Tales of the Unexpected

This is really about the TV show, rather than the story collections it was based on. I loved both, however, but the TV show has a special place in my heart. Dahl's creepy, sometimes nasty stories take up the first two seasons, the other seven series' worth being brought in from other sources. I think it's fair to say the best are Dahl's. The Unexpected world is one ruled by a smart-arse globe-trotting gadabout raconteur. One who sits by the fire and tells you that he knows exactly how the world works, and what a shocking and terrible place it is. And people are ruthless, faithless monsters who'd stab you in the back. That's the twist in the Unexpected world, almost every time. And yet this ghastly world-view is presented in the most homely and cosy fashion: on the brightlit sets of studio bound TV drama of the period (apart from the rather glossier and almost always more crappy US-shot episodes starring the likes of Telly Savalas.)

I must have been nine or ten when those stories first imprinted themselves indelibly on my mind: Susan George as the wife who's killed her husband, cooking the leg of lamb for the coppers at the scene of the crime; the man who has fed his baby Royal Jelly... Elaine Stritch staring at her husband in reduced circumstances, when all that's left of him is a staring, still-living eye in a petri dish...

The late 70s and early 80s was a brilliant time for anthology tv of a creepy or sinister kind. The kind of TV that kids talked about excitedly in the playground the next day: Hammer House of Horror ('The House that Bled to Death' and the tea party sprayed in blood!), Armchair Thriller and Tales of the Unexpected - they were all shows that you knew you perhaps shouldn't be watching. You were chancing your arm, asking to watch them with the grown-ups. There was something racey and macabre about these stories. I used to think that 'Tales' especially was a glimpse into the bizarre adult world - in which people made outrageous bets with each other, or betrayed each other in appalling ways, or made pacts with the devil in human form.

And of course the theme tune was the best thing. And the dancing woman in the title sequence flames. Somehow they conjured up for me the very idea of the surreal, the quixotic and the faintly menacing.

This is all brought on by the thought of my promised Christmas present: the Complete box set. I can watch - to my heart's content - Peter Cushing, Brian Blessed, Joan Collins and Elaine Stritch - get hoist by their own horrible petards. Again and again and again. People used to make jokes about how predictable some of the Tales were. (Peter Cook: 'Tales of the Pretty Much as we Expected'). But I enjoy these stories even more now that some of the novelty has worn off their shocking endings. They're like old friends, with amusingly familiar kinks and twists.