An Irish Diary

Tales of the Unexpected – ’80s TV that promised a scare at bedtime

An Irishwoman’s Diary

Irish actors Siobhán McKenna and Cyril Cusack featured in Tales of the Unexpected – to scary effect.

Alison Healy's face
Alison Healy
Tue Nov 9 2021 - 04:28

At what age do you finally shake off your childhood fears? For some of us, the answer is never. Perhaps you still take a deep breath before wiping the steam from the bathroom mirror, just in case there is a killer brandishing a bloody knife behind you. Or maybe you pause before opening a shower curtain because you never know who might be lurking behind it.

If even half the movies made in the 1980s were accurate, it would be an enormous surprise to find no one hiding in your bath.

I, for one, always take a very wide berth when passing someone fishing on the riverbank. I have an irrational fear of a fish hook lodging in my cheek when the rod is swung back. I told someone about the fear, expecting him to tell me it was ridiculous, but he immediately told me about a man who got a fishing hook embedded in his eyeball. And then he did a quick internet search and found several similar incidents, as well as a case where a large hook became embedded in a foot. So now there are even more reasons to approach people fishing like they are landmines on the verge of explosion.

Getting a fishing hook embedded in your cheek sounds like something that might have happened to a cartoon character and indeed television is to blame for most of my childhood fears. It certainly is to blame for my fear of getting my hair stuck to flypaper. Remember that twisty strip of yellowing sticky paper that hung from many ceilings to catch flies, in the summers of the 1980s? I shuddered every time I looked at it, and only realised why recently.

READ MORE

I was searching for something on YouTube when I clicked on a link and heard the haunting music of a programme that once terrified and thrilled me in equal measure. I was immediately transported back to the early 1980s, polishing my school shoes during the opening credits of Tales of the Unexpected.

The 1980s series of short stories – mixing horror, mystery and suspense – hopped around RTÉ’s schedules, but for a time it was on at 9.20pm on Sunday nights. It might not have been the most appropriate viewing for impressionable children who should have gone to bed after Glenroe. The sinister fairground music signature tune was accompanied by an apparently naked woman dancing suggestively.

You just knew that this was a world away from Biddy and Miley’s concerns about a calf with scour.

One of the more disturbing Tales of the Unexpected featured a young orphan girl who was pursued by a creepy man at a time when a serial killer was at large. Despite her best efforts, she was lured into danger, and it ended with her panicked face looking at flies helplessly struggling to get off the sticky flypaper. We are forced to conclude that she too would be unable to free herself.

I was so shook afterwards I had to watch Liam Ó Murchú’s Trom Agus Éadrom before I could even think of venturing down the dark hallway to bed.

Just as the fridge was stocked up with sandwich spread for the week’s lunches, Tales of the Unexpected ensured we were well stocked up with nightmares for the week ahead.

Two of the most beloved Irish actors were in a few episodes and they used their charms to lure the viewers into a false sense of security.

In one, Cyril Cusack played the harmless hitchhiker who turned out to be a criminal mastermind. His crimes were minor when compared with those committed by Siobhán McKenna’s apparently kindly landlady. She was so fond of her young male lodgers that she made it impossible for them to leave. I will leave the rest to your imagination, but just know that she had impressive skills in taxidermy.

Of course McKenna had a track record in scaring people. In the 1948 British movie Daughter of Darkness, she played a psychopathic killer who slashed the face of a young boxer she met at a travelling fair. He had been trying to seduce her when all she probably wanted was a goldfish from the carnival. She was shipped off to England to work on a farm, but this was no bucolic dream, and violent chaos followed her arrival.

In the twilight of his acting career, Cusack also arrived at a farm, but this was in Glenroe so only benign chaos followed. And unlike Tales of the Unexpected, his portrayal of Uncle Peter did not lead to sleepless nights.

That Glenroe signature tune did strike fear into every child of school-going age, but that’s a whole other story.

LATEST STORIES