue between two iconic figures from horror cinema.

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The 1970s: comedy and horror Horror parody continued as a popular option within sketch shows and sitcoms in the early 1970s: for instance, The Navy Lark episode ‘The Loch Ness Monster’ (18 July 1971) is a successful and sustained Gothic parody. As for standalone drama, Nicholas Rowe’s The Axe Murderer (1976) is a fine example of extremely dark comedy. A perfectly cast Peter Sallis1 plays Lionel, a serial killer who stalks the woods, talking directly to the listener in confidence and confession. Lionel emphasises how privileged we are to be listening to him: ‘as an axe murderer, one does enjoy a certain pleasurable rarity value when all is said and done and the heads are counted, ha ha ha, er, that’s a little joke …’. Rowe’s playful script features sustained examples of ironic dialogue and some monologues for Sallis that have a bravura comic lyricism: And then, there’s prowling, sneaking, looming, lurking, casting shadows dimly in soft scented woodland paths such as that on which I currently stand, catching my breath, savouring the air, a creak with each merest movement and very nasty too when you have to hang about too long of a winter’s night waiting … waiting … for that homeward bound girl guide who missed the last bus – they all said she would – and took the woodland shortcut – they all said she shouldn’t – and ending up as newsy meat on your front pages over tomorrow’s breakfast flakes and her so clean and quiet say the neighbours.

Such sequences combine the scenario of countless horror movies (lethal serial killer prowling the wilderness) with the lyricism of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. A few minutes into the play, Rowe pulls the play back from the realm of extreme horror into a safer realm of bathetic comedy: we hear Lionel make ready to kill the ‘victim of the day’ (a man walking his dog in the woods) and he warns us, ‘as I pounce, as I leap, I usually scream – not a pleasant sound to be frank but it is rather expected of me, so be warned, eh!’. Lionel does indeed scream – a feeble wail which deteriorates into ‘what a nice dog’. This parody of the trademark utterance so often used in audio horror is effective and a key moment. Lionel engages in polite conversation with the dog walker and then confesses to the listener that ‘It’s never worked. Not ever.’ Far from being the homicidal prowler Lionel aspires to be, the play becomes an exploration of Lionel’s comic alienation and failure, above all when he is taken home by the insufferably patronising Melanie (Angela Pleasance) and Louise (Richenda Carey) who know that he is a wannabe killer. The finale to the play returns to horror inasmuch as Lionel

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finally succeeds in murder: not by using his beloved axe but, much more suitably, slow acting poison in some homemade biscuits. Later in the 1970s, the BBC would present one-off horror plays such as David Campton’s forty-five minute radio adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (22 November 1978), starring Edward Petheridge and Tim Pigott-Smith.2 The BBC also presented a series called Just Before Midnight, ‘A Series of Plays for Late-Night Listening’. Although the title might suggest horror plays,3 the repertoire was much more one of comic drama. For example, in the play that uses the series title itself, Dave Simpson’s ‘Just Before Midnight’ (1 July 1979), a burglar (Alan Rothwell) breaks into a house only to find that the owner is an ex-girlfriend (Stephanie Turner): although the play begins with elements of suspense and menace, it turns into a comedy of ever-increasing irony. Perhaps the one exception to outright comedy in the series is Stephen Grenfell’s ‘Remote Control’ (3 February 1979), a two-hander featuring Nigel Hawthorne (as John) and Bruce Lidington (as Rogers) about two men trapped in a house with a dangerous snake. The theme is, in some ways, ideal for radio. Indeed, Appointment with Fear featured a snake play in its seventh series: ‘Black Mamba’ (2 April 1946) by A. R. Ramsden and Hugh Barnes in which a British couple in Rhodesia encounter a pair of deadly snakes. Despite the couple’s survival, the horror of the play reaches its ironic climax when we realise that Margaret (Grizelda Hervey) is unhinged, having never recovered from the trauma. The broad theme is reworked in Roald Dahl’s tale ‘Poison’ about a British man in India at the mercy of a deadly snake that has crawled into his bed. Dahl’s story was first published in Collier’s Weekly (3 June 1950) and rapidly adapted into a highly effective thirty-minute radio play for the US series Escape (28 July 1950), a series which produced numerous ‘snake’ plays. In ‘Remote Control’, despite the danger of the mamba that is slithering around the room, the clear-headed John reassures the panic-stricken Rogers that he has a supply of anti-venom should the snake attack. Although the play does not build the claustrophobic terror that we find in ‘Black Mamba’, ‘Poison’ and the Escape adaptation wherein the hapless victims scarcely dare to blink or breathe, ‘Remote Control’ nevertheless builds effective tension along with a sense of grim humour. The men attempt to drive the snake away by using the intense heat of a sunlamp which hums faintly in the background. The snappy dialogue in Grenfell’s script succeeds in creating the presence of the silent adversary: rogers: The head’s higher. john: Jaws? rogers: Still shut. john: Good. rogers: [after a pause] He doesn’t like it. john: Those things are really hot. rogers: [trying hard not to raise his voice […] to contain his excite-

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ment] He’s … he’s moving … john: Where? rogers: Back along the skirting. john: Ah! rogers: No! He’s coming out into the room … towards you … don’t move! [after a long pause] He’s past you. john: I know … I heard him. rogers: [another long pause] It’s … it’s gone.

The crowning irony of the play is that John knew that he did not have any anti-venom left as he had used it all up on two of his workers in this ‘mamba-infested country’: despite the detached ‘control’ of John (a ‘cool bastard’ as Rogers calls him), a bite would have led to certain death. As we see, the script emphasises the pauses and the intonation of the actors – the snake is silent as far as the script is concerned. The fact that it is an essentially a performers’ piece (not a play driven by effects or soundscape) is supposed to extend to the framing of the play: Grenfell has written a note at the beginning of the archived script insisting: ‘Please get the announcer to adopt a suitably creepy tone! (all about a deadly snake!!!)’. It seems like a script crying out for a framing character-narrator but it would be another nine years before The Man in Black would return as the host of Fear on Four. However, in the interim, between 1979 and 1984 the BBC World Service presented a classic-style horror drama programme with three series of Haunted. The programme included half-hour adaptations of classic uncanny fiction (many dramatised by Patricia Maze or Derek Hoddinott, who was also the director of the programme), including Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Decoy’ (2 December 1979) and ‘Keeping His Promise’ (16 September 1984); Wilkie Collins’s ‘The Dream Woman’ (25 November 1979); J. B. Priestley’s ‘The Grey Ones’ (26 August 1984); H. G. Wells’s ‘The Inexperienced Ghost’ (24 April 1982); Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Emissary’ (8 May 1982); Agatha Christie’s ‘The Lamp’ (22 July 1984); and, favourites for horror anthologies, such as Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘A Pair of Hands’ (28 March 1982) and Bram Stoker’s ‘The Judge’s House’ (31 January 1982). Haunted also dramatised less familiar writers such as Fitz-James O’Brien, whose 1859 short story ‘What Was It?’ (21 October 1979) is an ‘invisible spirit’ tale that has been seen as a precursor to Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 horror masterpiece ‘The Horla’ (Colavito, 2008: 145) and Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 ‘The Damned Thing’ (Gale, 2001: 65). Haunted interpreted two stories by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, both of which work especially well: ‘The Liberated Tiger’ (5 August 1984) is an exquisitely played – and disturbing – two-hander in which a bedridden, terminally ill man (Leslie Sands) starts to haunt his wife (Rosemary Leach) before he has actually died. Similarly, Chetwynd-Hayes’s ‘Which One?’ (9 September 1984), about a team of incarcerated fire wardens during the 1940 London Blitz, is a work of powerful drama which shifts effectively from realism to

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the uncanny when the survivors realise that although they all seem alive, one of them must actually be dead. Haunted had a particular penchant for the neglected writer Rosemary Timperley, dramatising more tales by her than any other writer. Indeed, Haunted premièred with Derek Hoddinott’s adaptation of Timperley’s ‘The Little Girl Lost’ (14 October 1979). The second series premièred with another Timperley story – ‘Listen To The Silence’ (27 March 1982) – a tale particularly well realised for radio in Patricia Maze’s adaptation, as it is about a woman, Mary (Gwen Watford), with a terror of silence who eventually starts to hear the voice of her alleged ‘grandfather’ (George Pravda) when he catches a hiatus of enough silence to breakthrough to Mary. In particular, the first part of the play with Mary’s monologue and its sonic texture (including a variety of radio music and heartbeats and so on) before her fateful decision to finally ‘listen to the silence’ is extremely effective. Although no host was used in Haunted, the style of the plays frequently opened with an intimate monologue by a central figure in each self-contained play. Overall, Haunted presented listeners with fine acting, well crafted scripts and minimally used, but extremely effective, sound distortions and other effects for uncanny register (these being used on, for example, screams, laughter and eerie voices). In many respects, Haunted is the clearest example of a British horror radio series since the ‘retirement’ of The Man in Black in the 1950s and prior to Fear on Four, which would begin at the end of the 1980s. It is perhaps significant that Haunted chose a work by the creator of The Man in Black as a source for adaptation with Patricia Maze’s dramatisation of John Keir Cross’s short story ‘Esmeralda’ (1 May 1982), in which a viciously embittered husband (George Baker) murders his wife only to be haunted by their imaginary daughter. With the benefit of hindsight, Haunted demonstrated the viability of the horror drama series and indicated that Fear on Four was on the horizon, a series which would use some of John Keir Cross’s scripts and reanimate The Man in Black for a different epoch.

Notes 1 Most familiar in popular culture as the voice of Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit series of animated films (Nick Park, 1989 onwards) and the BBC sitcom Last of the Summer Wine (1973–2010). 2 David Campton originally adapted ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a stage play in 1962 before adapting it as an episode for the Mystery and Imagination television series (12 February 1966) starring David Buck and Denholm Elliot. 3 Just as, earlier in the decade, Brian Hayles’s ninety-minute play for Saturday Night Theatre, Lord Dracula (27 April 1974), starring Kenneth Haigh in the title role, may suggest a horror work but is actually a play set in the fifteenth century about the historical ‘Vlad Dracula’.

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The Man in Black returns: Fear on Four

The eventual reanimation of The Man in Black is thanks to two BBC producers: Martin Jenkins and Gerry Jones. Separately, the two producers were behind a huge range of plays,1 and together Jenkins and Jones co-produced major achievements in radio drama such as Vivat Rex (1977), the epic twenty-six part account of the Wars of the Roses that mixed the plays of Shakespeare (and other Elizabethan–Jacobean writers) with new writing. One of the Fear on Four writers, Bert Coules, reveals that it was ‘wonderful’ working with them as they understood the value of good writing: Two producer-directors of enormous skill and experience who both had a great deal of respect for their writers and what they wrote. Gerry Jones was a highly successful writer himself, which informed everything he did. In general, writers of BBC audio plays are allowed far more input and presence in the recording process than is usual in TV or film, something that can only be good both for them and the genre. (Bert Coules, 2011)

It was on the back of their successful creative partnership on Vivat Rex and other projects that Jenkins and Jones decided to act on a feeling of nostalgia: Like so many I had grown up with the Man in Black and together with my long-standing colleague Gerry Jones we felt that the fear/horror genre (perfect radio) had been neglected for too long. Together we directed about 40 [episodes of] Fear on Four. (Jenkins, 2010)

The series was called Fear on Four because of its home on BBC Radio 4, but when the episodes were broadcast on the BBC World Service it was given a more apposite title of The Man in Black. There were five series of Fear on Four, broadcast in 1988, 1989, 1990–91, 1992–93 and 1997. Jenkins and Jones may have had fond memories of The Man in Black, but there was no escaping the fact that he had not been on the air since the 1950s. For one of the writers they recruited, Stephen Gallagher, horror radio ‘had the feel of a lapsed tradition when I came to do my stuff’ (Stephen Gallagher, 2011). This is also one reason why Jenkins and Jones used three John Keir Cross scripts from The Man in Black.2 Another tribute to Cross is in the first episode. As mentioned earlier, the closing episode of 1949’s The Man in Black whetted its listeners’ appetites for an abominable snowman

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tale, and the first episode of Fear on Four – ‘The Snowman Killing’ (3 January 1988) – by the well-established radio writer J. C. W. Brooke, finally permitted the telling of a snowman horror tale. However, even if there was a sense of tradition, it would have been a mistake to permit that to burden the creation of a new horror series. Bert Coules explains: It’s impossible of course not to be aware of what’s gone before, and to know that to a certain extent I’m continuing the work of some very distinguished predecessors. But that, I think, is as far as it must be allowed to go: if every modern writer sat down at the keyboard feeling the great names of the past looking over her shoulder and muttering ‘go on then – do better than we did!’ then nothing new would ever be created. (Bert Coules, 2011)

Jenkins and Jones recruited an ensemble of writers which included established and younger figures. Fear on Four also featured a deliberately wide range of themes in a repertoire which mixed original works along with adaptations of horror literature, including classics and neglected works. As well as featuring straightforward generic examples through to more surprising and adventurous works, the repertoire could also move from supernatural plays to more Grand-Guignol tales of ‘real’ or ‘possible’ horror. To this end, Fear on Four featured plays that are underpinned with themes of serial killers (Nick Warburton’s ‘His Last Card’ (12 March 1989)); monstrous nature (John Duquemin and Gregor Grice’s ‘Vicious Fish’ (21 January 1993)); recurrent nightmares (John Pirito’s ‘The Edge’ (24 January 1991)); vivisection (Guy Jenkin’s ‘The Monkey’s Revenge’ (10 January 1991)); the consequences of switching off a life-support machine (Stuart Kerr’s ‘Dance in the Underworld’ (14 February 1991)); and even science fiction (John Wyndham’s ‘Survival’ (19 March 1989) adapted by Pat Hooker). Technophobia is a recurrent theme in Fear on Four, and plays on the subject include Nick Fisher’s ‘The Chimes of Midnight’ (2 October 1997) about a physics professor’s obsession with horology; Stephen Gallagher’s ‘Life Line’ (11 February 1993), an example of telephone horror about a community chat-line (which today sounds like a precursor to internet communication chat-rooms); and Stephen Wyatt’s pioneering example of an internet-themed story ‘Net Suicide’ (4 September 1997). Although Fear on Four was diverse in theme, there was one consistent ingredient: The Man in Black. This was an essential part of the script development too, as writer Stephen Gallagher reveals: ‘I would write the framing narration and Martin would rewrite it for his needs. That was understood’ (Stephen Gallagher, 2011) At the beginning of ‘A Child Crying’ (2 April 1989) by James Saunders, an effective, dialogue-driven tale about a man who can constantly hear a girl crying in his flat, The Man in Black talks about the importance of specific sounds in horror, thus drawing attention to a repeated theme in the series and horror radio genre as a whole: In many of the previous stories, sound itself has featured strongly as a means of creating fear. […] Why do certain sounds disturb us so much?

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Sometimes it’s all too obvious. A scream, for example. But there are sounds which disturb us for no apparent reason, the cause of the fear locked deep inside the subconscious. This week, sound features once more as a transmitter of terror. And on this occasion it’s a sound we all know only too well: the simple everyday sound of … a child crying.

In developing this ambitious repertoire, Fear on Four strove for an output that was well written, well performed and well produced. In other words, although it was in the populist tradition of thrill-ride sensationalism, the creative team wanted to ensure it was high-quality drama. In discussing classic US horror radio, Gallagher reveals Fear on Four’s combination of literary and cinematic endeavour: American radio drama was a quite different beast, I think. When I think of the kind of BBC drama I grew up with, I think of dignified thespians reading in a studio. But you listen to American ‘old time radio’ shows from the archives and they’re like whirlwind rollercoaster rides with live music and a constant rain of shocks, stings, and climaxes. They’re great fun but at the end of it you realise that it was all in the ride and nothing much of any weight has been said. We were trying for something with a little more literary weight but still with a cinematic momentum. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

Certainly there are exceptions – classic US radio shows like Quiet, Please cannot be dismissed as mere thrill-rides. More recently, Himan Brown’s ambitious and prolific CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) demonstrated the creative potential and vibrancy of the form. However, Gallagher’s point reveals a key impetus in Fear on Four: a horror series with literary weight suitable for BBC Radio 4. Nevertheless, an awareness of the US tradition is apparent in Fear on Four episodes such as ‘A Day at the Dentist’s’ (13 March 1988), which is, in large part, a tribute to vintage US horror radio. The play, by James Saunders, is credited as being ‘based on an idea by Arch Oboler’, who was one of the major figures in US horror radio of the 1930–40s (and died the year before Fear on Four launched). Saunders takes one of Oboler’s Lights Out horror plays, and although there is no extant recording of ‘A Day at the Dentist’s’ (10 March 1937), Oboler presents a short (a little over three minutes) version of his long-playing record Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror (1962). On the album, Oboler takes the listener on a journey through different types of horror with the sardonic voice of Oboler addressing an audience whose experiences of horror are shaped by cinema, television and reality (Hand, 2006a: 104). The shortened version of Oboler’s ‘dentist’ horror play is presented as an example to demonstrate ‘the humorous type of horror’. The dentist agrees to treat Mr Houseman, who arrives with toothache just as the surgery is about to close. The dentist recognises Houseman as the man who seduced and assaulted his wife, so

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he ties him into the chair and takes a drill in order to ‘drill a little hole to let out some of “lover boy”…’ The ‘humour’ lies in the sense of ‘sweet revenge’: the wronged husband strapping the womaniser into the dentist’s chair to be subjected to extremely skilled torture and retribution. For Fear on Four, Saunders develops the short scenario into a fully realised horror play with particular attention given to the adultery theme as well as rich characterisation, irony and suspense. For the producer Martin Jenkins, ‘A Day at the Dentist’s’ is a personal favourite as he believes it succeeds as ‘a superb example of the fear genre’ (Jenkins, 2010). The production was not without controversy, as Sam Boardman-Jacobs reveals: In this particular radio play, all that was used was the sound of the drill and the recipient’s scream, rapidly faded out. The BBC received a huge number of complaints about this scene. Each listener created their own mind picture of the event. Most of the audience found that image too terrifying to deal with. (Boardman-Jacobs, 2004: 11–12)

Examples of the ‘dentist’ in horror and suspense are not surprising given the fact that fear of dentists is a frequently encountered phobia. It is not far from the legend of Sweeney Todd ‘the Demon Barber of Fleet Street’: the horror of the skilled person we hope to trust when we place ourselves in their hands. The dentist provides a subplot of horror in Little Shop of Horrors as original film (Roger Corman, 1960) and musical version (Frank Oz, 1986). It also occurs in the thriller Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) in which Laurence Olivier tortures Dustin Hoffman, as well as horror movies such as Decay (Jason Robert Stephens, 1998) The Dentist (Brian Yuzna, 1996) and The Dentist 2 (Brian Yuzna, 1998). On radio, the first example of a dentist play is probably the BBC’s ‘A Visit to the Dentist’ (9 January 1925), a fiveminute comic interlude by Arthur Black and arranged by A. M. Shinnie, about a farmer visiting ‘Mr. Reginald Cavity’ (Beck, 2001). Alan Beck also mentions W. A. Dove’s ‘The True Character of the Bad-Tempered Dentist’ (11 December 1928), a presumably comic thirty-minute play, ‘enacted in John Grizzle’s surgery, between 9.30 and 10.0 p.m.’, although its night-time setting perhaps suggests a macabre aspect. We have already encountered Appointment with Fear’s ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’: another example of ‘dental horror’ in the 1940s is John Dickson Carr’s ‘The Man Who Was Afraid of Dentists’ (10 February 1944), in which a Nazi spy masquerading as a dentist in Britain forces another dentist at gunpoint to drill into the teeth of the British agent who has blown his cover. The brutality of the German is evident in his threats to ‘spread your insides all over the back of that chair’ and that his girlfriend’s looks will be marred with ‘the top of her skull blown off’ – and this is before the drill starts to grind the victim’s teeth. Rescue arrives when it is revealed – in a vintage Carr plot resolution – that the assistant was drilling ‘SOS’ in Morse Code which nearby British agents heard.

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Fear on Four’s Man in Black: Edward de Souza When The Man in Black was reanimated in 1988, the role was taken by Edward de Souza. The character actor de Souza featured in the Hammer horror films The Phantom of the Opera (Terence Fisher, 1962) and The Kiss of the Vampire (Don Sharp, 1963) and developed a long career as a television actor. In a Radio Times (2 January 1988) profile on de Souza to promote Fear on Four, the actor is careful to pay tribute to the role: ‘the Man in Black is a BBC legend […] a sort of darker Somerset Maugham, a creepy raconteur who picks up news of the spooky bits of life’. De Souza recalls the experience of listening in his own childhood: ‘The impact was tremendous. I was a schoolboy then, and if you could sit alone through the latest episode of Appointment with Fear it was something to swank about to your friends’ (2 January 1988). This Radio Times feature is promoting the heritage of The Man in Black. In the following month, Radio Times coverage develops this heritage into the ‘myth’. The actor Nicola Pagett featured in the Fear on Four play ‘Mind Well the Tree’ (28 February 1988), and in Radio Times (27 February 1988) she explains that while she was driving home from Wales after the recording ‘the haunting play still very much on her mind, she suddenly found herself lashed by a gale, with relentless rain reducing visibility to only a few yards’ Pagett comments: ‘It was very frightening … It was the night of the dreadful hurricane you see’.3 Edward de Souza has an appropriately sonorous and sardonic voice, in keeping with Dyall’s precedent. De Souza’s Man in Black speaks with a voice that comes out of the darkest silence. Generally, there is no ‘theme tune’ or background music until the stories themselves begin. Throughout the various series, we also learn interesting facts about The Man in Black: for example, he is a fan of blues music, a fact revealed in the opening narration to ‘Hellhound on My Trail’ (28 January 1993) by Paul Sirett (one of the few episodes to open with music). The first series of Fear on Four uses numerology as its overarching narrative frame. At the beginning of each episode, The Man in Black mentions the number of the tale and provides a sinister context for the relevant number. The effect establishes a sense of The Man in Black’s knowledge and interests, but it also helps to hold together the rationale of the series. It lends a heightened sense of the occult to the series as well as giving the entire series a sense of superstructure, with The Man in Black’s numerological explanations enhancing the theme of the subsequent play or giving an ironic context to it. The importance of numbers is not without precedent for The Man in Black: on Appointment with Fear’s ‘All Cats May Snarl’ (29 April 1947) by J. Vernon Basley, The Man in Black opens with a speech on the power of numbers in superstition, and the subsequent play – about the power of Fate – develops this principle.4 In the first episode of Fear on Four – ‘The Snowman Killing’ – the opening lingers for fifteen seconds on the approaching footsteps of The Man in Black

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as he climbs up from a basement, opens a door (in the tradition of the famous creaking door of the US series Inner Sanctum Mysteries) and speaks with cool glee:

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Man in Black saying ‘Welcome, to my open house of horror …’

In ‘The Snowman Killing’, The Man in Black presents the story of a ‘nice’ house, which opens with children playing in the snow in a work that plays with conflicting vision, with one of the children, Colin (Alistair White), describing a snowman which his mother (Imelda Staunton) cannot see. The play develops a sadistic relationship between the children, with Colin tormenting his ‘wet’ brother Alex (Altheas Constanturos), even if Colin is ultimately the victim. The production uses a rich soundscape of blizzards, cold winds, cars skidding on ice and eerie music as well as the human sounds of Colin’s evil laugh and his mother’s extraordinary, pained groan of despair when she sees his corpse protruding from the snowman. In many respects these sounds not only realise the script but thoroughly enhance it as horror radio. As Martin Jenkins reveals, this resurrection of the form was not uncontroversial but would also lead to its cult status: Sound effects were of supreme importance in working on the imagination of the listener. Interestingly, when the first Fear on Four ‘The Snowman Killing’ went out in the 6.30pm slot it was deemed too frightening and we were asked to tone things down but refused. Later Fear on Four was moved to a more appropriate late evening slot where it garnered a huge student audience. (Jenkins, 2010)

Fear on Four develops a conceit whereby de Souza’s Man in Black inhabits Broadcasting House itself and, for the half-hour of the show, transforms it into a realm of terror, especially effective when it was given a late evening slot. In opening narrations of Fear of Four, The Man in Black will variously welcome us into the ‘icy chamber of horrors’, ‘house of horror’, ‘world of fear’, ‘my private world of fear and horror’ and many other variations. At the beginning of ‘Dreaming of Thee’ (12 February 1989), he announces: Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to spend another thirty uncomfortable minutes in the company of your friend, The Man in Black.

