Face in the Dark

Bond's story is perhaps a page and a half long, and cannot sustain a TV episode of 45 minutes. The original story describes a short horrific incident in the life of a Mr Oliver, a local school teacher. Now this had been padded up with several layers, many of them quite meaningless, to create this episode. The horror experienced by Mr Oliver is gone. Instead we see, ad infinitum, long panning shots of a lonely but huge boarding school, which seems to have just one sadist teacher and a chowkidar (guard-cum-cook). We see prolonged scenes of sadistic behavior of the teacher, a cemetery with graves, a school dormitory which has possibly only one student - the protagonist, and vague imagery of another (dead?) schoolboy who appears to be wearing a sort of leather mask, which hides his face. In short, the TV treatment is horrible, irritating, and a waste of time.