Tales of Unease (1970)

Mention the phrase 'classic British anthology horror TV show' and titles like Thriller, Ghost Stories For Christmas, and Hammer House of Horror will come to mind. But there's also a number of other series out there, ones that often only lasted a handful of episodes and which have remained unseen since their original broadcast. 

One such show is TALES OF UNEASE, produced by ITV's London Weekend Television unit and lasting seven episodes. The title was taken from the Pan anthology series of the same name edited by John Burke and which lasted three volumes. Two of the seven stories broadcast were adapted from stories that appeared in the books (Michael Cornish's Superstitious Ignorance and Jack Griffith's The Black Goddess). Now Network have released TALES OF UNEASE on DVD the question remains - has it been worth the wait?

If you're a fan of the old Pan & Fontana paperback anthologies of the 1970s you'll probably appreciates the short but disturbing title sequence, featuring as it does a crudely fashioned wax head with one eye that emulates the covers of those old books. As for the stories the best, and the one that most evokes the feel of the newer stories that made it into those old anthologies, is Bad Bad Jo-Jo by James Leo Herlihy. Roy Dotrice plays a very successful and even camper and cattier writer whose success is based on the creation of a monstrous psychopathic killer and the old lady who controls him. He is visited by two fans who like to dress up as their favourite characters and want to 'play' with their creator, resulting in a decent, tense bit of studio-bound TV.

Other stories include John Burke's Calculated Nightmare, in which a computerised building is programmed to trap the two men responsible for a series of planned redundancies, Michael Hastings' Ride, Ride in which Susan George plays a ghost who spells death for a motorcyclist, and Superstitious Ignorance in which appallingly Bright Young Things Jeremy Clyde and Tessa Wyatt plan to buy a rotting old house only to find they may never leave. 

Comedy horror arrives in the form of Richardson Morgan's The Old Banger in which an abandoned car slowly makes its way back to its owners, while a writer's neglected wife locks him in his study in Andrea Newman's It's Too Late Now. Finally, miners have to deal with a cave-in in the Rhondda of 1932 in the Black Goddess.

If you're a fan of 1970s TV you'll want to have these. The transfers look as if they are mostly taken from tape transfers of 16mm film and you can see a thumb print at the bottom of the frame for most of one story. But it's classic TV and if you want more stuff that's in the vein of Brian Clemens' Thriller then you won't be disappointed. No extras were provided for review. Here's a trailer: 

TALES OF UNEASE is out from Network on DVD now