This opening line captures the strategies of de Souza’s Man in Black: he starts formally (‘Ladies and gentlemen’), but by the end of the line he has become more intimate (he is our ‘friend’) while in the middle of the sentence he is mordantly jocular, promising us discomfort. ‘Snipe 3909’ (15 January 1989) by Graeme Fife has an unusual opening inasmuch as the continuity announcer has a role to play within the framing of the story. Informing us that The Man in Black has phoned to say he is on his way, the announcer speaks with slight unease, eager to get away as the

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footsteps approach:

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announcer: Ah, I think I can hear him now. Excuse me while I leave you to him. man in black: Hmm, I heard that. I don’t know why my phone call upset him though. Still, it is true that the telephone can be a most disturbing instrument.

It is a surprise to hear The Man in Black nearly in dialogue as opposed to the state of isolation he is usually in, but the device cunningly introduces a horror play about the telephone. At the end of the episodes, The Man in Black reads the cast lists, including describing himself as ‘Edward de Souza, The Man in Black’. Although this breaks the illusion, releasing us from the half hour of horror, de Souza continues to read with gravitas and resonance. In contrast, the 1997 series merely uses de Souza for the opening announcement, and the cast lists are read out by a ‘non-character’ announcer. This is partly because the final series of Fear on Four was directed not by Martin Jenkins and Gerry Jones5 but a younger generation of directors including David Blount and David Hunter. In many respects, William Ingram’s ‘Dead Man’s Boots’ (31 January 1991) is a conventional ghost story which is distinguished by strong characterisation and the use of sound. In the play, a couple – Richard (Sean Barrett) and Myra Duncan (Jane Wittenshaw) – purchase a nineteenthcentury terraced house in south London at a bargain price. In a hidden cupboard they discover a pair of hobnailed boots with a newspaper cutting which describes a brutal murder that happened in the house. Myra becomes obsessed with the story while Richard plays the comedian, calling Myra a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ for her deductions. As a sense of the uncanny develops, the dual role of the married couple is like the pairing in Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) where one partner is sceptical, the other a believer. The climax of the play comes when Richard is away on vital business. The power supply and phone line are cut, and Myra, dreading the ghostly killer’s return, casts the boots outside. The production has developed a masterful sense of sound and environment, the creaking house and everyday sounds of all kinds culminating in a set piece in which we hear the clumping footsteps through the house and then the rasping, snarling breath of the intruder. The Man in Black interrupts to conclude: When they found her, every door in the house was locked, every window securely latched, there was no sign of forced entry, no clue as to who – or what – could have perpetrated such unimaginable acts of horror and desecration upon her. The official verdict on Myra Duncan was ‘murder by some person or persons unknown’. After it was over, Richard moved away. He married that vitally important piece of business he’d pleaded on his Manchester trip.

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The play has become a locked-room mystery in the John Dickson Carr tradition, although the solution is supernatural not rational. Myra meets a gruesome end, a victim of looking too deeply into something, but the horror twist is Richard’s infidelity, suggested in their bickering but nonetheless a cruel irony to Myra’s ending of ‘horror and desecration’. ‘Music Lovers’ (24 January 1988) by Nick Warburton, starring Prunella Scales and Nigel Anthony, is an effective horror play driven by dialogue. It is a simple scenario: two people in a church with a tape recorder. It is an example of audio horror that is about sound. The story concerns a meeting between two classical music concert aficionados. There is a touch of the erotic, this seems like a ‘date’, the man finding a way to meet the lady ‘in the blue straw hat’ he has seen at so many concerts. They seem to share so many tastes in music, extolling the virtues of musicians they have seen perform. Mr Pauley explains how he has learned to hold his breath so that the sound of his own breathing does not interfere with that of a virtuoso musician. But Miss Eames has a cough. A nervous, unconscious cough. Pauley plays recordings of concerts and points out the recurrent cough. In the most disturbing moment, we hear how Pauley in his mania has prepared a looping tape of Eames’s very light and faint yet, for him, maddening cough. He then decides to ‘cure’ the cough and strangles the life out of her. The play works with its almost comic style of delivery, the rather ‘geeky’ characters, and the sardonic humour of the play’s punchline: ‘Well, I did say I’d get rid of that cough for you, didn’t I?’ The aforementioned ‘Snipe 3909’ (15 January 1989) is another example of that powerful subgenre in horror radio, telephonic horror. Unlike some in the repertoire, Graeme Fife’s play is a straightforward narrative with the ironically named Mary Luckham (Hannah Gordon) – a far from ‘lucky’ protagonist – harassed by nuisance phone calls: a man singing ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ down the line. Mary is a vulnerable woman, recently divorced and humiliated by the success of her husband’s new relationship. Her enforced loneliness makes her paranoid – the play is about noises beyond the ringing phone, with thumps and bumps in the empty cottage. In addition, the production’s soundscape features birds, a yapping dog and the ticking clock in her bedroom. The detail extends to acutely realised sounds such as the ring of the bell still chiming when Mary picks up the receiver. Gradually, the picturesque cottage seems to deteriorate around her, above all in the gutters which are becoming clogged and overgrown. One is reminded of Nigel Kneale’s Beasts episode ‘Baby’ (6 November 1976), which begins with the nest with ‘addled’ eggs being cleared from the rooftop of a country home: what should be a picture of the idyllic is revealed to be corrupt and contagious. The title is a telephone number in the old style: exchange location (typically the town or village) and short string of numbers. Similarly, the old style of telephone etiquette would mean that in answering the telephone

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the person would state their own number. ‘Snipe’ is a fictitious place and yet sounds like it could well be the name of an English village. In addition, the choice of title is a calculated decision: a ‘snipe’ is a bird that is notoriously difficult to hunt, and is where the word ‘sniper’ comes from (i.e. a hunter skilled enough to shoot a snipe); a ‘snipe hunt’ is a colloquial term for a deliberate prank, typically an absurd task that an experienced, yet mischievous, person persuades a naïve person to do. In terms of the play, the nuisance phone calls begin as a prank but grow in malice, with someone determined to ‘get’ Mary: what might be a practical joke in the spirit of a snipe hunt becomes a sniper’s deliberate target. Fife’s story follows a classic suspense narrative: the vulnerable Mary is isolated and yet encounters a variety of characters ranging from her ex-husband to the estate agent, her friend’s husband Craig, the handyman who clears the gutters, to the policeman who investigates the nuisance calls. The listener speculates ‘whodunit’: it could be any of the people she has to deal with in her daily life, and the listener does not even exclude the possibility that it is all in Mary’s imagination given her fragile emotional state and the fact that no-one else has the opportunity to hear the voice. In this respect, ‘Snipe 3909’ is reminiscent of the frequently nihilistic suspense television drama series Thriller (1973–76) by Brian Clemens, which typically subjects middle-class protagonists in seemingly ideal or privileged environments to torment, often with extremely bleak endings. Interestingly, the short-story version is less explicit than the radio play.6 The story ends abruptly with the policeman in Mary’s cottage whistling ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, and the reader is left to imagine the worst, whether that is sexual violation or murder or both. In the spine-tingling finale to the radio play we hear the voice of the policeman (Peter Craze) metamorphose as he murmurs the nursery rhyme and promises Mary that ‘We won’t be disturbed …’ In a carefully moderated conclusion, The Man in Black reveals the aftermath: When the police arrived some time later, they received no answer to their ringing at the door. When they went to the back of the house, they saw the reason why. Mary’s dead body was lying on the grass. And beside her, cradling her head on his lap, was what appeared to be a policeman. A few yards away, a large spade rested beside the beginnings of a grave.

Although there is a valid argument that ‘less is more’, the description provided by The Man in Black fulfils an important function with regard to his persona. The Man in Black’s delight in the morbid, moderated by his sardonic humour, is an important function of his omniscience and his playful sadism, revealing horrors, revelling in the details and invading our minds with the concept of them. Additionally, in this final description is a summation of the ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ motif: in a grotesque parody of a parent and child emblem, we have the killer cradling his victim.

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Two writers: Bert Coules and Stephen Gallagher The writer Bert Coules is most famous for an extraordinary project in radio dramatisation: between 1989 and 1998, Coules was the head of the small writing team which dramatised Arthur Conan Doyle’s complete Sherlock Holmes canon for BBC radio. As well as this landmark achievement, Coules has written many other works of radio drama with a particular interest in dramatisation and the genres of mystery and science fiction. Around the same time as Coules’s Holmes magnum opus, he was also writing for Fear on Four. Although he was already well established as a radio writer with a decade of experience, Coules appreciated working with Jenkins and Jones, and he gives an invaluable insight into the production practice of Fear on Four: I learned an enormous amount, and not only during the studio sessions. There would be detailed discussions with the producer at the script development stage, when ideas were bounced back and forth to be gleefully seized or hastily discarded; I was always consulted on casting; I was at all rehearsals and recordings, and was always listened to and taken very seriously at every stage. The quickest and best way to learn what works on radio is to experience something not working and to be part of fixing it. (Bert Coules, 2011)

Coules’s contributions include ‘Every Detail But One’ (7 February 1988), a compelling play which interpolates telephonic horror (what initially seems to be a ‘heavy breather’) with a phone-in radio show about the paranormal. Coules’s ability to successfully create different levels of narrative is repeated in ‘Green and Pleasant’ (3 January 1991), a play about the kidnapping of the rock star Sarah Lovecraft (Sarah Jones), who has championed environmental issues but has been exposed as a hypocrite because of her financial investments in companies that use vivisection and cause pollution. She has been abducted and placed in a small cage by a man – ‘Mr Smith’ (Jonathan Tafler) – who wants to teach her a lesson about environmental issues. The play also features a television phone-in show which successfully mediates the ‘breaking news’ about the abduction and liaison with the kidnapper. In his other play for the series – ‘The Journey Home’ (26 February 1989) – Coules plays with time rather than intermediation: a hypnotherapist attempts to recover a woman’s memories and the play steps between the therapy sessions and the traumatic experience, creating a sense of rationalism jostling against nightmare – and prophecy. Coules’s plays for Fear on Four demonstrate that thirty-minute horror radio can be ambitious in structure and plot, using a number of levels of storytelling in creating narratives that are suspenseful and coherent. In developing plays for Fear on Four with Jenkins and Jones, it would seem that Coules’s experience was very much writer-led when it came to the development of themes:

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The only way I know to write something which will grip and involve and – with luck – frighten people, is by writing something which grips and involves and frightens me. The genesis of the Fear on Four plays was always the simple question ‘What would be scary?’ and those subjects were the result. And since scares and shocks and psychological traumas are deepseated and mysterious and elusive, I don’t want to think too much about why I found myself creating visions of future tragedies or dead babies or global destruction – I was just grateful that the ideas came. (Bert Coules, 2011)

Another writer of several plays for Fear on Four is Stephen Gallagher. However, while Coules wrote all-new works for the series, all of Gallagher’s works are adaptations of his short fiction. Gallagher is a writer who spans media, working in fiction and television as well as radio. He has a particular interest in science fiction and the uncanny, with writing credits on Doctor Who in the 1980s and, in the mid-1990s, the underrated ITV horror series Chiller (1995). Gallagher gives us an insight into the Fear on Four recording sessions, creating the impression of something balletic and magical: It was a rehearse–record system. Different parts of the studio were furnished in different ways to produce different kinds of sound quality, and effects were either created live with props by a studio manager, or played-in from pre-cued vinyl recordings on one of a bank of turntables. Watching it all come together was like some great elaborate ballet resulting in auditory magic. This was my words getting the historic BBC treatment and I was living the dream. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

When it comes to Gallagher’s plays, he stresses the significance of his Fear on Four plays being adaptations: It’s important to note that the stories came into being for their own sake, as opposed to being thought up and pitched to fit a brief. So I suppose they were theme-driven, and they came out as horror because the themes were dark and sad and horror was their natural form. I’d write my short fiction between other projects and rarely with a specific market in mind. When Martin called me about Fear on Four I showed him a selection of the ones I thought might fit the bill. The job of adaptation was one of finding the best way to put over the material in the medium; what the story was about was already taken care of. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

Gallagher’s ‘By the River, Fontainbleau’ (14 February 1988) is, appropriately for its première on St Valentine’s Day, a ‘love story’ of sorts. It is a play set in France about artists and artistic vision. One might expect this to be a perfect play to be in the visual media with its nineteenth-century setting and its focus on two aspiring painters looking for inspiration in bucolic France. However, what makes this an ideal example of audio drama is that it is partly about difference in point of view. ‘By the River, Fontainebleau’ – the very title like the name of a painting – is an audio horror play that problematises vision: as in Mystery and Imagination’s 1940s play ‘The Picture’,

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we have a play about people seeing things differently even if, ‘By the River, Fontainebleau’, the horror is far from supernatural. To this end, lines in the play like ‘Tell me what you see’ are interesting as one artist talks to another and serve an expositionary function, but are also interesting moments for the listener’s imagination: what do we see? A consequence of this problematised sense of vision is that the focalising character Marcel realises that he has ‘technique’ but no ‘vision’ – and it is time to take up a bourgeois office job and become a patron of the arts, rather than a creator. Along with the bourgeois Marcel and the bohemian Antoine, Gallagher gives us a third character, Anneliese who lives on a farmstead and beguiles Antoine. Anneliese confesses to Antoine: Sometimes I feel as if you’re the only one who really sees me … as I am, I mean … as if, when you close your eyes, I no longer exist … Because I didn’t, in a way, until you came along.

This initially seems to establish Anneliese as a ghost, as though Antoine’s muse – as evidenced in his numerous sketches and drawings of her (the sole subject of his output) – is an apparition. However, it becomes clear that she is tragically flesh and blood: a whore to the men on the farm and ultimately to be butchered as livestock. As in Fife’s ‘Snipe 3909’ it comes as a surprise that Gallagher’s original short story version is subtler in its horror than the radio version. This is evident in the horrifying dénouement when Marcel barges into the farmhouse to confront the family in the midst of their feast: My gaze came to rest on one of the smaller serving-dishes, runny with juices and melted fat. The joint that lay on it was charred around the edges, the skin scored and crisp; but for no more than a second it was recognisable, nails and all, as a human hand. I blinked and stared, and even as I did so the joint seemed to shimmer and to change, becoming indistinct for a moment before being restored to my sight in a less obvious form. (BBC, 1990: 289–290)

The piece of roasted meat is, momentarily yet unambiguously, a human hand. Gallagher parodies the aesthetics of interpretation: it is an ‘impressionist’ glimpse that Marcel perceives. Marcel and Antoine make their escape and Gallagher’s short story ends with the theme of interpretation, doubt and denial that has run through the plot. Antoine claims that he ‘never wondered’ (BBC, 1990: 290) where Anneliese went at night, and although Marcel knows he is lying it is still a telling moment of stepping back from the totality of admission. In the audio version, the horror is more intense and explicit. In the banquet scene in which Marcel attempts to confront the family (including the retarded son) we hear them eating: ‘Antoine, look what he’s given me! Antoine, look what he’s given me! T-take it away!’ As the men hurry away outside, we are given a complex hierarchy of sound: the brilliantly used eerie piano music7 and barking dogs, ironically underpinned

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with the sound of a breeze blowing in the trees and birdsong. marcel: [breathless and emotional] You could still see the shape of her arm and the hand … I don’t know how you can be so calm. You even saw them do it … antoine: There is a terrible beauty in suffering, Marcel. marcel: I can’t believe you’re saying this. You’re mad! antoine: You’ve still learned nothing, have you Marcel? Well, you can stand before saints and martyrs and thieves on the cross and you’ll nod your head and pass on to the next. But could you walk by so calmly if you saw a young girl, her limbs broken and strung up by her heels and bleeding to death? marcel: Oh my god! And you didn’t even try to stop it? antoine: An artist can only observe. marcel: So your education is now complete. antoine: If education is what you want to call it. I’ve glimpsed the poetry in human degradation … You see, I knew all along how it would end. I was fascinated, obsessed by the prospect. Do you know, she never uttered a sound? She just hung there slowly bleeding to death. And now, god help me, I must lead others to the same trough of blood. I must relive the same degradation and suffering again and again and again …

Gallagher’s original short story seems more reticent than the radio adaptation, partly because it is a challenge to realise the fleeting vision of human form in a play that is resisting narrative intervention, aside from the framing by The Man in Black. The resulting horror, including the cannibalistic family feast and the concept of Antoine’s muse being bled like a slaughtered pig while being hung from her ankles from a butcher’s hook, makes the elegantly titled ‘By the River, Fontainebleau’ more like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), while the demented (presumably inbred) offspring is reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977). Where one might expect a journey into the idylls of French impressionism, we are sent into a brutal nightmare, into the ‘poetry’ of ‘human degradation’. One is reminded of the journey of the artist into the extreme, like Arthur Rimbaud’s in writing Une Saison en Enfer (1873) or painters like Vincent van Gogh. Gallagher creates a disturbing vision of art cradled in suffering and cruelty. After all, although we hear birds sing in this rural idyll, what is birdsong but a territorial battle cry? Stephen Gallagher’s ‘The Horn’ (19 February 1989) is set on a snowbound motorway and features a group of drivers trying to survive until a snowplough can rescue them. The play is reminiscent of The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) with an all-male group trapped in snow and ice and pitted against a lone, female monster.8 In both works the ideal solidarity of the male group begins to unravel in distrust and incompatibility. In ‘The Horn’, the maintenance hut the three men use as a refuge threatens to be as psychologically perilous as the lighthouse in the 1960s radio play ‘The Dark’.

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However, when the power runs out and the men are forced back out into the snow, we are taken into a different type of horror when a supernatural peril becomes evident: a spurned lover buried in the motorway has returned from her concrete grave. The title itself plays with issues of sexuality and masculinity: in a colloquial sense to have ‘the horn’ is a (predominantly male) phrase meaning to be sexually aroused. Gallagher explores male attitudes towards women: in the hut, news cuttings about murdered women are mixed in with pornographic magazines which provide an ironic context of male desire and misogyny. ‘The Horn’ is a story about the horrors of the sexual exploitation of women by men, a ‘hell hath no fury as a woman scorned’ anecdote that stretches beyond the grave. The language in Gallagher’s original short story features a well-crafted hybridisation of horror and romanticism. Indeed, in works like ‘By the River, Fontainebleau’ and ‘The Horn’, Gallagher produces horror which successfully combines different genres: a tale about French artists merges with rural cannibalism; a pulp romance unleashes an avenging zombie. The undead woman in ‘The Horn’ stills yearns and calls for her faithless lover ‘Louie’. In the short story, Gallagher dwells on the foetid state of the living dead corpse, even taking us into ‘the dark, tangled worm-pit of what was left of her mind’ (BBC, 1990: 159). In contrast, in the play version there is less explicit decay and the woman is thus less of a zombie than a phantom, albeit one that can still pursue, kiss and tear the men apart.9 Nonetheless, the haunting, disembodied female voice calling or whispering within the constant blizzard works supremely well on radio. The music soundtrack uses a musical saw, which lends the story an effective 1950s science fiction feel. Likewise, the looping sound of the vehicle horns, blasting in despair and at different depths in the snowstorm, is highly effective audio.

Medical plays Arguably, Fear on Four’s most intimate and interior plays are its medically themed works, such as Martyn Wade’s ‘A Routine Operation’ (7 February 1991) and Judy Upton’s ‘Tissue Memory’ (16 October 1997). In ‘A Routine Operation’ – produced by Martin Jenkins – Mary Russell (Hannah Gordon) is a woman suddenly struck down with severe abdominal pains. Mary has an intense phobia of hospitals and Gordon delivers an intense performance of rising anxiety and terror, conveyed through the use of her breath and the conveyance of ineffable pain, as she is forced into surgery. The play consummately steps between dialogue and interior monologue. In regard to dialogue, we hear a surgeon explaining to a student how to conduct the ‘routine’ procedure of appendectomy, as well as Mary bickering with her husband prior to admission, which captures their unhappy relationship. We also have the interiority of Mary’s nightmares about dying under the knife and her consciousness as the operation commences. The surgery

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scenes deploy a soundscape of the rhythmic lung pump and a highly detailed realisation – through dialogue and sound effects – of the procedure as they enter Mary’s body and remove the infected appendix. At the end of the play, Mary awakes, relieved that all was a success only to realise that the operation is about to begin and she is fully conscious although unable to move. The story taps into perennial ‘true life’ horror stories of inadequate anaesthetic administration, leading to ‘anaesthesia awareness’ or ‘intra-operative awareness’, wherein patients were subjected to the agony of surgery while being conscious although unable to react. With this in mind, The Man in Black’s concluding words, ‘Allow me to reassure that what happened to Mary is quite impossible. You have nothing fear’, are mischievous to the extreme: we have all heard the stories, haven’t we? Another medical anxiety is explored in Judy Upton’s ‘Tissue Memory’ (16 October 1997), produced by David Blount, which was the final play broadcast on Fear on Four. In this play, which extrapolates the controversial phenomenon of ‘organ transplant memory syndrome’, a transplant patient begins to acquire memories, sounds and visions from the life – and death – of the donor. These anxieties regarding medical malpractice or the uncanny horror of alleged medical phenomena are ideal for the interiorised world of radio. Although Fear on Four came to an end, medical obsessions almost seamlessly continue on British radio, albeit in a starkly different style, with Blue Jam (1997–99), a series which we will look at in due course. Just as Appointment with Fear was seen as a gamble for its ‘Americanness’, Fear on Four was ‘risky’ inasmuch as it attempted to reintroduce a format – and host – that had been off the air for more than a generation. However, Fear on Four succeeded in being ambitious and eclectic, mixing new writing with adaptation and exploring themes from the classic to the experimental and arrestingly contemporary. Whatever the content, The Man in Black was the consistent ‘frame’ of the repertoire, talking with disarming friendliness as he lures us into his residence, transforming, for thirty minutes, Broadcasting House into a ‘house of horrors’. Once again, there would be a long gap before The Man in Black returned, but when he did, he was very much a figure for the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 Jenkins was producing radio plays from the 1970s onwards, Jones from the 1960s onwards. For details of their oeuvres see www.suttonelms.org.uk. 2 ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ (14 March 1949) was broadcast in a new production for Fear on Four on 31 January 1988; ‘The Judge’s House’ (28 February 1949) on 9 April 1989; and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (7 March 1949) on 27 December 1990. 3 The ‘great storm’ of 15–16 October 1987. 4 In Basley’s script, the key number is ‘7’, which defines the life of the central character but is subtly present elsewhere, including in the names of two other

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characters whose initials are both ‘G. G.’ (‘G’ being the seventh letter of the alphabet), in a careful and implicit patterning. The BBC made Jenkins redundant in 1997; Jones had left in 1989. As with the 1948 Appointment with Fear story anthology, the success of Fear on Four was such that BBC Books published an anthology of short stories linked to the series – The Man in Black: Macabre Stories from Fear on Four (1990) – which comprised twenty-five short stories including the republication of preexisting tales adapted for the radio programme and, conversely, what could be described as ‘fictionised’ versions of original radio plays. That favourite for radio adaptation, W. W. Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, is the only tale to appear in both volumes. The music is Eric Allen and Frank Reidy’s ‘Shadows in the Dark’, which is stock music from the De Wolfe music catalogue. It is a slow and ponderous piano piece with simple looping bass notes and edgy, high stings. Although not specified, the alien in The Thing is presumably female given its reproductive ability. In the short story, when the woman pulls the narrator’s face up for a kiss, he is on the cusp of an ‘airshaft straight down to hell’, and although he wants to scream he instead ‘peed himself’ (BBC, 1990: 157). This is a significant role reversal of, for example, the (in)famous sequences in Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976), in which women wet themselves. Gallagher presents the breakdown of the control of masculinity, culminating in the symbolic tearing apart of the men with her talons.

