I just watched a couple more. Again both worth a watch and the endings seem to get nailed really well making them feel worth your time. On the surface they seemed to be similar, but weren't. One called Possession about a passessed chap looking for money, and another I can't recall the name of, which was about a guy suddenly asking about a girl called Theresa which actually gets better the more it goes along and has a great finale. The posh English accents are a delight. Everyone sounds like a Lord.
I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill was a very linear mute killer hunting woman in tower block tale, which at times felt overlong but had really decent moments of suspense in it and a satisfying conclusion. I've really been enjoying Thriller.
Screamer was well acted by Pamela Franklin and I enjoy seeing Jim Norton but I found it difficult to enjoy, though it managed to sustain the hour just about and finished well enough.
Understandable that "Screamer" is 'difficult' because of its subject matter about a young woman behaving as a post-traumatic rape victim. The rather clinical proceedings leave little room for appetizing titillation usually offered by suspense fiction. No Hitchcock escapism, this. But it is well-directed.
Something about vertical chases inside tall business buildings tends to produce highly-favored results. "I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill" was a personal favourite of Brian Clemens, just as Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand" is a well-regarded episode of The Outer Limits. What anchors the pacing down for me is the budding (obligatory? gratuitous?) romance between the female protagonist and chief police officer. Still, this is top shelf - with the best teaser of the whole series.
Im sort of miffed I never saw any of these before. The series deserves to be better known. Not sure how I could have missed it in the 31 years I lived in England. Did they never reshow it much?
Bill Carson recalls re-runs into the early '80s, so it may not have been shown since '83/'84? I purchased these in a single DVD set around 2005; I'd never seen any of these before then. I suspect their runtime duration makes them awkward to schedule in re-runs.
The teasers are frequently great. I think The Bradford Dillman episode might be my favourite after killer in the corner. There's not a bad one innte bunch. You're right about screamer, it was still good, just harder to watch. I do like the incidental music too. It's never but hit it's mark, unlike Tales of the Unexpected where some of the music destroys an episode. The quality of actors is great too. I'm not seeing anything close to bad overacting that would ruin an episode.
I think The Bradford Dillman episode might be my favourite after killer in the corner.
Actually, Dillman did 2 THRILLERs. The one you saw was the last one broadcast. Earlier, Dillman portrayed a blind pianist who attempts to identify a killer by sound alone.
I think The Bradford Dillman episode might be my favourite after killer in the corner.
Actually, Dillman did 2 THRILLERs. The one you saw was the last one broadcast. Earlier, Dillman portrayed a blind pianist who attempts to identify a killer by sound alone.
Oh I look forward to that one. I've noticed a few actors being reused already to varying degrees. A guy in the Usher one is knocked out in the beginning of the Dillman mafia one.
Death in Deep Water was another good one with an excellent cast. Bradford Dillman is on the lam from the mafia in a U.K. Fishing village. He gets involved with the very lovely Suzan Farmer. Philip Stone is underused and hampered by a bad American accent. Ian Bannen is great as ever as a fisherman.
Very lovely Suzan Farmer indeed! My mind remembers her from mid-'60s features like The Devil-Ship Pirates, Die, Monster, Die! & Rasputin - The Mad Monk. Never saw her in a bikini until "Death in Deep Water". Now I wish she had more bikini or underwear scenes in her movies!
The Man at the Top of the Stairs was another good one, again with Donna Mills. Some of these secondary male lead characters are quite patronising or creepy and overbearing i've noticed.
This my favourite Brian Clemens story. "Marvelous"
I love the scene of Judy Carne disrobing in the bathroom ... and being spied upon via a peep hole by a young boy! This was like 3 years beforeThe Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea ... and it was for television.
Im sort of miffed I never saw any of these before. The series deserves to be better known. Not sure how I could have missed it in the 31 years I lived in England. Did they never reshow it much?
Bill Carson recalls re-runs into the early '80s, so it may not have been shown since '83/'84? I purchased these in a single DVD set around 2005; I'd never seen any of these before then. I suspect their runtime duration makes them awkward to schedule in re-runs.
Correct. Original mid70s premiere on itv and (possibly reruns after that?) but then for sure after 82 because i know where i was when i recorded the themes of those listed earlier. Iam not aware of them being on terrestrial tv since then. To be honest, talking pictures or forces tv could do worse than to screen these.
More than if a Tales of the Unexpected being hot on video rather than film, I think sound has a bigger part to play in a production feeling cheap. That's my thought watching them and Thriller. A few Unexpected tales don't seem like they have the right mic placements or but enough and the dialogue is sometimes almost lost. The hollow sound of feet on stairs or studio floors doesn't sound right and if there's a punch or a crash there's often no sound at all or it sounds fake. I think Thriller does better at overcoming that issue.
