INTO THE TWILIGHT

I buy weird stuff. I know that I do. Sometimes I just get it into my head that I really, really want to see something, even though I know that it’s likely to be a bit rubbish and then, when the price is at least approaching what I like to think of as being “right” (usually about a week before the price is dropped through the floor to less than half of what I paid) my finger will hover for merely a split second over the “complete order” button and whatever it is will be on its way.

I do actually sometimes wonder whether Amazon and/or all of the other online book-and-other-media-stores are monitoring me as if I am some kind of barometer for fashion when it comes to such things. “Uh-oh - Holmes has bought it, that means that it’s definitely moved into the Twilight Zone... We’ll never shift any more at that price... Let’s get it dropped... Now, now, now, now, NOW!!!”

Hmmm... I was always a barometer for fashion in a similar way back in the old days when clothes vaguely mattered to me... and music, come to think of it. “What...? Holmes has bought which album...? Pulp those magazines, guys! That band’s most definitely not trendy any more...!”

Which brings us, rather unnaturally, to “The Twilight Zone”, Rod Serling’s famous and really rather wonderful anthology series which started in the late 1950s and ran for about five years, which I chose to purchase the first series of a few weeks ago when a couple of quid got shaved off the asking price. Not much, I’ll admit, but enough to persuade me that its time had come.

Watch out for it in a bargain bin near you sometime next week.

There have been any number of attempts at reviving “The Twilight Zone” since it finished in 1964, many of them by those master film-makers for whom it was an essential cornerstone of their own childhoods during which it no doubt helped to stretch their imaginations beyond the fifth dimension, and, coincidentally, making sure that a fifty-year old television series has never quite managed to be forgotten.

Since those film-makers were young, and possibly with their help, that familiar music and that slightly disturbing sense that things have all rather gone beyond your control and you have moved into another, stranger dimension, has become a rather iconic cornerstone of much of the storytelling and film-making made since. Much of the kind of themes and tropes of stories by the likes of Stephen King, films by people like M Night Shyamalan, and TV series like “Torchwood”, “UFO” and (to a lesser extent) “Star Trek”, seem to have been at least inspired by episodes from “The Twilight Zone” which Rod Serling, in his own lugubrious and slightly cynical world-weary way, was writing week after week over fifty years ago, and back then, he was managing to tell his stories in a brief, brusque and economical twenty-five minute time slot, on a television budget and without much in the way of embellishment, and, by crikey, some of those stories made for some powerful viewing.

I could try and justify my own revisiting of “The Twilight Zone” by saying that, because of my own recent dismal attempts at script writing, I wanted to look at some taut, twenty-five minute dramas, most of them (in that first series at least) written by an acknowledged master craftsman of the art. You could argue that watching a TV series that is over 50 years old is not really the way to explore the notion of modern script-writing, but there are such amazingly complicated stories being told in that brief running time, many of which have since become almost standard ideas in horror and suspense films like the “Final Destination” that going back and looking at the craftsmanship that formed the roots of these modern screenplays is definitely well worthwhile.

I did think that these shows, produced as they were in the infancy of television with relatively primitive equipment and effects technology might look just a little bit “hokey” to modern eyes, but the sprogrammes were so well produced that they actually hold up rather well, and whilst the stories might not now seem quite so original, daring and surprising as they once might have done, they still have to power to invoke a strange and disturbing sense of unreality and unfolding mystery, whilst also giving you the opportunity to see some of the greatest actors of a generation, rapidly becoming a lost one, going through their paces.

This is a world of deserts, small towns, blowing tumbleweed and forgotten diners all very familiar to us from all those iconic 1950s science fiction films like “Them!” and which would later be fatefully explored by architect David Vincent in “The Invaders” half a decade later. This is a world of dark twists and turns of fate, ghosts, shadows and surprise twists of expectation and ironic outcomes that mean that you never quite know which way the story is going to turn out if you are watching it for the very first time.

The evening the set arrived, I settled down to watch a couple, almost expecting to somehow be disappointed and realise that I’d made another catastrophic mistake based upon some ridiculous rose-tinted sense of nostalgia, and end up realising that, ultimately, I’d wasted my money again, and so, another box would be placed onto a shelf to gather dust. I expected to find all of the storylines extremely cheesy and the effects to all be rather risible and a little bit cheap and nasty and old-fashioned.

Instead, that evening, I ended up watching six of them. I was mesmerised. I was drawn into a disturbing world  where the uneasiness of what the mind tells you might happen really does take you on a journey into some dark and mysterious corners of your own imagination, and sometimes what your mind is telling you might happen in a story can put you far more on edge than the eventual actual outcome on screen manages to.

During the course of those six episodes I was transported to a world emptied of people, the solution of which was actually slightly more ordinary than what my own imagination was conjuring up. After that, I watched a elderly man making the pitch of his life having found that he had an appointment with a certain “Mr Death”. Then I saw fate intervene in the life of a washed-up, drunken old gunfighter in the wild west, was transported to the fantasy world of a fading movie star, before travelling back to the boyhood of a jaded advertising executive who found out that sometimes you really can’t go home again. The final episode of that evening ventured into a world of light comedy when an unrelenting hypochondriac made a pact with the devil to live forever and found that any such deal is bound not to be quite what it might at first appear to be.

A diverse mixture of tales, I’m sure you’ll agree and all very much the sort of things that you might expect to find when you enter “The Twilight Zone”.