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Terror tales for the twenty-first ­century: The Man in Black

Since 2009, there have been four series of The Man in Black on the BBC digital channel Radio 4 Extra.1 Writer David Lemon explains the brief for the programme: ‘to tell contemporary tales in modern settings; to find the twenty-first century equivalent to the Gothic Castle or remote rural railway station’ (David Lemon, 2012). To this end, the programme follows the classic horror radio formula of thirty-minute episodes of self-contained drama framed by the eponymous character-host. The programme has offered writing opportunities to well-established radio dramatists (such as Fear on Four’s Nick Warburton) as well as writing talent new to radio. The lynchpin to each episode is Mark Gatiss in the role of the titular Man in Black. Gatiss was an obvious yet inspired choice for the role. He came to prominence as a member of The League of Gentlemen comedy ensemble, which, after establishing itself in live comedy performance, had a radio series in 1997 followed by three television series (1999–2002) and a feature film (2005). The League of Gentlemen is a particularly distinctive example of British comedy, the ensemble of Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith playing multiple roles and co-writing the programme with Jeremy Dyson. The universe of The League of Gentlemen is centred on the village of Royston Vasey and is in many respects as much a horror series as it is a comedy show. As Peter Hutchings writes: Themes explored through three series and a Christmas special included murder, kidnapping and imprisonment, incest, monstrosity and deformity, masturbation, transvestism and transexuality, dead children, cruelty to animals, the imbibing of urine, erotic asphyxiation, vampirism, voodoo, implicit cannibalism (a rare moment of restraint), limb grafting and a plague of nosebleeds. Add nudity, some violence and gore, the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, and an obsessive fixation on bodies marked in various ways as grotesque, and you end up with a most unusual recipe for TV comedy. (Hutchings, 2007)

The horror-comedy of League of Gentlemen characterises the subsequent work of members of the ensemble, whether in the similarly macabre tele­ vision comedy of Psychoville (2009–11) or in Jeremy Dyson’s stage play (co-written with Andy Nyman) Ghost Stories (2009). Dyson also adapted

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Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales (2011) for the stage, based on Dahl’s Kiss, Kiss (1960) stories. In the area of radio, as well as the 1997 radio series On the Town with The League of Gentlemen, Dyson worked with Gatiss on writing an adaptation of Robert Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’, which was broadcast on the BBC on Halloween 2000. Aickman’s 1964 short story is a subtle and atmospheric horror tale about a mismatched honeymooning couple in a small town where the incessant pealing of church bells signifies the raising of the dead. The story is an ideal source for radio adaptation, with its aural register of tolling bells, multitudes of reanimated dead and the difficult, intimate relationship of the newlyweds. ‘Ringing the Changes’ was previously adapted for radio on the Canadian horror series Nightfall for Halloween 1980, and for one major radio writer, Marty Ross, this production is a personal landmark of audio horror: Very decisive for me was when, in the late ’80s, you used to be able to get cassettes in WH Smith of the Canadian CBC Nightfall series: two shows on one inexpensive cassette. I’d go home, wait till dark, turn out the lights and listen on the headphones. And the best of those shows were very powerful. There’s a couple of them, ‘Windchill’ and ‘Child’s Play’ that I still have on cassette but haven’t listened to since that first hearing: because they scared me too much! But the masterpiece was an adaptation of Robert Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’: it’s not perfect (it has a horrible acid-jazz music score), but it stands for me as Citizen Kane or Mean Streets or 2001 might stand for a film-maker – as an exemplar of how powerful the combination of a particular medium and a particular genre can be. Crucially, it’s a frightening story, but so much more besides – like an intricate piece of symbolist poetry. ‘Pure’ horror doesn’t interest me at all – poetry and a weird kind of beauty have to be mixed in there too. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Ross captures the particular effect of the CBC version, but what he says also has relevance for the original story itself. ‘Ringing the Changes’ is a tale of ‘weird beauty’ and strange lyricism. Dyson and Gatiss’s more recent adaptation captures, in its own right, a sense of the scale and depth of Aickman’s town of the living dead and features detailed, witty characterisation (by George Baker and Fiona Allen) and an evocative mood of horrific realisation. As an actor, Mark Gatiss has become a particularly stalwart performer on British television, with notable appearances on Doctor Who (2007–11), Sherlock (2010–12) and numerous other leading or cameo roles ranging from the sombre to the comic. Of particular relevance for this study, Gatiss plays the role of ‘The Curator’ in his self-scripted BBC television series Crooked House (2008), a four-part series of self-contained yet linked horror plays. Crooked House premièred the year before the first series of The Man in Black. To a degree, Gatiss has acquired a cult if not iconic status as a figure of horror, hosting horror documentaries as well as his comedy-inflected horror roles (or horror-inflected comic performances) in the tradition of Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Gatiss brings this exquisitely

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realised balance of horror and comedy to his incarnation of The Man in Black and in so doing captures the legacy of Valentine Dyall and Edward de Souza. Reviewing the fourth series in the Guardian (27 November 2011), Elisabeth Mahoney playfully comments that Gatiss’s ‘introductions are the very embodiment of “mwahaha”’. Gatiss certainly does embody The Man in Black, and although Mahoney suggests there is something melodramatically sinister about Gatiss’s portrayal, there is an additional complexity to his characterisation. Matthew Wilkie, one of the new generation of writers on The Man in Black, celebrates Gatiss’s ability to mix the solemnity of horror with sardonic wit, which he aptly describes as ‘the knowing audio wink to the audience’ (Matthew Wilkie, 2012) and David Lemon, another writer on The Man in Black, would concur: Mark Gatiss’ role is very much in the Roald Dahl/Rod Serling mode – someone on the outside of events, observing them with a wry smile. Whilst he doesn’t play the role too tongue-in-cheek, his presence does add a welcome respite from the grim nature of the stories. (David Lemon, 2012)

A veteran of Fear on Four, the writer Bert Coules also celebrates Gatiss: It’s been fun to hear a notably different way of using the good old Man in Black: all those years between jobs that he spent stalking the basement corridors in Broadcasting House have clearly changed him, but haven’t diminished his creepiness. (Bert Coules, 2011)

In stating that Gatiss’s Man in Black is ‘notably different’, Coules is referring to the fact that Gatiss is markedly younger and has a lighter timbre to his voice than his predecessor Edward de Souza. As Coules clarifies, Gatiss’s ‘voice – and the willingness to use that sort of voice in a role which has traditionally always been cast rather differently – strikes me as a major change’ (Bert Coules, 2012). Gatiss also gives the listener an increased immediacy to what was an already an intimate character-host. When we listen to The Man in Black, the narrator often ‘accosts’ us with the invasive abruptness of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’. Sometimes Gatiss’s Man in Black encounters us is in the echoing neo-Gothic surroundings of a church (‘Death Us Do Part’ (7 November 2009)) or crematorium (‘The Punt’ (4 December 2011)). In ‘Uncle William’s House’ (5 March 2011), The Man in Black bumps into us, looks into the pram and admires our baby. In ‘Flesh’ (14 November 2009) we are on a bus and The Man in Black asks us to move our bag so he can sit down, after which he complains about teenagers as a setup to Tom MortonSmith’s excellent contribution to the increasingly crowded zombie pandemic genre in a play about a virus that kills teenagers and re-animates them as flesh-eating zombies. Sometimes The Man in Black chats to us in supermarkets: in ‘Project Purple’ (11 October 2009) we are stocking up on painkillers (‘I get terrible headaches too, quite disabling …’); and in ‘Angels in Disguise’ (21 November 2009) we are choosing a good bottle of red wine when The Man in Black makes us look over at a little old lady staring at the ‘buy one

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get one free’ offers. On rare occasions, we have made a specific appointment to meet The Man in Black: in the first-ever episode, ‘The Tower’ (4 January 2009), he meets us to show us around a housing estate; in ‘The New Boy’ (25 December 2011) The Man in Black is an interviewer at a job agency and scours our CV before offering us positions at an undertakers or mortuary which we (silently) decline. Unsurprisingly, the tone of Gatiss’s Man in Black is not quite as formal or ‘received pronunciation’ as that of Valentine Dyall or Edward de Souza: he is a ‘chattier’ figure, disarmingly amicable with the slight lilt of his northeast England accent (Gatiss hails from County Durham), who swiftly meshes the macabre into his language. This ‘meshing’ is a frequent strategy in the introductions to The Man in Black. In ‘The Beaten Track’ (11 December 2011) – a fine example of the ‘tourist trap’ subgenre of horror tale, with a young British couple falling victim to a New Zealand community and their rapacious insects – The Man in Black finds us waiting for a flight: Hello. You going on holiday? I see you’ve got your suitcases with you. I hate airports. I hate it when they make you take your shoes off. An airport is a ‘nowhere place’, full of tired, excited, hopeful people who all want to be somewhere else. People who become stupid when they’re in transit … like cows in the back of a truck, on the way to the slaughterhouse. But I’m sure you’re not like that. You’ve got your eyes open to the kind of risks you face when you go away on holiday. Sunburn, upset stomach, death. I hope you’ve taken out comprehensive travel insurance.

As well as being unambiguously contemporary (the removal of shoes reflects fairly recent increased security measures),2 this speech mixes the banal with the morbid, stepping between impatience and abattoirs, tummy bugs and fatality, delicately building a sense of growing unease. We know that The Man in Black will tell us a story that will discomfort and disturb us, once again, like the eponymous storyteller who accosts us in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). In ‘Bomber’s Moon’ (1 February 2009), The Man in Black sits at our table in a busy café and describes the heroin addict begging for change outside. The addict has just witnessed a fatal car accident and claims he was a soldier in Afghanistan. It’s a pretty hostile place. Two and a half thousand years of spilt blood is bound to result in a certain number of … wandering spirits …

The café, the begging drug addict, the car accident and the ongoing war in Afghanistan set the play in the contemporary context, and Lucy Kirkwood’s play is a tale of the supernatural in a very ‘real’ military context, in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce’s uncanny short stories set in the American Civil War. ‘Bomber’s Moon’ is all the more effective for its convincing construction and characterisation of people at the frontline of the ‘War on Terror’. Just as ‘Bomber’s Moon’ meshes the supernatural into the genuine horrors of the contemporary world, other plays find The Man in Black presenting

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his gentlemanly charm in the context of the mores of an emphatically contemporary world. For instance, in Lucy Moore’s ‘Connect’ (21 February 2011) The Man in Black is at the other end of a phone: Hello there. Sorry to call so late – hope I didn’t catch you at an inconvenient moment. Although, is any moment considered inconvenient these days? People will take calls anytime, anyplace, anywhere, won’t they? We’re all connected. Contactable, traceable at all times. You’re never alone with a mobile phone. Of course, not all phone calls are pleasant ones. Some calls we wish we’d never picked up. Problem is, once you’ve answered, whoever … or whatever … is on the other end … they’ve got your number.

The Man in Black has a deferential, apologetic charm which gradually merges into a sense of the omnipresence of technology, its invasiveness and its menace. Kim Newman’s ‘Phish Phood’ (31 October 2009) is another play about technology. This play opens in an internet café, and The Man in Black talks, almost whispers, to us: Checking your email? Or are you on one of those social networking sites? [Windows ‘exclamation’ sound] I’d close that popup … Nasty viruses going round. Funny thing about this: the internet, email, twitter … it’s so recent. But it’s everywhere. Only the box is new though. What’s inside is what’s always been. It’s like a sea, the net, with depths and tides and … sharks. Oh yes, sharks. Know what happens when you meet a shark? You – Well, I’m getting ahead of myself … Click ‘continue’ … [Click] Hmm, I knew you would. Curious, eh? It’s how it works. A temptation, a tease, a left-click and … oh, you never know what you’ll get. Jim Hickson could tell you a story about that, if he had a mind to …

This is not the first time horror radio has used the internet as inspiration: earlier the same year, BBC Radio’s Weird Tales presented Lyn Ferguson’s ‘The Fly’ (17 February 2009) about an on-line relationship between Alan (Alec Newman), a lonely entomologist, who meets a woman Amber (Rachel Ogilvy), who not only has an aptly ‘fly-trapping’ name but is an expert on spiders. The characterisation and evocation of an on-line romance is as strong as the gruesome fate of Alan is predictable. However, internet horror drama stretches further back: Fear on Four’s ‘Net Suicide’ (4 September 1997) by Stephen Wyatt is a remarkably pioneering tale in this regard. In the Fear on Four play, Michael Scantgrace (Gerard McDermott) stumbles across an on-line ‘suicide club’ and, in his depression, joins it only to find, when in a happier mood, that it is impossible to quit his membership. ‘Phish Phood’ is different in a way that reflects a decade of internet advancement. Scripted by the popular horror writer and aficionado Kim Newman, it is a satirical tale about a retired accountant (John Rowe who, curiously, played a small role in ‘Net Suicide’) who gets out of his depth in exploring the internet. What makes the production particularly effective is the use it makes of the familiar sounds of the keyboard and computer alerts; and the

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diverse voices and music (becoming distorted and cacophonous) it gives to the various popups and items of spam that tempt, pester and ultimately destroy Jim. ‘Net Suicide’ is in the tradition of a secret society being uncovered, as in Stanley Ellin’s 1948 short story ‘The Speciality of the House’ about a cannibalistic restaurant which was adapted on an earlier series of Fear on Four (20 March 1988) and on The Price of Fear in the 1970s. In contrast, ‘Phish Phood’ is more intimate in the relationship with the listener, not just in the way The Man in Black addresses us, but also in the way the play captures more contemporary anxieties: one is never sure how much of Jim’s on-line communication is authentic or virtual, and yet the internet’s ‘hunger’ for him is as insatiable as it is real. As a tale about technology, ‘Phish Phood’ is in the tradition of technophobic horror which The Man in Black revisits with ‘The Old Road’ (28 November 2009), Penelope Skinner’s story of a haunted highway mainly apparent through the dispassionate voice of the Satnav, which ‘talks’ with foreboding to a lone female driver (Laura Molyneux); and ‘Uncle William’s House’, which makes eerie use of a domestic baby monitor. In contrast to the technophobia apparent in some episodes of The Man in Black, Lucy Gough’s ‘The White Hare’ (18 January 2009) is a horror tale that explores arcane myth and a starker brutality.3 Izzie (Janice Acquah) and Casper (Tom Goodman-Hill) escape city life by moving to a remote farm. They are moving with their ‘boys’ Freddie and Charlie, which the listener discovers are actually their pet dogs. The sense of idyll is short-lived: they nearly crash their car when the ominous and ghost-like white hare of the title runs across their path on the day they relocate. Less uncanny but no less disturbing, their nearest neighbour, a farmer (Stephen Critchlow), threatens to kill the dogs (or, as he describes them, ‘wolves’) if they worry his sheep. With the farmer lives his enigmatic, orphaned niece (Poppy Lee Friar) who strives to befriend Izzie, who is initially charmed but becomes increasingly paranoid about the girl and the troubling occurrences at their new home (especially the ones which seem to threaten the wellbeing of ‘our boys’). Lucy Gough has become an established playwright and radio writer since her 1994 BBC radio play Our Lady of Shadows, a free adaptation of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’. As well as original plays, Gough has produced a number of other notable adaptations, including stage and radio dramatisations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. A recurrent interest in Gough’s work is myth, and in developing ‘The White Hare’ Gough reveals that she was fascinated by the story of ‘St Melangell: I love myths and old stories and reinventing them’ (Lucy Gough, 2011). St Melangell is the patron saint of rabbits, hares and small animals in nature. ‘The White Hare’ is a play of remarkable efficiency, in which Gough manages to sustain a number of threads of ambiguity touching on the horror genres of lycanthropy and witchcraft at one moment and, at the next, with the aggressive farmer, the menaced ‘out-of-towners’ in the tradition of Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971).

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For Gough, the opportunity to write in the genre of horror radio was ideal to explore a story of ambiguities: The ability for the story to have undefined edges, a story that can go either way. A story that dwells in the unstable fragile mind of a person. A story which has a clear, easily assessable reality which is then undermined … A story which is not predictable and which takes the listener on some unexpected routes. I love radio horror, and where else can horror be so scary? There is so much potential to play with shifting realities, with indeterminacy, things that radio does so well. On radio it is possible to not be specific about anything, to walk that line of indeterminacy, to play with the audience’s own perception of reality. The fact that radio is directly connected to the imagination with nothing in the way, means that that fluidity of reality is possible, so with my play I made this the premise of it. (Lucy Gough, 2011)

The play becomes a work about obsession: the girl’s enigmatic gifts of wolfsbane and animal skulls and the mysterious unleashing of the dogs (which nearly gets them shot) point, in Izzie’s mind, to witchcraft in this ‘land of savages’. Izzie can only understand this world through a sense of myth: lycanthropic folklore; fairy tales of the witch Baba Yaga or Billy Goat Gruff; and a maternal drive to defend her ‘boys’. As Gough explains, another impulse for the play was an interest ‘in people who are so obsessed with their dogs they would do anything to save them’ (Lucy Gough, 2011). It is an obsession that for Izzie is worth the life of a sheep, a white hare – or a child. Gough spells out the questions she hopes to provoke in the mind of the listener: Is the girl a witch? Or is Izzie mad? Do the dogs savage the child or the hare? What I hope is that we get into Izzie’s mind, something so possible in radio, and feel the instability/fear there and the uncertainty. I very deliberately leave the end open, because again this is where real horror resides. (Lucy Gough, 2011)

As in a work like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, it is possible that Izzie has encountered something genuinely and malevolently supernatural or that her own descent into insanity has had tragic consequences. The truth resides with the listener, only the listener can make a conclusive decision on Gough’s delicately balanced ambiguity. The production of ‘The White Hare’, by the highly experienced producerdirector Peter Leslie Wild, captures the sense of space to a complex level. The hierarchy of sound in the play immerses the listener in the open countryside and farmland but can also feature the gates, doors and floorboards of the properties and, particularly effectively, the ferocious snarls of the couple’s beloved and characterful ‘boys’. In addition, the production captures the sound of rain of all types, a feature which was important to Lucy Gough in writing the play in terms of rhythm and mood:

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I always work from rhythm and with horror this seemed to be even more important: the repeated rhythm of the rain, the pacing of the scenes. The twists as things get worse and worse for the couple. Always backgrounded by the relentlessness of the rain. (Lucy Gough, 2011)

The Man in Black has afforded opportunities not only to established writers such as Lucy Gough, but also to writers comparatively new to radio. One such writer is David Lemon, and it is interesting to learn what influenced him in writing his play ‘Containment’ (27 November 2011) for The Man in Black: I was keenly aware of the programme’s history – ‘The Man in Black’ is a mantle Mark Gatiss inherited from Edward de Souza and Valentine Dyall. Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales, Jeremy Dyson’s stage adaptation of several macabre short stories, also helped me to try to tell my tale as succinctly as possible. However, the biggest influence for me was film. There is obviously a precedent for horror stories about grieving parents and ghostly children. The films I love in this subgenre include: Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002), The Innocents (Freddie Francis, 1961), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) and The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona, 2007). (David Lemon, 2012)

‘Containment’ is a horror tale set in a self-storage facility (which, incidentally, Jeremy Dyson used to similarly uncanny effect within the stage play Ghost Stories). These are environments which are familiar to many people, and for Lemon personal experience was integral: The idea came about last year when I had to move some things into storage. The long echoing corridors, locked and numbered doors and flickering lights suggested a place filled with secrets – and somewhere you could easily get lost. Apparently I’m not the only person who felt this way. When I went back recently I discovered that they’re now piping soothing music over the speakers as lots of customers had complained about how unnerving the place was, especially at night. (David Lemon, 2012)

In the story, Helen (Clare Corbett), a worker at the storage facility, encounters a small child Lucy (Katie Angelou). Despite being friendly and likeable, the lone child is clearly supernatural, and in a clever twist Helen realises fairly early on that Lucy is a ghost but still accompanies her to find her own ‘lost’ child Peter. The theme is not dissimilar to Natalia Power’s ‘Sally Go Round the Moon’ (15 January 2004), performed on BBC Radio’s horror series A Sting in the Tale (2003–4). In this play, a woman Sally (Jaimi Barbakoff) is haunted by the voice of a baby that gradually ages into the voice of a child (Jessica Crossley). No one else – except the listener – can hear the infant, and Pauline Harris’s production successfully achieves a balance between the day-to-day world, the haunting voice, Sally’s mania and particularly effective piano music (played and directed by Clement Power) which shifts between a nursery feel and something more sinister. Another episode in the series, Philip Martin’s ‘Voices from Another Room’ (8 January 2004),

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develops a similar premise insofar as we are presented with an artist (Neil Dudgeon) who is haunted in his home by unambiguously adult voices who gradually describe the narrative of a murder which proves to be prophetic rather than abstract or something from the past. For ‘Containment’, Lemon was determined to develop the monster beyond being some mere spirit of malevolence: I was also keen to tell a story in which ‘The Monster’ had a plausible motive. I’ve never understood stories in which ghosts are inherently evil and enjoy tormenting the living. Surely they’d only be as good or bad as when they were alive? (David Lemon, 2012)

‘Containment’ is interesting in that it features The Man in Black within the play, in a return to a device more in keeping with John Keir Cross’s 1949 The Man in Black series. In ‘Containment’ The Man in Black makes a brief cameo nearly halfway through the play: man in black: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just depositing some, er … things … There. All done. Well … Good night, Helen. helen: Wait! How did you know my name? man in black: You’re wearing a name badge, dear. Um, nearest exit? helen: Straight down there, second left. man in black: Thank you. It’s so easy to get lost in here … Much harder to find a way out.

This is a very fleeting and playful encounter, but it proves highly effective. We recognise our host and may delight in speculating what relics he may be storing up in this anonymous facility. It also confirms that a line earlier in the play is a joke when Helen’s co-worker talks about the regular customers, including ‘Johnny Cash’ – ‘I just call him that because he always wears black’ – which we realise must be a reference to The Man in Black (Cash being, of course, the most famous ‘Man in Black’ of all). The Man in Black speaks with his usual charm and yet, in this context, we detect the resonance and irony of his words about being trapped inside. At the same time, David Lemon’s script succeeds with an excellent red herring: Helen’s concern at the customer’s knowledge is diffused when he points out her name badge. Like David Lemon, Matthew Wilkie is also a writer new to radio. In writing his play ‘The New Boy’ (25 December 2011), Wilkie cites influences that span radio, film and fiction: Three examples spring to mind: Alfred Hitchcock’s radio version of The Lodger (1940), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) and Mark Z. Daniel­ ewski’s book House of Leaves (2000). Arguably, these three sources most influenced ‘The New Boy’ … To be honest, I guess I was largely unaware of the tradition of British horror radio so I kind of ‘made it up’, drawing on the above reference points, based on what I thought it should be. (Matthew Wilkie, 2012)

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‘The New Boy’ uses the principles of the three cited works – each classics of broadly speaking horror in their own right – in creating his distinctive work of horror radio. The play charts the arrival of a new clerical assistant Craig Hooper (Simon Bubb) at the office of a small business.4 The play mixes the banal environment of the office with a sense of unease and ambiguity. At the same time, the play is ‘a satirical dig at the workplace’ (Matthew Wilkie, 2012), exploiting the stereotypes of office work, including a flirtatious, ‘fit-looking’ secretary and a bullying manager. The boss, Rubenstein (Stephen Greif), utters clichés of business jargon (‘a minute is a minute is a minute’) and is a fearsome tyrant, but as Wilkie reveals: ‘I was trying to emulate the villain in The Lodger: is he truly terrible or just an ordinary person who you would simply avoid due to his grim demeanour?’ (Matthew Wilkie, 2012). At the heart of the office is the photocopier, but it is here that things begin to turn awry: what seems a normal workaday environment is transformed when the photocopier starts producing images of the face of a former worker and emitting eerie sounds and distorted ‘voices’. Wilkie has used the photocopier in ‘The New Boy’ as Poltergeist uses the television: I wanted to take the ordinary and make it into something potentially terrifying. For me, the opening sequence in Poltergeist culminating in the girl up against the TV broadcasting nothing but static, is a brilliant demonstration of how we can turn the world around us into something really quite spooky. That was what I was trying to do with the photocopier. As the play developed I decided to expand the terror to the other clichés of the workplace, basement offices, locked doors, The Shining-esque corridors and the people that work in them. (Matthew Wilkie, 2012)

At the heart of Wilkie’s uncanny technophobia is a simple, but disturbing, image: The idea for the radio play started with the idea of knocking coming from a photocopier and, when the office worker opens the lid, he is greeted with the face of some emaciated former employee trapped inside. Whilst this may still have worked, the producer and I decided to focus on the sounds rather than the visuals, given this were for an audio medium. This encouraged me to explore the idea of sound scaring rather than images. We took this further with a variety of sounds for the copier and the makeshift mortuary hidden behind the locked boardroom door. Far from limiting me, taking the visuals away opened up ways in which suspense and scares could be built, particularly if we placed our protagonist often in the dark putting him in a similar position to the listener (i.e. relying on what he can hear rather than see). (Matthew Wilkie, 2012)

To this end, Lucy Collingwood’s production develops the sound so that it moves from familiar noises of the office and photocopier – and Dolly Parton’s hit song ‘9 to 5’ – to defamiliarised sounds that invade Craig’s nightmares and, increasingly, the workplace itself. Moreover, this distortion creates the physical transformation of the office environment which is where

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Danielewski’s postmodern novel House of Leaves has its influence:

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The scene where Craig runs out of the building was improved by stripping back his dialogue and relying on the sounds as he tries to find the exit in the dark (taking its cue from House of Leaves). Earlier drafts did include quite cheesy thoughts said out aloud and the producer was right to get me to trust her on helping to tell theses sequences through sound. (Matthew Wilkie, 2012)

The play ends with something less abstract but wholly disturbing: the claustrophobic sounds of Craig himself stuck inside the photocopier. The Man in Black has given opportunities not only to British writers but also to international contributors. ‘Lights Out’ (26 February 2011) is co-written by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson. Golden is a prominent American writer of popular horror and fantasy fiction and comics, while Benson is a writer and actor most popularly known from her role in the US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Their play for The Man in Black is set in a British women’s prison, and yet the title ‘Lights Out’ evidently alludes to one of the greatest of US horror radio series Lights Out, a link confirmed by Golden: ‘It seemed serendipitous that, if we were going to be doing an episode of a horror anthology set in a prison, we could make the title serve two purposes’ (Christopher Golden, 2011). It is interesting that Golden and Benson permit the title of a highpoint of American horror to ‘haunt’ their contribution to an institution of British popular horror. In co-writing a play for radio, Golden and Benson thought carefully about exploiting the potential of the form: When it’s done well, radio plays can inspire more fear – I won’t say horror, but fear – than most visuals. What we imagine is always so much worse than what someone else can show us in a moving image. When we’re seeing, we’re tapping into what the filmmaker feels, but when we’re imagining – as radio plays inspire us to do – we’re tapping into our OWN fears. That’s the very core of it, and certainly was in our minds as we wrote. (Christopher Golden, 2011)

‘Lights Out’ is set in a women’s prison which is haunted by the ghosts of malevolent children: the ‘redemption’ of these hardened offenders brings them into contact with the supernatural as much as traditional law and order. The production, by Gemma Jenkins, features a rich variety of dialects among the inmates and wardens. Similarly, the script develops the personalities and backstories of the prisoners with impressive detail. The production is also sophisticated in capturing the spatially ambiguous locale of the prison: intimate dialogue in tightly enclosed cells at the same time as the stereophonic echoing of the wardens’ patrolling footsteps. Similarly, sequences in the play develop a hierarchy of sound to surround the terrified prisoners: the reality of the terrified voices and the metallic clunks and echoes of the cells are juxtaposed with the distorted, uncanny voices and

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laughter of the spirits that stalk the prison. At the same time as the play’s aural complexity, Golden reveals that they maintained a guiding principle that is the very opposite to complexity: We approached the concept in the same way we might if we were making a film with a tight budget. Simplicity. We wanted a claustrophobic setting to add to the fear factor, as well as a setting in which sounds would be immediately identifiable – such as the clanging shut of a cell door, or the shouting of ‘Lights Out.’ A prison was perfect. As for the theme … for me, again, it hearkened back to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. I’ve written two novels – The Boys are Back in Town and Wildwood Road – that revolve around the idea of how it would change us to have our childhood experiences wiped away. There’s a direct connection between that and the idea of the creatures in ‘Lights Out’ that eat the innocence of their prey. (Christopher Golden, 2011).

