May 30, 2021
Out of the Unknown: The Yellow Pill (3.12, BBC, 1969)
"The year is 1969. This is 1969, this is the year in which you claim to have been born."
"You really are gone, aren't you, old boy?"
"Look, Connor, if I were to show you a calendar, or a newspaper, which clearly shows today's date is June the fourth, 1969, will you believe me then?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because this job we're doing is difficult enough, and sometimes everybody doubts his or her reason. The pressure's on all the time, so you have to cling to certain unalterable things - like your name, the date, the names of friends! Now, I know what year it is, do you understand that? I know!"
#Out of the Unknown#The Yellow Pill#Single play#Missing TV#Rog Phillips#Leon Griffiths#1969#BBC#Michael Ferguson#Francis Matthews#Stephen Bradley#Angela Browne#Glynn Edwards#Steve Peters#James Haswell#Carl Conway#Our last surviving s3 episode! Again this is an audio presentation of the surviving soundtrack set to promotional photos taken by the BBC#The Yellow Pill had actually been adapted before for Out of this World‚ the Sci fi anthology which acted as the catalyst for OotU and which#Had brought Irene Shubik recognition in the first place; sadly that version is also lost‚ audio as well. This is maybe the most successful#Of the audio presentations simply because of the brevity of plot and staging: the whole thing is largely conversational and set in one or#Two rooms‚ and in fact if you were adapting the story as a radio play there are very few differences you'd need to make to Griffiths'#Script. That's not to say this is an overly simple tale; actually it feels very 60s‚ classic mindbending look at what constitutes reality#And how one can be sure that the real world is‚ well‚ the real world. The Matrix meets Inception but on a BBC budget and starring Captain#Scarlet. Matthews is very good actually; there's a cleverness in casting here so that Matthews and Edwards are both playing to type (as a#Haughty psychiatrist and a rough policeman respectively) but it's very much a conscious decision: after all the plot hinges on whether#These ppl are actually real at all or whether they're a form of fiction (meta casting in a way). There's room in the story (and seemingly#From reviews in the previous adaptation) for a degree of uncertainty in the final reveal (again think the end of Inception) but this#Version‚ for better or worse‚ plays it straight.
