In January, ABC’s V reboot returned for ten episodes before it was finally put out of everybody’s misery. Original star Marc Singer turned up in the final episode while Jane Badler, who reprised her role as the evil “Diana” from the original 1983 show, turned out to be alien leader Anna’s (Morena Baccarin) estranged mother.
Medium finally also reached the end of its seven-year run on NBC in January. The final episode flash-forwarded forty years into the future.
Chuck played out its fifth and final season on the same network, as Zachery Levi’s character created his own spy agency. Mark Hamill guest-starred in the first episode.
The CW’s Smallville ended after ten seasons with a satisfying two-part finale that finally saw the return of Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor.
The Syfy channel finally aired the remaining nine episodes of its overblown Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, which ended on a virtual reality teaser for a second series that never happened.
NBC’s meandering The Event was also justifiably cancelled, as was Syfy’s SGU Stargate Universe after only two seasons.
As part of Turner Classic Movies’s “Lost and Found” series, in April the station showcased a rare print of the 1976 Spanish film The Mysterious House of Dr C (aka Dr Coppelius), while two months later the “Drive-In Double Features” series presented a number of 1950s “Monsters, Mutants and Martians”. In August, the channel programmed a day of Lon Chaney, Sr. films, including The Monster, Mockery, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar and both the silent and sound versions of The Unholy Three.
On October 3, TCM premiered A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King, an hour-long documentary in which the author traced the history of the genre through personal recollections and film clips.
Appropriately, director John Carpenter was the TCM’s Guest Programmer for the month, and his picks included The Thing from Another World, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Curse of Frankenstein.
Rex Appeal was an hour-long BBC4 documentary about dinosaurs in the movies.
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Michols, Billy Mumy, Angela Carter and Marta Kristen were amongst those who recalled the golden age of TV science fiction and the sometimes rivalry between Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry and Irwin Allen in an episode of PBS’ Pioneers of Television.
Ridley Scott executive produced the Science channel’s eight-part Prophets of Science Fiction docu-series, which began its run with an episode about Mary Shelley (played by Mara King in the re-enactments).
Broadcast by BBC3 from Kirkstall Abbey on 19 March, Frankenstein’s Wedding: Live in Leeds was a muddled musical retelling of Shelley’s classic novel. Andrew Gower played Dr Victor Frankenstein, while David Harewood was his sympathetic Creature.
During the summer, actress Joanna Lumley joined an online petition of those opposed to BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams’ plans to cut the broadcaster’s short story output in favour of more news coverage.
To tie-in with the launch of the mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day in July, Radio 4’s Afternoon Play presented Torchwood: The Lost Files. Broadcast in three forty-five minute episodes, John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Kai Owen recreated their original TV roles alongside Martin Jarvis, Juliet Mills and Rosalind Ayres.
All the Dark Corners featured three spooky tales by Andrew Readman, Paul Cornell and Rosemary Kay and was broadcast over three successive days in the Afternoon Play slot, while The Shining Guest was written and narrated by Paul Evans and used real-life sound recordings to tell the story of a puzzling ancient corpse discovered in the Welsh hills. It was produced by the same team that created The Ditch in 2010.
Other editions of the Afternoon Play featured Kim Newman’s Cry Babies, about busy couple’s genetically enhanced daughter; Sally Griffiths’ Haunted, in which a professional illusionist and a spiritualist medium teamed up for a television show with unexpected results, and A Time to Dance, directed by Julian Simpson, in which a mysterious plague affected London’s South Bank.
Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts of Battersea was adapted over two days in the same slot at Christmas.
Julian Simpson’s Bad Memories for Radio 4’s The Friday Play slot involved the macabre disappearance of a family from their remote country home in 2004, and the discovery six years later in the cellar of five bodies apparently dating back to 1926. The hour-long drama made use of digital audio files to unlock the key to the time-travel mystery.
David Robb starred as Professor Challenger in Chris Harrald’s two-part dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as part of the radio station’s Classic Serial series.
Wilkie Collins’ 1868 macabre mystery The Moonstone was adapted into four one-hour episodes on Radio 4 starring Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Bill Paterson, and Cranham also portrayed carnival owner Mr Dark in Diana Griffiths’ hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, broadcast as The Saturday Play on 29 October.
The following month, Robert Powell starred in an hour-long adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in the same slot.
The crew of a spaceship retrieving a valuable ore from an abandoned mining operation on a mysterious planet encountered an intelligent life form in Mike Walker’s hour-long The Saturday Play: Landfall.
Radio 4’s Weird Tales returned for four new episodes, while Beasts on the Lawn: Saki 2011 featured updated dramatisations of five stories by Edwardian author Saki (H. H. Munro), set in a gated community and linked by security guard Clovis (Pippa Haywood).
Filmed twice by director George Slulzer, The Vanishing was an hour-long radio dramatisation in July of Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg, about a man attempting to discover what happened to his missing girlfriend.
Dramatised by Brian Sibley in six one-hour episodes to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, The History of Titus Groan encompassed the entire Gormenghast trilogy and the epilogue written by his widow, with a cast that included David Warner, Miranda Richardson, Tamsin Greig and William Gaunt.