The tradition of radio drama has had a hiatus in the US (although podcasting and other web-based opportunities are marking a renaissance in the form), and in that regard it is unsurprising that The Twilight Zone and horror/ fantasy fiction were the most immediate influences for Golden. The latest incarnation of The Man in Black has created a characterhost viable for the twenty-first century, a slightly more intimate figure who accosts, encounters or contacts us rather than haunting the corridors of Broadcasting House. This has created a more peripatetic and fluid Man in Black suitable for a more ‘networked’ (but no less alienated) society: The Man in Black is not in a fixed abode but crops up ‘doing stuff’, inhabiting various nooks and crannies of contemporary society itself. The fact that The Man in Black is more mobile reflects the place of audio in the twenty-first century context: listeners may have ‘tuned in’ to the digital-only Radio 4 Extra, but they may be listening at their own convenience on the BBC iPlayer, in between listening to other spoken word outputs via radio, websites and downloads. Around the same time as The Man in Black, BBC Radio presented three short series of Weird Tales (2009–11), thirty-minute horror plays framed by a host Lovecraft (Stephen Hogan), an American-voiced figure evidently based on H. P. Lovecraft even if this is never made explicit in his opening narration or in the repertoire itself. In the first two series, Lovecraft is incarcerated in a dark room and tells us stories he has inscribed in a book. He is a rather obscure figure, talking in a half-whisper about the tales that have come to him from the world outside. The plays cover a wide range of horror plots, from Ed Hime’s ‘Bleeder’ (10 February 2009), in which a surgeon has recurring nightmares about a car accident he survived, to Chris Harrald’s ‘The Loop’ (3 March 2009), about the excavation of the underground in Edwardian London, which is partly allusive to Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967). Particularly noteworthy is Richard Vincent’s ‘The House on Pale Avenue’ (20 January 2010), which presents a family who have moved into a new home: the soundscape of the play develops an impressive

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sense of settling into the house and the variety of strange noises throughout the building which start to terrify the new inhabitants and alienate them from each other.

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Notes 1 Formerly known as BBC Radio 7 from 2002–11. 2 These came into effect following the failed terrorist attack by Richard Reid – the ‘shoe bomber’ – in December 2001. 3 The radio script of ‘The White Hare’ is available as an e-book (Gough 2013). 4 The protagonist’s surname Hooper is clearly an allusion to the name of the director of Poltergeist.

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Adaptation and twenty-first-century ­horror radio

Throughout this study we have seen that the adaptation of fiction has been a central process in radio drama since the very beginning of the form. Adaptation has been at the heart of the most popular broadcasts on British radio: for example, the radio ‘institution’ BBC’s Woman’s Hour (1946 onwards) has, for many years, featured a fifteen-minute dose of drama in each weekday broadcast. This slot covers a wide range of genres with a particular penchant for adaptation. This occasionally ventures into the macabre. In April 2011, the BBC broadcast a short series of fifteen-minute dramatisations of five stories from Roald Dahl’s Kiss, Kiss (1960) as part of Woman’s Hour. Dahl is best known as a children’s writer, but his more adult-orientated, frequently morbid, short stories are also classics of popular fiction. Dahl’s short stories have been frequently adapted for tele­vision, including several on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62; 1985–89), some of which were dramatised by Dahl himself. In the UK, the most famous Dahl short story adaptations are on Tales of the Unexpected (1979–88), which, in many episodes, featured Dahl himself as a host introducing the dramatisations and giving insight into the inspiration behind his own tales. Although Dahl was evidently in the tradition of the Hitchcock-style host, director Norman Lloyd’s comment that ‘Roald tried to be a Hitchcock … and he just didn’t have it’ (Grams, 2001: 32) is perhaps a little ungenerous. Dahl presents himself very much as a writer and as such is sombre and intense. Dahl could not have competed with the comic irony and wordplay of the iconic Hitchcock, the ‘Master of Suspense’ showman: indeed, it would have been foolish to try. In the 2011 BBC radio adaptations written by Stephen Sheridan and directed by David Blount, the British actor Charles Dance plays the ‘Storyteller’ who frames each play. Each is a highly efficient dramatisation that works well in the very concise format of just under fifteen minutes’ duration. Dance, in particular, is an authoritative and precise narrator, drawing the listener’s attention and occasionally commenting and embellishing the tale as it proceeds. The chosen stories include favourite examples of Dahl at his most macabre: ‘William and Mary’; ‘Parson’s Pleasure’; ‘Royal Jelly’; ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’; and ‘The Landlady’. In ‘William and Mary’ (a different, longer adaptation of which was broadcast on Fear on

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Four (10 January 1988)), a woman achieves revenge against her oppressive, recently deceased, husband when his brain is kept alive in an innovative life support system and he watches, powerlessly, as she does everything he forbade her to during their lives together. In ‘Royal Jelly’ (which has become a cult favourite of television horror since its broadcast on Tales of the Unexpected (1 March 1980)), a beekeeper feeds his baby daughter royal jelly with metamorphic consequences. Particularly successfully realised is the last in the short radio series, ‘The Landlady’ (15 April 2011). In the radio adaptation of Dahl’s 1959 macabre story, Billy Weaver (James Joyce) has arrived in Bath to take up a new job. He checks into a bed and breakfast run by a landlady (Doreen Mantle), surrounded by stuffed animals. The lodging house is strangely quiet, and Billy seems to recognise the other names in the guest book. While having a cup of tea with the strangely predatory landlady, Billy suddenly remembers the names: they were young men who have disappeared without trace. In the television version of the story on Tales of the Unexpected (21 April 1979), the landlady (Siobhán McKenna) is effectively seductive, and the finale of the play takes us into the bedroom where we see the preserved and yellowing corpses of the young men which the landlady kisses goodnight before commencing her taxidermy procedure on Billy. The radio version refuses to be so blatant in its horrifying presentation of necrophilia and taxidermy but follows the short story more closely with an ending of suggestion and implication from the perspective of Billy. The television version evidently felt compelled to be visual in its horror, while the fiction and radio versions are more intimate – but no less disturbing – by placing us within the head of Billy as we, with him, piece together the truth of his hideous circumstances and fate. The BBC series describes Dahl as ‘Master of the Bizarre’, and these short plays are successful vignettes of the macabre, exploiting suggestion and inference in audio form, as Dahl does as a writer. A few months before the Dahl adaptations, in September 2010 Woman’s Hour presented a serialised adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) in fifteen-minute episodes adapted and produced by Polly Thomas. Lindsay’s novel is a fictional account of a group of schoolgirls who disappear during an outing to the outback on St Valentine’s Day 1900. The novel was famously adapted for the screen by Peter Weir in 1975 in what remains a classic work of Australian cinema. The radio version adheres to the narrative of Lindsay’s novel, but as an example of radio drama it is distinguished by its sound design. In the radio Picnic at Hanging Rock, the narrator (Penny Downie) uses a precise and measured tone in permitting the horrific story to unfurl. The first horror in the story – the vanishing of the girls – is conveyed with the soundscape and music capturing a sense of the scale of the hostile wilderness. The second horror is in the discovery that Sara Weybourne, a sensitive child who had been forbidden from attending the picnic and later goes missing herself, has committed suicide at school: her decomposing body is discovered by

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the gardener. The scandal of the disappearances and the suicide destroy the school whose headmistress, the austere Mrs Appleyard, ventures to Hanging Rock herself. In the intensity of the heat and her own despair, Mrs Appleyard beholds a vision of the dead Sara Weybourne, lying face down on a ledge of rock with her arm cast up above her head like child who has dozed off, tiny flies swarming around her ‘much-publicised ringlets’ matted with dust and blood. Mrs Appleyard’s vivid yet fantastical discovery, before she tumbles to her death, presents a passage almost identical in language to the equivalent section in the novel but is a superb example of horror radio narrative: [Ambient tones, sound of birds and insects and Mrs Appleyard struggling on rocks and gasping with effort; drum beats coming in.] To the right a narrow ledge overhung a precipice at which she dared not look. To the left, on higher ground, a pile of stones. On one of them a large black spider, spread-eagled, fast asleep in the sun. She had always been afraid of spiders, looked round for something with which to strike it and saw Sara Weybourne … [girls’ laughter heard] in a nightdress … with one eye fixed and staring from a mask of rotting flesh. [Wilderness sounds grow in cacophony, drum beats, Jon Rose music, Mrs Appleyard screams.] An eagle hovering high above the golden peaks heard her scream as she ran towards the precipice and jumped. [Falling rocks] The spider scuttled to safety as the clumsy body went bouncing and rolling from rock to rock towards the valley below. Until at last the head was impaled on a jutting crag. [Wilderness, whispering sounds grow in cacophony, drum beats, girl singing.]

The extract above gives a sense of the pervasive use of sound. The production carefully combines Eloise Whitmore’s sound design (the sounds of the Australian wilderness; recurrent incoherent whispering – which captures the mood of gossip and rumour – as well as specific sound effects) with eerie reverberating string music by Jon Rose. Rose is a notable figure in avantgarde music, with projects such as Great Fences of Australia (2002) which he developed with Hollis Taylor in which the two men – both violinists – ‘played’ fences across thousands of miles of Australia. The use of Jon Rose’s work in the radio adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock captures a sense of space and the intersection of humanity in a seemingly endless wilderness. Rose’s music captures the mood and meaning of this Australian tragedy: schoolgirls lost in the might of pitiless nature. Rose is no stranger to radio production or radio writing: he directed, edited, composed and produced Skeleton in the Museum (2003), an experimental and highly accomplished one-hour radio drama about the eccentric composer Percy Grainger, mixing experimental music, narrative, comedy and pornography.

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‘Don’t Look Now’ is a novella in Daphne du Maurier’s collection of uncanny tales Not After Midnight (1971). In the story, John and Laura are taking a holiday in Venice after the tragic death of their daughter, Christine, from meningitis. They encounter two elderly twins, one of them blind, who can ‘see’ Christine seated between the bereaved couple. John is appalled by the effect of the mediums on his wife, suspecting some kind of vicious scam. John also catches a glimpse of a small child in a hooded coat which, when the clairvoyants announce that John has psychic ability (although he himself is not aware of it), the reader interprets as being a vision of Christine. The psychics convey a message from Christine that her father is in danger and should leave Venice immediately. When a message comes from their son’s school that their child has acute appendicitis. Laura returns to England leaving John in Venice, to his doom. Du Maurier’s novella is a well-crafted example of supernatural literature which is extremely succinct and a sustained exercise in irony. Nicolas Roeg’s film version is a significant example of adaptation in that it turns a comparatively simple tale into a rich and complex work of cinema. One is reminded of Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) which, although on its own terms an effective example of pulp fiction, is turned into a masterpiece of film in the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation. Interestingly, Alan Scott and Chris Bryant’s screenplay for Roeg follows du Maurier’s plot closely, and although Peter Bradshaw may claim that the famous sex scene in Roeg, Scott and Bryant’s film ‘was entirely their invention’ (Bradshaw, 2011), du Maurier sets this up with John’s thoughts:   ‘Now,’ he thought afterwards, ‘now at last is the moment to make love,’ and he went back into the bedroom and she understood, and opened her arms and smiled. Such blessed relief after all those weeks of restraint.   ‘The thing is,’ she said later, fixing her ear-rings before the looking-glass … (du Maurier, 1971: 19–20)

Du Maurier’s ‘afterwards’ and ‘later’ in the short scene suggests the timebending montage in the film wherein the couple’s intercourse is intercut with scenes of them getting dressed. The fact that the daughter drowns rather than dies of an illness is a decision which permits visual and thematic echoes (water, red coats, psychic vision, etc.) and a sequence of intense terror, just as changing Bloch’s obese, bespectacled and middle-aged Norman Bates into the svelte and apprehensive Anthony Perkins is alteration at its most inspired. The brilliance of the film of Don’t Look Now has two components: the performances and the editing. Not only do we see Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie at the height of their powers, but the casting of Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania as the sisters was a similarly inspired decision. Moreover, much of the meaning and effectiveness of the film as an example of the postmodern Gothic lies in the ingenuity of Nicolas Roeg and Graeme Clifford’s editing, which exploits the theme of clairvoyance to decentre narrative linearity to

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unnerving effect. As we have seen, du Maurier suggests this in her efficient short novel, but the film version turns this into an epic of complex perspectives and timelines. Similarly, Hitchcock’s Psycho is a triumph of cinematography and performance. As well as the landmark editing in the ‘shower scene’, we should recognise the sustained effectiveness of the point-of-view and mise-en-scène throughout the film. As well as Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, the film’s ensemble features a range of ideally cast actors in integral roles and cameos. The film’s alterations of the source novel are, as in Don’t Look Now, of major significance. Bloch did indeed conceive of the shower murder and the slaying of the private investigator, but, without wanting to be facetious, the decapitation of Mary/Marion (Bloch, 1997: 31) is perhaps a horror too extreme and the murder of Arbogast on the doorstep (rather than lured inside and up the stairs) is a horror too slight. Like Psycho, Don’t Look Now is in many respects a sustained and profoundly sardonic ‘joke’. Robert Bloch saves the twist surrounding Mrs Bates’s identity for the last chapter, and du Maurier’s decision to reveal the true identity of the hooded ‘child’ is saved for the final page. These are grim punch-lines, lethal jokes, but all-important to the meaning of the entire works. In du Maurier’s story, John almost sees the joke himself, reflecting on ‘what a bloody silly way to die’ (du Maurier, 1971: 58) as he fades into non-existence. The one-hour radio adaptation of Don’t Look Now (9 December 2001) by Ronald Frame, featuring Anna Chancellor and Michael Feast, adheres closely to du Maurier’s novella. Much in the radio play is effective, such as opening the play with Laura looking at tourist books in order to decide what to do while in Venice, and the play develops with an appropriate sense of unease. However, as a radio adaptation the play falls into a trap of overstatement, above all in the finale. Here is John’s death in the novella:   The child struggled to her feet and stood before him, the pixie-hood falling from her head on to the floor. He stared at her, incredulity turning to horror, to fear. It was not a child at all but a little thick-set woman dwarf, about three feet high, with a great square adult head too big for her body, grey locks hanging shoulder-length, and she wasn’t sobbing any more, she was grinning at him, nodding her head up and down […] The creature fumbled in her sleeve, drawing a knife, and as she threw it at him with hideous strength, piercing his throat, he stumbled and fell, the sticky mess covering his protecting hands.   And he saw the vaporetto with Laura and the two sisters steaming down the Grand Canal, not today, not to-morrow, but the day after that, and he knew why they were together and for what sad purpose they had come. (du Maurier, 1971: 58)

In Roeg’s film, this scene is memorably adapted onto the screen with notable changes. The dwarf (Adelina Poerio) keeps the hood of her coat in place but turns (not unlike Mrs Bates turning in the fruit cellar in Psycho) to reveal a broad grin. Interestingly, the nodding of the killer’s head in the novella

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becomes a stilted shaking of the head in the film; and the thrown knife becomes a firmly held slicing knife (reminiscent of Psycho again). In the radio version, all is filtered through the narration of John: john: Turn round, turn round – so I can see you. Go on. The pixie-hood, it’s fallen down. Now turn round – what the – [The ‘child’ begins to laugh a warped adult laugh, building in volume] john: Who are you? – [with mounting horror] big square head – not a child – grey hair hanging down – not sobbing any more – grinning – a dwarf? – grinning at me. Nodding her head up and down. Up and down – […] A crazy midget. A madwoman. She’s insane. Oh my God, help me – […] A crazy, a lunatic – Christ, help me – I can everything. She’s in her sleeve – What’s she – Oh no, oh no – she’s got a knife – she’s aiming it, she’s going to – she’s throwing it at me – all that fury – [With a ghastly cry, the dwarf hurls a knife. John’s agonising pain as the blade slashes his throat] john: Aargh! john: [a beat after the above] ! I can see everything – [From the dwarf, laughter crossed with a wail] john: – everything. [John gasps] john: She’s slashed my throat, I’m stumbling, falling, my hands, my red hands – [From the dwarf, a high-pitched ecstatic shriek] john: This stupid sticky red mess – [John’s ragged breath] john: I can see everything – [John desperately inhales] john: Laura and the sisters. I’m seeing them. They’re in the vaporetto. [Surreal toot of a vaporetto horn] john: Not today, not tomorrow, the day after, yes, Laura is sad, crying, she’s so sad, they’re here to bring me back, they’re bringing back my body. [The dwarf’s gibbering. momentarily, the men’s clamouring voices, the hammering at the door, the dog barking. then the extraneous sounds are siphoned out of the room, scooped up, leaving us with John’s embattled breathing, a rattle in his throat.] [Music sting] [A thud as John’s body hits the floor] john: Oh God … oh God, what a bloody silly way to die …

It is a two-minute sequence (a little longer than the equivalent section in the film) and is perhaps too long and overstated, an example of over-narration in radio drama. It is an easy trap to fall into: the abrupt shock in the novella and film seems doomed to misfire in audio drama. This is a genuine risk, but having John spell out each moment in more detail than even the

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novelist does herself is perhaps an imbalance. Furthermore, if narration is approached in such a completist manner, the blatant omissions are always going to become more conspicuous: in this case, although we hear the dwarf laughing (and laughing …), we do not hear the knife thrown – or striking – in fury. Although Michael Feast does his best with the monologue, he can only struggle against its length and the protracted use of the overbearing musical soundtrack and insane giggling of the dwarf. Far more successfully realised as a full-length radio adaptation is Oliver Emanuel’s dramatisation (30 October 2010) of Tim Krabbé’s novel The Vanishing (Het Gouden Ei, 1984). To a degree, The Vanishing novel is in the tradition of Psycho and Don’t Look Now, although a more meticulously realised and crafted literary achievement. All three stories are deeply disturbing works that take real, even mundane, characters but gradually develop a sense of impending menace with tremendously ironic narrative twists at their end. The Vanishing captures the banality of evil and the true horror it has the capacity to inflict. The work is a chilling tale of terror in the commonplace world of service stations, seatbelts and vending machines. The novel has a deliberately sparse style and functions as a modern myth, a work that draws on urban legends but also classical legend (such as Antigone) and the Gothic anxieties of Edgar Allan Poe. At the same time, the contemporary setting of Krabbé’s story makes them less mythic and allusive than genuinely disturbing. In the novel, Rex and Saskia are on a vacation and pull into a service station to refuel: Saskia goes into the shop and is never seen again. Years later, Rex is in a new relationship with Lieneke but continues to obsess about the vanished Saskia. Rex is contacted by Raymond Lemorne who is responsible for Saskia’s disappearance and in his desperation to learn what happened to his girlfriend, Rex agrees to go through what she endured even if it will cost him his life (which it does). The 1988 film adaptation by George Sluizer utilises a deliberately simple filmic style which works very effectively. The breaking of the line when Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) stares directly into the viewer’s eyes at the end of the film is one of the most arresting moments in European horror cinema. George Sluizer remade the film himself for Hollywood in 1993, and his concessions blunt the sharp terror of the ending in his original version. In choosing to adapt the novel to radio Oliver Emanuel explains: ‘For me, it has an incredibly fundamental sense of horror, a sense of fear at the heart of it. It was a story that stayed with me.’ (Oliver Emanuel, 2011). In adapting the novel, Emanuel was encouraged not to be trapped by the source text: The radio writer Robert Forrest1 gave me some invaluable advice: read the book a couple of times, then throw it in the corner and write your play. I forgot bits of plot, I ignored other bits but as long as the play had an internal logic I was happy. I started with the end of the book where he says ‘My name is Rex Hoffman’. I found this to be an interesting motif throughout the play. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

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As well as constantly returning to intense subjectivity (various characters state ‘My name is…’), Emanuel’s play successfully realises a fantasy dimension by giving a sustained presence to the vanished Saskia, a woman who, like Eurydice in the Orpheus legend, will disappear if Rex looks back. Emanuel felt that ‘the women are incredibly underwritten’, and he takes the moment in the novel where Rex detects Saskia at the badminton court as ‘a signal that she’s always with him and inserted her in the play whenever it felt relevant to do so’ (Oliver Emanuel, 2011). This permits dialogue and commentary that can develop exposition and implicit description (without the need for a narrator), just as John Dickson Carr used it in his landmark 1940s adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ for Suspense/ Appointment with Fear. In the case of The Vanishing, Emanuel opens the work through dialogue without losing the claustrophobia or the interiority of Rex’s personal hell. Emanuel’s use of the device perhaps enriches the sense of fantasy and tragic, mythic lost love while diminishing the brutal banality of this modern horror classic. However, Emanuel makes a very important point in this regard: ‘Tim Krabbé insists it is not a horror story. He insists it’s not a thriller. He insists that it’s a love story.’ (Oliver Emanuel, 2011). In the radio adaptation, the story becomes even more fine-tuned into a tale of obsession and the trauma of inexplicable loss. The finely balanced dialogue in the radio play and the nuances of character certainly capture the ‘love story’ dimension to the novel, a feature enhanced by the sense of fantasy. After all, Emanuel was acutely aware that despite Krabbé’s assertion that it is a love story there is a problem in balance, which is rectified by Emanuel increasing the vocal presence of the women. The environments of The Vanishing are well-served by soundscapes as diverse as motorway traffic and the inside of a stifling box. The production is enhanced by the range of accents: Sam West’s English accent jostling against the Scots accent of Liam Brennan: West’s Rex has an English accent on the edge of breakdown while Brennan remains cool and hauntingly authoritative throughout. The BBC Scotland production, directed by Kirsty Williams, was inventive in its exploration of production techniques. Indeed, a number of plays produced by BBC Radio Scotland in recent years have taken an innovative approach to production: The Container (24 January 2011), the radio adaptation of Clare Bayley’s 2007 play about illegal immigrants, directed by Marilyn Imrie and produced by Turan Ali, was recorded in an actual lorry container. In the case of The Vanishing Emanuel explains: We placed coins in mud and grass and water, so the actors were really digging things up. Most of what you hear is happening: people walking or looking in mud; we built a little car for the actors to be in to record some scenes. It was all actualised. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

