From Tales of the Unexpected to Inside No.9: how Roald Dahl’s twisted genius comes alive on screen

Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected is remembered not only for its “twist in the tale” endings, but also its opening sequence: the eerie fairground waltz theme tune; the quasi-Bond titles, with the silhouette of a naked woman (well, she looked naked) dancing with fate itself – a gun, a roulette wheel, tarot cards, faces of death; and lastly Roald Dahl, sat at a crackling fireside, introducing that week’s strange yarn.

It’s during one of these softly-spoken introductions that Dahl ponders the streak of deathly black humour that underscores his tales. “If a bucket of paint falls on a man’s head, that’s funny,” says Dahl to the camera. “If the bucket fractures his skull at the same time and kills him, that’s not funny – it’s tragic. And yet, if a man falls into a sausage machine and is sold in the shops at so-much a pound, that’s funny. It is also tragic. So why is it funny? I don’t know.”

In that particular episode, Neck, Joan Collins plays an adulterous wife whose head gets stuck in a wooden sculpture. After a humiliating effort to get her free, having her lovely head lubed up with butter and Vaseline, there’s only one way out: to be decapitated by her axe-wielding husband.

First broadcast in 1979, Neck sums up the early Roald Dahl-led Tales of the Unexpected: top-drawer stars; deliciously dark irony; the perils of morality and comeuppance; and an occasional cruelness to women. 

(In another intro, Dahl describes how Indian men bump off their wives by slipping tigers’ whiskers into their food. “In other countries, tigers’ whiskers are rather hard to come by,” says Dahl. “So we husbands have to use other, less refined methods.”)

By its third series, Tales of the Unexpected had mostly run out of Roald Dahl stories. But the show – an immense ratings success and overseas hit for Anglia Television – continued until 1988, chalking up an impressive nine series. Even now, the impish, sometimes sinister spirit of the anthology series continues with Inside No. 9, which recently finished shooting its sixth series and is about to return to BBC Two.

Roald Dahl was a writer of macabre short stories long before he was the world’s best-loved children’s author. “He started his career writing short stories,” says Kris Howard from the Roald Dahl Fans website. “A lot were published in magazines – that was the golden age for short stories in magazines. Apart from The Gremlins [a children’s picture book which Disney bought but never adapted] he didn’t write children’s books until he had kids.”

His best known short story is A Lamb to the Slaughter, about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a leg of lamb – and feeds the murder weapon to the police. Susan George and Brian Blessed would star in the Tales of the Unexpected version. Both A Lamb to the Slaughter and The Man from the South – about an oddball gambler who likes to make wagers for other people’s little fingers – were first adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (the latter starring Steve McQueen, no less). In 1961 Road Dahl had even presented another weird tales-style series, Way Out, one of several American anthology shows to emerge after The Twilight Zone.

Tales of the Unexpected came about when Roald Dahl met the producer Sir John Woolf at a Christmas party in 1976. Interviewed by Starburst magazine several years later, Dahl recalled their meeting. “On the spur of the moment I said to him something I have scrupulously avoided saying to any other producers,” said Dahl. “‘How would you like to make a television series of all my stories?’”

On film, Sir John Woolf produced The African Queen, Room at the Top, Oliver! (all Oscar winners), and The Day of the Jackal. For Anglia Television, he was – as described by Anglia – a “drama supremo”.

Interviewed in 1979, Woolf described how he snapped up the offer to adapt 24 of Dahl’s stories. “I accepted with alacrity,” Woolf said. The savvy producer had an immediate eye on US television.

“Sir John Woolf had a business mind,” says Carol Gould, the Tales on the Unexpected story editor from 1981 to 1988. “The red lights went on in his head. He thought this could be not just a great creative project but also a great financial project for Anglia.”

The series would cost £1.5 million – pricey for the time – but it successfully sold it to US networks, raking back production costs before it had even aired in the UK. It was shown on 70 different stations in the US. Later episodes were even made in the States with a separate US production team.

The carnival-esque theme was composed by Ron Grainer – he also composed the comedy parping of  Steptoe and Son – while the role of sexy dancer went to 27-year-old secretary Karen Standley. She got the job because her boyfriend, who also worked for Top of the Pops, was hired to produce the titles. A generation of dads and kids up past their bedtime will be disappointed to know she wasn’t nude. “Well, it looks as if I am, so they can use their imaginations, can’t they?” said Karen, speaking about the series in 2001. “In fact, I was wearing about three coats of white grease paint.”

Peter Ustinov was in line to present the series, but hosting duties ultimately went to Roald Dahl himself. In front of the camera, Dahl hasn’t quite got the slick charisma of The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, but there’s something about the quaint, delightful Britishness of his delivery which perfectly suits the pace of the show.

The series debuted on March 24, 1979 with its own version of The Man from the South. Airing between 9 and 10pm on Saturday nights, it was a ratings hit. An Anglia press release boasted that A Dip in the Pool – a story about a gambling addict aboard a cruise ship who takes a literal plunge – even beat FA Cup final edition of Match of the Day, attracting 11 million viewers.

Across the first two series, broadcast in 1979 and 1980 respectively, 21 episodes were adapted from Dahl stories. According to interviews at the time, Dahl supervised the adaptations and helped select stories from other writers. They included Robert Bloch, the original author of Psycho. Bloch’s story, Fat Chance (the one preceded by Dahl’s jovial intro on bumping off the missus), tells the story of a man who gives his overweight wife poisoned chocolates.

