Dead of Night is described (by the BFI, no less) as a “legendary BBC horror anthology series.” I’m not quite sure what qualifies a TV show to be legendary, perhaps it’s something to do with how a series is remembered—shocking, controversial, scary, disturbing—rather than any association with mythical status.

I recall when Dead of Night was first screened, I wasn’t allowed to sit up late to watch its first episode “The Exorcism,” as my superstitious father believed its occult subject matter might lead an impressionable mind into devil-worship. Personally, I never considered that an option for my god-fearing father, no matter how impressionable his mind.

If I had watched it, I would most likely have been a tad disappointed in my childish hope for some Hammer Horror/Dennis Wheatley thrills, as Don Taylor’s drama is not really about the occult, or even an exorcism, but rather it uses the supernatural as a metaphor reflecting the collective responsibility for poverty and social inequality.

Taylor was a political film-maker, who was best known for his early collaborative work with the playwright David Mercer, author of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, amongst others. Both men were dedicated socialists, who produced topical (and there’s the reason some of their work has not lasted) political plays that questioned the role of political action within everyday life.

Taylor was inexplicably placed on a “blacklist” for seven years by the BBC’s James MacTaggart, which stopped Taylor making plays for the BBC’s Drama Department. He moved to the Arts Department, where he wrote and directed documentaries on Sean O’Casey, Wordsworth, the Liverpool Poets, and Milton.

In 1972, Taylor returned to the BBC’s Drama Department to work on Dead of NIght. His contribution to the series was The Exorcism, which tells the story of two comfortable, middle class couples haunted by the ghosts of the past. It’s not exactly directed with any visual flair, Taylor has focused on the dialog and getting his point across in-between some chilling, supernatural horror, but it’s certainly effective and memorable.

The Exorcism proved so successful it was revived on London’s West End with the actress Mary Ure in the cast.

Ure was famed for her roles in the films The MInd Benders with Dirk Bogarde, and Where Eagles Dare, alongside Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Ure was married to the actor Robert Shaw. They had a passionate and tempestuous relationship, but its most damaging effect was that Ure had gradually become an alcoholic. Having taken time-off from film-making to raise a family, Ure returned to the theater in the early 1970s.

In 1975, Mary Ure was starring in The Exorcism, when she mysteriously died. It was claimed by the more sensationalist tabloids that Ms. Ure had committed suicide after being traumatized by the play’s occult subject matter (or worse, possessed by evil spirits). Good copy, but not true. Mary Ure had suffered from depression, and was on prescription dugs. It was the accidental mix of these drugs with alcohol that killed the actress known as the “Scottish Marilyn.”
 

 
Two more chilling episodes from ‘Dead of Night’ after the jump…

 
The playwright David Mercer was born in 1928, in a working class district of Wakefield, in the north of England. He was raised amid the poverty and hardship that bred the instinctual Socialism of his father and uncles, which they had learned from experience, and gathered from books by Wells, Shaw, Lenin and Marx. This was Mercer’s first taste of the politics, handed-down, father-to-son, which was to influence all of his writing.

He quit school at 14, and worked as an apprentice technician, before he signed-on for 4-years with the Royal Navy. He went on to study at King’s College, Newcastle, then married and moved to Paris, where he tried his hand as an artist, before deciding he was best suited at being a writer. He wrote long, rambling novels influenced by Wyndham-Lewis. The practice taught him he could writer, but his novels were too abstract and had no relation to how he truly felt. This taught him that he could write but was not a novelist, he therefore started writing plays.

His first Where the Difference Begins (1961) was originally intended for the stage, but was produced for television by the BBC. The play was a valediction to the old men of Socialism, the Keir Hardie inspired patriarchical socialism being left behind by the active Marxism of a younger generation. The play reflected the difference between his father’s beliefs and Mercer’s own—though Mercer was smart enough to be critical of his own ideals.

The play was successful and he followed it with A Climate of Fear (1962), which dealt with conscience under the threat of a possible nuclear war, and The Birth of a Private Man (1963), concerning the problems of maintaining strong political conscience within an affluent environment.

Mercer brought a naturalism to the theater of ideas—he discussed issues of Empire, politics and patriarchy in plays such as, The Governor’s Lady (1965) and After Haggerty (1970), while his television plays, The Parachute (1968), which starred fellow playwright John Osborne, and On The Eve of Publication (1969) with an incredible central performance by Leo McKern, and Shooting the Chandelier (1977) with Alun Armstrong and Edward Fox, which have shaped TV drama right through to present day (in particular the works of Stephen Poliakoff or David Hare), though David Mercer himself is all too often forgotten.

Though a Socialist, Mercer was never blinkered to the follies and mistakes of Socialism, Communism and the politics of the Left. He was aware that the aim of political revolution was often frustrated by the inherited conventions of society, and by the frailty of human emotion and mind. This was shown to it great effect in the film version of his play, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), in which David Warner, had an obsessional relationship with Marxism, apes, and his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave), that led him to (literally) become a revolutionary “gorilla” determined to derail his ex-wife’s new relationship. 
 

 
With thanks to NellyM
 
More from David Mercer and the theater of politics, after the jump…