The story of The Vanishing concludes with Rex waking up to find himself interred in a coffin and realising that Saskia shared the same fate. It is a

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horror that is claustrophobic and visionless. As Emanuel reveals, he realised that the ending ‘was going to be the easiest part to do’ (Oliver Emanuel, 2011). After all, although Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010) – in which Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) finds himself buried in a coffin for most of the film – is a powerful thriller, the film needs to find light sources in order to work and does so with Paul using a cellphone, torch, glowstick and, as Sluizer gives Rex in the film version of The Vanishing, a lighter. Back in the 1920s, Richard Hughes understood the pure darkness of radio and, likewise, Oliver Emanuel was acutely aware of the advantages of radio form, exploiting the ‘exact void’ that he defined earlier. In particular, Emanuel’s The Vanishing takes us into utterly confined darkness: Claustrophobia is easier to convey on radio than in any other medium. It’s harder to do in a film or even a novel in a real way. On radio you can have someone breathing in a box – because we put someone in box and recorded it! (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

Other effective aspects of The Vanishing are not about performers or literal props and settings but more driven by production: One thing the director Kirsty Williams developed was a decision to keep Rex on the right-hand side. When Saskia and Rex are initially in the car, he is on the right and she is on the left. Once she’s disappeared, he remains on the right-hand side for the rest of the play, while all the other characters swirl around him. There should be a sense of disorientation. It’s like he’s dropped down a rabbit hole and everyone else is following him. That effect was something we’d talked about in the early stages, but it was really exciting to hear that come together in the studio. Of course, many listeners might not even notice, but I think those details really matter. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

Similarly, just as Emanuel understood the mortifying purity of radio darkness, the production itself plays with sound and silence, taking things out of the control of the listeners, alienating us by changing the volume and giving us ‘dead air’: Mostly with radio plays, when a scene ends you fade out. We do the absolute opposite in this production. Every time a scene ends, the sound goes up. So when Rex is running around the petrol station looking for Saskia, the sound goes up: the traffic noise increases. Throughout the play, when the scene ends, the rain comes up; the sound of the road comes up; the sound of people walking by comes up. But towards the end of the play, when Rex decides to get back into Lemorne’s car and shuts the door, I wrote a stage direction which says ‘Total, utter, black silence. For as long as possible…’ The whole point for me was that this is a huge moment. Silence is common in radio drama with most scenes fading into silence, but I wanted to make the sound go up throughout the play in order to create this total, utter, black silence. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

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As well as dramatisations of literature, British radio has also adapted film. For example, a four-part radio adaptation of An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981) was broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in 1997, written and directed by Dirk Maggs and with Jenny Agutter, Brian Glover, and John Woodvine recreating their original film roles. The play works particularly well as Maggs carefully reworks the story for audio – notably expanding Glover’s role – and creates a richly textured soundscape and dynamic pace. BBC Radio 1 is predominantly a station for popular music, and the extremely fast-paced nature of the thirty-minute episodes of the adaptation makes sense in this context. In his An American Werewolf in London, Maggs neither emulates nor adheres to the original film but rather reinvents the core story as thrilling audio. A different approach to the audio adaptation of horror film is to be found in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s version of Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2009). A particularly fine example of a film about radio – and bloody, zombiesque pandemic – this Canadian horror film is scripted by Tony Burgess as an adaptation of his own novel Pontypool Changes Everything (1998). Interestingly, with radio in mind, according to the film’s director Bruce McDonald, Burgess wrote the screenplay with great rapidity, deliberately emulating the method that produced Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ (Turek, 2008). In the story, a virus is taking over the world outside a small-town radio station and turning the victims into mindless, homicidal maniacs. The theme may be a familiar plot from the contemporary zombie genre, but Burgess’s brilliant twist is that the contagion is spread through spoken language. As such, Pontypool Changes Everything and its adaptations become works about language and power; language and identity; and language and meaning. Gregory J. Sinclair’s radio version for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2009 is an adaptive re-edit of the soundtrack of the original film, turning the full-length feature film into an audio drama of less than an hour’s duration. The direct use of a film source might seem to be risky, but the streamlining of the film into a tighter dramatic structure succeeds possibly because the work is, at essence, about the nature, use and abuse of spoken language and is ideally suited for the airwaves. Moreover, as a story set in a radio station with a DJ (Stephen McHattie) as the protagonist, Pontypool as audio finds its most authentic medium. A radio play which uses cinema in a broader context is the BBC’s The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock (14 March 1993) by David Rudkin and produced by Philip Martin. This radical example of biographical drama takes the audience on an interior journey into the mind of Alfred Hitchcock (Richard Griffiths). Disturbing and epic, we are ‘inside Hitchcock’s head’ as we encounter his psychological obsessions, memories and creativity. Music, sound and other voices create an experimental, fragmented narrative about the life and achievement of a unique ‘dark genius’: The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock gives the kind of ‘insight’ that only radio can.

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Writers such as Oliver Emanuel, Dirk Maggs and David Rudkin have produced adaptations in which they have been careful to ‘rethink’ the core source in the original works as examples of audio drama at its fullest. As the radio writer Marty Ross indicates, this is not typically the case: Usually, with the BBC, the tradition in adaptations is that when you dramatise a literary work, you’re basically a sort of glorified script editor for the original author, rather than an imaginative dramatist in your own right: you’re essentially providing an edited down version of the original text. As much as possible the dialogue should be verbatim from the original, big chunks of the original descriptive prose should be inserted and the plotline is just a step-by-step following of what’s on the page, even if it means lots of bitty 30 second scenes being crammed in. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Ross himself adapted three uncanny Scottish tales for the BBC as The Darker Side of the Border: ‘The Captain of the Polestar’ (24 April 2003) adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle; ‘Olalla’ (1 May 2003) adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson; and ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’ (8 May 2003) based on James Hogg. In adapting these nineteenth-century tales, Ross resisted becoming ‘trapped’ in a spurious sense of fidelity. In contrast: The approach I took was, as I saw it, more like screenwriting, like that accepted aesthetic in film adaptation, where the idea is to use the original essentially as raw material for a whole new work, with the point being to produce something that works to maximum effect in the new medium, with fidelity to the original less important than effective drama. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Particularly significant in the adaptations is the use of dialogue: Ross creates and introduces original dialogue to replace the dominance of the narrator’s voice (redoubtable in all three of his chosen novelists). The use of dialogue assists in the development of dramatic rhythm, enriching character and psychological complexity. A change in mood is also detectable in the adaptation of ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’, in which Ross strove to transform a tale that Hogg’s narrator admits may appear to the reader as ‘ridiculous’ (Hogg, 2001: 28) into ‘something, hopefully, more stern and sober and tragic’ (Marty Ross, 2011). Ross’s other recent audio works include Medusa on the Beach (2009), an extraordinary comedy in which the head of the Medusa – complete with its petrifying powers – is discovered in a carrier bag washed-up on the English coast. Although not a horror play per se – indeed, for Ross himself it is ‘a kind of surrealist tragi-comedy beyond any straightforward genre’ (Marty Ross, 2011) – Medusa on the Beach is a startling work for the way it conflates gentle comedy and well-realised characterisation with the power of Greek legend, the terrifying gorgon’s head being used to wreak havoc in the assumed tranquillity of seaside Britain. Medusa on the Beach was not a BBC play but an original work written for The Wireless Theatre Company, a London-based audio drama company that has, since 2007, been producing

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a wide range of dramatic works for download from its website. The Wireless Theatre Company’s artistic director, Mariele Runacre Temple, is also a co-producer with 3DHorrorfi, another web-based audio drama company which – because of its horror specialism – we will look at in detail in due course. Back in the late 1990s, Tim Crook expressed his belief that the internet marked the expansion of ‘the democratic potential of freedom of expression in writing and art in broadcasting’, including a greater public access ‘to mass communication and participation’ (Crook, 1999a: 41). The rise of companies such as The Wireless Theatre Company and 3DHorrorfi demonstrates the way in which the internet has revolutionised audio broadcasting. For the greater part of the radio era in Britain, the BBC has been absolutely dominant. However, the rise of the internet and proliferation of digital culture has wrested this dominance away, changing the options for what we can listen to and how we can listen to it.

Notes 1 Amongst other things, Forrest was responsible for BBC radio’s ambitious John le Carré adaptation series The Complete Smiley in 2010.

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Multifarious terrors: horror audio in the digital age

Thus far we have looked at fairly conventional examples of horror radio: dramatic works that have used a host to frame tightly structured and formulaic plays; or adaptations of works of literary fiction that transform a pre-existing story into an audio version. Within this, of course, there is a spectrum of approaches: as well as – and within – productions that are ‘conventional’ there is work that is daring or audacious in theme and approach. In this chapter, however, we will extend our frame of reference to look at works that are less formulaically presented or explore the potential of audio to the limit. For instance, there are some fascinating works about sound itself. In addition, there are also works which are enterprising in their use of technology, from binaural recording to digital experiments. Moreover, in entering the contemporary world we discover that certain boundaries become less meaningful: web-based audio and podcast facilities (even the ostensible ‘catch up’ functionality of the BBC iPlayer) have created a listenership that can listen ‘on-demand’ rather keep its ‘appointment’ with a programme. Likewise, although this book has been framed as a study of a national broadcasting repertoire, web-based culture is something more international and there is a sense of access and exchange, whether in terms of audience or collaborations. We have already seen how, for want of a US radio culture, writers like Christopher Golden and Amber Benson have written for the BBC’s The Man in Black. However, in the rapidly burgeoning culture of independent web-based audio drama, above all in the USA, there is a sense of internationalism: for instance, Julie Hoverson’s drama programme 19 Nocturne Boulevard (2008 onwards) and Christof Laputka’s science fiction epic The Leviathan Chronicles (2008 onwards) are both based in the USA but feature actors from all over the world (particularly from the UK), often recorded in their own contexts and edited seamlessly together in a studio in the USA. We have seen how important comedy has been in the development of British radio. The comic-experimentalist achievement of The Goon Show in the 1950s and the formal and thematic satire in sketch-based comedies of the 1960s are followed by Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978–80). This programme used radio in an extraordinarily inventive, if not audacious, way, as is evident in the very first episode with

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the total annihilation of the Earth. Adams’s script plays with the clichés of science fiction, but in so doing creates a work that is as original as it is comic. With the assistance of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and a distinctive cast of voice actors, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stretched the use of sound to create a universal odyssey, countless spectacular effects and perilous and uncanny situations. The programme retains a cult following, not least evident in the successful live tours (and post-show audio downloads) of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Live Radio Show (2012–13), developed by Dirk Maggs. The programme has also had a diverse influence on other radio comedies, including Tolkien parodies such as the underrated Hordes of the Things (1980) and, more successfully, ElvenQuest (2009–13). Moreover, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s fantastical evocations can even be detected in the postmodern Absurd of Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding’s The Boosh (2001), which became the television series The Mighty Boosh (2004–7). In the area of science-fiction television, the influence of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is strongly apparent in the hugely successful comedy Red Dwarf (1988–99). Another notable achievement in the history of British radio comedy is in the 1990s with the work of Chris Morris. Following his work as part of the ensemble-based news satire On the Hour (BBC Radio 4, 1991–92), Morris presented The Chris Morris Music Show (1994) on BBC Radio 1. Although ostensibly a DJ-led music programme, Morris and sidekick Peter Baynham exploited the comic potential of the genre to the full, including many grotesque set pieces. These include a protracted sketch in which Morris and Baynham examine a ‘tortoise’ and use tools to crack open its shell, with detailed sound effects of the experiment, including squidgy flesh sounds and a close-up microphone to catch the creature’s dying breath (22 June 1994). In another sequence, they find fellow DJ Johnny Walker ‘dead’, and a soundscape creates the sound of swarming flies and Walker’s jingle looping endlessly as Morris and Baynham manipulate the corpse to croak a final farewell to his listeners (12 October 1994). In both sketches, Morris takes his comedy of horror into prank humour when he phones genuine animal charities to report Baynham for animal cruelty or attempts to find a taxidermist willing to stuff a famous radio personality. After The Chris Morris Music Show, Morris returned to Radio 1 with three series of Blue Jam (1997–99). This highly experimental series interpolates contemporary and classic popular music with inventive sketches, all melded together with a fluid, atmospheric soundscape. Blue Jam uses a diverse range of comic languages, but frequently it presents grotesque and disturbing comedy. In the deranged humour of Blue Jam we meet parents who have had a transplant operation to give their young daughter the penis and testicles of a forty-five year old man (19 December 1997) or have given birth to a zombie baby which they feed with stray animals and human flesh donated from the local mortuary (4 February 1999). One of the most consistent sketches in Blue Jam presents a medical practitioner (David

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Cann) to a variety of comic ends. Cann captures the voice of the doctor with great realism within sketches that parody contemporary medicine or make a humorous treatment of negligence and malpractice: although of a different style and format, these sketches reflect the same anxieties that underpin medical horror plays on Fear on Four. Over all, the disturbing, hilarious world of Blue Jam presents sketches of excess, shock and obscenity for the purposes of satire or surrealism in episodes which flow, seamlessly, in dream-like and mesmeric style.1 Earlier we mentioned BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and its penchant for serialised drama, especially adaptations. However, it has occasionally featured series of audio drama based on a particular unifying concept. For example, Ears Wide Open (May–June 2005) was five plays all set in the dark. These adventurous plays are extremely diverse in style and mood but follow a strict adherence to the principle of complete darkness as a central component to each story: Charlotte Goodwin’s ‘Surprise, Surprise!’ is about a woman hiding inside a giant birthday cake; Van Badham’s ‘In the Dark’ is about a singles party in a blacked-out room; Trevor Lloyd’s ‘Float On’ is set in the sensory-deprived environment of a flotation tank; Lavinia Murray’s ‘The Nocturnalist’ presents two zookeepers in a power cut; and Sheila Goff’s ‘Soft and Gooey’ features a blindfold party game. What is striking in each of the plays is the creation of tension and irony and, in some cases, the macabre, the disturbing and even the erotic. In this respect, the Ears Wide Open series spans back many decades to the world of Richard Hughes’s A Comedy of Danger, and yet the discipline with which each play develops and utilises the sense of utter darkness feels, in most cases, innovative and compelling. While Ears Wide Open develops different approaches to the concept of complete darkness, some other noteworthy recent plays have been concerned with audio technology itself. Laura Wade’s Hum (17 May 2009) is a drama that successfully explores the alienating effect of ‘noise’ in contemporary life, centring on the activities of Emma (Nina Sosanya), a noise pollution investigator. In one sequence, Emma and a colleague visit Mr Ames (Paul Rider) a man who has purchased a Mosquito2 to disperse neighbouring youths that gather near his home: emma: It’s like rape. mr ames: What!? emma: It’s like raping people’s ears. Assaulting them. mr ames: I haven’t assaulted anyone. I haven’t touched them. emma: The sound touches them, that’s how it works. A sound travels into your ear and physically touches your eardrum. Unwanted touching is an assault, isn’t it? mr ames: What are you accusing me of? dave: Um, no-one is accusing you of anything! The problem with the Mosquito is that it’s an indiscriminate weapon, it can’t differentiate between people actually causing a nuisance and people

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who aren’t doing anything wrong. emma: Yeah, someone walks past with a baby in a buggy mr ames: What? So now I’m raping babies!?

Hum captures the tragically destructive power of sound in an increasingly ‘noisy’ society. More clearly within the horror genre but similarly concerned with the power of sound is the forty-five minute BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play ‘The Ditch’ (1 February 2010). This is a significant example of horror radio for its use of recording technology and its featured writer/performer, Paul Evans. Wildlife sound recordist Tom Saunders (Jimmy Yuill) has gone missing, presumed dead, in the (fictional) wilderness of Slaughton Ditch, and his final recordings and notes are sent to the narrator character (Paul Evans) who attempts to solve the conundrum of his friend’s fate. Paul Evans is a nature writer and broadcaster whose voice would be extremely familiar to listeners of BBC radio’s wildlife and natural history documentaries. The decision to let Evans play the role in the story he has written is an inspired decision in terms of verisimilitude. Just as Ronald Knox in Broadcasting the Barricades in the 1920s or Mercury Theater on the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ in the 1930s emulated ‘real’ broadcasting, Evans’s role in ‘The Ditch’ lends the work an authenticity similar to – albeit not so audacious as – the strategy of using Michael Parkinson, Craig Charles and other celebrity figures as ‘themselves’ in BBC television’s Ghostwatch (1992). On radio, BBC horror series A Sting in the Tale (2003–4) has also featured playful cameo roles. For example, ‘Ghosting’ (22 January 2004) by Gregory Evans is a horror play about ghost-writing, with the writer Michael (Jimi Mistry) writing the ‘autobiography’ of a supermodel (Honeysuckle Weeks). In the play – which sees the duped ghost-writer become a literal ghost – the arts presenter Francine Stock appears as herself. In A Sting in the Tale’s ‘No Conferring’ (25 December 2003) by Jonathan Holloway, a group of students who appeared on the television quiz University Challenge (1962–87; 1994 onwards) in the 1980s hold a guilty secret surrounding one of the team members. Twenty years later an eerie manifestation on a new episode of the quiz terrifies the surviving team members. The play is lent a sense of authenticity with both quizmasters of the two phases of the long-running quiz – Bamber Gascoigne and Jeremy Paxman – appearing as themselves. In ‘The Ditch’ Evans is also like Stock, Gascoigne and Paxman in ‘playing himself’. Evans employs his usual personable voice, and some information about the wildlife is academically cited. It is significant that the play was produced by Sarah Blunt of the BBC Natural History unit in Bristol, and other voices scripted into the play include ‘non-actor’ BBC staff Christine Hall (as ‘Presenter’) and Richard Angwin (as ‘Shipping Forecast Reader’). This documentary reality is further enhanced by the play being framed as a ‘tribute’ to the late ‘Tom Saunders’, although he is a fictional construct. However, even more effective in the creation of an uncanny effect are the recordings used within the play. Saunders had gone to the remote coastal

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landscape to capture the sounds of the location and its wildlife. The recordings reveal that Saunders had become obsessed with electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), claiming to hear ominous voices hidden within the rich soundscapes he captured at Slaughton Ditch. As Chris Maume’s review in the Independent puts it, EVP is the ‘perfect plot device for paranormal radio drama’ (Maume, 2010). EVP has proved a central topic for other examples of horror such as the film White Noise (Geoffrey Sax, 2005) which exploits the eerie dynamic of recorded sound: as we argued earlier, sometimes what is heard on screen can be more terrifying than what is seen. Indeed, in another horror film – The Innkeepers (Ti West, 2011) – the sequences where the protagonists explore EVP are possibly more unnerving than some of the more blatant, visual manifestations. ‘The Ditch’ utilises extraordinary soundscapes (created by the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson and sound engineer Mike Burgess) as Evans plays us Saunders’s recordings of the sea (above and below the surface), the wild birds and his commentary about the desolate location. Some of Saunders’s recordings feature him playing and commenting upon genuine extracts from Raymond Cass’s EVP research, samples of which are collected on The Ghost Orchid (1999), which is cited by name on the unpublished script – but not the broadcast – for ‘The Ditch’. In addition, the play develops the atmosphere of Saunders’s caravan and, of course, the general ambience of the location. Despite the growing unease the listener experiences, Saunders is a jocular figure, but this is a ploy to make his terrifying descent into madness – or epiphany – all the more dramatic. As in the tragic true story of Donald Crowhurst,3 the failed round-the-world solo yachtsman, we wonder whether we are witnessing, through Evans, the mental collapse of Saunders, losing his mind when cut off in this alienating realm. However, when we are played the individual recordings – complete with the ‘click’ of the playback button – we hear for ourselves disturbing, unintelligible voices in isolation or chorus meshed in with the distorted sounds of water, wind and wildlife. As Chris Maume says, the resulting fragments are ‘soundtracks to a nightmare’ (Maume, 2010). Saunders taunts Evans – and us – by telling us how to set up an EVP recording and then uttering ‘I bloody dare you’. Ultimately, Evans is lured into the wilderness and finds himself ‘in conversation’ with the distorted voice of the deceased Saunders during a terrifying storm which nearly kills him. The eerie noises of Slaughton Ditch are the sounds of a ‘predatory force’ which attempts to lure the isolated listener to his death. Like Nigel Kneale’s television horror play The Stone Tape (1972), the arcane horror of rituals of the past seems to have been summoned up and, like Marlow in pursuit of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Evans’s journey seems to lure him into madness of his own. ‘The Ditch’ steadily builds its tension highly effectively, but its noncommittal ending is not so much an effective ambiguity as something of an anticlimax. However, the play remains a significant example of horror radio for its deliberate verisimilitude of documentary style and (authentic) voice

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and, above all, its remarkable, unsettling soundscapes. The use of genuine landscape recording distinguishes ‘The Ditch’ and reflects a move to record more radio drama ‘on location’. Sound recording technology has become increasingly advanced and compact, which has permitted a greater degree of mobile, yet high-quality, recording. An example of this is Bad Memories (7 January 2011), a one-hour supernatural BBC radio drama written and directed by Julian Simpson, which was recorded by Lucinda Mason Brown and David Chilton at Stanmer House in Brighton. The first two minutes of the play feature two male students exploring an abandoned house – the ‘Blake’ house – and one of them one falls through a floor and discovers several sets of human bones, the scene ending with a loud, distorted female scream. After this we learn that the bodies are of a number of people who disappeared in 2004, and yet forensic tests show they were murdered in the 1920s. A number of digital audio files are discovered alongside the bodies, and Rachel Weir (Nicola Walker), an audio expert who helps police to restore corrupted audio material, gradually rebuilds the recordings. As with ‘The Ditch’, the most effective aspect is the soundscape of the recordings: creaks, drips, birdsong and echoes but also distorted voices, eerie childlike singing and other uncanny noises which do not seem to be audible to the people caught in conversation on the audio files. The stereo sound design by David Chilton uses the echoing corridors, stairs and general ambience of Stanmer House to unnerving effect even before the uncanny aspects are introduced let alone the chilling recording of the 2004 murders, including the repeated screams of the victims. The play uses ‘levels’ of sound to an effective end. Rachel reclaims the corrupted audio files one short section at a time and speculates with the police as to what we are hearing: the curtailed recordings allow some evocative moments of ‘unlistenable’ distortion, which further builds suspense and tension. We hear the murder victims’ initially mundane chitchat while creepy sounds and malevolent ghost voices imbue the documentation. The fragments gradually build an account of what happened to the victims (they are dragged back in time to die at the hands of a vengeful ghost from a murder that happened on the site in 1926). In the dénouement, Rachel visits the abandoned house herself to record the environment. Commencing with a classic horror sound of a slowly creaking door, the sound design permits long sequences of Rachel’s footsteps wandering through the hallways and rooms of the house, evoking the mood and dimensions of the house to great effect. When the policeman Jim Marquez (Rupert Graves) phones Rachel in situ he complains of the ‘deafening noise’ of screams around her: we are only given the faintest whisper of this before Rachel, in terror, realises her fate and we hear the same bloodcurdling female scream that we heard at the beginning of the play as Rachel is murdered. The play effectively develops the narrative around Rachel, a role realised very well by Nicola Walker, as we follow her (and the victims of 2004) on a journey from scepticism through to horrific realisation.

