Broadcast only once - or at most twice - in a time before on-demand, catch-up or the video recorder, most of the drama made for British television up until the early 1980s has lain unseen for decades. For the past four years, researchers from Royal Holloway have been taking part in a AHRC-funded project sought to explore the history of forgotten and critically neglected television drama.
Following two series of Forgotten TV Drama screenings at the BFI Southbank, London, and screenings in Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester, the researchers from the Department of Media Arts have teamed up with DVD distributor Network to resurrect shows from the archives that haven’t been seen for decades.
Project leader Professor John Hill said: ‘We are delighted to be partnering with Network on this series and look forward to making a wide range of interesting and exciting television drama available once again to audiences both old and new’.
Not your average thriller
The first in the collection will be The Frighteners, a series of 13 short psychological horror films from the early 1970s. Although little-known and almost unseen, the series is a rare and highly acclaimed thriller anthology features instead a range of stories in which ordinary people are threatened by situations that slide startlingly, menacingly out of control.
Featuring the considerable talents of John Thaw, Ian Holm, Warren Clarke, Tom Bell, Ray Smith and Robert Urquhart, The Frighteners features thirteen haunting tales of malice and manipulation, vengeance and mounting terror. It features stories from acclaimed novelist and playwright William Trevor, Bouquet of Barbed Wire author Andrea Newman, Get Carter writer/director Mike Hodges, and Secret Army co-creator Wilfred Greatorex.
“The Frighteners is an important series with its own distinctive style and ethos,” says Dr Billy Smart. “It succeeds in telling stories that can still disturb today, while at the same time providing an evocative record of the times in which they were made.”
Bringing the archives back to life
Selected and curated by the research team - Dr Lez Cooke, Professor John Hill and Dr Billy Smart - the collection will make a wide selection of unseen titles from the ITV archive available once more. The range aims to encompass a broad spectrum of plays, both series and serials, comic and tragic, realistic and fantastic, film and videotape, lavish and intimate.
Find out more about the Forgotten TV Histories Project and the Department of Media Arts. The Frightenersis now available to purchase on DVD.
