Serenade for Dead Lovers

'Worlds Beyond' was an ITV series of the late 1980s that dramatised stories lifted from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.  They made 13 episodes and truthfully none of them are particularly very good but i'm kind of addicted to them and you'll find a few eposodes on the blog.  It's an odd sort of series mostly of interest because, despite it's obviously miniscule budget, it featured some interesting casting choices, including faded Hollywood stars Eli Wallach, Karen Black and Louise Fletcher alongside the likes of Denholm Elliott, David Warner, Connie Booth, Mary Tamm & Natasha Richardson and in this case, perhaps less notably, 'Robin of Sherwood' Mk 2, Jason Connery and Nancy Travis who would later go ghost hunting again in the Stephen King mini series 'Rose Red'.

Written by legendary Wyrd Britain screenwriter Brian Clemens - who really should have done better - 'Serenade for Dead Lovers' - the best song title Bauhaus never used - revolves around an old village hall, a 40 year old romance and, for seemingly absolutely no resaon at all, a dud German bomb.  Travis and Connery do their best but there's too little here for them to really work with and what could have been a delicately poignant ghostly tale of love lost and found falls pretty flat.

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The Eye Of Yemanja

Late(ish) 1980s ITV series 'Worlds Beyond' featured 13 'true' stories from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.  We've featured a few of these on Wyrd Britain before and, to be entirely honest, they're a pretty ropey bunch.

In this episode, written by the usuably reliable Brian Clemens (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Someone At The Top Of The Stairs), model Suzy (Amanda Hillwood), who has apparently never read or watched any horror, takes home an ominous carving she finds washed up on the beach.  Repeatedly discounting a warning of the statue's evil intent she is soon beset by accident and injury.

It's all been knocked together quickly and cheaply so it's all pretty rudimentary with very little jeopardy and some brutally terrible editing but there're a few nice touches that could have been developed into something interesting and it has a naive, cheap and cheerful charm.

NB - Eagle-eyed viewers may wish to watch out for a brief appearence by Julia Deakin (Spaced).

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The Black Tomb

We've featured several episodes from the mid 1980s ITV series 'World's Beyond' on Wyrd Britain before one of which, 'Home', featured the unlikely casting of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest's' Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher. This episode, the fifth in the series, features the equally unlikely casting of Eli Wallach of 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' as acting teacher Charles Burgess alongside his real world wife Anne Jackson as Marian, an actress struggling to come to terms with her declining career, holidaying in England where they discover a strange black tomb belonging to the former, unlamented, lord of the manor and Marian is stalked by a masked and cloaked figure.

With a flat and obvious script by Marc Alexander purportedly based on a story from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research from which he entirely fails to ring any sort of spookiness and some truly dire acting from the principal cast save perhaps John Vine as the Vicar and Derek Benfield (Frank Skinner in 'Timeslip') as the Doctor this is a dreadful piece of old tat. That said though it's an interesting curio of the time it was made within the slight revival of spooky anthology television in the middle of the 1980s alongside other series such as the supernatural classics plundering 'Shades of Darkness', the, apparently mostly lost and Robert Aickman focused, 'Night Voices' (of which only 'The Hospice' seems to remain) and 'Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense' but it is by far the weakest of them all and provides little more than an opportunity to idle away 24 minutes in the company of some unlikely stars.


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Voice From The Gallows

I throughly enjoyed the last episode of mid 80's TV series World's Beyond that I featured here - 'Guardian of the Past' - so I thought I'd try another but this time the results are a lot less enthalling.

'World's Beyond' took it's stories from the archives of The Society of Psychical Research so the general conceit is that these are dramatisations of 'true' hauntings.  Here a couple (Darren McGavin & Connie Booth (Polly from 'Fawlty Towers') are awoken by a man's voice and discover that someone has tried to hang their daughter.  After trying again the spirit possessing  her changes tack and decides to ask for the family's help.

Unfortunately neither (long time Eastenders) director Sue Butterworth nor writer Brian Clemens (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) really manage to get to grips with the story and inject any sort of dynamism and it just kind of stumbles along in a jumble of cliches.  It's not terrible but it's a missed opportunty.

