Running out of Roald

One of those long days yesterday, and I was glad to get home to pizza and a glass of wine and a whole heap of episodes of vintage telly. I'm working my way through 'Tales of the Unexpected'. I'm at the end of season two, so it's 1979 or thereabouts. Watching them in order is fascinating, because it's at this point that they start to run out of stories by Roald Dahl. He's still presenting and looks slightly grudging and piqued when he has to lavish praise on somebody else's story-telling genius.

Something curious happens... one minute we're in Dahl-land... a land of colonels and crazy wagers and vintage wines. It's essentially a world from the forties and fifties and the end of the British Empire. I just watched Maureen O'Brien being a strange kind of vamp in a story about a portrait painter. The most shocking and unexpected thing going on in that story is the fact that a woman's nude portrait is set before her society friends - and the shame drives her to murder. It seems somehow quaint. (Quaint as the disco-style retooling of the Ron Grainer theme in the nightclub scene at the start of the episode...)

But then, at the end of the season, we get a shift. Three episodes written by three new writers. Younger men, you presume. The world conjured up in these last tales is a different one. A world of academics and faculty wives and research trips. There's still adultery and capricious murder, as in Dahl's world - but it seems truer and more vicious, somehow. We're in a nastier world. One closer, perhaps to that of Brian Clemen's anthology series, 'Thriller.' It's a world that seems more macabre than Dahl's. Here comes Elizabeth Spriggs and we think she's a poor, duped, rich widow... but look how she gets the upper hand! What a monstrously clever woman! But what's going to happen to her in the end? And what will happen to her husband as a result? They're more sophisticated, these tales, as well as nastier...

The final episode in season two takes us into a seedy harbour town... kindly prostitutes, gangsters, and a protagonist who stoops to murder, quick as a flash, for a few bob. And we'restill meant to be on his side, and be appalled when he can't escape the consequences of his own actions.

In Dahl's world Dahl - or someone very like him - was always at the centre. A rich and clever man about town; always up for a good bet, always willing to display his superior knowhow. We're supposed to cheer when he wins through - or feel shocked when he gets unexpectedly swizzed. But when Dahl's not writing this character gets turned on his head. He's the cheating, wife-killing surgeon who chops up Sian Phillips in the bath and buries her under his greenhouse. He gets found out and hoist by his own petard. It's a really interesting shift in the tone of the series. I'll be fascinated to see how it pans out. It's like the whole of the series begins, in thrall to the Dahl character, sitting before the fire and telling us what's what... and then, slowly, surely, unexpectedly... the whole programme turns against him... As if to say that no one and nothing is sacred or safe in the 1980s... no one is exempt from the twist in the tale...