Among the best of the Dahl-written episodes are William and Mary’: about a disgruntled widow (Elaine Stritch) who discovers her husband’s brain is alive and well – which finally gives her the upper hand in their marriage. There's also Skin, in which a vagrant (Derek Jacobi) has a valuable work of art tattooed on his back – which art collectors go to grisly lengths to procure. Then there's Galloping Foxley, about a stuffy commuter (John Mills) who faces the memory of his sadistic boarding school bully – apparently based on Dahl’s own childhood. 

Dahl’s twists often feel like a punchline, but pick the stories apart – even the seemingly innocuous yarns – and there’s often something tragic, or frighteningly dark lurking there.

The most unnerving of Dahl’s tales is the Series 2 opener Royal Jelly. Timothy West plays a beekeeper who tries to fatten up his poorly baby by feeding her a jelly-like bee secretion – much to the horror of his wife (Susan George’s second role in Tales). There’s a sting in the tail of this one. The final seconds are Cronenbergian horror.

“Roald Dahl had horrible things happen to him in his life,” says Kris Howard. “Going through World War Two, being horribly injured, and having chronic pain for the rest of his life. And his daughter Olivia dying. Patricia Neal [Dahl’s wife] said he pretty much lost his mind with grief [the death of their daughter is the subject of the new film, To Olivia]. His baby son was in an accident where the pram got hit by a taxi and they weren’t sure if he’d live. And his beautiful, glamorous actress wife had strokes and had to be nursed back to health. It’s Book of Job-level stuff. It would be hard for anyone to maintain a particularly sunny outlook.”

It’s well known that Dahl had a fraught relationship with adaptations of his own work. He disliked changes in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and The Witches, and was disillusioned by his experiences writing the screenplays for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and You Only Live Twice. “He didn’t have great luck with the movies,” says Howard. “Some of the biographies say he’d given up on Hollywood by that point.” 

Indeed, it’s interesting that he approached Anglia to adapt his stories and he became the face of the series. “I needed the money,” Dahl told Starburst. But clearly, he endorsed the series.

“He had a high regard for Sir John Woolf,” says Carol Gould. “Sir John's films won Oscar after Oscar. John Rosenberg [also a producer on Tales] always worked with Sir John and I think Roald Dahl had a great respect for them, and what Anglia did. It had the highest production standards. We had the highest requirements of everyone – actors, designers, everyone.”

As Carol tells me, Anglia was dubbed the “Rolls Royce of ITV”, or “19th Century Fox” – a nod to its old school drama and vintage stars. Among Anglia’s other high-end productions were mini-series adaptations of the PD James mysteries.

By the third series, there were just a handful of Dahl tales left. He had labored over his short stories; there was little chance of him knocking out a new batch just for the show. “It took him decades to write that many,” says Kris Howard. “He described writing them like polishing a jewel. It’s really hard to write something that short.”

Dahl still returned to introduce several of the episodes. The Series 3 opener, The Flypaper, written by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor) is perhaps the most harrowing of all the Tales – the story of a schoolgirl pursued by a far-too-talkative stranger. It’s punishingly bleak, like a public information film gone very, very wrong.

When Carol Gould joined as Tales of the Unexpected story editor in 1981, Roald Dahl had finished working with the show. “He allowed the production team to have full reign,” Gould says. “We spent another seven years commissioning writers. We had to find stories with a twist in the tale. I worked with John Rosenberg and Sir John Woolf, taking home stories at the weekend and ploughing through them. We used writers like Antonia Fraser and Wolf Mankowitz – pretty heavyweight names. We got some wonderful directors and stars.”

The cast was impressive right to the end. George Peppard, Jane Asher, Pauline Collins, Joss Ackland, Jim Broadbent, Harry H Corbett, Frank Sinatra Jr, and Telly Savalas were among the guest stars in later series. Carol Gould credits their internationally-known casting director Jenia Reissar. “She was a living legend,” says Gould. “She was known by every actor, actress, producer and writer. She was able to get any star.”

Carol Gould recalls that Elizabeth Taylor (yes, that Elizabeth Taylor) even wanted a role, after Gould became friends with Roddy McDowall during the shoot of Evil Under the Sun in Mallorca. “When he got back to Hollywood, he rang me up and said, ‘I told Elizabeth Taylor that I met you,’” says Gould. “Next thing, I got a bouquet of flowers with a letter saying ‘Please can find me a Tales of the Unexpected to be in?’”

Any show that runs for nine series produces some duds. But the later Tales of the Unexpected are still very watchable. Some of the best non-Dahl stories from later series include Stranger in Town, about a mysterious magician (Derek Jacobi) who endears himself to townsfolk until his reveals his true, terrifying self; Wink Three Times, a farcical bed-hopping romance with a rare happy ending (starring Peter Davison and Liza Goddard); and Blue Marigold, in which the star of a naff TV ad (Toyah Wilcox) cracks up – and things turn genuinely nasty in the final seconds. Long after he left the show, the best episodes continued to have the playfulness or dark edges of Roald Dahl. 

“I don’t think he had the best view of humanity,” says Kris Howard.  “I think in little kids he did – you get the sense of a little more goodness in his children’s stories. But his adult stories are pretty bleak. He knew that people don’t mind a bit of nastiness.”

Inside No 9 series six premieres on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on Monday 10 May at 9:30pm