SNT 1959-10-01-TheHollowMan(JohnDicksonCarr).txt
The Hollow Man" : Saturday Night Theatre 10.1.1959
The Hollow Man","John Dickson Carr","Home","10.1.1959/2115","Norman Shelley/Barbara Couper/Lockwood West/David March. Dramatised by John Keir Cross.
The fairly recent series of Gideon Fell mysteries starring Donald Sinden have had their moments, although the last suffered from the restrictions of a 55 or so minute time slot. John Dickson Carr's plots have enough twists and turns to fill 90 minutes without any difficulty. However, from the opening jokey music, the Sinden versions are played somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
The original rendition of this play from 1959 with Norman Shelley as Fell was played straight and, apart from a slight touch of the "theatricals" in one or two places, stands up well today. My Saturdays in the late 1950s always involved playing out with friends in the daytime, a quick early tea and out to the local flea-pit cinema, and finally home to bed with the valve portable radio by the pillow listening to "SNT" in the dark. This sacrosanct routine was soundly trashed when the BBC in its wisdom brought the starting time for SNT forward from 9.15 to 8.30 - at that stage of life, the cinema won!). "The Hollow Man" with its background of convicts escaping from buried coffins and not one, but two, 'impossible' murders (both observed by independent witnesses but with a rational explanation at the end) started me off as a collector of Carr's fiction, which I read avidly for years. John Dickson Carr was a prolific writer of radio plays himself in the 1940s, and some of his playscripts have been published in recent years. Sadly, very few tapes have ever surfaced.
Notes from Sutton Elm and prepared by katydidit.
Original recording shared by 'Magersfontein' is at 128k/stereo and Sadsack has kindly filtered to 80k/mono.
Many thanks to Magersfontein for sharing this rare Saturday Night Theatre and Sadsack for his sound engineering skills.
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