All Hallow’s Eve, 1980: the CBC broadcasts “Ringing
the Changes,” a new episode of the radio series Nightfall. Years later,
but not that many years later, I begged my father to turn off “Ringing the Changes,”
which we were listening to on cassette; the story was about to reach its
climax: Holihaven’s bells had stopped ringing, an anonymous street evangelist
had cried, “The dead are awake!” and, indeed, the dead were dancing and
chanting: “The living and the dead dance together. Now’s the time. Now’s the
place. Now’s the weather.” My father finally snapped the tape off, but not
until one voice rose above the chanting: a phlegmy,
corpse-with-little-left-of-its-vocal-chords kind of voice: “Now’s the time. Now’s
the place…”
Eventually
I heard all of “Ringing the Changes” and it has since become a favorite episode
of Nightfall—in no small part because it introduced me to Robert
Aickman.
Aickman’s
short story “Ringing the Changes” is the better version, of course. P. Norman
Cherrie, who wrote the radio adaptation, fit the story into a half-hour by
cutting some of Commandant Shotcroft’s story (he is punishing himself, living
in Holihaven—for what he did during a war, perhaps) and other details, such as
the samurai suit at the end of the hall (an element of atmosphere that goes
unexplained in the Aickman story—a perfect illustration of Aickman’s
understanding that while everything in this world might add up, we are unlikely
ever to discover how or why). Nonetheless, Cherrie’s script does Aickman’s
story justice.
As
does the production. “Ringing the Changes” is perfect for radio, and the sound
effects people met the story’s potential. The ringing of Holihaven’s bells
steadily increases, and the chanting of the dead, as I described, became too
awful for me to bear as a boy. When Phrynne and Gerald walk down to the beach,
looking for the sea—“I think seaside attractions should include the sea,”
Phrynne says—Phrynne screams. Her scream is not just a high-pitched scream, but
something subtler. She sounds revolted and chilled all at once. And all the
while sodden ground squishes and church bells ring. Cherrie adds a line here
that, though too heavy-handed for Aickman, works well for the show: Gerald
asks, “What do you think it was you stepped on?” and Phrynne replies, “It was
something soft. Something soft and…” she hesitates, Gerald pushes her on,
“And?” he asks. She says, “…And bone.” Perhaps the best sound-effect moment
comes when Gerald and Phrynne attempt to leave Holihaven. They rush into the
streets; the bells are ringing like mad—and then the bells stop. From the
moment Gerald and Phrynne arrived in Holihaven, bells rang, so the listener becomes
inured to the sound. When the bells stop—we freeze. A moment later, the
evangelist announces that the dead are awake and we hear earth churn.
Nightfall began in 1979, when Susan Rubes was hired by the CBC to update their radio
dramas. She, “asked for an increased budget, more air time, and a variety of
time-slots in order to reach a wider audience.” She was contacted by a producer
from Toronto, Bill Howell, who sold her on his idea for a horror radio
anthology. Rubes felt she had a hit on her hands, and gave Howell the go-ahead.
Bill Howell, several years later, wrote a piece called “Notes on Nightfall for NPR” (America’s National Public Radio aired about thirteen episodes of Nightfall, beginning October, 1981). He wrote this about the origin of the show:
It started innocently enough. Somebody on a network management task force decided that CBC Radio Drama should shed its tweed-pipe-and-smoldering-jacket-image, and a seductive way to do this would be to produce a new horror series, “like the Inner Sanctum or The Shadow.” Five senior executive producers immediately had heart attacks, sixteen script editors resigned in protest…
Most of Howell’s writings regarding Nightfall are a mix of truth and his delightfully creaky horror humor. The series ran for
two seasons under Bill Howell’s production, with episodes recorded in Toronto
at “studio G,” which Howell described thusly:
Imagine a barn of a room, chipped and flaking institutional pastel walls, black drapes, stained glass, arcane gray sound effects doors and wind machines, a spider’s web of microphone cables, dilapidated armchairs, sections of scripts spread everywhere, and a control room jammed with dim nodes humming to be transformed. And, since you are a guest in this article, we’ll provide the bats.For season three, the show’s final season, Nightfall was transferred to CBC Vancouver and the production duties were handled by Don Kowalchuk. Another thirty-two episodes were aired, and then Nightfall was no more.
A version of this post is still online at the Open Letters Monthly archive; the editors titled it “As Dark Locks In” when it was published in October, 2012. I’ve made revisions for clarity and to include information I’ve learned about the show since, but my motivation to repost is a recent re-engagement with the show itself and a correspondence with one of its authors. Part two will complete the re-post of the original article. Subsequent parts will be “addenda.”