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Binaural recording: 3DHorrorfi BBC plays like ‘The Ditch’ and Bad Memories use location recording – with a significant amount of postproduction – to create exciting examples of horror radio, works that probably would not be as successful if recorded entirely in the studio. However, perhaps the most innovative use of location recording for contemporary horror drama is to be found in the binaural works being produced by the podcast audio drama company 3DHorrorfi. The company uses a form of binaural (an advanced and enhanced form of stereo recording) to create extremely high definition ‘three-dimensional’ horror plays. There have been earlier examples of binaural suspense or horror: a masterpiece of radio experimentation, Andrew Sachs’s The Revenge (1978), produced by Glyn Dearman, is a BBC radio play consisting entirely of a rich range of binaural sounds, but not the spoken word, and ‘tells’ the story of a desperate man on the run from the police and exacting an act of vengeance. The complex soundscape of The Revenge is rich for detailed analysis (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 58–68) and Seán Street celebrates its abiding power as a binaural work: Interestingly, decades after its creation, before the digital age, The Revenge continues to have the power to surprise the ear, and make sound pictures of a remarkable potency. In particular, an underwater sequence, when heard on headphones rather than speakers, gives a sense of ‘being there’ in the listeners’ mind that is – quite literally – breathtaking. (Street, 2012: 112)

A few years later, the US-based ZBS Foundation produced a genuinely epic ‘three-dimensional’ audio adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’ in 1984, four years after the novella was published and decades before the 2007 film version by Frank Darabont. 3DHorrorfi co-producer Mariele Runacre Temple explains the appeal of binaural horror from her own perspective: When I started working with 3DHorrorfi, I hadn’t actually really been exposed to much audio horror and knew it was something I was keen to explore. I am not a huge fan of the current trend of exceptionally gory horror films, but I love thrillers and more old fashioned horror movies, like Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). I also enjoy the new reality style horror – like Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) which uses incredible actors and really makes you feel like you are sharing the experience with them. It’s this naturalism that I think has worked well in 3DHorrorfi plays. You feel like you are somehow silently witnessing what is going on around you, powerless to help. It’s very effective. (Mariele Runacre Temple, 2011)

The 3DHorrorfi repertoire features well-written scripts and intense performances that are optimised as a listening experience by the intricate technology of binaural recording. Jack Bowman, actor and – as ‘Gareth Parker’ – writer for 3DHorrorfi states that binaural production, as used by

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­ DHorrorfi, is ‘wrapped up in secrecy’ (Jack Bowman, 2011). In general 3 terms, however, Hand and Traynor explain this unusual recording process: In binaural stereo, a dummy head is used. The head is 18cm across, roughly the same as the human head, and the stereo pair is separated, one microphone on each side. The sound is therefore picked up by the microphones in the same way as our ears would hear it. The resulting recording is much more accurate. Instead of being ‘inside the head’, the sound is as it would be in real life; outside the head and around us. The effect of binaural stereo can only be heard on stereo headphones, but the positioning of the characters to the left, right and even behind is much more realistic than simple stereo. (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 136)

This technology makes certain demands on the type of play that can be produced. As Jack Bowman explains: ‘3DHorror-fi has a formulaic structure that they like the stories to follow, the main one being is it should follow one main character from their perspective all the way through’ (Jack Bowman, 2011). In using the technology of binaural recording, 3DHorrorfi extends this emphasis to the locations it uses: for example, its adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ was recorded on location in an old cathedral (including its vaults) in Norfolk.4 The use of binaural technology in drama certainly increases the realism of listening, creating an intensely personal experience and perspective, but it is not without certain limitations. Binaural drama has to be listened to in a certain way in order to receive the benefits of its innovative technology, as Runacre Temple explains: The only downside with binaural radio is that it must be listened to through headphones. And ideally, good quality ones. If you listen through regular speakers, no matter how amazing and hi-tech they are, you won’t get the 3D effect. We usually recommend that the listener sits or lies down, in the dark, on their own and listens to the play in one sitting. That way nothing is missed and you can totally immerse yourself into the 3D experience, which is really something when you hear it properly. (Mariele Runacre Temple, 2011)

Although its results can be remarkable, it is worth remembering that binaural recording can be traced back almost to the beginnings of recording technology. As Ian Roger reveals, the development of binaural sound ‘at first seemed to promise greater flexibility in radio drama production’ (Rodger, 1982: 140).5 However, one result was that ‘the representation of exterior effects was made harder rather than easier’, and the ‘ingenious creation of effects which had sufficed in monaural productions to provide an image for the listener was no longer practical’ (Rodger, 1982: 140). The challenge that binaural places on exteriority and the illusion of effects accounts for 3DHorrorfi’s deployment of a predominantly individual point-of-view/ listening and its use of location recording. In essence, binaural drama has to be produced with a filmic approach to location and sound recording. This cinematic aspect is not merely acknowl-

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edged by 3DHorrorfi, it is embraced, as the producers make clear: ‘we don’t write and direct as you would a radio play. We always think in terms of screenplays – so no surprise one reviewer has said “This is like cinema in your head.”’ (3DHorrorfi, 2011). Runacre Temple further develops this: We liken it in many ways to making a short film, as much as it is to making radio drama. Scenes have to be recorded all the way through with everything done live – which means you may have someone standing next to you, stabbing a chicken, whilst you try to remember the lines you’re meant to be saying! It takes a long time to get each scene right and you’re not always sure that the sound effects you create are going to translate as you’d hoped in the recording – but it’s worth it. When the plays are listened to through headphones as top quality WAV files, the binaural affect is amazing. And works wonders with horror. (Mariele Runacre Temple, 2011)

As Hand and Traynor argue, the film dimension extends to the listener: The intensive experience created by [3DHorrorfi’s] high-quality sound, the tightly focused script and tense performances do turn this into a cinematic experience in the sense that it is immersive. However, it is doubly affecting, because the listener is isolated and alone in the ‘cinema’. (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 49–50)

From a performer’s perspective, 3DHorrorfi actor Richard Holt reveals: ‘I find binaural frees you up a bit more to move around as you might do on stage, especially if you are playing the “1st person” in the recording.’ (Richard Holt, 2011). Another actor in the team, Jack Bowman, equates binaural recording with the ‘visual’ performance forms of screen and theatre: binaural recording is ‘akin to a short film in terms of production crew and a piece of theatre, in terms of acting and staging’ (Jack Bowman, 2011). Bowman further develops the theatrical aspect in regard to the role of the actor and the writer: Recording is ‘as live’, so normal things you can eliminate in post in audio like paper rustles, glitches, fluffs are incredibly difficult to remove because of the sensitivity of the mics and the difficulties in editing out production glitches. The actors need to either know their lines, like it’s screen or stage work, or you, as a writer, have to help them by writing on sheets of paper or clipboards or books or something as props to keep the scripts as part of the scene. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

All of 3DHorrorfi’s productions are works developed with an acute awareness of the potential and limitations of binaural, and the content of the repertoire reflects this. If we look at its output, we can certainly find familiar works of horror. We have already mentioned the Poe adaptation, and the company has also created the works that draw on classic examples of Gothic horror. For example, Stuart Man Price’s ‘The Curse of the Wolfman’ is a richly textured tale of lycanthropic terror. The production uses a rural landscape and interiors – complete with crackling log fires – to great effect.

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In writing the play, Price was conscious that it was going to be made as a binaural production:

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I wanted to write things that the tech crew could bounce off. If you have binaural, use it! So I started with a character that could quickly occupy a truly 3D place all around the head of the listener. That’s how I came up with the crow. This guy was flying around the head of the listener and getting in close and moving away, he could go above, behind, in front. (Stuart Man Price, 2011)

The play creates an evocative historical setting, and the climax with the snarling werewolf is a particularly effective moment when mediated through binaural recording. Jack Bowman claims that when producing horror work for binaural one has to learn to ‘think three-dimensionally as a writer in terms of the finished production’ (Jack Bowman, 2011). Bowman is the writer of ‘The Intruder’, a play in which a woman Sue (Jessica Dennis) is woken in her bedroom by a man (Paul McEwan) in the middle of the night. The play captures the claustrophobic sense of the house in the dark from Sue’s breathless perspective, becoming a grotesque game of ‘hide and seek’ before the ironic confrontation. As Bowman explains: With normal audio, I would write a FX direction on the location ambiance, then specific sound effects and the levels they should be at. Then from there, actors record their dialogue and you can set them off mic a little, or change their levels to imply things like distance in post. However, with binaural, it being recorded ‘as live’, it can’t work like that. Nor can you add FX into the mix later. You have to start staging the action like it’s a piece of theatre or film, so I make it very clear where an actor should be approaching the main character. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

This can be demonstrated with an extract from Bowman’s unpublished script for 3DHorrorfi’s ‘The Intruder’: Scene 2. Bedroom. Night. One hour later. fx: J ust the ambient noises. voice: [slightly sinister] Sue? fx: J ust the ambient noises. voice: [from the other side of her head] Sue? Susie-sue? fx:  Sue screams, suddenly awake in a panic! She leaps out of bed! She keeps screaming until she gets her wits together and says: sue: Who’s there?! Who’s there? Help me! fx:  Nothing can be heard. sue: Simon? Simon! Who’s there? fx:  Somewhere else in the room a voice says: voice: Sue … Suuuuu-ooooo. sue: HELP! SIMON! SIMON!!!!! fx: Sue dives for the lights – we hear her flick on a lamp then struggle in the dark to the light switches.

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sue:  Simon!?!? There’s someone here! Someone’s got in! Simon!?!?! HELP ME!!! voice: [now somewhere else in the room, closer] I cut the power darling, fx: She screams and is heard knocking things over while trying to find her way in the dark.

As we can see, Bowman’s script is quite specific about the general ambience of the space and where sounds come from. Bowman believes that this approach is enormously beneficial to all involved in the production. Commenting on the extract above, Bowman states: During those moments, being conscious of how the finished effect should sound, you can see I took care in suggesting stage directions to the actor and director about where and how ‘the voice’ threatening Sue in the dark should behave, how it should fully float around her, knowing that the binaural recording would love that effect. Yes, you could just record a straight audio script in binaural, however, it makes the cast and crew’s life more difficult as time will then have to be spent staging and rehearsing lines and recordings from scratch before going for a take. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

In contrast to Price and Bowman’s conscious consideration of binaural as a writer, veteran radio writer Marty Ross was not conscious of the technology when he wrote his play Blood and Stone (2011) for 3DHorrorfi: To be honest I’m hopelessly dull-witted when it comes to technical matters and so the differences between binaural and conventional recording are largely over my head. In a way, as a writer, I feel I’ve got enough on my hands just writing a good story with strong characters without worrying about the technical minutiae. But I certainly wanted a little bit of creeping around in the darkness to make the fullest use of the surround-sound effect. But even there, I was probably thinking of the low-tech aesthetic of old Val Lewton movies! (Marty Ross, 2011)

Ross’s Blood and Stone is based on the life of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious ‘Bloody Countess’ who (legend has it) killed hundreds of young women for their blood and, in the early seventeenth century, was immured in her own castle where she died. As Ross explains: The Bathory who fascinated me, crucially, was not the blood-soaked massmurderess in her prime, but the frail, haunted, ageing woman locked up all alone in that castle tower, amid the merest ruin of her former grandeur. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Ross’s play presents the relationship between a young woman Katya (Josephine Arden) and the ancient, reviled Countess (Fiz Marcus) and is a play driven by richly textured dialogue and psychological creation. Far from being an aural ‘thrill ride’, Ross’s play is a complex exploration of identity and iconography enhanced by the binaural sounds of the castle dungeons. The Cask of Amontillado, The Curse of the Wolfman and Blood and Stone are fine dramatic examples in the tradition of the literary Gothic.

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Other plays in the repertoire can be seen as belonging to a sub-generic tradition in horror radio. In Jack Bowman’s ‘The Autopsy’ (2011) we are presented with a play that is as satirical as it is gruesome. Jeff (Richard Holt) is a ruthless and abusive man who seems to suffer a heart attack only to wake up in the morgue and endures his post-mortem in a state of consciousness. The play is essentially in the tradition of Fear on Four’s ‘A Routine Operation’ (7 February 1991), which, as we saw earlier, is a similarly intensely interior play about the phenomenon of ‘anaesthesia awareness’ or ‘intra-operative awareness’. Even Appointment with Fear featured a play on this theme with Charles Hatton’s ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ (30 April 1946), although in this play the perspective is not from the ‘groaning’ victim but only becomes clear when the choice of anaesthetic is revealed and its inadequacy explained. Bowman’s ‘The Autopsy’ exploits binaural to the full: we hear everything from Jeff’s perspective, including his phone calls, his perception of his murderers having sex in front of his stultified body, and his visceral dismemberment. Bowman explains how he developed the play: The idea of a man, waking up in the middle of his own autopsy, just popped into my head. That was an idea born out of me listening to the results of the binaural recordings we had done. From there, you then had to create a reason how someone ended up in that situation, and then from there, the whys. It was a very organic process in that I was simply fleshing out the chain of events that could be plausible, within reason. Also I knew it had to be a very contemporary piece, which informed the character’s and their motivations, responses and actions. ‘The Autopsy’ came together very, very quickly simply because the idea was strong and the elements to that idea – notably the autopsy itself – has a set procedure to follow and so on. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

The theme is an ideal one for horror radio and it seems each generation rediscovers it for individual creations in horror audio. In addition, just as Charles Hatton’s objective perception in the 1940s becomes the subjective perspective in Martyn Wade’s play in the 1990s, Jack Bowman pushes the horrific potential of the phenomenon to the limit in a ‘three-dimensional’ play which is gruesome, sexualised and grimly hilarious. One episode of 3DHorrorfi offers a double-bill of two short plays by Nick Hewson: The Passenger and The River. The latter is an efficient ghost story set beside a riverbank which captures particularly well the immersive sound of lapping waves, flowing water, eerie footsteps and drowning. In contrast, The Passenger is not a supernatural tale but a work of brutal, sexualised horror performed by Paul McEwan, Jessica Dennis and Andrew Ward. In the play a couple are driving in the New Forest and stop to help an injured man. They start to take him to hospital but he holds them at knifepoint and rapes the wife, although, in a grim ironic twist worthy of the Grand-Guignol, it turns out that she is complicit in the act. The play captures the juxtaposing ambience of the claustrophobic car and the eerily open forest as well as the horrendous violence in a way that is ‘all too close’.

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Experimental podcasts: Everyday Moments The digital world has opened up the opportunities for how, when and where we listen to audio drama. Not only has high-quality location recording become easier to realise for the producer, but the concept of location has also become a more important consideration for the listener. This is particularly evident with the audio work of the producing organisation Fuel.6 In contemporary British theatre, Fuel is helping to support and facilitate the work of the theatre company Sound&Fury, which develops productions – such as Hattie Naylor’s Going Dark (2012) about an astronomer’s descent into blindness – that are highly innovative in the use of sound and sometimes take place in complete darkness. This interest in innovative audio performance has been further championed by Fuel with Everyday Moments (2011), a collaborative project it developed with Roundhouse Radio and featured as Guardian newspaper podcasts. The project commissioned twelve artists to each create a ten-minute podcast designed to be listened to at a particular time in a particular place. For example, Nick Whitfield wants us to listen first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee as an excuse to delay starting work; Josie Long wants us to listen at 5.30 pm in an express supermarket; and Inua Ellams’s piece is designed to be listened to, with friends, on a city bridge at midnight with writing implements handy. The pieces were developed by Fuel and the artists with a tight, efficient timescale. Fuel has primarily worked with theatre companies, and the experiment of one podcast per month for a year has evidently been as enlightening as it has been enterprising: as the company reveals, the ‘podcasts have been a real success and a fascinating learning curve for us as producers’ (Fuel, 2011). Compared with developing a full-scale theatre work, podcasts are economical in terms of time and money, but have clearly managed to have an impact judging from the number of downloads and positive audience feedback via social networking sites and other contexts. The resulting works are diverse in approach given that the artists commissioned come from a variety of backgrounds and use the podcast to create particularly individual ‘experiments’. Although some are evidently dramas or playlets, the terms are not satisfactory to describe the whole series. As Fuel explains ‘(we’re) not sure the Everyday Moments are audio drama as such’ (Fuel 2011). Indeed, the listening experiences encompass soundscape, poetry, music, narrative, and audio ‘snapshots’. Fuel states: We would say that these are audio ‘experiences’ for audiences. Each artist brings something new and different to each podcast. Some are poetic, some are short ‘dramas’. These podcasts were made so that audiences could experience an artist’s work in a new, fresh way that defies a specific category. We would expect the experience to be much more intimate. Rather like a one on one show. Although this isn’t the case with each of the podcasts – Inua Ellams requires that you carry out his poetry exercise with a group of friends. We would expect that the experience of an Everyday Moments

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podcast is that it is a personal journey that you go on alone with the artist, unlike experiencing it in a theatre where you experience the ‘drama’ or ‘art’ collectively. After experiencing it on your own, you might share it with a friend, and then talk about it with them and compare experiences. (Fuel, 2011)

Although none of the Everyday Moments are generic works of horror, their sense of intimacy and focus makes them works of particular intensity that can be somewhat uncanny. For example, Melanie Wilson’s podcast requests that we listen while standing in a locked bathroom in the evening staring at ourselves in the mirror. The subsequent monologue, accompanied by bathroom and other ambient sounds, is a gripping and literal ‘reflection’ on the complexities of identity and personal relationships. 3DHorrorfi and Fuel Theatre’s Everyday Moments reflect the exciting innovation of spoken-word audio in the world of podcasting. One is reminded of other figures in the international context of experimental sound such as the German sonic artist Andreas Bick whose ‘captured’ recordings of the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2010) or, in contrast, complexly produced experimental narratives like A Pot Calling the Kettle Black (2010) are revealing the radical potential of aurality in the twentyfirst century (Hand and Traynor, 2011: 55–68).

Interactive drama Works of podcast drama – such as 3DHorrorfi – are available ‘on demand’ rather than as part of a strict schedule, and this has become a key feature of audio listening in the digital age. Tim Crook cites the Swedish Radio Theatre in Finland 1997 play Särskilt de primitiva as, in the company’s own words, ‘the first straight audio drama broadcast as radio-on-demand over the Internet’ (Crook, 1999a: 26). Interestingly, the play is described as ‘a short science fiction adventure – with lots of … explosions and futuristic sounds effects’ (Crook, 1999a: 27). The company defines it as a play ‘about our fear of the unknown’ (Crook, 1999a: 27), with a man rescued in space only to be abandoned when his DNA reveals he may not be entirely human. Once again, Särskilt de primitiva represents another ‘first’ in spoken-word audio that can be associated with horror and suspense. As well as podcast cultures, the digital era has had an impact on listeners in other ways. With traditional broadcasting, the BBC website’s ‘Listen Again’ function enables listeners to catch up with broadcasts on-line after they went ‘live’. However, in the digital age not only have listeners gained greater freedom to access, acquire or download material, they have also been able to explore interactivity. In the digital age, interactivity is usually associated with gaming. Digital games explore the relationship of the player with the game. The decisions and actions of the player can have a direct impact on the game and its narrative, creating a sense of choice, even if such choices may be illusory

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to different degrees. Although interactivity may find its apogee in digital gaming, there are significant precedents. In literature, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (‘El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, 1941) establishes the concept of an interactive fiction, a fluid narrative that is not linear but evolving and negotiable. Practical experiments in realising this genre of fiction can be found in Julio Cortàzar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1962) through to children’s ‘gamebooks’ such as the prolific Choose Your Own Adventure (1976 onwards) and Fighting Fantasy (1982 onwards) publications. Whether in Cortàzar’s postmodern reflection on identity and consciousness or a thrilling adventure gamebook for children, the principle is the same: within a single volume a diverse number of pathways and endings are possible, potentially offering a multiplicity of ‘journeys’ for the reader. In radio drama, it could be argued that back in the 1920s programmes like The Mayfair Mystery offered listeners the chance to ‘interact’ in offering a whodunit solution. However, Nick Fisher’s The Wheel of Fortune (18 April 2001) is generally regarded as radio’s first truly interactive radio drama. The BBC broadcast different versions of the play on two radio channels and, in addition, a third on-line version so listeners could ‘channel hop’ to hear different versions of the play. The play(s) primarily focuses on three characters: physics academic Leonard (Miles Anderson); professional gambler Steve (Douglas Hodge); and computer programmer T (Sophie Okonedo). Although from different walks of life, the characters all have an interest in probability, and Fisher brings them together in dialogue that is witty and philosophical. The parallel plays were structured so that at some twentytwo intervals the listeners were told that they could change channel and listen to the story from another angle or emphasis. The principle has been used subsequently: in December 2009 German radio (WDR) presented an adaptation of Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern novel House of Leaves (2000) by Thomas Böhm, with the music of Andreas Bick in parallel broadcasts across three channels, a strategy that ably captures the essence of a novel which is often described as an experimental example of horror fiction: The German Akademie der Darstellenden Künste voted the WDR-production ‘Das Haus (House of Leaves)’ the best radio play of December 2009. The jury wrote: ‘The three directors and composers developed an acoustic aesthetic for everything that is tempting and threatening. As long as the ear can reach, it is whimpering and rumbling in an endless loop of horror. A radio play for the remote control? Yes, but not only. The experimental play reflects in one and the other way existential challenges. The listener becomes an adventurer searching for lost pieces of a central theme.’ (Andreas Bick, 2010)

BBC Radio 4 presented its own version of The House of Leaves – titled Recordings Recovered from the House of Leaves (28 October 2011) – adapted by Mike Walker and produced/directed by John Taylor. Given Walker’s outstanding contribution to the field of contemporary radio ­

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drama, the adaptation of Danielewski’s novel feels rather disappointing compared with the German interpretation. The BBC version is a single play carved from Danielewski’s 700-page novel. It is an awkwardly structured play with, for example, a digital sound signature marking each of the many extracts. At just under an hour in duration, the adaptation is obliged to focus on the story at the very heart of the novel – the explorations conducted by Navidson (William Hope) – with Zampanò (Jim Norton) as a narrator. In contrast, the German version featured the three key texts drawn out of the novel (The Navidson Record; Zampanò’s material; and Johnny Truant’s testimony) and broadcast on three channels simultaneously, a strategy which aptly captures the complexity of ‘experiencing’ Danielewski’s novel. Ironically, the WDR strategy was one that had already been deployed by Mike Walker several years before with his own triple-layered interactive narrative, The Dark House (23 September 2003).

Mike Walker’s The Dark House The interactive mode of listening is evidently difficult for some. Sue Arnold’s review of The Wheel of Fortune in the Observer newspaper described the experience as being ‘more frustration than pleasure’ (28 September 2003). In fact, the reviewer was recalling The Wheel of Fortune in the context of reviewing another BBC interactive radio drama, Mike Walker’s The Dark House. As a concept of interactive audio drama, The Dark House was the brainchild of radio producer Izzy Mant and composer and sound designer Nick Ryan. In explaining the principle behind the production Mant and Ryan state: The project has flagged up that we need a new language to describe what interactivity is. People often think that interactivity in drama must mean the audience determining the narrative, like one of those choose-your-ownadventure books. But part of the fun of being told a story is not knowing what’s going to happen next; or knowing all-too-well what’s going to happen and not being able to stop it – a horror favourite. We want suspense, surprise and emotional truth – that’s what a writer’s for – and that’s why we brought in top dramatist Mike Walker […] We wanted uncertainty, confusion, characters who were lost or trapped in their own nightmares. We wanted our listeners to share that uncertainty: who can I trust? Who should I believe? Which world is real? (Izzy Mant and Nick Ryan, 2003)

Walker’s resulting horror play featured three separate characters within the same story and environment. After a fixed opening of five minutes to establish the story, the listeners were able to vote via phone and text message for the character they wanted to focus upon. Every three minutes, the votes were collated and the character who received the most votes became the protagonist until the next democratically elected ‘shift’. The play was really three simultaneous binaural productions of three parallel scripts, but on the day of broadcast was crafted by the audience into a single, experien-

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tial horror drama. After broadcast, all versions were available on-line and listeners were able to listen to all three in a linear fashion or re-craft new versions. In The Dark House, a radio presenter, Lucy (Claudie Blakley), is on location at one of London’s most haunted buildings (an apartment block in Clerkenwell) for a live Halloween link with a local radio station. As such, the play is in the tradition of Suspense’s late 1940s play ‘Ghost Hunt’. Although the three scripts are distinct, there is significant crossover and shared dialogue and sound. This is because the three core characters – Lucy; the old caretaker Jim (Alan Ford); and a child Kelly (Connie Gurie) – are all in the same building and interact with one another. However, what is distinctive is our point-of-listening: although the characters interact, they are sometimes on either side of a locked door; and, more profoundly, Walker mixes internal thoughts with shared, exterior dialogue. An example from the triple script demonstrates this (italicised dialogue is interior speech): Lucy’s script lucy: She’s probably scared [to Kelly] It’s all right Kelly – it’s just me and Jim. He can let you out. jim: Get a bit jumpy. That’s all. Who wouldn’t. lucy:  Who wouldn’t, in here! kelly: What did you say? lucy: Jim.  / Can we get on with this… kelly: [loud] What Jim? [ In the silence, the sound – very loud – of the key going into the lock] Jim’s script lucy: She’s probably scared [to Kelly] It’s all right Kelly – it’s just me and Jim. He can let you out. jim:  Get a bit jumpy. That’s all. Who wouldn’t.  / Cos something happened. kelly: What did you say? lucy: Jim. jim:  Something bad, if only… kelly: [loud] What Jim? [ In the silence, the sound – very loud – of the key going into the lock] Kelly’s script lucy: [to Kelly] It’s all right Kelly – it’s just me and Jim. He can let you out. jim: Get a bit jumpy. That’s all. Who wouldn’t. kelly: If it’s HIM I have to see… / What did you say? lucy: Jim. kelly:  Not in the dark, I can’t… / [loud] What Jim? [ In the silence, the sound – very loud – of the key going into the lock]

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As the parallel script reveals, at the beginning of the extract Lucy is talking directly to Jim, out of earshot of Kelly until she shouts through the locked door. The scripts also make clear the different thoughts of the three characters which unites them in anxiety, albeit with different causes: for Lucy, there is a terror of the situation; for Jim, there is horrifying memory; for Kelly, there is a dread of seeing Jim. The play explores darkness, the electricity being cut off early in the story, and therefore the characters rely on sound. It also means the characters are simultaneously together and yet alone and dread each other’s touch. After a spectral, odourless explosion which could only be fatal if it was real, Lucy reaches out for Kelly, fearing what this might yield: Good girl … reach OUT … / Oh God, what if she’s burnt … what if … [Very slowly the door swings half closed] … I can’t feel her … NO.

