NightTransmissions Show 125

The Clock:

Reference Please(01/05/47)

Tales From The Morgue:

Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Vanishing Point:

Strange Child (12/22/86)

Whitehall 1212 :

The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)

The Clock: Reference Please (01/05/47).

Produced in Australia by Grace Gibson Productions The Clock was a thirty-minute series featuring stories of suspense and mystery . The introduction to each show was always the same; “Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death the whole drama of life is written in the sands of time”.

The show debuted on November the 3rd of 1946 and would run for a bit more than a year closing out on May the 23rd of 1948 for a total of 65 shows.

Although the series was produced in Australia the locales for the stories were rather generic.

The actors and actresses spoke without a perceptible Australian accent which caused the program to sound, “American”. This marked the program as a natural for export to the American market where it would be picked up by ABC.

The show must have been reasonably successful because ABC then continued for another 13 weeks with an All-American cast and crew producing 13 new scripts bringing the series to a total of 78 episodes.

This is a bit like Charles “Dickens Christmas Carol”. It is clearly some sort of derivative. I mean when an unpleasant rich old man, finds himself traveling in the company of a spirit to find out what people really think of him. Well suspicions should be aroused, don’t you think? But still, it’s rather fun.

Tales From The Morgue – Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Chet Chetter’s Tales from the Morgue is a series of short stories as told by an old obliging morgue attendant, licensed embalmer and resident story teller named Chet Chetter to a passing stranger of the night played by you the listener. The stories Chet relates to us are all quite fanciful. They deal with topics that would be classified supernatural and science fiction. They border on outrageous but that is how they are meant to be. Roughly half of the shows feature a nice, likable, rural southern manure hauler by the name of Elmer Korn who always finds himself involved in some inane predicament. The creators of the series themselves admit the show is rather off-beat but, you will find, not without it’s own charm which lies within the humorous writing and the recurring characters.

“Where-in Elmer Korn and other residents of Biloxi, Mississippi are troubled by Mole Rats the size of cats and dogs.

Soon enough Elmer goes down the rat hole to find that the trap has turned. It all turns out okay for Elmer.
Not so well for the rats though.

Vanishing Point – Strange Child (12/22/86).

Vanishing Point is a science fiction anthology series that ran on CBC Radio from 1984 until 1986. Declared by the shows introduction to be, “The point between reality and fantasy.
The series was produced by Bill Lane in the C.B.C.’s Toronto studios and produced some excellent radio.
In 1986 Vanishing Point produced a, what I guess you would have to call a miniseries of six programs, each featuring a story that was suggested by ideas found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notepad.Collectively these six episodes are known as, “Thrice Told Tales”.

This is one of those.

The story seems rather Bradberryian (with a dash of Stephen King thrown in for good measure) with it’s conception of the story of a Science Fiction writer and his family, who have taken, what is for the father, a working vacation to the beach.

The children spend their time playing with sand castles on the beach. Well the Girl calls them sand castles. The boy insists they are, “Space Castles”.

In the blink of an eye something terrible seems to happen. The boy shows up at the ...