You’re absolutely correct about the audio problems on Tales of the Unexpected.
The sad truth is that the sound recording goes from the sublime to the ridiculous - though if you watch the complete series it becomes apparent that the problem lies almost invariably (but not always) with the filmed episodes. The videotaped episodes, despite their studio-bound visual aesthetic, have, by and large, relatively decent soundtracks with boom operators capturing even the subtlest of sounds - creaking leather underwear, for example, and the occasional sound of tea slurping in the country vicarage.
Last night I rewatched “Neck” – a filmed episode from Season 1 starring Joan Collins and Peter Bowles. Director Christopher Miles (who helmed “The Virgin and the Gypsy” and “Priest of Love”) pays keen attention to the blocking, camera placement and lighting, creating an agreeable “cinematic” effect. However, the sub-par soundtrack with its muffled dialogue and piddling post-synched sound effects serves to undermine Miles’ efforts and renders the final result on screen amateurish and cheap - as you rightly point out.
And this is just one of many TOTU episodes shot on film with compromised audio quality. It really does make for uncomfortable repeated viewing at times…
The worst episode I'd seen for sound issues, and I've nowhere near seen them all, was a David Suchet one, which was actually a pretty good and enjoyable episode, but it did have definite problems with the sound. If two people were in different parts of the room it would pick up one stronger than the other. It's a bit of a shame as the productions deserved the best quality. Ah, well.
Was there a reason there is an American in almost every episode? Was it for transatlantic appeal? The episodes seem veddy veddy Briddish otherwise. The American in the episode I'm watching now is the mum in Better Off Dead, which is funny to see her not demented and goofy. This episode is about applying for a job: Good Salary - Peospects - Free Coffin Bruce Boa, Keith Barron, Julian Glover! It's great seeing them all together. Barron was on TV all the time when I was a kid. Loved Duty Free at the time.
My understanding regarding how co-productions with funds from 2 or more counties operated were that certain percentages of talent had to originate from each country participating. If Sir Lew Grade secured funding from America towards producing THRILLER, then a requirement was to have one U.S. performer in the cast. Another aspect is the runtime. During the early '70s, American television had a variety of 90-minute productions circulating under an umbrella theme of 'mystery' night. Week #1 might air a 90-minute Columbo (with commercials, of course), then week #2 might be a McCloud, and so on. One needed to wait until the following month to see the next Columbo. This is why a single season had only 8 or 7 stories. I suspect Brian Clemens wished to 'cash-in' on this fad by writing 7 or 6 stories per production block and have them 66 minutes in length so they could fit into an American broadcast time slot of 90 minutes with commercials. This American format, though, did not last long. By the time some of these THRILLERs were ready to export, they were probably deemed as fodder for public TV transmission due to the videotape medium, and not good enough for prime-time in the U.S. Can't say for sure because I've never seen them in the seventies, but perhaps another FSMer could verify one way or another how these were distributed. Maybe straight to cable TV or VHS?
The worst episode I'd seen for sound issues, and I've nowhere near seen them all, was a David Suchet one, which was actually a pretty good and enjoyable episode, but it did have definite problems with the sound. If two people were in different parts of the room it would pick up one stronger than the other. It's a bit of a shame as the productions deserved the best quality. Ah, well.
That would be “A Time To Die” – the penultimate episode in the series. Shot on videotape and displaying the standard 1.33:1 blocking for a two-person interaction: one character near the camera and the second over the shoulder in the middle or far background. Given the lack of close boom-miking, the actor closest to the camera is almost always louder than the background individual. Whilst it does make some sort of spatial/acoustic sense, it’s extremely disconcerting for modern viewers expecting the same crisp sound levels anywhere within the frame. You can hear this most demonstrably at 14:45-15:30 and 18:08-18:55. It’s important to point out that while the characters are spatially distant, the dialogue from both is usually still relatively clear, no matter the sound level.
This is decidedly not the case in a later scene (22:08-22:28) where two conversing characters walk down a long staircase with the stationary camera recording their approach from a ground-floor vantage point. As the actors descend the stairs towards the camera, the dialogue goes from muddy and indistinct to clear and loud – betraying a complete lack of audio tone consistency.
To make matters worse, there’s a scene at 21:28 that completely abandons the internal audio perspective of the episode: Suchet is giving a rousing dinner speech in front of business colleagues and as the roving camera goes from long shot to close-up, there’s absolutely no modulation in the strident sound level.
No surprise that discerning viewers/listeners get upset!
On the subject of video vs film. Very few people prefer video for all the reasons stated so far. It's like looking through a window watching people do stuff and not an actual drama. There is indeed a better sense of a distance from reality with film. Everything is better.
