Thriller

A pre-Hallowe'en treat

As my last few posts have been intensely serious and heartfelt - the Edith Thompson case, my love affair with the thoroughbred - I felt that it was Time to be Trivial.

Also, I have been slightly ill over the past few weeks (The Virus, followed by A Virus - remarkably similar, excepting the shift from definite to indefinite article) and so I thought I’d write about the TV series that cheered my convalescence, during that brief period when convalescing is actually quite enjoyable.

Thriller.

Anybody who has ever seen an episode of Thriller will surely agree that tripe comes no better, no richer, no more satisfying.

It is arguable that the credit sequence (exquisitely unsubtle use of fish-eye lens, as above; fabulous Laurie Johnson theme tune, like a succession of looming Hitchcockian shocks) is the best bit of Thriller, and that it is all downhill thereafter.

I would disagree. Some episodes are better than others, but so far I have loved every single one of them. There are forty-three, of which I have probably seen half; originally broadcast between 1973-76, they have all been decanted onto blessed YouTube, where I pray they remain until I have savoured every last moment. Woman cannot live by Shakespeare and Chekhov alone. Sometimes we need a bit of trivia in our lives (I suppose Agatha Christie might qualify but I don’t read her that way). I don’t get the Jilly Cooper thing and I went off The Archers (alcoholic relapses when I am chopping my courgettes of an evening, no thank you). But the stratospheric-level kitsch of Thriller can console a receding flu, a minor sadness and raging insomnia. For me, it does what trivia ought to do: it takes the pressure out of life, rather like a massage for the overwrought brain, then lightens it with a spark of divine and intensely pleasurable silliness.

What, then, is Thriller? In its day it was, I believe, primetime Saturday night viewing, a jewel in the ATV (Associated Television) crown. It was the creation of the great Brian Clemens - today he would be called its showrunner, a term that I fondly imagine him sweeping aside with a Hamlet cigar during a proper lunch at Old Compton Street Wheeler’s - a man who really understood television in its pre-meta days, before it became quasi-film and got above itself. He also understood the basic principles of storytelling. Born in 1931, he learned what he would have surely called his trade on 1950s B-movies, then moved on to TV shows like The Avengers (it was Brian who cast Diana Rigg as Emma Peel); he also wrote one of my favourite, genuinely unnerving films, And Soon the Darkness (1970), about two girls on a cycling holiday through France, one of whom goes missing… enough said. The film would, I suppose, be called a thriller, although in fact it is - more simply - a constant layering of atmospheric tension. It is, indeed, very simple. Not easy to do.

Similarly, perhaps the most noteworthy episode of Thriller - from the 1974 third series, about a killer who seeks to eliminate the witness to one of his crimes, chasing her through an enormous office block in long dialogue-less scenes, the most excruciatingly gripping of which involve the elevator (is he inside it?) - is TV reduced to its essence. What will happen next? How can you bear not to know?

Two things. First, the image portrays the American Julie Sommars (brilliant as the murder witness); Thriller frequently cast a minor US name because the series sold in the States.

Second: the phone. And now we are getting to what I most love.

Thriller is essence of 1970s, and in the most obvious possible way. It is every flared-slacks, patterned-man-made-fibre, spatula-shaped-wide-collar, open-riser-staircase, dial-telephone (sometimes with elephant-trunk-receiver), businessman-plus-devoted-shorthand-typist, commuter-belt-executive-home cliché that one associates with the 1970s, except - and herein lies the greatness of Thriller - these are not clichés. They are just there. The show was made in the 1970s; it is unconsciously and absolutely of its time. Therefore any woman wearing a pinafore dress and square-toed patent shoes, any man in a Life on Mars suit plus Les McKeown hair, any ‘house’ with a leatherette sofa, ashtrays the size of cat litter trays and a fireplace that glows with a plastic frontage designed to look like bits of warming coal… these are not pastiches. They are not meme-worthy tribute acts. They are sincerely themselves. They are not merely non-ironic, they are from a world before the primacy of irony. And don’t we all long for that, at times?

I suppose if one wanted to be a bit more intelligent about it, one might divine a tinge of 1970s paranoia in Thriller, the Vietnam/Watergate/post-Altamont/three-day-week/lights-are-going-out/ hangover-from-WW2-has-finally-truly-hit/ Depression-era-revisited/ doom-laden quality that pervades so much good cinema and music of the era, and that infused TV with a desire to retreat into Upstairs, Downstairs (although that, too, destabilized itself, undermined its own apparent eternal certainties, in later episodes). Thriller is, after all, murder and mayhem as ‘Saturday night entertainment’. Its plots tend to centre upon the possibility of evil within the familiar: an apparently perfect husband who is in fact a Lady Killer (played by Jesus of Nazareth Robert Powell); an apparently idyllic country village that is in fact peopled by Satanists; an apparently ideal cheap flat that is in fact within a house full of dead people; an apparently immaculate butler who is in fact slowly destroying his employer; an apparently perfect old nurse who is in fact a witch (and who is, moreover, Diana Dors, in a less than perfect wig apparently fashioned from skeins of grey wool).

But I honestly don’t think that Thriller will withstand that kind of analysis. The facade and what lurks behind has been around ever since Cain smiled at Abel. Every Thriller trope is as old as the hills. What the show does is to identify them, reduce them to their essentials, then dress them up in Crimplene and plonk them down in Hertfordshire. And even as I write those words I can feel my own longing for the next episode.

Another lure is the British cast… Equity gold! Helen Mirren, for heaven’s sake, lustrous and majestic - an insanely beautiful Francesca Annis - a callow but unmistakable Nigel Havers - Nyree Dawn Porter - Michael Kitchen - Hayley Mills - Bob Hoskins - Susan Hampshire… are you tempted yet???? There is also an episode, quite flagrant in its larceny from Dial M for Murder although with a delicious extra twist (plus the remarkably delicious Stuart Wilson), entitled ‘The Double Kill’, which Thriller geeks - I suppose I am teetering on becoming such a thing - regard as a contender for Best Ever Episode.

Another is the Helen Mirren one, which is wildly entertaining and which - lest the accusation of gratuitous violence against women be held against Thriller - is unarguably feminist in its resolution. It is set, furthermore, in the 1970s incarnation of a ‘health club’, which involves large glasses of orange juice being poured by Arthur English (Are You Being Served?) and Michael Jayston pulling manfully at what is now called a vintage Bullworker.

But for sheer full-blooded unabashed idiotic delight, and for anybody who feels that their trivia levels are sinking along with their natural supply of Vitamin D, try the episode pictured at the top of the page. Spell of Evil.

Diane Cilento is a witch, reincarnated, with a wig, married to a high-powered tycoon of whom she makes a voodoo doll stuck with pins. His secretary is determined to save him, although Diane contrives a Carrie-style incident in which the office coffee percolator explodes over the secretary’s hands…

For the outfits alone (a lurex tasselled kaftan will also feature), and for a bit of monumentally non-scary but vaguely apt Hallowe’en delight, it might just be worth an hour of your precious time.

Enjoy.