As part of the morning fifteen-minute Woman’s Hour Drama slot, Kiss Kiss presented five macabre stories by Roald Dahl, dramatised by Stephen Sheridan. Each episode starred Charles Dance, supported by a cast that included Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and John Baddeley.
In May, The Doll: Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier featured abridged readings of three stories by the author of The Birds, while Summer Ghosts in August presented readings of three fifteen-minute spooky tales set in daylight written by Sophie Hannah, Louise Welsh and Adam Thorpe.
David Tennant returned to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime with A Night with a Vampire 2, for which he read fifteen minute adaptations of “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber, “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton, “Drink My Blood” by Richard Matheson and “A Lot of Mince Pies” by Robert Swindells.
In the same slot, Derek Jacobi read Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The House of Silk over ten nights in early November. Meanwhile, James Fleet played Inspector Lestrade, who introduced four half-hour episodes of The Rivals, featuring other fictional detectives of the period. The weekly series kicked off with an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” starring Andrew Scott as C. Auguste Dupin.
In April, BBC Radio 7 was re-branded BBC Radio 4 Extra. Jonathan Morris’ four-part Doctor Who: Cobwebs reunited fifth Doctor Peter Davison with companions Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa in an abandoned gene-tech facility, and their adventures continued in Stephen Cole’s Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest and Marc Platt’s Doctor Who: The Cradle of the Snake.
Meanwhile, Doctor Who: The Hornet’s Nest featured fourth Doctor Tom Baker in three two-part adventures (“The Stuff of Nightmares”, “The Dead Shoes” and “The Circus of Doom”) scripted by Paul Magrs.
The Horror at Bly was Neville Teller’s response to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, while actor Richard Coyle read H. P. Lovecra
ft’s At the Mountains of Madness over five half-hour episodes on successive nights in June.
Don Webb’s four-part dramatisation of Elidor updated Alan Garner’s 1965 novel for a new audience of younger listeners.
In mid-September, Radio 4 Extra broadcast half-hour productions of “The Captain of the Polestar” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Olalia” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” by James Hogg under the umbrella title The Darker Side of the Border.
Mark Gattis returned to introduce new half-hour episodes of The Man in Black on the same station in October, including “Lights Out” by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson.
Radio 4 Extra celebrated Halloween with a selection of Gothic tales from the archive that included an adaptation of Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes v Dracula, a reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, a reading of Tanya Huff’s “Quid Pro Quo” as part of A Short History of Vampires, and a forty-five minute adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla starring Anne-Marie Duff, Celia Imrie, David Warner and Brana Bajic in the title role.
Each evening during the same week, Haunting Women presented five fifteen-minute supernatural tales by Dermot Bolger, while Benjamin Whitrow read Ghost Stories by M. R. James.
Christopher Lee’s Fireside Tales was a fifteen-minute series broadcast over Christmas in which the veteran actor read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”, Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Man of Science”, E. Nesbit’s “John Charrington’s Wedding”, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake” and W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”.
In October, BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3 broadcast Opera North’s new version of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, featuring soprano Dame Josephine Barstow as the mysterious old Countess.
BBC Radio 2 celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the musical Phantom of the Opera with The Phantom Phenomenon in November. Lyricist Don Black talked to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and others about their involvement in the longest-running Broadway musical of all time, which is estimated to have grossed $5.6 billion to date around the world.
Described as a “historical-shtetl-magic-realist-feminist-musical audio drama”, The Witches of Lublin premiered on New York radio stations WBAI and WNYC in April. Co-scripted and introduced by Ellen Kushner, the broadcast included Neil Gaiman amongst the voice cast.
Broadcast on Radio 4 in February, The Priest, the Badger and the Little Green Men from Mars was Rob Alexander’s half-hour profile of prolific genre writer-turned-reverend [Robert] Lionel Fanthorpe, who contributed readings from his own work.
Comedy broadcaster Natalie Haynes investigated the modern fascination with blood-drinkers and the walking dead in Radio 4’s half-hour Vampires v Zombies, while in the two-part Cat Women of the Moon on the same station, novelist Sarah Hook looked at how the SF genre pushes the boundaries of sex with the help of China Miéville, Iain Banks, Nicola Griffith and Robert Winston.
Hosted by The League of Gentlemen writer and actor Jeremy Dyson, The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was a half-hour reappraisal of the author’s work, broadcast on Radio 4 in December.
The CD box set of Tales from Beyond the Pale: Season 1 was hosted by Larry Fessenden and included audio plays featuring Vincent D’Onofrio and Ron Perlman.
The “curse of Spider-Man” continued when actress T. V. Carpio, who took over the role of the evil Arachne after the original actress suffered a concussion, was forced to pull out of the $65 million Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in March following an injury sustained during an on-stage battle.
Following a series of accidents, multiple missed opening dates and a critical lambasting, controversial director and co-writer Julie Taymor was relieved of her day-to-day duties by producers the same month, and the troubled production shut down for more than three weeks as a new team was brought in to re-imagine the show. It finally opened in June to mostly unenthusiastic reviews.
