Dickens, Hitchcock and Steam

[mrs_emma_peel]

Dickens, Hitchcock and Steam on BBC4’s Railway Night ...



One of the very best ghost stories ever shown on television is repeated on BBC4 Thursday 9th October, 2008 – Andrew Davies’s brilliant adaptation of Charles Dickens’ terrifying ghost story The Signalman – with Denholm Elliott giving one his finest performances ever, as the ill-contented and troubled Signalman.

The ghost story tells a terrific spine-chilling tale that transports the viewer into the midnight hour and enhances a splendidly planned evening of railway themed programmes on BBC4



8.00-8.30pm

Steam Days – The Fishing Line

Miles Kington travels on one of the most picturesque railways in Britain from Fort William to Mallaig.

8.30-9.00pm

Railway Walks – Discovering Snowdonia

Julia Bradbury takes a series of walks following the old tracks, overgrown cuttings and ancient viaducts of Britain's lost rail empire.



9.00-10.00pm

Between The Lines – Railways in Fiction and Film

Novelist Andrew Martin presents a documentary examining how the train and the railways came to shape the work of writers and film-makers.

At the beginning of the railway age, locomotives were seen as frightening and unnatural - Wordsworth decried the destruction of the countryside, while Dickens wrote about locomotives as murderous brutes, bent on the destruction of mere humans.

Martin traces how trains gradually began to be accepted - Holmes and Watson were frequent passengers - until by the time of The Railway Children they were something to be loved, a symbol of innocence and Englishness. He shows how trains made for unforgettable cinema in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter, and how when the railways fell out of favour after the 1950s, their plight was highlighted in the films of John Betjeman.



10.00-11.35pm

The Lady Vanishes

Classic Hitchcock suspense drama in which a young couple investigate the mysterious disappearance of an old lady on a train from Switzerland to England and unwittingly become involved in a spy plot. The train staff insist that the woman never existed - is it possible that everyone on the train is part of a conspiracy?



11.35-12.15am

The Signalman

The Signalman, was the 1976 entry in the successful Ghost Story for Christmas BBC TV series. Charles Dickens' spine-tingling tale of rationalism versus superstition is set on a lonely stretch of railway at the mouth of a foreboding tunnel, where a haunted man is visited by a spirited traveller and confesses to him that his post is cursed by tragedies and spectres.

The Signalman is the first evidence of Andrew Davies' gift as an adaptor of literary fiction, as he transforms a Victorian page turner into the finest 40 minutes of supernatural drama television has ever produced. His script constantly refers back to the original story, tightening the screw by adding dream sequences, pin-drop conversations and tantalising hints of the terribly inevitable climax.



Director Lawrence Gordon Clarke cast Denholm Elliott in the lead. "Denholm was so wonderful in that role, like a tightly coiled spring. There was such tension in the character: he was always only a step away from insanity."

The railway itself becomes a character in the story, Dickens somehow managing to spot that beyond the shock of the new, there was already something eerily antiquarian about this strange new mode of transport that was roaming through lonely corners of the countryside. And despite an extremely arduous shoot, Davies and Clarke's fog-wreathed, flame crackling masterpiece manages something the production team could never have imagined: it's better than the book.

[EllyMack]

Thanks for that, Mrs Emma. When I took my English literature O'level at night school, 'The Signalman' was one of an anthology of short stories we had to study and the film, I recall, was very well done.