Emily Vancamp hosted ABC-TV’s Marveclass="underline" 75 Years, from Pulp to Pop!, which looked at the success of the comics publisher turned mega-movie studio.
Produced for the BBC by Oxford Scientific and narrated by Claire Foy, Frankenstein and the Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night was a drama-documentary recreation of the night in 1816 that led to the creation of Frankenstein and the first modern vampire story. Hannah Taylor Gordon portrayed Mary Shelley, and Miroslav Zaruba played her literary Monster.
Smugly presented by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the BBC’s four-part series Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction (aka The Real History of Science Fiction) gave the impression that most SF was based on films and TV shows, despite commentary from the inevitable Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Aldiss, Audrey Niffenegger and Ursula K. Le Guin. My Life in Science Fiction was a series of three spin-off shows, narrated by the indefatigable Mark Gattis.
During the lead-up to Hallowe’en, historian Andrew Graham-Dixon led viewers through the BBC’s three-part series The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour, which looked at the literature, art and architecture of the period.
TCM premiered the documentaries Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen and George Lucas & the World of Fantasy Cinema. In the latter, the film-maker looked back over a century of fantasy movies, with clips from A Trip to the Moon (1898) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011).
In February, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Robert Forrest’s two-part adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, starring Robert Glenister as Father Karras, Iain McDiarmid as Father Merrin and Lydia Wilson as the possessed Regan.
Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s cursed immortal wanderer (Paul Hilton) helped an old friend who was being haunted by a malevolent spirit in the four-part Afternoon Drama: Pilgrim.
In Baczkiewicz’s ‘Ghosts of Heathrow’, broadcast in the same slot, Paul McGann’s businessman encountered various phantoms at the busy London airport. The forty-five minute drama was interspersed with interviews with real Heathrow workers. A young woman (Indira Varma) discovered that there were legal consequences to using pixie blood for her tattoos in Ed Harris’ fifteen-minute Afternoon Drama: ‘Pixie Juice’.
Good Omens was a six-part dramatisation by Dirk Maggs of the comedic fantasy novel about the son of Satan by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The voice cast included Mark Heap, Peter Serafinowicz, Josie Lawrence, Phil Davis, and the two authors themselves playing policemen.Maggs also reunited original radio cast members, including Simon Jones, Stephen Moore and John Lloyd, to relive their adventures for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Live at the BBC Radio Theatre in March.
In Sean O’Connor’s re-imagining of Blithe Spirit, fictional characters from the Archers radio series were cast as characters in Noël Coward’s classic wartime supernatural comedy. Real-life cast members included Julian Rhind-Tutt and Eleanor Bron.
BBC Radio 4 also presented a five-part serialisation of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise, featuring Daphne Alexander as Modesty and Neil Maskell as Willy.
Having appeared in the 1969 movie version, actress Joanna Lumley was back as the lethal henchwoman to Alfred Molina’s Blofeld in Martin Jarvis’ ninety-minute production of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which once again featured Toby Stephens as James Bond.
Meanwhile, an episode of The Reunion was devoted to the Roger Moore era of James Bond films, with contributions from Britt Ekland, Richard Kiel and Moore himself.
Brian Sibley dramatised an epic six-part retelling of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King for BBC Radio 4’s Classic Serial, starring David Warner as Merlin.
Book at Bedtime: The Bone Clocks was a fifteen-part serial based on David Mitchell’s time-spanning metaphysical novel, read by Hannah Arterton and Luke Treadaway, while Ian McKellen read a ten-part adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1914 Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear in the same slot.
James Purefoy starred as bounty hunter “Rick Deckard”, alongside Jessica Rain and Nicky Henson, in Jonathan Holloway’s two-part adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, part of the summer “Dangerous Visions” series on BBC Radio 4.
As part of the same thematic stream, Brian Sibley dramatised Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man into an hour-long radio show starring Iain Glen in the title role, while Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle’s adaptation of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles starred Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell.
The “Dangerous Visions” season continued in Afternoon Drama, which presented a series of short plays that explored future dystopias. These included Anita Sullivan’s The Bee Maker, which was set in the year 2020, when artificial insects were used to help pollinate fruit trees across the planet; Miranda Emmerson’s Iz took place in the segregated world of 2091, ravaged by Avian flu; Trevor Preston’s two-part The Zone unfolded in a world where the criminal elite controlled the trade in body parts, while Stephen Keyworth’s The Two Georges looked at how paranoid SF writer Philip K. Dick (Kyle Soller) was investigated by the FBI in the early 1950s.
Robert Powell played Ebenezer Scrooge in Saturday Drama‘s festive musical version of Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.
Film expert Matthew Sweet investigated the creative rivalry between British film studios Hammer and Amicus during the 1960s and ‘70s in the half-hour Radio 4 documentary Houses of Horror.
In November, BBC Radio 4 Extra presented a welcome repeat of Robert Holmes’ creepy six-part drama Aliens of the Mind, originally broadcast in 1977 and starring Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.
A month later, the same broadcaster presented a rare repeat of the 1981 production of Gregory Evans’ The Hex, loosely based on M.R. James’ ‘Casting of the Runes’ and featuring Conrad Phillips and Kim Hartman.
The free weekly horror fiction podcast Pseudopod marked its 400th episode with a classic story by James Tiptree, Jr. and partnered with John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine for its “Women Destroy Horror” project. It also offered readings of work by such contemporary authors as Joe Hill (available to North American subscribers only), Daniel Mills, Silvia Moreno Garcia, David Nickle, Christopher Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Terry Dowling, Paul Finch, Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, Kim Newman and Darrell Schweitzer, along with classic authors like Charles Dickens, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, Elliott O’Donnell and Alfred Noyes.
On May 27, film legend Sir Christopher Lee celebrated his 92nd birthday by releasing a heavy metal album. Metal Knight featured seven tracks, including two covers from the musical Man of La Mancha.
Veteran British-born actress Angela Lansbury returned to the London stage after thirty-nine years to portray muddled medium Madame Arcati in Michael Blakemore’s impressive revival of Noël Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre. Jemima Rooper played the seductive but irritating ghost accidentally called up by the flamboyant clairvoyant.