Five months later, former director Taymor reportedly sued the producers of the show for $1 million compensation, claiming they had “violated her creative rights”.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated as Frankenstein and his Creature in Nick Dear’s new adaptation of Frankenstein for director Danny Boyle, which premiered at London’s National Theatre’s Olivier in February.
Anita Dobson and Greta Scacchi portrayed Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively, during the making of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in Anton Burge’s Bette and Joan, which opened at London’s Arts Theatre in May.
That same month, Terry Gilliam directed Hector Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of Faust at the Coliseum, while Arthur Darvill portrayed a melancholy Mephistopheles in Matthew Dunster’s revival of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare’s Globe in June.
Adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin from his 1990 movie, Ghost The Musical opened in July at London’s Piccadilly Theatre.
Despite a much-hyped revamp in November 2010 and a subtle title change to Phantom: Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical sequel still closed its London run at the end of August after just seventeen months. Although a Broadway transfer for the show was delayed, the new version received rave reviews when it opened in Melbourne, Australia, in the summer.
Meanwhile, Lloyd Webber’s production of The Wizard of Oz opened at the London Palladium in March. Michael Crawford starred in the titular role.
Following his stage success with Ghost Stories, the League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson adapted three classic tales for Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales. Polly Findlay’s production ran for a month from the end of January at London’s Lyric Hammersmith theatre.
Actress Judi Bowker (who played “Mina” in the 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula) starred in Harry Meacher’s stage play Mist “After Dracula”, which ran for three nights at the end of February at the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel in London’s Hampstead area. Meacher himself portrayed Van Helsing in the play, which was set ten years after the Count’s death.
Based on his 1985 cult movie, Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator The Musical, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s story. With music and lyrics by Mark Nutter and starring Graham Skipper as crazed medical student Herbert West, the critically-acclaimed stage show ran from March until August at The Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles.
In July, The 2nd H. P. Lovecraft Festival was held at St. Marks Theater, New York City. Written and directed by Dan Bianchi, performance art company Radiotheatre! performed stage versions of “Reanimator” and “The Call of Cthulhu”.
Meanwhile, from its usual venue in Portland, Oregon, the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival expanded to Los Angeles in September. Along with screenings of short films and rarities (including a new version of The Whisperer in Darkness), the event featured appearances by directors Roger Corman and Guillermo Del Toro and readings by Michael Shea, Cody Goodfellow and Jenna Pitman.
Alison Steadman, Hermione Norris, Robert Bathurst and Ruthie Henshall starred in a revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit at London’s Apollo Theatre, while Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton were the stars of Jonathan Kent’s critically-acclaimed revival of Stephen Sondheim’s macabre musical Sweeney Todd, which made its debut at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
Ralph Fiennes starred as a tortured Prospero in Trevor Nunn’s sold-out revival of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which ran at London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket, over nine weeks in September and October. The production took more than £1 million in advance ticket sales.
In early summer, the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre staged an outdoor production of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The Veil, playwright and director Conor McPherson’s first piece in five years, dealt with secrets and spiritualism in 1822 Ireland, while a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1994 play Haunting Julia was said to have caused the show to be stopped six times after audience members collapsed at the Garrick Theatre in Lichfield.
The Caped Crusader battled his great
est foes, including the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler and Catwoman in the musical extravaganza Batman Live, which kicked off a world arena tour at the O2 in London in August.
The following month, Somtow Sucharitkul’s ghost opera Opera Siam: Mae Naak premiered at the Bloomsbury Theatre.
In December, London’s Southwark Playhouse mounted a production of the late Diana Wynne Jones’ novel Howl’s Moving Castle, narrated by Stephen Fry.
Throughout the year, the organisers of 2.8 Hours Later transformed areas of British cities into giant urban chase games in which participants assumed the role of zombie attack survivors trying to reach a final sanctuary before they were “infected” by the walking dead.
John Carpenter and Steve Niles were brought in by Warner Bros. to work on the first-person shooter game F.E.A.R. 3, which featured the return of devil child Alma.
An idyllic getaway was overrun by an invasion of zombies in the survival game Dead Island, while Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, released for the new Nintendo 3DS handset, was basically a reworking of episodes from previous games in the franchise.
Players of the challenging Dark Souls, an unofficial follow-up to the equally difficult Demon’s Souls, were among the dead trying to regain their mortal lives in a world where evil had triumphed.
In the near-future, a global conspiracy to create cyborgs was at the heart of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while the eagerly awaited Dead Space 2 quickly became one of the most popular electronic games of the year.
Despite the success of the movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was as disappointing as all the other games in the movie tie-in series. At least Captain America: Super Soldier was somewhat better.
The Caped Crusader attempted to bring order to the urban chaos that was Batman: Arkham City, an even better sequel to the excellent Arkham Asylum.
The successful Dead Space game franchise was reconfigured for mobile use on iPhone and iTouch, so that the touch-screen player could use their finger to slice off limbs, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies was available as an app for download onto iPads and iPhones.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 10