Lucy has a growing suspicion that Kelly may be a ghost. In fact, the ‘Dark House’ has assembled three ghosts: Kelly died in a domestic accident in the 1970s; Jim died during the Blitz; and – we discover from the local station’s broadcast at the end – Lucy herself dies during the broadcast, even if she does not realise it herself. Interestingly, an examination of the unpublished script reveals that the broadcast of the play did not realise all of Walker’s instructions. The coda of the play – in which Lucy is greeted by Kelly and Jim and descends into ‘utter, unending despair and horror’ – is cut, probably as it was an overstatement: the sombre tribute to Lucy on the radio being enough of an ironic ‘punchline’. Overall, the unpublished script gives the reader the sense of a much more heightened horror play. For instance, the broadcast production did not use Walker’s description that ‘we can hear Kelly’s heart beating fast in the silence’: the broadcast opts instead to relish the ambience of the location recording and its unnerving silences, echoes and creaking. Elsewhere the production resists Walker’s descriptions of a spontaneous ‘crazy laugh’ from Lucy, as well as the slow motion and morphing explosions and the sound of the building ‘stretching’. However, towards the end of the play, the production begins to utilise music and dramatic sound effects, ‘saving’ these heightened aspects of the soundscape as the work heads towards its climax. In addition, the sounds of bombers and explosions are more effective by being saved for the story’s ‘reveal’ towards the finale. The work certainly steadily builds in intensity, capturing, for example, Walker’s notes on how the actor playing Jim should begin to confess his past: ‘The words are dragged out of Jim like pliers pulling rotten teeth’. In evaluating The Dark House experiment, Mike Walker explains: We were creating a new kind of drama – a drama of complicity, in which the audience could, must, share the fears and dashed hopes of each of our characters in turn. In normal drama the audience gets to know exactly as much and no more than the writer wants. In The Dark House we decided

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that the audience themselves would choose the world of fear they would share; they would have no one to blame but themselves as they were driven into the very places they least wanted to be. (Mike Walker, 2005)

Walker recognises that the listener will get an enhanced experience if he or she is actively involved in the creative process, whether that is by directly influencing the storyline or by contributing a large dose of imagination to the production. The mode and experience of listening to radio drama has been enhanced by new technologies, while the fundamental role of the listener is as important as it ever was. According to the BBC, over 2,700 votes were cast over the twelve voting opportunities (equally split between the three characters) which the BBC found gratifying for what was a ground-breaking experiment. Indeed, The Dark House did win a prestigious BAFTA award. Nevertheless, the critical reception from some quarters was evidently mixed: the aforementioned Sue Arnold in the Observer was less than impressed, declaring that it is ‘a clever idea, possibly a little too clever for good oldfashioned radio, or at any rate good old-fashioned listeners like me’ (28 September 2003). This seems a somewhat facetious remark, and yet it is very revealing. The demand to mix the skills of listening and interacting was a difficult one for some people to master. After all, back in 1931, Filson Young declared: Concentration is a science, but we are not taught it. The condition required […] is a kind of receptivity, an emptying of the mind of all precedent thought and association, that will leave room for the entertainment of the transmitted drama. (Young, 1933: 140)

By the twenty-first century, some people have learnt to be listeners. Ironically, The Dark House demanded a new level of required skills: to listen and physically engage, to take control and even some responsibility in shaping the unfurling narrative. Returning to the interview with Nick Fisher prior to The Wheel of Fortune broadcast/webcast, he looks to the future: Ultimately where do I see drama going on the Web? I don’t think anyone knows. But I’m sure it’s here to stay. What I do foresee is greater and greater interactivity being built into the whole experience of drama. It may well be that we’ll soon be able to enter a play as a character – and change the course of the action through what we do. (Fisher, 2001)

Despite Fisher’s optimism, The Wheel of Fortune and The Dark House did not usher in a new trend of audio drama, but the concept and practice of interactivity are the very essence of another medium: digital gaming. With regard to radio drama, subsequent examples of interactive audio drama in the UK have been, at best, sporadic. In 2010, the BBC broadcast on radio Graham White’s adaptation of B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates. Johnson’s novel was published in 1969 in the form of a box with loose chapters inside. Although the first and last chapter need to be read in their specific location,

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the other twenty-five chapters can be read in any random order. The Unfortunates takes place in a single day (like another masterpiece of experimental writing, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)) and is about a football journalist who arrives in a strange city to report on a match, only to discover that he knows the place well, as it was here that he met a now deceased friend. The necessarily randomised structure permits a switching between past memories and the present. The radio broadcast played the adaptation in a fixed sequence (albeit one that was decided at random prior to broadcast), but the on-line presence after the broadcast permitted the novel to come into its own in a way that returned to Johnson’s original intention. Once it was placed on-line, the listener could choose the adapted chapters in whatever order they preferred, although the titles of ‘First Part’ and ‘Z Final Part’ were clear signposts as to when they should be listened to. The voice of the narrator (Martin Freeman) dominates, and yet there are highly effective sequences of dialogue and a constant awareness of environment and setting through a meticulous sound design and Mary Peate’s well-paced direction. There have been other examples of on-line interactivity aside from the BBC’s. For example, the on-line music streaming/download site Spotify, launched in 2008, offers a vast collection of recordings that can be selected and queued individually or as part of a ‘radio’ function. Although the content is predominantly music, there are some spoken-word tracks including historical speeches and classic examples of radio drama. In 2010, Spotify was used as a forum for an innovative type of drama best described as an interactive audio novel clearly in the tradition of post-Borges nonlinear fiction outlined earlier. For Spotify, the British novelist Joe Stretch and the music group Hurts co-created Don’t Let Go, in which the actor Anna Friel narrates the story accompanied by a backing soundtrack and song extracts by the band. The ‘chapters’ are effectively short tracks – rarely over two minutes – and the listener makes choices for which path to follow by typing specific codes into the Spotify search engine. The choices may seem mundane (e.g. whether to wear a grey three-piece suit or a turquoise dress; or whether to play the party game Twister or enter a carnival Tunnel of Love); however, the work is an evocative thriller in which you as the protagonist are attempting to save the human race from the diabolical Guy Lockhart who is attempting to destroy existence as we know it with his ‘heartbreak cocktail’. There are many ways to die in Don’t Let Go, and this generic choice is important as a way to keep the listener engaged enough to keep listening and to keep typing in the codes. Obviously, Don’t Let Go belongs to a tradition of interactive gaming where the participant is required to make informed choices or downright lucky guesses in order to progress through what is usually designed to be a compelling and dynamic narrative. Similar to Don’t Let Go and yet more blatantly a game is Soul Trapper, an iPhone app produced by Realtime Associates in 2009. The advertising blurb for the game states:

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Sure, you’re good at video games, but how are you at audio challenges? Soul Trapper is a unique, richly produced interactive audio drama that’s going to challenge your memory, stereo perception and pattern recognition skills by asking you to master audio mini-game sequences interwoven into the narrative. Help Kane Pryce hunt down, capture and send ghosts to the afterlife … if you think you can! (Realtime Associates, 2009)

Soul Trapper takes us back to the power of listening that we discussed in the opening chapter. Our culture is visually dominated, and yet sound is so important and potent. In contemporary gaming, sound is an extremely important feature but is typically used as a way to create atmosphere, depth and rhythm or, most minimally, as a kind of ‘filler’ for the visual spectacle. After all, games are traditionally visual. The Soul Trapper game tests our aural sense inasmuch as the game is about listening. In the digital age, audio’s uncanny ability to transform our real world into a virtual one continues with works like the iPod app Zombies, Run! (2012), developed by the games company Six to Start and the novelist Naomi Alderman. It is an audio exercise package that creates a soundscape in which you need to run at varying speeds on a number of ‘missions’ to save a town from a zombie invasion. The experience of the game constructs an audio-based horror environment while you jog through your real world. Seán Street explores the immensely powerful nature of the podcast when downloaded on demand and listened to in non-domestic environments (i.e. in public space): A memorable piece of audio absorbed in this direct way can have the power of informing the location in which it is experienced in new and unexpected ways. (Street, 2012: 112)

The ability of audio to ‘map’ onto our actual world environment works particularly effectively with the uncanny and horror. Whether an iPod app or a binaural drama creating sounds inside or around our heads, or a more ‘traditional’ play that fills our domestic environments with strange sounds and disembodied voices, audio is invisible, internalised and can be compelling – and terrifying. Moreover, as Graham Reznick suggested earlier, sound has the frightening ability to ‘unwrite and rewrite reality’ (Graham Reznick, 2012). The crystal set, the radio, the digital device are all audio machines that can produce, and make us listen to, ‘ghosts’.

Notes 1 For a detailed examination of Blue Jam, see Dean and Hand (2013). 2 This genuine audio device, invented in 2005, is a high-frequency sound weapon that can be used to disperse young people when set at levels that only they can hear. 3 The doomed physical – and mental – journey of Crowhurst is thoroughly explored in the documentary Deep Water (Jerry Rothwell and Louise Osmond, 2006).

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4 It is worth noting that, as mentioned earlier, the BBC chose ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for an experiment in stereophony in 1959: the eerie setting of wine cellars and the theme of premature burial has evidently proved ideal for experimental audio drama. 5 Interestingly, the US zombie podcast drama We’re Alive (2009 onwards) presents its listeners with extremely high production values including complex soundscapes. Although it began in stereo, after a few episodes the producers decided to abandon this in preference for mono (see Hand and Traynor, 2011: 49). 6 The members of the Fuel team at the time of making the Everyday Moments podcasts were: Louise Blackwell (co-director), Kate McGrath (co-director), Jenny Paton (project manager), Alice Massey (project manager), Christina Elliott (senior project manager), Rebecca Hannah-Grindle (general manager) and Roz Wynn (administrator).

Conclusion

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Closing thoughts

In this book, we have surveyed a century of audio drama. Throughout this history, horror is recurrent partly because it was a significant genre of popular performance that was ‘absorbed’ into what was an unprecedentedly popular medium. It is also recurrent because of the social context: Paul Wells argues that the ‘history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in the twentieth century’ (Wells, 2000: 3) and the same could be said of horror radio, a form in Britain that is found in some standalone examples after the First World War, is given its first dedicated programme in the Second World War, and continues into the world of interactivity, podcasts and apps with auditory horrors that can ‘map’ onto and transform our day-to-day world. Horror is also recurrent because audio can ‘do’ horror – and the linked genres of suspense and mystery – particularly well. In the body of work we have examined certain themes are recurrent. Many are interlinked, some are familiar from horror across a full range of media, but some have a unique place or special prevalence in audio. The themes we might want to mention are: • • • • • • •

technology: phones; radios; baby monitors; Satnavs; computers and the internet; EVP medical: dentists; intra-operative awareness; organ donor memory; vivisection natural world: animals; hostile environments location: haunted and hostile spaces; lighthouses and mineshafts spatial: claustrophobia and agoraphobia; open roads and lightless boxes sensory deprivation: darkness; blindness dreams/nightmares: fantasy and memory, frequently in crossover with reality or as prophecy

In the exploration of these themes, horror audio often utilises subjective/objective mediation wherein there is a crossover between interior consciousness and external context. Similarly, certain techniques such as binaural recording can place us at the focal point of action. Horror audio also makes use of unnerving sound in its purest form: namely, through the scream and through silence.

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The scream has a profound role in radio drama: above all, perhaps, we may think of the death scream of Agnes Moorhead in ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’, by far the most popular Suspense show being broadcast live some eight times over the years. Allison McCracken, following theories developed by Michele Hilmes (including Hilmes, 1997: 130–150), writes of the ‘horror of the disembodied voice’ (McCracken, 2002: 184), and the female scream in horror radio is extremely potent and uncanny (see Hand, 2006a: 21–22). In many respects, the scream can be seen as an icon of modernist culture, with key examples resonating with undimmed potency into our time, such as Edvard Munch’s various art works The Scream (1893–1910); Helene Weigel’s silent scream when she played the lead in productions of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), so powerfully described by George Steiner (Steiner, 1987: 166–167); and the offstage death scream – at the hands of Jack the Ripper – of the eponymous (anti)heroine in Alban Berg’s masterpiece of opera Lulu (1937).1 One is also reminded of the place of the scream in Antonin Artaud’s visionary desires, namely – in Susan Sontag’s words – to discover ‘the transcendence of language in the actor’s scream’ (Sontag, 2003: 89). In 1935, as part of his avowed desire to re-ignite European culture, Artaud himself declared: In Europe no one knows how to scream anymore, particularly actors in a trance no longer know how to cry out, since they do nothing but talk, having forgotten they have a body on stage, they have also lost the use of their throats. (Drain, 1995: 273–274)

The comparatively new invention of radio would certainly explore the scream. Wally K. Daly’s science fiction epic ‘Before the Screaming Begins’ (1 July 1978) will open with an astonishing sixteen-second scream; Anna Massey will seal the monologue-driven ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (Fear on Four, 27 December 1990) with a gut-wrenching scream of terror; and in Oliver Emanuel’s The Vanishing, the scream had to be moderated: We put Melody Grove (Saskia) in a box and made her scream. The first time we did it, it was the most terrifying thing you’d ever heard and we had to ask her to tone it down! It was the sound of someone screaming in a box but it was too much, too realistic, and we would have had complaints so we had to tone it down. It was too terrifying to hear. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

For Allen Weiss, ‘The scream reveals the chaotic depths of linguistic and vocal systems’ (Weiss, 1995: 83) and in his exploration of Gregory Whitehead’s work finds an association with Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille in parody of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘What cannot be said must result in the outburst of a scream’ (Weiss, 1995: 84). Whitehead is a sound artist whose postmodern works such as The Club (BBC Radio 3, 1 January 2006) and Bring Me the Head of Philip K. Dick (BBC Radio 3, 8 March 2009) have transformed the potential of audio drama. Whitehead also created an

Closing thoughts

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extraordinary project titled Pressures of the Unspeakable for the ‘Institute for Screamscape Studies’, in which people left screams on an answerphone (Whitehead, 1992).2 When it comes to silence – the antithesis of the pure, primal emotion of the scream – this seeming peril of an only-audio form has a profound status when used appropriately, as Seán Street reveals: For many radio dramatists, poets and producers, silence is an active thing. It is not ‘dead air’. It is often the first word written on a radio script: ‘Silence …’ Into that opening silence – or stillness – is placed the first sound or first verbal utterance. For the listener it is analogous with the moment in the theatre or cinema, when the lights dim and the world of make-believe draws back its curtain: the moment of infinite possibility. (Street, 2012: 38)

The living, infinitely open silence that Street describes is a place where fantasy can begin. Whether populist and generically formulaic or radically experimental, horror audio can reach into our innermost consciousness and make us complicit in creating worlds of make-believe or utterly convincing reality. As Stuart Man Price claims, ‘There is something about radio that feels classic. Feels ancient. It feels old and that is a great strength. Also it’s more grown-up. You tend to believe the radio’ (Stuart Man Price, 2011). It probably feels arcane and truthful because of its ability to be so directly perceived and absorbed: there can be no smoke and mirrors with audio as most of the time it works best in complete, undistracting darkness. It may seem ‘old’, and the history of radio is one of extraordinary change and progress, but even in a culture obsessed with vision, audio drama will continue: as Bert Coules states, ‘any storytelling medium so potent, so personal, so varied and so powerful will never die’ (Bert Coules, 2011).

Notes 1 Although Berg died before completing Lulu (his operatic adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s play cycle), he left notes for the third and final act of the opera, and the versions as completed by Friedrich Cerha in 1979 and Eberhard Kloke in 2010, present the appalling scream of Lulu as she meets her annihilation. 2 In discussing the project, Whitehead explains: ‘In an intermedia concept like Pressures of the Unspeakable, the audience performs a different role, becoming “scream donors” to an answering machine “scream bank” located at the host station. These screams are allowed to accumulate over several weeks, then are assembled and intercut into a local screamscape, which is then broadcast, with phone lines remaining open. The grand acoustic icon of modernism (the scream) is set loose inside the pinball machine of the postmodern media’ (Whitehead, 1996: 99).

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Appendices

I have provided listings for Appointment with Fear and Mystery and Imagination from the 1940s and 1950s. For listings of more recent programmes please consult www.radiolistings.co.uk/index.html.

Appendix 1

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Appointment with Fear listings

First series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘Cabin B-13’ (11 September 1943) ‘The Pit and the Pendulum (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe) (18 September 1943) ‘Into Thin Air’ (21 September 1943) ‘The Body Snatchers’ (30 September 1943) ‘The Customers Like Murder’ (7 October 1943) ‘Will You Make a Bet With Death?’ (14 October 1943) ‘The Devil’s Saint’ (21 October 1943) ‘Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble’ (28 October 1943) ‘The Phantom Archer’ (4 November 1943) ‘The Man Who Died Twice’ (11 November 1943) ‘Menace in Wax’ (18 November 1943) Second series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘Vex Not His Ghost’ (6 January 1944) ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe) (13 January 1944) ‘The Room of the Suicides’ (20 January 1944) ‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door’ (adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson) (27 January 1944) ‘Dragon in the Pool’ (3 February 1944) ‘The Man Who Was Afraid of Dentists’ (10 February 1944) Third series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘The Speaking Clock’ (13 April 1944) ‘Death Flies Blind’ (20 April 1944) ‘A Watcher by the Dead’ (adapted from Ambrose Bierce) (27 April 1944) ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe) (4 May 1944) ‘Vampire Tower’ (11 May 1944) ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ (18 May 1944)

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206

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Fourth series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘I Never Suspected’ (5 October 1944) ‘The Devil’s Manuscript’ (12 October 1944) ‘Death Has Four Faces’ (19 October 1944) ‘The Purple Wig’ (adapted from G.K Chesterton) (26 October 1944) ‘He Who Whispers’ (2 November 1944) ‘The Great Cipher’ (adapted from Melville Davisson Post) (16 November 1944) ‘Vex Not His Ghost’ (30 November 1944) ‘The Curse of the Bronze Lamp’ (7 December 1944) ‘The Gong Cried Murder’ (14 December 1944) ‘Lair of the Devil Fish’ (21 December 1944) ‘The Oath of Rolling Thunder’ (28 December 1944) Fifth series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘Into Thin Air’ (11 September 1945) ‘Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble’ (18 September 1945) ‘The Man Who Died Twice’ (25 September 1945) ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ (2 October 1945) ‘Cabin B-13’ (9 October 1945) ‘Will You Make a Bet With Death?’ (16 October 1945) Sixth series ‘He Wasn’t Superstitious’ by John Dickson Carr (adapted from Ambrose Bierce) (23 October 1945) ‘The Man With Two Heads’ by John Dickson Carr (6 November 1945) ‘The Case of the Five Canaries’ by John Dickson Carr (13 November 1945) ‘And The Deep Shuddered’ by Monckton Hoffe (20 November 1945) ‘The Case’ by John Slater and Roy Plomley (27 November 1945) ‘Death at Midnight’ by Robert Barr (4 December 1945) Seventh series ‘The Nutcracker Suite’ by J. Leslie Dodd (adapted from E. CrawshayWilliams) (26 March 1946) ‘Black Mamba’ by Hugh Barnes and A. R Ramsden (2 April 1946) ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ by Laidman Browne (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe) (9 April 1946) A Watcher by the Dead’ by John Dickson Carr (adapted from Ambrose Bierce) (16 April 1946) ‘The Man Who Knew How’ by Ronald Cunliffe (adapted from Dorothy L. Sayers) (23 April 1946) ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ by Richard Fisher (adapted from Charles Hatton) (30 April 1946)

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Appointment with Fear listings

207

‘Experiment with Death’ by Harry Bunton (7 May 1946) ‘Death Takes a Honeymoon’ by Mileson Horton and W. L. Catchpole (14 May 1946) ‘Renovations at Merrets’ by Rankine Good (adapted from Honoré de Balzac) (21 May 1946) ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ by Louis N. Parker (adapted from W. W. Jacobs) (28 May 1946) ‘Cottage For Sale’ by T. J. Waldron (4 June 1946) ‘A Mind in Shadow’ by Kenneth Morgan (11 June 1946) Christmas Special 1946 ‘Escape to Death’ by Mileson Horton (25 December 1946) Eighth series ‘Mrs Amworth’ by E. F Benson (25 February 1947) ‘Sink or Swim Together’ (4 March 1947) ‘The Last Pilgrimage’ by T. J Waldron (11 March 1947) ‘The Bell Room’ by Lester Powell (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe) (25 March 1947) ‘The Diary of William Carpenter’ by John Atkins and Patric Dickinson (1 April 1947) ‘The Treasures’ by Gilbert Frankau and Charles Hatton (8 April 1947) ‘The Hands of Nekamen’ by Kathleen Hyatt and Lester Powell (22 April 1947) ‘All Cats May Snarl’ by J. Vernon Basley (29 April 1947) Ninth series ‘The Clock Strikes Eight’ by John Dickson Carr (14 January 1948) Tenth series all scripted by John Dickson Carr ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed’ (26 July 1955) ‘White Tiger Passage’ (2 August 1955) ‘The Dead Man’s Knock’ (9 August 1955) ‘The Sleuth of Seven Dials’ (16 August 1955) ‘The Villa of the Damned’ (23 August 1955) ‘Till Great Armadas Come’ (30 August 1955)

Appendix 2

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Mystery and Imagination listings

‘Golden Dragon City’ by Lord Dunsany (1 November 1945 ) ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ by Leonard Cottrell adapted from E. M. Forster (8 November 1945) ‘Music from the Sea’ by Walter de la Mare (15 November 1945) ‘The Rosewood Door’ by Oliver Onions (22 November 1945) ‘The Picture’ by Gwendoline Foyle adapted by Felix Felton and ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ by D. H. Lawrence adapted by Cecil Lewis (29 November 1945) ‘The Church by the Sea’ by Hugh Stewart (6 December 1945) ‘Lord Mountdrago’ by Paul Dehn adapted from Somerset Maugham (13 December 1945) ‘Chinese Magic’ adapted and produced by Felix Felton from Algernon Blackwood (20 December 1945) ‘Evening Primrose’ by John Collier adapted by Douglas Cleverdon (3 January 1946) ‘Nurse’s Tale’ from a story by H. R. Wakefield and ‘Thursday Evenings’ from E. F. Benson both adapted by Felix Felton (10 January 1946) ‘Confession’ by Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson adapted by Robert G. Newton (17 January 1946) ‘The Fall’ based on story by Stacy Aumonier adapted by Felix Felton (24 January 1946) ‘Uncle Arthur: A Moral Fantasy for Organ and Voices’ by John Pudney (31 January 1946) ‘Warsaw Fantasy’ by Phyllis Austen (7 February 1946) ‘The Boy Who Saw Through’ by John Pudney and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ adapted from H. R. Wakefield (14 February 1946)

Appendix 3

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Music in Appointment with Fear

A BBC document details the following: 27 August 1943, 6.30–9.30pm ‘Special Music Recording Session’ Appointment with Fear Conducted by Walter Goehr Orchestra consisted of: 4 trumpets 4 trombones 2 percussion 1 harp 1 organ [memorandum of 5 August says this will be a celeste] 2 cellos 2 double bass 1 bassoon 1 double bassoon 1 set of tubular bells

The session produced 8 discs to be used in broadcasts: Disc 1 (a) Introduction with knife chord (b) Introduction without knife chord

1’22” 1’20”

Disc 2 (a) Coda (b) Knife chord

58” 7”

Disc 3 (a) Incidental mood (b) Incidental mood

29” 22”

Disc 4 (a) Incidental flash no. 1 (b) Incidental flash no. 2 (c) Incidental flash no. 3 (d) Incidental flash no. 4

9” 7” 7” 6”

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Disc 5 (a) Incidental flash no. 4 (repeat) (b) Incidental flash no. 5 (c) Incidental flash no. 6 (d) Incidental flash no. 7

7” 8” 7” 6”

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Disc 6 (a) Incidental flash no. 6 (repeat) (b) Incidental flash no. 8 (c) Incidental flash no. 9 (d) Incidental flash no. 10

6” 6” 6” 7”

Disc 7 (a) Introduction without knife chord (repeat) 1’14” (b) Alternative knife chords 6” (c) Alternative knife chords 6” (d) Alternative knife chords 5”

Disc 8 Coda (repeat)

59”

A memorandum of 16 December 1943 states that some of the music is proving not ‘satisfactory’ and Goehr has been requested to write and record music along the following themes: Mysterioso approx 30 seconds Excitement approx 10–15 seconds Pathetique approx 10–15 seconds Gaiety approx 10–15 seconds Excitement working up to climax approx 30 seconds Sentiment (love theme) approx 10–15 seconds

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Interviews and personal correspondence Amari, Carl. Interview with Richard J. Hand, 26 April 2012. Bowman, Jack. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 22 May 2011. Coules, Bert. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 11 May 2011 and 14–15 November 2012. Emanuel, Oliver. Interview with Richard J. Hand, 23 May 2011. Fuel. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 28 June 2011. Fuel. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 5 September 2011. Gallagher, Stephen. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 8 May 2011. Golden, Christopher. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 2 June 2011. Gough, Lucy. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 26 May 2011. Holt, Richard. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 23 May 2011. Lemon, David. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 12 January 2012. Price, Stuart Man. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 23 May 2011. Reznick, Graham. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 31 July 2012. Ross, Marty. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 21–27 May 2011. Runacre Temple, Mariele. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 12 November 2010. Runacre Temple, Mariele. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 27 May 2011. Wilkie, Matthew. Correspondence with Richard J. Hand, 11 January 2012.

