1972
TV: The Stone Tape
Creator: Nigel Kneale
Well, I found the DVD this year in my local library. Since it's often mentioned in sci-fi round-ups I thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm not saying how ...
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The Stone Tape
A British electronics research team try to analyse a ghost.
Commissioned as "a ghost story for Christmas", this Nigel Kneale script is one of the masterpieces of genre television. It's a genuine alliance of mind-stretching science fiction concepts with the suspense mechanisms of horror.
An electronics company buys up a derelict country house as a research centre to develop new recording media. The project co-ordinator (Michael Bryant) discovers that a particular room needed for computer storage has not been made ready because the workmen refuse to go into it.
A sensitive computer programmer (Jane Asher) sees the ghost of a terrified 19th-century servant girl. Bryant decides to treat the haunting as a set of data that can be analysed with all the scientific equipment at the company's disposal.
As the rational scientists dissect the phenomena, the instinctive Asher decides that something more frightening and much older lies beneath the Victorian spook and is drawn into a tragic finish.
Intensely acted, the play carries over the themes of Kneale's work on Quatermass and the Pit, pitting science against the supernatural and discovering that an explanation doesn't always mean an end to the terror.
Work nominated by electronicseadog.
Text © Radio Times/BBC Worldwide
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