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Guardian of the Past

'Worlds Beyond' was an ITV series broadcast in the mid 80s that apparently sourced it's material from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.  We've featured a couple of episodes before on Wyrd Britain - 'The Haunted Garden' & 'Home' - which were, in turn, a light and fluffy ghostly love story and a messy and confused haunted house tale.  

This time out it's script by ITC spy-fi alumni Tony Williamson (The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!, Jason King, and others) keeps things a lot more vigorous.  The cast includes Paul Freeman (Raiders of the Lost Ark's Nazi archeologist 'René Belloq') and Mary Tamm (Doctor Who's first 'Romana') as an entitled middle class couple who stupidly steal a bone from a mummy's tomb as a souvenier of their Egyptian holiday and Terrence Alexander (Bergerac's 'Charlie Hungerford') as a sort of occult detective who just happens to be a member of that intrepid society of psychical researchers.  

Williamson keeps things moving at a fairly breakneck pace and litters the 30 minute runtime with a car crash, two spinal injuries, a blinding, an attempted stabbing, hypnotic trances galore and a not entirely ineffective ghostly figure, well it's more effective than Tamm's American accent at least.  

Personally, I like this one a lot,  it's good, cheap fun. It wears it's lack of budget well and goes all out with what it has and does it well with a cast who all appear fully committed. Storywise there's nothing here that devotees of ghostly fictions won't have seen before but as an adaptation of a 'real' haunting one has to suspect it's been given just enough of an authorial tweak by Williamson to give it a satisfying narrative arc.

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Home

'Home' is an episode of the late 80s ITV series 'World's Beyond' which told stories based on the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.  We've featured another of their stories, 'The Haunted Garden', here in the past but unfortunately that video has since been taken down.

Written by Chris Menaul this is a haunted house tale starring Samantha Holland who some may know from her role in another similar story that we featured recently, 'Interference', and 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest's' Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher.

Karen Earl (Fletcher) is visiting her troubled daughter Perdita (Holland) who is home from school and staying with her grandmother Alice (Rachel Kempson) in a country cottage from which Karen wants to take her away.  Karen's arrival seems to trigger all manner of unpleasantness at the house - fires, flickering lights, smashed crockery and slammed doors.  Creeping around in the background is farm worker Joe (Warren Clarke) and local witch Miss Robertson (Brenda Bruce) who is entirely convinced that Perdita is at the mercy of 'forces'.

It's an odd sort of programme that at its end leaves you feeling like they've missed out a chunk of the story.  I suppose we can put the blame for this on a desire to remain true to the Psychical Society's reports but one has to wonder why the writer didn't make more of it and present a more coherent story arc but we are left with some interesting unanswered questions about motive and mindset to ponder while the credits roll.



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The Haunted Garden

'World's Beyond' was a late 1980's anthology television series of tales based on the archives of the Society for Psychical Research and it is perhaps the single most genteel and stereotypically 'English' thing I think I have ever watched.

Moments after hearing what sounds suspiciously like a plane crash terminally ill English rose Jennifer (Judi Bowker) meets an American pilot named Ben (Alex Hyde-White) when he unexpectedly walks into her garden one afternoon. Their decision to marry sparks concern amongst her family and friends who have yet to even see hm let alone meet him - although the vicar thinks he does have a familiar sounding name - but they make plans for the wedding all the same.

It features a cast of rock solid jobbing actors such as Bowker whose earliest acting credits are listed as the unlikely sounding pairing of starring roles in 'The Adventures of Black Beauty' and Franco Zeffirelli's life of Saint Francis of Assisi 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon', Hyde-White who is perhaps most known to bad movie fans for playing Reed Richards in Roger Corman's never released 'The Fantastic Four' and Moray Watson who gets all the best lines here and whose innate poshness means he has a filmography littered with characters listed as 'Major...', 'Colonel...', 'Lord...' and 'Sir...'  including as 'Sir Robert Muir' in the fifth Doctor serial 'Black Orchid'.

The final piece is a bit of an oddity.  In many ways it feels like a throw back to a very different era which I suppose it is given where the source material came from but it is a gentle little oddity whose ending will leave you with many questions of a practical nature but it has a charm of it's own and it's all so terribly, terribly nice.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much appreciate a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain