Dahl made a sort of franchise out of Tales of the Unexpected. Following the nude-dancing Anglia TV series of 1979, his great early collections Over to You, Someone Like You, Switch Bitch and Kiss Kiss were pillaged and re-packaged as ‘More Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘Further Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘New Tales of the Unexpected’ and so on in limitless pile-‘em-high editions. Any new stories were generally unconvincing, and with Jeffrey Archer’s entry into the surprise-ending market with A Twist in the Tale (1988) the genre died an ignominious death.The title Tales of the Unexpected did not originate with Dahl, however. There was an earlier US TV series which aired in 1977 called Tales of the Unexpected. And the ultimate owner of the franchise was a far greater writer: HG Wells. His original Tales of the Unexpected was published in 1922, and included classic stories such as ‘The Door in the Wall’ and ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’.
Consulted:
Treglown, Jeremy: Roald Dahl (1994)
See a clickable index of all titles covered
No comments:
Post a Comment