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The Grave - Rod Serling (Audio CD)
by Jake Speed
The Grave is a Twilight Zone radio adaption from 2009. It's based on a television episode written by Montgomery Pittman and originally broadcast in 1961 as part of series three of the cult fantasy series. The Grave is a good solid ghost story set in the old west and begins with an outlaw named Pinto Sykes being ambushed and gunned down ... by a group of men in a small town. Soon afterwards, grizzled gun for hire Conny Miller (played by Michael Rooker here and by Lee Marvin in the television version) arrives in town. Miller had been on the trail of Pinto for a long time but had never quite managed to catch up with him for some reason. He enters the tiny saloon where the men who killed Pinto are waiting, these men also the ones who hired Miller to hunt and kill Pinto in the first place. He is told that Pinto is dead and goaded somewhat about the fact that he was unable to ever confront Pinto, almost as if he'd never wanted to and had failed deliberately. Miller is irritated by the suggestion he was scared of Pinto but spooked when told that Pinto's last words were that if Miller ever went near his grave he would reach up and grab him. The men offer Miller a wager. To win all he has to do is trek up to Pinto's lonely windswept cemetery alone at midnight and plunge a knife into the burial mound to prove he was actually there. Surely he still isn't afraid of Pinto, even in death? An uneasy but annoyed Miller agrees to the challenge and prepares to make his way out into the night and begin the walk to Pinto's grave. Will his old rival really come back to haunt him?
The Twilight Zone featured several episodes set in the old west and The Grave was probably the best of them. There is something about the period and setting that is quite conducive to a spooky ghost story and - both here and in the television version - all the possibilities of the time and place are used effectively to enhance the eerieness of the tale on offer. Most notably I suppose the fact this all takes place on a very blowy and wild night with the wind howling away outside as it whips around corners and rattles signs in the street. You can paint a vivid picture in your imagination of the little saloon very late at night, a tired and irritated Miller at the bar as he is questioned about his apparent lack of enthusiasm for finding Pinto. The story here is just a good old fashioned ghost story with the wonderfully simple but enjoyable device of Miller having to go up to Pinto's gave alone and stick a knife in it to win his wager and - perhaps more importantly - prove he isn't a coward. The music here is pleasantly spare and understated and the sound effects are incorporated into the adaption in an equally agreeable fashion. The old fashioned and rather desolate nature of the setting (small, quiet and empty cowboy town in the dead of night) is captured quite nicely too although the television version had a huge advantage of course.
Michael Rooker (currently playing the nasty one in The Walking Dead who got handcuffed to a roof in an early episode) has a very deep gravelly voice that is convincingly weary and cynical here and could believably be from another era. Lee Marvin was excellent in the original (which also had Lee Van Cleef in it too if I remember) but Rooker is well cast. He's able to convey the barely concealed apprehension of Miller. He's defiant and determined to not look or sound uncertain but he is really. As silly as it sounds, the dying promise of Pinto to reach out to him from beyond the grave has deeply unsettled Miller. Able support to Rooker comes from Stacey Keach, a regular in the radio series, who takes on the plot function mostly of the character played by James Best in the original and also has the monologue and Twilight Zone intro duties famously performed by the late Rod Serling. These audio stories are not straight transcripts of the television episodes and do change a few things here and there. In the case of The Grave there are no jarring modifications that will irritate fans of the series and it always does a decent enough job in capturing the dustball, lonely dark and stormy night old west quality of the original piece.
A strength here is the source material by Montgomery Pittman. Pittman was excellent at detail and language, how people spoke in certain places and periods. His three episodes, this, The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank and Two were all well above average and it's a shame he didn't do more. The Grave's intimate nature works well on radio and although the story here is rather slight it is clever and manages to keep the listener entertained over the 40 or so minutes that it lasts. Even if you are familiar with the original television version you should have fun with this, especially late at night listened to through earphones for extra effect. Out of the adaptions in this series I've listened to so far The Grave is certainly one of the best and more suitable for this radio format than some of the other stories. I think the fact that these adaptions don't try to be too flashy or showy with multiple actors and sweeping music and sound effects is a great help and makes them enjoyably understated at times. Any Twilight Zone fans who are interested in this radio series should certainly enjoy The Grave. At the time of writing you buy The Grave as part of an audio collection of these or download it individually for £1.19.
