Audio CDs review
Starring Valentine Dyall, Vincent Price, Eleanor Bron
BBC Audiobooks/AudioGO
Release date Out now

This is BBC Radio Fear…

Ghost stories are funny things. No one ever tells one without first making the genre abundantly clear – yet the ghostly goings-on rarely manifest until the end, making the rest of the story an exercise in anticipation, ahead of an inevitable, and predictable, conclusion.

So if we all know the ending will be: “He was dead all along!” or: “It was the self same house where those terrible events took place so many years before!” the only criteria on which to judge a ghost story is by how well it sustains its mood, and how heavy its atmosphere hangs. It’s a quality any good parapsychologist would call “spookiness”.

These three collections from the BBC’s chiller cabinet span 70 years of tellings and retellings of classic tales, with varying degrees of that all-important attribute. Oldest and best among them is Appointment with Fear, comprising four episodes of the famous radio series that made a name for Valentine Dyall as “your storyteller, the man in black”.

Dating from 1943 to 1945 (though the show ran well into the 1950s), these tall tales succeed for not in fact being supernatural at all. Instead, they are tightly plotted little thrillers dealing with murder and madness, and the images they conjure up are all the more vivid for being set in the real world.

The Price of Fear, meanwhile, is set in a no-place of storytelling, where the listener has no sense of the characters or settings existing beyond their purpose in some very slight stories. Made in the 1970s in an attempt to recapture the success of Appointment with Fear, these full-cast dramas replaced Dyall with the equally distinctive sounding Vincent Price, as both narrator and main character in a series of odd encounters.

These mostly concern Price meeting up with insufferable friends who bore him terribly until it is time for the heavily telegraphed denouement. While Price is drily humourous and endlessly listenable, to say these stories were well signposted would be an understatement. Rather, they come with full GPS coordinates, like some kind of spooky satnav. Even the title of one of the stories is a dead giveaway!

Perhaps the best thing to say about The Price Of Fear is that it mixes supernatural stories with strictly earthly ones, so you never quite know what you’re going to get. However, only the fourth and final story, The Ninth Removal is really worth a listen, starring as it does the wonderfully batty Richard Pearson (The Wind in the Willows, One of our Dinosaurs is Missing).

Finally, and bang up to date, Ghostly Tales is a collection of short stories read by Michael Maloney, Eleanor Bron and Andrew Sachs. None of the actors sounds especially engaged as they fail to breathe life into lesser known tales by Bram Stoker, Jerome K Jerome and Sir Walter Scott, and the whole affair sounds terribly tasteful: ghost stories as period curiosities rather than anything that might frighten the horses.

It’s all a far cry from the 1940s, when listeners would gather round the radio to listen to Valentine Dyall’s dark voice in the dark night, drawn into another world for half an hour. The ghosts of Ghostly Tales are background bogeys, suitable for driving or while doing the ironing. When it comes to genuine spookiness, none of these tales can touch that Dyall. Simon Hugo

VERDICT
Appointment with Fear: 7/10
The Price of Fear: 5/10
Ghostly Tales: 3/10