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Index

19 Nocturne Boulevard 179 3DHorrorfi 82, 96n, 178, 185–192 Alfred Hitchcock Presents 96n, 107, 118n, 167 ‘All Cats May Snarl’ (Appointment with Fear) 142, 207 Amari, Carl 70 American Werewolf in London, An 176 anaesthesia awareness see intra-­ operative awareness anamnesis 8–9 Anatomist, The 60 anechoic chamber 9 Antrobus, Yvonne 3 Archers, The 51, 107 Armitage, Simon 38 Arnold, Sue 194, 197 Art of Noise, The 13 Arthur, Robert 53 Assault on Precinct 13 (film) 10 audio noir 57 Augoyard, Jean-Francois and Henri Torgue 8 ‘Autopsy, The’ (3DHorrorfi) 190 Axe Murderer, The 134 Bad Memories 184–185 Balsam, Martin 10 Barney & Friends 8 Barranger, Milly S. 11 Barrie, J. M. 5–6, 29 Bathory, Countess Elizabeth 108, 189 BBC Radiophonic Workshop 126, 180 ‘Beast with Five Fingers, The’ (The Man in Black/Fear on Four) 109–114, 152n ‘Beaten Track, The’ (The Man in Black)

157 Beck, Alan 29–35, 49n, 141 Benson, Amber 164–165, 180 Berkeley, Reginald 33–34 Berkoff, Steven 16–17 Bick, Andreas 192, 193 Bierce, Ambrose 77, 79, 80, 99, 109, 136, 157, 205–206 binaural recording 96n, 180, 185–195, 199, 201 ‘Birds, The’ 114–115 ‘Black Cabinet, The’ 119–120 ‘Black Magic’ 84–85 ‘Black Mamba’ (Appointment with Fear) 135 Black Out 67–69 Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster 38 Blair Witch Project (film) 56 ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ (Mystery and Imagination) 93–95, 208 blindness 5, 7n, 201 Blood and Stone (3DHorrorfi) 189–190 Blue Jam 1, 152, 180–181, 199n Boardman-Jacobs, Sam 141 ‘Body Snatchers, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 60–61, 205 ‘Bomber’s Moon’ (The Man in Black) 157 Boosh, The 180 Borges, Jorge Luis 193, 198 Bowman, Jack 3, 69, 185–190 Bradnum, Frederick 126 Brand, Russell 1 Briggs, Asa 24, 30, 38, 39–40, 50, 98 Brighton Rock (film) 60–61 ‘Broadcasting the Barricades’ 36–38, 182

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Browne, Laidman 80, 206 Bull-Dog Drummond 31 ‘By the River, Fontainbleau’ (Fear on Four) 148–150 ‘Cabin B-13’ (Appointment with Fear) 59–62, 100, 106–107, 205–206 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 40, 44–47, 54, 120 Campbell, Ramsey 15–16, 107–108 Carpenter, John 10, 150 Carr, John Dickson 51–54, 57–66, 70–80, 84, 96n, 98, 99, 102–107, 109–110, 120–122, 141, 145, 174, 205–207 ‘Case, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 79, 206 ‘Cask of Amontillado, The’ 80–81, 96n, 186, 189, 200n, 206 Casson, Lewis 12, 32 ‘Cat’s Cradle’ (The Price of Fear) 133 CBS Radio Mystery Theater 71, 73, 109, 140 Chignell, Hugh 5 ‘Child Crying, A’ (Fear on Four) 139–140 Citizen Kane (film) 63, 155 Clarke, Arthur C. 107 ‘Clock Strikes Eight, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 77, 84, 100, 205–207 Cloverfield (film) 56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 102, 156–157 Collier, John 91–93, 109, 114–116 Comedy of Danger, A 25–29, 68, 95, 181 Conan Doyle, Arthur 14–15, 126, 147, 177 Conrad, Joseph 25, 98, 101–102, 183 ‘Containment’ (The Man in Black) 161–162 Cottrell, Leonard 37, 89, 208 Coules, Bert 4, 5, 138, 147–148, 156, 203 Crippen, Dr 20 Crook, Tim 4, 5, 138, 139, 147–148, 156, 203 Cross, John Keir 107–117, 137, 138, 162

Index Curse of the Wolfman, The ­(3DHorrorfi) 187–189 Cushing, Peter 133–134 ‘Customers like Murder, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 60, 205 Dahl, Roald 118n, 131, 135, 155, 156, 161, 167–168 Danielewski, Mark Z. 9, 162–164, 193–194 ‘Dark, The’ 128, 150–151 ‘Dark House, The’ (1956) 123 ‘Dark House, The’ (2003) 194–197 Dark Water (film) 161 Darker Side of the Border, The 177 Dawn of the Dead 91 ‘Day at the Dentist’s, A’ (Fear on Four) 140–141 de la Mare, Walter 50, 89, 120, 131, 208 de Souza, Edward 102, 142–144, 156–157, 161 Dead Calm (film) 98 ‘Dead Man’s Boots’ (Fear on Four) 144–145 ‘Dead Men’s Teeth’ (Appointment with Fear) 81–83, 141, 190, 206 Dead of Night (film) 77, 119, 132 Dearman, Glyn 3, 185 ‘Death at Midnight’ (Appointment with Fear) 79–80, 206 dentist theme 81, 83, 115, 140, 141, 201 ‘Devil’s Saint, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 61, 205 Dirda, Michael 52–53, 57–58 Dirty Harry (film) 42 disappearance thriller 62, 96n ‘Ditch, The’ 56, 182–185 Do You Believe in Ghosts? 120 Donkey Punch (film) 98 Don’t Let Go (Spotify) 198 Don’t Look Now (film) 170–173 Dracula 2, 3, 14, 72, 129, 130, 137n ‘Dragon in the Pool’ (Appointment with Fear) 77, 134–135, 205 dreams/nightmares 3, 6–7n, 125, 126, 139, 151–152, 163–164, 165, 194, 201

Index

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du Maurier, Daphne 114, 170–171 du Maurier, Gerald 31 Dunsany, Lord 86–87, 96n, 208 Dyall, Franklin 80 Dyall, Valentine 50, 80, 99, 102, 105–107, 110, 111, 117, 120–123, 142, 156–157, 161 Dyson, Jeremy 154–155, 161 ‘Ear for Music, An’ (Uncanny Stories) 125 echoes 9 Edison, Thomas Alva 17–21 Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) 21–22, 183, 201 ElvenQuest 180 Emanuel, Oliver 4–5, 56–57, 173–175, 177, 202 Escape 78, 93, 98, 128, 135 ‘Escape to Death’ (Appointment with Fear) 84, 207 Evans, Paul 56, 182–185 ‘Evening Primrose’ (Mystery and Imagination) 91–93, 208 ‘Every Detail But One’ (Fear on Four) 147 Everyday Moments 191–192, 200n ‘Experiment with Death’ (Appointment with Fear) 83–84, 207 ‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’ 16–17, 131, 135, 137n Fangoria’s Dreadtime Stories 70 Farjeon, Herbert 40, 97 Fear on Four 6, 36, 82, 107, 109, 117, 128, 136–153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 181 ‘Feathered Friends’ (The Man in Black) 109, 114–115 Fessenden, Reginald 20, 21 Fife, Graeme 143–146, 149 Fight for Mr. Lapraik, The 5–6 ‘Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble’ (Appointment with Fear) 61 Fisher, Nick 96n, 139, 193, 197 ‘Flesh’ (The Man in Black) 156 Fletcher, Lucille 43–44, 56, 58 ‘Fly, The’ (Weird Tales) 158 Forrest, Robert 3, 173, 178n

219 Frankenstein 2, 3, 32, 48, 54–55, 102, 129–130 Friday the 13th (film) 185 Fuel 191–192, 200n Gallagher, Stephen 4, 128–129, 138–140, 147, 151, 153n Gatiss, Mark 102, 154–157, 161 ‘Ghost Hunt’ (Suspense) 55–56, 57, 195 Ghost Ship (film) 98 Ghost Train, The 12–13 Ghostwatch 56, 182 Gielgud, Val 29–30, 34, 38–41, 50–51, 59, 63, 80, 97, 99, 103 ‘Glass Eye, The’ 107 Gobbet 127 Goehr, Walter 63–64, 209–210 Golden, Christopher 164–165, 180 ‘Golden Dragon City’ (Mystery and Imagination) 86–89, 208 Goon Show, The 122–123, 126, 129, 180 Goosebumps 127 Goring, Marius 64, 69, 91, 93 Gough, Lucy 159–161, 166n Grams Jr., Martin 48–49, 54, 58–59, 99, 103, 105, 107, 118n, 167 Grand-Guignol 11–12, 26, 28, 31–34, 102, 123, 128, 139, 190 ‘Great Cipher, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 78, 206 ‘Green and Pleasant’ (Fear on Four) 147 Greene, Douglas G. 52, 53, 59, 62–63, 65, 78–79, 103, 104 Guthrie, Tyrone 39 Hall of Fantasy, The 48, 71 Halloween (film) 10 Halloween shows 36, 50, 108, 155, 195 Hamilton, Patrick 40–43, 50, 56 Hand, Richard J. and Mary Traynor 23, 24, 38, 39, 40, 185–186, 187, 192, 200n Hand, Richard J. and Michael Wilson 12, 102 ‘Hangman Won’t Wait, The’ (Suspense) 77

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220 Hanley, James 127 Haunted 136–137 Haunting, The (film) 9 Heppenstall, Rayner 6n, 85 Hermit’s Cave, The 48, 54, 95, 101 Herrmann, Bernard 10, 58, 63, 103 Hills Have Eyes, The (film) 150 Hindenburg airship 23, 38 Hitchcock, Alfred 41, 58, 63, 77, 94, 96n, 107, 162, 168, 170–171, 176 ‘Hitch-Hiker, The’ (Suspense) 56 ‘Hitch-Hikers, The’ 123–124 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 106, 179–180 Hole, The (film) 91 Holmes, Sherlock 3, 14–15, 118n, 125–126, 144, 147, 155 Holt, Richard 69, 187, 190 Hope-Wallace, Philip 5, 6, 38, 43–44, 86, 96n Hordes of the Things 180 ‘Horn, The’ (Fear on Four) 150–151 horror radio in the USA 48–49, 101 Horstmann, Rosemary 3 Houellebecq, Michel 14 House of Leaves, The 9, 162–164, 193–194 House of the Devil, The (film) 10 ‘House on Pale Avenue, The’ (Weird Tales) 165–166 Hughes, Richard 25–29, 32, 51, 68, 95, 123, 175, 181 Hum 181–182 Hutchings, Peter 154 I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again 130 ‘In the Trenches’ 18–19 Inner Sanctum Mysteries 48, 71, 99, 101, 129, 143 Innkeepers, The (film) 10, 183 Innocents, The (film) 161 interactive drama 192–199 intra-operative awareness 152, 190, 201 ‘Intruder, The’ (3DHorrorfi) 188–189 Is There Anything In It? 84–86 Jacobs, W. W. 35–36, 87, 99, 153n, 207 James, Henry 14, 101–102, 115, 128,

Index 131, 160 James, M. R. 90–91, 108–110, 132 Jeffrey, R. E. 30, 34 Jenkins, Martin 138–139, 141, 144, 147, 151, 152–153n Johnson, B. S. 197–198 Jones, Gerry 138–139, 144, 147, 152–153n Joshi, S. T. 52, 53 ‘Journey Home, The’ (Fear on Four) 147 Journey Into Space 85 ‘Judge’s House, The’ (The Man in Black/Fear on Four) 109, 136, 152n Just Before Midnight 135–136 Kahn, Douglas 21 Karloff, Boris 47, 55, 71 King Lear 97 King, Stephen 185 Kiss of the Vampire, The (film) 142 Knox, Ronald 36–38, 182 Kogan, David 53, 63 ‘Lair of the Devil Fish’ (Appointment with Fear) 78 ‘Landlady, The’ 167–168 ‘Last Pilgrimage, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 98–99, 207 League of Gentlemen, The 154–155 Lemon, David 4, 102, 132, 154, 156, 161–162 Lenkiewicz, Rebecca 3, 14 Leviathan Chronicles, The 179 lighthouses 12, 128, 150, 201 ‘Lights Out’ (The Man in Black) 164–165 Lights Out 48, 54, 95, 101, 140, 164–165 ligyrophobia 9, 21 Little Shop of Horrors (film) 141 locked-room mystery 51, 54, 58, 61, 98, 145 Lodger, The 58, 96n, 162, 163 London Can Take It! (film) 67–68 Lorre, Peter 48, 61, 71, 110, 155 Lovecraft, H. P. 14, 147, 165 Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock, The 176

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Index Macbeth 43–44, 61 McCarty, Nick 3, 6n McWhinnie, Donald 126 Maggs, Dirk 176–177, 180 Maltin, Leonard 23–24 Man from Belsen, The 37–38 Man in Black, The 6, 35, 95, 107–120, 125, 137–138, 154–166 ‘Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 121, 127 ‘Man Who Hated Scenes, The’ (The Price of Fear) 133–134 Marathon Man (film) 141 Maupassant, Guy de 50, 136 Mayer, T. E. and Duncan Melvin 40, 44–47 medical themes 151–152, 180–181, 201 Medusa on the Beach 177 ‘Menace in Wax’ (Appointment with Fear) 61, 66, 205 Mercury Theater on the Air, The 25, 34, 37, 38, 56, 63, 176, 182 Mighty Boosh, The 180 ‘Mist, The’ 185 Money with Menaces 40–43 ‘Monkey’s Paw, The’ 35–36, 87, 153n, 207 Moorehead, Agnes 43 Morricone, Ennio 10 Morris, Chris 1, 152, 180–181, 199n ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue, The’ 16, 52 Murray Schafer, R. 23 music 9–10, 63–64, 125, 145 ‘Music Lovers’ (Fear on Four) 145 Mysterious Traveler, The 48, 53, 101, 103 Mystery and Imagination 84, 86–96, 110, 114, 115, 125, 148, 208 Navy Lark, The 128, 134 ‘Net Suicide’ (Fear on Four) 139, 158–159 ‘New Boy, The’ (The Man in Black) 157, 162–164 Newman, Kim 158 Nightfall 36, 71, 155 ‘Nightmare’ (Suspense) 56

‘No Conferring’ (A Sting in the Tale) 182 ‘No Escape’ (Suspense) 56 ‘Nutcracker Suite, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 80, 206 ‘Oath of Rolling Thunder, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 78, 206 Oboler, Arch 101, 140 Old Dark House, The (film) 94 ‘Old Road, The’ (The Man in Black) 159 ‘On a Country Road’ (Suspense) 56 Orphanage, The (film) 161 Others, The (film) 161 Paranormal Activity (film) 56, 144, 185 Peck, Gregory 56 ‘Phantom Archer, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 61 Phantom of the Opera, The 142 Philipsz, Susan 1–2 ‘Phish Phood’ (The Man in Black) 158–159 Picnic at Hanging Rock 96n, 168–169 ‘Picture, The’ (Mystery and Imagination) 89–91, 148–149, 208 Pierron, Agnès 12 ‘Pit and the Pendulum, The’ 60–66, 69–70, 75, 77, 79, 93, 97, 102, 106, 174, 205 ‘Plane Case of Murder, A’ (Suspense) 57 Plomley, Roy 79, 206 podcasting 2, 165, 179, 185, 191–192, 201 Poe, Edgar Allan 1, 16, 52, 55, 60, 61, 64–65, 70–77, 80, 99, 131, 135, 173, 174, 186–188, 205–207 Poltergeist (film) 162, 163, 166n Pontypool 176 Price of Fear, The 131–133, 159 Price, Stuart Man 4, 187–188, 203 Price, Vincent 64, 131–134, 155 ‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares: a Radiophonic Poem’ 126 Psycho 10, 63, 77, 94, 170–173 Quatermass and the Pit (film) 165 Quiet, Please 48, 140

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222 radio noir 57 recordings recovered from the House of Leaves 193–194 Red Dwarf 180 ‘Remote Control’ (Just Before Midnight) 135–136 ‘Revenge’ 56 Revenge, The 185 Reznick, Graham 10–11, 49n, 199 Ridley, Arnold 12–13 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The 102, 156–157 ‘Ringing the Changes’ 155 Ringu 10, 13 Robinsons, The 51 Robson, Flora 43–44 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (film) 94 Rodger, Ian 23–24, 30, 33, 101, 125, 127, 186 ‘Room of the Suicides, The’ (Appointment with Fear) 67, 205 Rose, Jon 169 Ross, Jonathan 1 Ross, Marty 4, 69–70, 155, 177, 189 Rossolo, Luigi 13 Round the Horne 128–130 ‘Routine Operation, A’ (Fear on Four) 150, 190 Rowe, Nicholas 134 Rudkin, David 176–177 Run Lola Run (film) 42 Sachs, Andrew 1, 126, 185 Sallis, Peter 134 Saunders, James 140–141 Scooby Doo 53, screams 9, 13, 15, 17, 25, 40, 123, 137, 141, 184, 201–203 Shakespeare, William 25, 43–44, 50, 61, 97, 138 Shelley, Mary 2, 3, 32, 48, 54–55, 102, 129–130 Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula 3 Short, Horace L. 20–21 Sieveking, Lance silence 9–10, 14, 39, 137, 175, 201–203 Sisters’ Tragedy¸ The 26, 123

Index Slater, John 79, 206 snakes 135–136 ‘Snipe 3909’ (Fear on Four) 143–146, 149 ‘Snowman Killing, The’ (Fear on Four) 117, 138–139, 142–143 ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ (Suspense) 43–44, 56 Soul Trapper (iPhone app) 9–10, 198–199 sound effects 12, 18–19, 26, 28, 39–40, 63, 81, 95, 102, 112, 116, 123, 126, 143, 152, 169, 180, 187, 188, 196 sound, hierarchy of 149–150, 160, 164 Spadoni, Robert 9 Spotify 198 Spring and Port Wine (film) 123 Stafford, Nick 3 Stevenson, R. L. 2–3, 18, 35, 48, 77, 109, 177 Sting in the Tale, A 161, 182 Stoker, Bram 2, 3, 14, 72, 109, 129, 130, 133, 136, 137n Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The 2–3, 18, 48 Straw Dogs (film) 159 Street, Seán 3, 21, 30, 185, 199, 203 subjective/objective 90–91, 190, 201 Suspense 43–44, 53–64, 71, 77–78, 84–85, 96n, 102–107, 109, 116, 174 Sweeney Todd 25, 141 Tales of the Supernatural 131 Tales of the Unexpected 167–168 technophobia 43, 139, 159, 163, 201 telephone 19–20, 25, 35, 39, 42–43, 139, 143–146, 158, 201 ‘Tell-Tale Heart, The’ 1, 16, 63, 70–77, 131, 205 Tempest, The 124 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (film) 150 Theatre of Blood (film) 131 Thing, The (film) 10, 150 Thomas, Dylan 125, 134 Thorndike, Russell 12, 26, 32–33 Thorndike, Sybil 12, 26, 32 Three Investigators, The 53 ‘Three Skeleton Key’ (Escape) 128

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Index ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ (The Man in Black) 106, 109, 114–116 Tibbetts, John C. 51 ‘Till Great Armadas Come’ (Appointment with Fear) 121, 207 ‘Tissue Memory’ (Fear on Four) 151–152 Titanic 20 ‘To Find Help’ (Suspense) 84 To the Public Danger 50, 56 Turn of the Screw 14, 101–102, 115, 128, 131, 160 Twelfth Night 25 Twilight Zone, The 70, 93, 102, 129, 165 Tydeman, John 128 Uncanny Stories 123–125 Under Milk Wood 125, 134 Unfortunates, The 197–198 ‘Vampire Tower’ 104–105 Vanishing, The 56–57, 96n, 173–175, 202 ‘Vex Not His Ghost’ (Appointment with Fear) 97, 205–206 Vivat Rex 138 vivisection 139, 147, 201 Wade, Laura 181–182 Wakefield, H. R. 55–56, 93, 208 Walker, Mike 193–197 ‘War of the Worlds’ 25, 34, 37, 38, 56, 176, 182 Warburton, Nick 139, 144, 154 wax cylinders 17–18 Weird Tales 158, 165–166 Weird Tales (magazine) 55 Weiss, Allen S. 2, 13, 37, 202 Welles, Orson 56, 63 Wells, Paul 201 We’re Alive 200n Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (film) 54 Wheel of Fortune, The 193, 197 Whistler, The 58, 102–103 White, Graham 197–198 ‘White Hare, The’ (The Man in Black) 159–161, 166n

223 Whitehead, Gregory 22, 71, 126, 202–203 Wild, Peter Leslie 160 Wilde, Oscar 40 Wilhelm Scream 40, 49 ‘Will You Make a Bet with Death?’ (Appointment with Fear) 60–61, 205, 206 ‘Will You Walk into My Parlor?’ (Suspense) 104–105 Witch’s Tale, The 48, 54, 55, 101, 109, 131 Wolf, The 25 Woman in Black, The 4, 13–14 Woman’s Hour 167–168, 181 ‘Yellow Wallpaper, The’ 91, 109, 152n, 202 Young, Filson 22, 75, 197 zombies 91, 130, 151, 152, 156, 176, 180, 199, 200n Zombies, Run! (iPhone app) 199