Tales of Unease (1970): paperback horror brought to life in an unjustly forgotten series (Review)

Let’s address that title first. As far as horror anthologies go, 1970’s LWT miniseries Tales of Unease might be guilty of under-promising; not Tales of Terror, or Tales of Slaughter, just something to make you a bit uneasy. Two years earlier, BBC Two had given us Late Night Horror, a series which delivered rather too well on its title promise, garnering enough complaints to be taken off air after six episodes. Tales of Unease lasted just one episode more, but that was due to poor scheduling rather than public outcry.

John Burke, the series’ mastermind, had worked on Late Night Horror, but the direct inspiration for this series was the successful series of Tales of Unease anthologies that he edited throughout the 1960s. (In a thoroughly charming touch, Network’s DVD release is packaged to resemble a battered old period-appropriate paperback) Despite having its roots in an earlier decade, Tales of Unease deserves credit for nailing what we now call the “hauntological” style right at the start of the 1970s. The freedoms of the 1960s are visibly giving way to a more aimless, empty kind of hedonism in the first episode, Ride Ride, in which Michael Cornish essentially rewrites the old vanishing-hitchhiker myth for the age of free love.

If you’re familiar with 1970s British character actors, every single episode of Tales of Unease will draw a hearty “oh, it’s that guy!” from you, but Ride Ride has a bigger name in the cast: Susan George, just one year before Straw Dogs made her an icon of extreme cinema. She approaches Anthony Jackson’s art student Derek at a party with a matter-of-fact “I’ve been watching you”, before physically dragging him home. It’s the sort of thing many a young man in the ’70s would fantasise about, and you understand how Derek can overlook her extremely creepy blank delivery – something like a grown-up Midwich Cuckoo.

For all the episodes’ individual qualities vary, Tales of Unease remains a consistent actors’ showcase. It’s Too Late Now is written by Andrea Newman, who would go on to create one of the most notable success de scandals in 1970s British television with Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Her script here is more restrained but no worse for it, channelling her signature theme of dysfunctional marriages into a stunning one-woman show from Rachel Kempson. Jack Griffiths’s The Black Goddess is an ensemble piece, but it’s just as well-performed by a cast including Ronald Lewis and Talfryn Thomas. It’s set entirely in a Welsh coal mine, and it’s shot on location rather than in a studio. This means that, in line with standard television policy of the 1970s, it’s shot on film rather than videotape, and it looks gorgeous as a result.

The producers of Tales of Unease – including Peter Wildebloode, whose primary fame now stems from his campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality – seemed to jump at chances to get out on location, lending a cinematic atmosphere to stories which might seem tame and cosy under studio lights. The final episode, The Old Banger, is a very silly tale of a car haunting its owners which is distinguished firstly by its surprisingly nasty ending, and secondly by a portrayal of 1970s suburbia that you can practically inhale. Superstitious Ignorance opens with a very different type of car-based horror; one that makes you say “Oh god, they thought that looked fashionable back then, didn’t they?” But it settles into a surprisingly astute portrayal of gentrification, and its ambiguously sympathetic portrayal of the “old ways” (the title is heavily ironic) harks ahead to imminent horror landmarks like The Wicker Man and The Exorcist.

Admittedly, Superstitious Ignorance is unlike The Wicker Man and The Exorcist in that it’s a PG – Tales of Unease was not about to repeat the mistakes of Late Night Horror. The disc’s 15 certificate comes entirely from one instalment, Bad Bad Jo Jo, by Midnight Cowboy screenwriter James Leo Herlihy. Roy Dotrice, looking alarmingly like Noel Edmonds, plays an arrogant comic book creator whose signature creation Jo Jo is a vigilante who makes Dirty Harry look like a socialist polytechnic lecturer. It’s no surprise that this preening creep faces the consequences of his art’s endorsement of reactionary violence, but the manner in which it happens remains truly weird and uncomfortable, and Herlihy’s every line is a gem. There are many ways to ask an artist if they worry about their impact with society, but none as deliciously quotable as “Well, sir, have you ever wondered about being murdered in some wonderfully campy way?”

Screen violence, extremist politics, mining disasters, frustrated housewives and class conflict – perhaps the only remaining Heath-era anxiety that hasn’t been ticked off the list is mechanisation, which is duly addressed in Calculated Nightmare. The only script John Burke wrote himself for the series, it’s a remarkably prescient look ahead at what we’d now call the “internet of things”. Here, two businessmen played by John Stratton and Michael Culver face the consequences of their decision to automate their factory when a disgruntled employee seizes the controls. It’s a story which shows Tales of Unease at its most stagey – most of the action simply consists of Culver and Stratton stuck in an office – and as such it may look very foreign to modern television audiences. The themes, however, couldn’t be more relevant.

If Tales of Unease is a mixed bag, it’s no more variable than a lot of more celebrated anthology series, and it certainly didn’t deserve to languish in obscurity for so long. Bad Bad Jo Jo justifies a purchase all on its own, but Network have packaged the disc with a limited-edition booklet by that great TV historian Andrew Pixley.

Tales of Unease