Author and playwright Francis Durbridge may be best known for his creation Paul Temple - the iconic dilettante crime author-cum-detective whose adventures (alongside his faithful other half 'Steve') have been portrayed in print and on the radio, as well as the screen large and small - but was also the author of a prolific amount of other, non-Temple related serials for radio and television.
Broadcast in five instalments of twenty-five minute episodes from November 26th to December 24th (a nice bit of a thriller for a cold Christmas Eve) 1966 on the only two years old BBC 2, our taut little tale Bat Out of Hell (the late Meat Loaf not included) begins with an establishing scene of Ibsenesque upper middle class domestic disharmony - the sniping betraying the animosity boiling beneath the genteel veneer of respectability - as we are introduced to the Stewarts; Geoffrey (Noel Johnson, a familiar face to watchers of cult UK television and film - he was a star of both the original A for Andromeda as well its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough, a twice Doctor Who guest star as King Thous of Atlantis in 'The Underwater Menace' and the treacherous Sir Charles Grover of Operation Golden Age in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' as well as the Judge in Pete Walker's Frightmare and the gin-sodden General in Bruce Robinson's seminal and semen-stained Withnail and I; away from the screen he was a familiar voice on radio as Dick Barton) and Diana (Sylvia Syms - I don't really have to tell you who she was, do I? Oh all right, she was Sister Diana from J. Lee Thompson's wartime ambulance frolic Ice Cold in Alex, Sister Mitya in Ralph Thomas's Conspiracy of Hearts, Mrs Crosby in Michael Winner's Dirty Weekend and Margaret in Martin Clunes vehicle Staggered. She may have have been more proud of some of those than others. Of course, she was also a guest star in Doctor Who, essaying the role of Mrs Pritchard in the wonderful 'Ghost Light'). Our couple are locking horns whilst getting ready for a trip away to Cannes, and Geoffrey's employee Mark Paxton (Morse himself, John Thaw, star of not only Inspector Morse and The Sweeney but also Edgar Wallace second-stringers Five to One and Dead Man's Chest, Home to Roost, the definitive Sherlock Holmes Jeremy Brett's version of The Sign of Four as the maniacal monopod Jonathan Small, and the frustratingly elusive Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition which I've still not managed to track down after a decade of trying) calls in to lend a hand and new packing case for the trip.
Before leaving for their holiday, Geoffrey visits Ned Tallboy (Stanley Meadows, who had small roles in Hammer's 1959 The Mummy and Vincent Price's 1964 The Masque of the Red Death before starring in Montgomery Tully's 1967 sci-fi romp The Terrornauts) to confirm their lift to the airport before going to the office to be told by Paxton that a long-vacant country house has found a prospective purchaser and so the businessman - in his suit and tie - goes out to the lonely property and explores the empty edifice until he runs across his erstwhile employee who is waiting for him with a gun. Mark and Diana have been engaged in an illicit affair you see, and this is their chance. Shooting Geoffrey and bundling his body into the car, Mark tells Diana that he plans to dump the body in some roadworks which are being filled in with concrete in the morning: her husband will never be found. Dutifully reporting her husband's absence to the authorities, she is paid a visit by the genial-seeming policeman Inspector Clay (Dudley Foster, another familiar face in vintage telefantasy being jarringly-named space pirate Maurice Caven in Doctor Who's 'The Space Pirates' as well as guesting in the original '50s Invisible Man, three instalments of The Avengers, and episodes of Danger Man, Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased and Jason King before his sad suicide at the age of only 48) who says that her missing spouse will be looked into - then Diana receives a phone call from a familiar-sounding voice and Mark finds that the corpse has vanished from the vehicle. This is truly Diabolique-al. Contacted by Clay to say a body has been found in the roadworks, Diana dutifully identifies the unknown body as her husband as per the menacing telephone voice's instructions.
As paranoia mounts, Diana and Mark begins to panic and unravel under Inspector Clay's watchful gaze. The Stewarts' family friends Thelma (June Ellis) and Walter Bowen (Emrys Jones, the Master of the Land of Fiction from 'The Mind Robber' as well as Robbie Ross in The Trials of Oscar Wilde) stop by, and Thelma passes on a cigarette vase that was in the pocket of Diana's mink coat that she took to get cleaned - a cigarette case that the shocked Mrs Stewart maintains that she has never seen before in her life, that is nonetheless inscribed:
"To Diana - who came like a bat out of hell. Geoffrey." About their wedding night, perhaps? I bet she did, you sly old dog. I bet she did.
Walter warns that Inspector Clay might seem like "he doesn't know his arse from his elbow... but he does". Perhaps like Babylon 5 no one here is exactly what they seem. Diana follows more phone instructions from the purported 'Geoffrey' (via Thelma), making her way to the Chichester Motel against Mark's cautioning only to find Clay already there with a cadre of police: the bullet-riddled corpse of the actual kosher Geoffrey has been discovered there; meanwhile Mark is contacted by Miss Kitty Tracey (Patsy Smart, make an 'orse sick she would as the elderly ghoul in 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang') who says she knows what is going on - especially concerning the "bat out of hell"...
As Clay continues to question, it emerges that the dead man identified as Geoffrey was named Ken Harding, and that he was wearing Mr Stewart's clothes and carrying his wallet and notebook - the notebook bearing a number of monetary payments to a 'T' - as well as a note written in Italian translating to the same 'bat out of hell' inscription as on the cigarette case. Paranoia and fear of blackmail from the cryptic Miss Tracey take Diana to her little shop on the high street, where she finds a bloodied knife and sees Thelma's body; the shaken and not very merry widow's straightened state of mind is not helped when the very much alive Thelma turns up at her house with her her husband and the Inspector in tow.
Another unexpected complication and Mark ad Diana's otherwise damn fine plan arises in the sultry Italian form of Diana Valesco (Paddy Glynn), Geoffrey's secret side piece to whom he has left the bulk of his estate in his will prompting Paxton to bloody thoughts of murdering the doxy. Plots, counterplots, suspicions and burning resentments begin to surface in a boiling web of mayhem that some of the antagonistic protagonists shan't make it out of alive. But fear not, Clay is on the case.
This classic thriller, a somewhat forgotten gem of '60s television, is currently being run in the UK on the Talking Pictures channel on Monday evenings, which is what finally prompted me to crack open and watch the DVD which I've had for about five years.
The presentation on the DVD from Danann Publishing (mmm... Danann) through Luxin is a beautiful restoration that really showcases the deft direction by Alan Bromly, a prolific TV veteran who also helmed the charming Diane Cilento fantasy The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1954) and was eventually driven to the point of a nervous breakdown - allegedly - by Tom Baker's booze-fuelled misbehaviour on the fraught set of 'Nightmare of Eden'. A nightmare indeed.
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