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DENNIS WHEATLEY: A LETTER TO POSTERITY
Tuesday 31 October 2006 11.10pm-12.10am; rpt 2.20am-3.20am |
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He wrote over 70 books and sold over 50 million copies of them; he served his country with distinction in both wars; he sold fine wines to the crowned heads of Europe; but he counted a conman and a murderer among his closest friends and was a keen student of the occult and the black arts.
Dennis Wheatley was labelled the prince of thriller writers by the critics, but less than 30 years after he died, he is largely neglected. In this programme, friends including the actor Christopher Lee and experts including Wheatley's biographer Phil Baker, summon him back to this world and reconsider him as the inheritor of the mantle left by Alexandre Dumas and Rider Haggard - which he himself passed on to the likes of Ian Fleming, George MacDonald Fraser and even Clive Barker.
But if Wheatley were really to return, what would he make of the modern world? At the heart of the programme, we reveal an extraordinary letter written by him in the winter of 1947, consigned to a time capsule and addressed to "Posterity".
In it he reveals his fears for the future and his contempt for the present. Just how representative was he of a slice of British society which found post-war austerity in general and the Labour government reforms in particular almost as bad as the war itself?
The programme includes extensive unseen private archive and contributions from Wheatley's son Anthony. Other participants in the programme are occultist Mogg Morgan, critic and friend Anthony Lejeune, authority on British popular fiction Clive Bloom, historian Philip Murphy and Kate Bradley, from Book Club Associates.
You will need RealPlayer to access the clips. Visit
WebWise for help downloading RealPlayer
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