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The Time Machine (Audio CD)
by Jake Speed
The Time Machine: Classic Radio Sci-Fi is a (yes, you guessed it) radio adaption of the classic 1895 fantasy novella by HG Wells. This famous yarn was all about a Victorian gentleman who travelled far into the future in his incredible Time Machine constructed from ivory, quartz, nickel and brass, allowing Wells not only to tell an ... exciting and imaginative story but present a parable about class and a possible future for mankind. This BBC adaption was released as an audiobook in 2009 and is 100 minutes long in duration. There are a few changes from the novel apparent right from the start. It's not as bad as that awful Time Machine film with Guy Pearce of about ten years ago but you do get slightly irritated that they never seem to leave Wells' books in their original form. The story here opens not in the warm glow of a Victorian home but in 1943 during the London blitz. HG Wells (William Gaunt) is recording a speech for the Home Service and afterwards talks to a young journalist named Martha (Donnla Hughes). Wells drops a bombshell when he claims that his novel The Time Machine was not fiction but something that actually happened. He was one of the Victorian Time Traveller's (Robert Glenister) weekly invited dinner companions and witnessed the return of the shaken time jumper before listening to the amazing story of what had happened to him in the far distant future. Wells recounts the extraordinary tale to Martha with a few extra details that were absent from his famous novel...
This is a modestly ambitious audio rendering of The Time Machine that has its moments but doesn't quite do enough to be regarded as a classic or memorable audiobook. The device of having an older Wells tell the story as if it really happened is quite interesting but was hardly essential. It does become a little wearing the way they always have to come up some minor twist or modification when adapting old stories sometimes. William Gaunt as Wells therefore has the bulk of the work here and he's generally fine. Gaunt, in case you didn't know, is a veteran actor who I think was in several sitcoms in the eighties and nineties. He's best known for the 1960s adventure series The Champions where he played one of three super powered humans who worked for the government. Or something. There was an American bloke who looked like James Bond, the lovely Alexandra Bastedo and Gaunt, Gaunt being the most unlikely member of the team as he looked like he'd struggle to hold his own with Larry Grayson in a fight let alone dodgy foreign super agents. Anyway, Gaunt has a warm and quite distinguished voice and is well cast. The Time Traveler is voiced by Robert Glenister (brother of Gene Hunt actor Phillip). Glenister is someone you'd probably recognise from television if you saw him (I remember him playing one of David Jason's assistants in Inspector Frost) and although he looks like a bit of a scruffy herbert in real life he's fine here, posher than usual and sounding relatively enthusiastic about being in this radio play.
The Time Traveller of course travels far beyond his own time into the 83rd Century and finds that human beings have evolved into two separate races - the Eloi and Morlocks. The Eloi are like children and live out a carefree existence on the surface. The grunting monster like Morlocks are subterranean and surface at night to prey on the Eloi. The Morlocks are suggested to be descendants of the working classes, the story making a not so veiled comment on the ever growing gulf between the classes as witnessed by Wells. The Eloi are suggested to be the descendants of the upper classes, the fragile and vacuous result of centuries of idleness and easy living. The section of the novel where the Time Traveller explores this strange new world (his Time Machine is temporarily out of action, leaving him stranded) is very gripping in the book and some of this sense of wonder and strangeness is captured quite nicely here at times. 'All the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror.' Problems with these sections? I suppose the most obvious would be some of the sound effects used to convey these future offshoots of the human race. The Eloi in particular are conveyed by a what sounds like a continental foreign language and also a fluffy chirping cooing noise. You sometimes can't help imagining Robert Glenister surrounded by cheeky little puppet monkeys or something.
Much better is the background music which is very ambient and atmospheric in line with this off-kilter dystopian world that the Victorian inventor has found himself in. There are a few changes here and there to the story (the ending is tinkered with in particular) and while it's always mildly interesting and fun to have a few additions and further speculations on the Time Traveller and what happened to him I wouldn't have had a problem myself with just being given a faithful version of the novel. The Time Traveller has a portable dictaphone here to record his thoughts. Obviously, if he can invent a time machine he's more than capable or inventing a recording device but it does seem rather contrived. In fact, the whole addition of an elder HG Wells recounting the story as if it were true does seem somewhat clunky too. While Gaunt is an enjoyable presence here you can't help thinking the whole thing might have worked just as well if the bedraggled Time Traveller had told his tale to his dinner guests in Victorian London as he munched on some mutton and drank some wine - just as he did in the original novel. The Time Machine: Classic Radio Sci-Fi is generally good fun and well acted but ultimately never quite as good as you want it to be. Those who haven't read the novel might possibly enjoy it more than pedantic HG Wells fans. At the time of writing you can buy this used or new from £7.
