Cult TV Blog

Next for Loch Ness (Monster) week comes this episode of Leap in the Dark about strange phenomena in an old lodge on the banks of Loch Ness. This is the show responsible for the brackets around the word 'monster' because the titular monster doesn't feature in it although you could say that other sorts of monsters do! I wrote an introduction to this series when I was going through orphaned shows (which you can find here ) so without further ado can go straight into the episode, which has rather been biting at me to do here. It's about a couple who take up pig farming in an old lodge at Fort Augustus near Loch Ness. They hire help and soon after their arrival strange things start happening. This episode is introduced by no less than the great Colin Wilson, doyen of all sorts of weird stuff at the time. He was something of a polymath and may be best known for his role in the angry young men school of literature, with his work The Outsider. He wrote extensively on occult and...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . Leap in the Dark is a confusing series which takes some understanding, which may explain why it isn't exactly all over the cult TV blogosphere. It picked up on the trend in the seventies for all things supernatural and a total of twenty episodes were broadcast in four series between 1973 and 1980. What makes it confusing was a couple of abrupt changes in what it did. Series 1 is straightforward documentary, series 2 is dramatisations of documented cases and the last two series are just plain fictional dramas with no claim to have happened in reality. You would be right to think that this would be a recipe for gaining and alienating audiences with the likely result that people would just give up. However the show also made up for this by attracting some serious big names so it's not all bad. Apart from the pilot the first series is missing believed wiped, and unfortunately the way they are labelled on the internet doe...