Sometimes, I got to see a piece of television quite by chance, a series I would not normally tune in for, often at odd times, when the television was turned on for some other purpose. We often had the set turned on when we had visitors such as our grandparents, and on the evening of Friday 7 July 1972, they came over on the occasion of our mum’s forty third birthday, a visit that I recorded in my diary.
Later that evening, we all sat down in front of the television, most likely so that the grown-ups could watch the Nine O’Clock News. I had no interest in this – but it was followed by an eerie mystery series that I’d never seen before, and will almost certainly never see again, all but two episodes having been wiped. The Man Outside was that comparative rarity in British television drama, an anthology series. Each week’s story was topped and tailed by Rupert Davies, playing a character named Baker (the thirteen-episode series had the working title Baker’s Dozen). Seated in his library, in very much the manner of Roald Dahl introducing his Tales of the Unexpected, Baker would begin to tell the story of one of life’s outsiders (hence the title) – loneliness being the factor that united a disparate array of unsettling narratives – before the action cut to the story itself.
The episode I caught that evening – and the sole example from the series that I ever saw – was Bye, Bye Mrs. Bly, an eerily atmospheric piece starring Sylvia Coleridge as an old lady who lives alone in a ramshackle cottage. The village children torment her and call her a witch, while their parents treat her with suspicion and believe her to be unhinged (Coleridge gave a very similar performance that same year in a memorable episode of The Lotus Eaters). Is there a dark secret in her past, and what has it got to do with the gnarled old tree in her cottage garden? I can tell you without risk of spoilers (since the episode no longer exists) that beneath the tree there lay a body.
Unusually, I sat and watched Bye Bye Mrs. Bly right through to the end – ordinarily, when the grown-ups settled down to watch one of ‘their’ programmes, I would find something else to do. Someone said something about Rupert Davies, evidently recognising him as Maigret, but the association meant nothing to me – I didn’t even recognise him as the voice of Professor MacClaine from Gerry Anderson’s Joe 90.
According to the Radio Times data, accessible via BBC’s Genome database, Bye Bye Mrs. Bly was broadcast not on 7 July 1972, but on the following Friday, the 14th. So either I’m remembering it wrongly, or the episode was substituted after the Radio Times had gone to print, as quite often happened. Given that I saw no other episodes of The Man Outside, and only chanced to see this one because of the visit from our grandparents, I’ll stick my neck out and say I’m right and Genome is wrong. The BBC holds ‘Programme as Broadcast’ data which could confirm it one way or the other, so if anyone out there ever happens to be looking through July 1972, I’d be interested to know the answer.
But it gets stranger still: because I’d swear to having seen Bye Bye Mrs. Bly on another occasion – probably in early 1973. I remembered it as ‘the one with the old woman and the tree.’ But this broadcast is unlisted on Genome – indeed, The Man Outside was wiped without ever being repeated, which always strikes me as an insult to all the actors and crew who were involved in the production. And if that’s not enough, my memory of the episode is in colour – although we only had a black and white set at the time...
A search on Google turned up some production dates for the series, which was shot in studio and on outside broadcast VT – unusual for 1972. Between 12 and 14 January 1972, the episode Last Target was on location in Chenies and Latimer, followed by shoots at White Waltham (27-28 January), Kilburn (3-4 February), Norland Square W1 (4-25 February) and Ealing (8-9 May). Studio days included 14-15 March (TC1), 14-15 April (TC3) and 5-6 May (TC3). The same source gives some interesting and slightly prurient anecdotes about the series’ production.
None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the archive status of The Man Outside, of which only two episodes are extant. Someone has certainly seen them, as there are screen grabs on imdb (above and below), but they’re nowhere to be found online.
The early 70s were a good time for British anthology TV, with series such as Out of the Unknown and Menace turning up reasonably regularly, and The Man Outside was a worthy entry in the genre, similar in tone to ITV's Thriller series but with a somewhat more melancholic edge to the drama. With so little of it left, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to see The Man Outside on Talking Pictures or any of the digital stations that still go in for archival material. If the episode I saw was anything to go by, then this is an unfortunate loss. Whilst the discovery of a missing Dr. Who episode would probably melt the internet, there would be little or no reaction should any of The Man Outside ever resurface. There isn't a single review for the series on imdb. And that’s a shame.
