Sep 16, 2022
The Man Who Walks By Night: A Dinner Date with Death (BBC, 1950)
"You can't take away a man's whole career!"
"Why not? He took away my wife."
"Ha, you never loved me."
"I don't love that picture - but the world values it, and I should hate to have it stolen."
#the man who walks by night#a dinner date with death#classic tv#tv pilot#1950#roy plomley#eric fawcett#single play#dennis holman#sir campbell cotts#robert ayres#patricia jessel#fletcher lightfoot#james cairncross#denis cowles#alicia marlowe#a long lost marvel from the early days of brit tv‚ found and scrubbed a little by those brave people at Kaleidoscope (long may they bring#us such treats). i got their tv detectives dvd ages back (optimistically titled vol 1 tho no others have followed) but I'm only just#getting around to watching. The Man Who Walks.. was an external production made with an eye towards overseas sales as well as a BBC showing#in the event only this one play was ever made‚ as US backers pulled out; the BBC and US networks showed this pilot but billed it as a short#film‚ not made for tv. the print has sustained the expected damage that nearly 70 years of unlove will do‚ but it's perfectly watchable#actually in production terms it looks pretty good when compared to surviving contemporary bbc productions‚ perhaps a result of having been#made outside the organisation. Bob Ayres‚ by the by‚ was an American living in the UK who made tv guest appearances very regularly over the#next two decades‚ making this quite possibly the earliest ever example of the rentayank on british tv! how many greats were to follow#in your footprints‚ Bob.. the plot is old hokum but enjoyable enough. very like what the Edgar Wallace mysteries would be doing 10 years on#or a tv version of the spooky radio shows that were so very popular in the post war years (with the titular Man filling the kind of role#that had made Valentine Dyall a star). interestingly the Man Who Walks is played by Roy Plomley‚ also the producer‚ best known now as a bbc#radio mainstay who devised and would present Desert Island Discs for some 40 odd years. perhaps it was his contacts that got this play#shown on the bbc? who can say. 72 years on and with precious little information surviving we're unlikely to find out too much more