But as a Classic Series Doctor Who fan, not to mention a tv viewer growing up in the UK through the 60s, 70s and 80s, I know all about video drama. Some channels/directors/actors etc are better at it than others. The BBC developed a way of using a mix. Interiors usually on video, exteriors on film. This works quite well most of the time and many of us got used to this format. ITV were less bothered about the mix. I've got what's left of an ITV kids fantasy called Ace of Wands, and I swear to goodness there is one scene where the hero is on video for medium shots, and film for close-ups. Or it may be the other way 'round, but it looks TERRIBLE.
Now, I also remember seeing a few (usually Muppet specials) on American video and they were even worse than the UK stuff! Mainly because of the conversion to a UK format for video where the US and UK have different picture 'make-ups' for tv broadcasting.
But Graham is so right about video. I suppose it's what you get used to. Hell, the thing about being a 'Who fan is that you get hooked whilst a child and by the time you can see the faults you can ignore them.
BUT!! Seeing as Thriller is on YT I will be giving it a go. Love everything that Clemens and Johnson have done, and remember this series well, and my memories of it are much better than Tales of Exceptionally Expected.
My all-time favorite TV series is The Avengers – and Clemens wrote most of my beloved episodes. Yet I watched almost none of his other TV material at the time. The same goes for maestro Philip Levene.
Bizarre and inexplicable!
Looking through the listings of all 43 Thriller episodes, I doubt whether I caught more than ten of them on their first run. That being said, three of the aforementioned episodes are included in ZardozSpeaks top dozen list – “Sign It Death”, “A Killer in Every Corner”& “Kiss Me and Die”— so I feel I got a taste of the best of them.
To this day I don’t know why I chose to watch only the odd episode of Thriller – perhaps there was something more compelling on the Beeb at the same time.
I remember consciously switching on (or over) for “Kiss Me and Die” because I saw a trailer with Jenny Agutter, and couldn’t possibly miss out on my dream-girl from “Walkabout”. And as for “Sign it Death”, well, Francesca Annis was still haunting my dreams as Lady Macbeth (thanks to an impromptu school trip to the Polanski film), so that episode was a definite shoo-in.
Thanks for the audio example above, John. It's an episode that has a satisfying ending too, and good performances, i thought. That's why the audio was most frustrating in that one.
I don't mind the studio set aspect in the Thriller's. Without any outstanding audio issues, it makes them seem almost like a play. And some of the scenes are so well written it works in its favour even.
The Keith Barron episode where there are ladies keep going missing after replying to jobs ads has him wearing a leather jacket hat you can hear every nook and cranny of, which made me smile.
I do like the aspect of having Americans in the episodes. The situations always seem to work, it just doesn't feel random in the story too much.
I enjoyed this one. Killings on a train, Judy Geeson is great as a troubled woman whose sanity is doubted, and Charles Gray is on top form as ever with some wonderful dialogue and acid insults. Charles Gray always adds quality. The main guy in it is also actually quite well cast and not some overbearing creepy chap. A nice little thriller. I'm pretty sure an episode in the first season of Inside No.9 directly lifted from this (but in a good way).
Thanks to saved newspaper ads, I've learned that ABC had a Wide World of Entertainment suspense series lined-up for broadcast in 1973 on weekday nights starting at 11:30 p.m. Most of these were American made-for-TV movies, but some (25% ?) were actually THRILLER episodes.
Someone wrote a February 1973 date in this one:
I commented earlier that video-taped shows would not have been deemed prime-time TV - and this was indeed the case with ABC. Other TV networks, though, showed some THRILLERs @ 8 p.m. However, I didn't realize how quickly the 1st season was broadcast in the U.S.A. Some American TV stations showed "Someone at the Top of the Stairs" prior to its transmission in the U.K.
The looooovely Ingrid Pitt is the best bit, obviously.
She was the best in many things during the early '70s. Ingrid Pitt did Hammer horrors, she did an Amicus, she was in The Wicker Man ... she even did a classic DOCTOR WHO with Jon Pertwee. This Polish lady luck must've had a remarkable U.K. agent. "Where the Action Is" deals the viewer aces from a stacked deck of talent. Director Don Leaver was an old hand from THE AVENGERS - delivering winners from both its videotaped and filmed seasons. Ingrid was stacked without any cards. A solid good 3-stars from me.
Surprised Bill Carson doesn't have his thumb up for Ingrid ...
My fave. With Linda. I was lucky enough to do an interview over several emails with Ingrid, mostly about Where eagles dare. Her book is a fascinating read. She had some life story, ending up in a concentration camp with her mother and then living in a forest for a year after the camp was liberated n they escaped.
