Tales of Unease

As a lover of 70s/80s horror, I looked forward to this series. I'm sorry to say it was rather poor. The opening episode in particular is badly done. From the entire series, only Bad Bad Jo Jo was particularly good. The episodes it's too late now and superstitious ignorance were also ok. The rest should have been scrapped. It would have easily been three highly quality episodes and be remembered. Unfortunately they made episodes with weak stories and this drags down the whole series. I will not give it a rewatch, but I do think Bad Bad Jo Jo could be a good idea for a modern remake. Maybe one day it will happen.

This is one of the better British horror anthology series I've seen. At only seven episodes, it's perhaps easier to keep up the quality, and the producers do a great job of selecting seven very different stories and assigning them to seven different directors, ensuring diversity from episode to episode. There's ghost stories; folk horror; cautionary tales; and technology gone bad, all told with a range of moods and styles. Generally, the writing and direction is strong and with each episode lasting only 26 minutes, none of them outstay their welcome. A few stories are a little derivative, but some are really quite innovative. The highlights for me were the tense thriller 'The Calculated Nightmare', the slow-burning, chilling 'It's Too Late Now' and the uniquely ambitious 'Bad Bad Jo Jo' that provides a social commentary on violence and politics in US entertainment. Even the weaker episodes have enjoyable atmospheres, especially for fans of late 60s/early 70s British TV who will appreciate the "tele-play" nature of most episodes and what can be achieved on a small budget.

During lockdown, I started to spend some of my time watching 70's horror anthology shows that I could find on free streaming services. After a bit of time away, I decided it was time to try and find another totally random one and after a bit of searching, I ended up on "Tales of Unease", a series produced by London Weekend Television and airing in 1970. I've written reviews for each episode of this, but I thought I'd also put something here about the series in general.

A strange woman disappears from the back of a motorcyclist giving her a lift. Two men are stuck in their offices by the automated services to the building. Three men are trapped down a collapsing mineshaft. A woman locks her dismissive husband in his study. A couple looking to buy a London house ignore the warnings of the current tenant. An author meets big fans of his most controversial work and a couple try to abandon their old car across London.

As it's an anthology series, it's perhaps not surprising that my enjoyment of the episode was varied. The episodes "It's too late now" and "Bad Bad Jo Jo" were probably my favourite, with "The Black Goddess" and "Ride, Ride" at the other end of the scale. Though it doesn't quite have the guest stars that some of its contemporary series do, the performances are generally really good and in one case, Rachel Kempson in the "It's too late now" episode, truly exceptional.

What the series overall did lack though was some sort of underlying theme or uniting premise behind the decision to tell these particular stories. A few have a direct supernatural element, a couple some vaguer form of otherworldliness and a couple don't have anything like that and are pure human stories. It's perhaps interesting that, whilst I wouldn't describe any of these episodes as being particularly scary, it's the outcome of one of the "human" ones (Bad Bad Jo Jo) that has stayed with me the longest.

Despite them all being (currently) available on Youtube the series is a bit too hit and miss and I'd say that, unless you're a completist for anthologies from this era, it's probably not worth your time.