The Stone Tape

Despite being a single studio drama first broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 and reshown only once a few months later, Nigel Kneale's seminal TV ghost story still seems to have managed to mark, scar or otherwise influence just about everyone who saw it back then. Amongst my generation of horror writers, most either acknowledge a debt or at least are aware of its effect on the field.

And to say that this has been possibly the most wished-for and anticipated release of its kind would be no exaggeration. There have been rare festival showings of the British Film Institute's archive copy, but otherwise THE STONE TAPE has been inaccessible for almost 30 years. More than a memory, almost a legend. Murky tenth-generation bootlegs circulated on VHS and versions of the script could be found out there on the internet, but these only sharpened the sense of absence. They did little to mitigate it.

So it's hard to imagine a more fitting first release for the BFI's new line of archive television drama, in a schedule that includes Ken Russell's DELIUS - SONG OF SUMMER and, to come, Peter Watkins' THE WAR GAME. According to the sleeve notes, Region 0 coding means that the DVD will play anywhere in the world, but would-be US buyers beware - despite being region-free, the discs will only play on machines that can handle the PAL system. The big questions now, of course, are a) Does the release do THE STONE TAPE justice, and, even more importantly, b) Does the material hold up in comparison to the memory?

To a restored country mansion called Taskerlands comes a team of research technologists led by the controlling and bombastic Peter Brock (Michael Bryant). The team includes nervy and damaged computer programmer Jill (Jane Asher), and they're here to brainstorm their way to a new form of information storage and transmission that anticipates the digital revolution in uncanny detail. Brock believes that he may have glimpsed his personal and professional grail in the form of Taskerlands' resident ghost, a recurrent haunting that has driven the builders away with their work uncompleted. No believer in the supernatural, Brock seeks a scientific explanation. Matter, he suggests, may be able to absorb an emotional charge that can be triggered to replay the moment of its imprinting directly into the medium of the human mind; that, in essence, is the reality behind the ghost and the nature of the 'stone tape'.

This is pure Kneale, the application of the rational to the irrational, not to demystify it but to take it to an entire new level. In turning their equipment onto the phenomenon, the scientists not only fail to tame it... they reveal it to have depths and dimensions that are way beyond their hope of control.

Have the BFI done the old show justice? Yes, they have. I haven't seen the VHS, but the DVD transfer is sharp and bright and looks far better than early '70s videotape has any right to. I'm sure it didn't look anything like as good as this when I saw it on first broadcast. The extra features are small in number but high in relevance, unlike the usual herding-together of trailers and TV spots that bulk out a disc menu but add no value. There's a short 'filmography' section (most of the text of which can also be found in the VHS sleeve notes), downloadable scripts of both THE STONE TAPE and THE ROAD, and an illuminating commentary/conversation track with Kneale and Kim Newman.

As to whether it holds up, that's more of a subjective question. For me, it does, passing the 'be careful what you wish for' test with flying colours. But it _is_ an archive piece, a lost form - the big, serious, one-off TV studio drama. Such dramas resembled the film form in a superficial way - scenes, shots, cuts - but were essentially theatrical. It was the acting that dictated the rhythm of a scene and the cutting was done by a vision mixer in the gallery, following the performances in real time. Postproduction editing was kept to a minimum and mainly involved stringing the shot scenes together into a continuity; more complex edits were usually required for outdoor sequences where multiple-camera technique had been unfeasible, and these tended to be less successful.

(There were various reasons for this - union practices and the technically cumbersome nature of two-inch tape ensured that it was top-grade video engineers who did the actual cutting, and the amount of expensive machinery that had to be tied up meant that all video editing was done against the clock, and in a hurry. What you can now do on your PC once involved analogue dubbing back and forth between three playback-and-record machines, each one the size of a small car).

(God, I feel old all of a sudden).

As far as THE STONE TAPE's concerned this means that Peter Sasdy's fluent, ambitious direction pushes the medium right to its limits and often exposes them. This unsteady crane shot, that patently fake stumble... and everybody shouts a lot, the way they do in the theatre. And the visual effects are... well, the effects are purely token in a disco-light kind of way.

But nonetheless, THE STONE TAPE justifies its reputation as a landmark achievement in TV drama, in the genre, and in Kneale's career. Trust me. Your life is incomplete if you haven't seen it yet.

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