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The Little People - Rod Serling (Audio CD)
by Jake Speed
'The time is the space age, the place is a barren landscape of a rock-walled canyon that lies millions of miles from the planet Earth. The cast of characters? William Fletcher, commander of the spaceship; his co-pilot, Peter Craig. The other characters who inhabit this planet you may never see, but they're there, as these two gentlemen ... will soon find out. Because they're about to partake in a little exploration into that grey, shaded area in space and time that's known as the Twilight Zone...'
The Little People is another Twilight Zone radio adaption from 2010 and an audio version of a television episode of the same name originally broadcast in 1963. In The Little People, bickering astronauts William Fletcher and Peter Craig land on a barren asteroid to repair their ship and are forced to put up with each other while they attend to their task. One day, Craig takes a wander around alone and discovers a city society not unlike the human race but with one key difference. The people are smaller than ants and their buildings, ships and cars are like tiny toys to us. The decent Fletcher tells him they should leave the race of tiny people in peace and concentrate on getting off the asteroid but the arrogant Craig becomes drunk with the power his size gives him over this microscopic civilisation. He's soon lording it over the miniature world, telling them they have a new God, threatening destruction, and ordering a huge statue of himself to be constructed in the city. He decides he's going to stay here bossing them around whether Fletcher likes it or not.
This is a slightly underrated Twilight Zone episode and works quite well in a radio version. Stacey Keach and Daniel J Travanti are fine as our chalk and cheese stranded spacemen and Rod Serling's confrontational dialogue makes this a good two hander between the actors. The actors here don't quite have the intensity of Claude Akins and Joe Maross in the television version but they are fine on the whole. Keach has fun as the deranged and oleaginous Craig, who quickly goes bonkers when he finds the tiny race of people, eager to make them fear him and cater to his every whim. The hubris of Craig builds to a highly enjoyable Twilight Zone twist ending in the classic tradition. The television version was shot in Death Valley but you are able to paint pictures in your imagination here and imagine the rocky, lonely asteroid, the rocket ship silent and awaiting repair, and the strange little world that Craig discovers.
The atmosphere is conveyed here in a number of ways. The beeps and metallic shudders of the ailing ship, ominous music, and then the high-pitched chatter of the tiny city. Because they are so tiny we can't actually make out what they are saying although Craig seems to understand them and they certainly understand him. 'All right, my little friends, comes now the new age, the age of... the age of Peter Craig! Let us commence to build the statue again, let us commence to begin!' The story here is enjoyably daft and serves as a very Rod Serling meditation on human nature, ego, and arrogance. Fletcher has no desire to bother the tiny race but Craig relishes the chance to be an all powerful dictator and reveals himself to be cruel and vain. Rod Serling served in the Pacific as a paratrooper during World War 2 and there is often an anti-war subtext to his stories with some world weary officer who has seen it all having to deal with some abrasive gung-ho character who hasn't seen anything. There is an element of that here in the debates and bickering between Fletcher and Craig.
This is good fun on the whole and another nice addition to what is a likeable and affectionate series of radio plays based on original Twilight Zone episodes. It's quite an intimate piece with just the two actors and it's probably slightly better to imagine the tiny civilisation rather than see it. In the television version you couldn't really see much either but we got some magnifying glass type shots where you could see houses and ships and things. The Little People runs to 40 minutes in this audio version and can be purchased as part of a bumper audio CD collection of these or individually downloaded for £1.19. I should mention that if you go to the official website for this radio series (just type 'Stacey Keach Twilight Zone' into a search engine and it should be one of the first things that comes up) you can I believe actually download a couple of episodes for free as a sample to get an idea of what to expect. That way you can listen to a couple for nothing before deciding if you want to part with any money for some more.
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