TV review – Escape Into Night

My notes on the TV serial Escape Into Night.

‘I can never make my drawings look quite like I want them.’

This six-part ITV teatime serial is the one with the ‘watchers’, evil megaliths with glowing eyes.

It’s a temptation to privilege the fragmentary impressions of the series which stayed with 1972 kid viewers into adulthood over the version of the programme available in the 21^st century.  The ‘user comments’ section of IMDb may, in this case, be the most useful writing on the series – though most of them were posted before a 2009 UK DVD release which made Escape From the Night accessible for review.  In the days before VCRs, let alone homevideo releases or streaming, television had a hallucinatory power which came from being seen once — and, in the case of serials, maybe missing an episode or two along the way because going to tea at Gran’s meant a whole chunk of story was irretrievably lost — and festering in the mind for decades.  Nightmare fuel images remain so vivid that other elements fade from the mind.  Often, memories of different shows got mixed up.  Ruth Boswell’s faithful adaptation of Catherine Storr’s novel Marianne Dreams (1958) for the Midlands ATV franchise is stuck with an off-the-shelf, unresonant title which made it easy to confuse with a number of 1970s serials and one-off plays which feature creepy standing stones (most obviously, Children of the Stones).

Though taped in colour, Escape Into Night survives only in black and white – the way most of its original audience saw it.  So it’s about a child who imagines a drab, grey fantasy world – which might be the ghost of something more colourful but equally might have been the makers’ intent.  Modes of viewing have changed in other ways since 1972 and the serial isn’t bingewatch-friendly: ‘70s kids’ drama acting often has a hectoring, strident tone and the leads here grate on audiences as well as each other, though they’re not unconvincing … claustrophobia is emphasised by the tiny cast (five characters for two and a half hours) and few sets (basically, three rooms) … the script has to pause and play catch-up every episode to fill in viewers who’d missed the story so far … and the plot stutters with repeated fades from Marianne’s bedroom to the twilit dream.  Escape also isn’t as focused on being terrifying as many remember – which may, paradoxically, be why its disturbing aspects were effective.  The horrors creep in surprisingly so the last episodes are much darker than the first.

Marianne Austin (Vikki Chambers) is thrown from her pony and ordered by her doctor (Edmund Pegge) to stay in bed for months, which puts her in a bad mood.  The huge pin-up of a grinning Persuaders era Tony Curtis in her bedroom can’t help.  Her father is away drilling for oil in Tunisia and her mother (Sonia Graham) is a long-suffering housewife.  Council-supplied home teacher Miss Chesterfield (Patricia Maynard) regularly keeps Marianne up to date with schoolwork.  The girl is interested in hearing about Mark, another of Miss Chesterfield’s pupils, who is bedridden with a more serious illness.  Using an old pencil she believes has magic properties, Marianne draws a house in a desolate landscape – and, in her dreams, finds herself there.  When she adds something to her picture, like a flight of stairs or bars on the windows, they appear in the dreamworld.  She draws Mark (Steven Jones) as a resident but gets irritated by him and changes the picture for the worse, adding a guardian ring of sinister stones with human eyes.

The ‘rules’ are established and played by – only the one pencil works, and what she draws with it can’t be rubbed out – but the story is spun out by the impatient heroine’s temper tantrums, mood swings, thoughtless actions and half-belief that none of this matters because it’s all a dream (though she suspects the real Mark is affected by what happens in her imaginary house).

For all the awkward line readings, these kids are more believable than most children in TV and film: they don’t act like miniature, responsible adults but bicker the way bored children actually do.  Marianne’s streak of cruelty is understandable without being over-analysed.  Her absent father – the big bad in Bernard Rose’s re-adaptation of the novel Paperhouse (1988) – is offscreen to keep the costs down rather than to suggest a fracturing of the girl’s family.  Storr’s idea is appealing: it mutated into a Doctor Who episode (‘Fear Her’, 2006) and has twice become a stage musical (1999, 2004).  Escape Into Night does a great deal with limited resources to make the drawn house an unearthly environment.  Whispering sounds, a ticking clock and a lack of music help.  When Marianne draws in a radio set, the children hear the stones’ disturbing inner monologue (‘Not the light … not the light’).  The stones with eyes – the thing most viewers remembered – are used sparingly, established early but only really becoming a threat when the children feel it’s urgent that they escape the dream house and the encircling watchers.

Boswell worked on The Tomorrow People, Noddy, Timeslip and Shadows).  Director Richard Bramall has credits on Casualty, The Bill, Bergerac, All Creatures Great and Small and the like; his other horror effort was ‘Special Delivery’, the Pauline Quirke-starring haunted supermarket episode of Nigel Kneale’s Beasts (1976).  Storr wrote a sequel Marianne and Mark (1960), which dispenses with the magic pencil and finds the protagonists – who never confirm or deny their earlier experience – as mid-teens.