The horror you can't see

Edgar, Will, Libby, Bobb, Barbara, Bill, Lynne, Jim, Mary, Steve L, Jeanette, Bob, Ray.

First appearance for several months by Libby, who I can report had a very pleasant evening and as a result is thinking of popping in every couple of months - as quite a few of the crew already do - subject to her other Monday night commitments. Let's hope we see much more of her.
If this blog seems on the short side, it's because there was little or no general discussion so I can only cover what was going on in my immediate vicinity - which may tell some of you things you missed, but it means that I missed plenty. All contributions gratefully accepted!
Question: what is the worst horror you can imagine? Answer: the one you can't see. Too many modern horror films are in your face, but if you go back to hits such as Quatermass and Frankenstein it was the fact you couldn't see the monsters that made them all the more frightening... which of course makes radio the ideal medium for the scary stuff and worked so spectacularly well with Orson Welles's War of the Worlds in the 1930s.
Strangely enough, this fits in with a little-discussed and genuinely frightening corner of the real world - torture. When the British SAS is training its soldiers to withstand torture, the main message is that the worst thing about it is the anticipation - which quite a few captors exploit by playing tapes of people screaming in agony before they begin questioning someone. The reality, the SAS assures its people, is never as bad. Don't want to test the theory, though!
Talking of radio, Bobb Lynes reminded us that the Gunsmoke western series was on radio before TV - and, naturally, a very different cast was employed for the screen version. I say naturally, but Bobb rightly pointed out that the radio team fought a valiant fight to make the transition, on the grounds that they looked more like real cowboys (ie, ugly, misshapen, totally unglamorous). They even organised a still photoshoot at Knot's Berry Farm in 1953.
The ugly argument might work today, but in the 1950s James Arness's 6ft 7in rugged good looks won easily over the radio Matt Dillon, William Conrad - a little fat guy who happened to have a deep voice. Howard McNear's Doc Adams was supplanted by Milburn Stone. Kitty Russell went from Georgia Ellis to Amanda Blake and Parley Baer had to yield Chester Proudfoot's character to Dennis Weaver, who adopted what became a famous limp (the TV character was renamed Chester Good).
Another TV series to get the backstage nostalgia treatment tonight was The Avengers, led for so long by the quirky-looking Patrick Mcnee as John Steed. Will revealed that the name of Steed's sidekick, Emma Peel, came from the requirement to provide Man Appeal, which became M. Appeal and transmuted into Emma Peel - true, according to the excellent Avengers entry in Wikipedia, which records the entirely believable reason for the series' end: it was up against the Rowan and Martin Laugh-In, which slaughtered it in the ratings. I had also forgotten that the show was invented by a Canadian, Sydney Newman, who worked for Associated Television (ATV) in Britain. He lived in Hampstead, North London, in the 1960s, when I knew his daughter (no, not that well).
However, I must correct one wild misunderstanding by Will, that Mcnee was brought up in a castle full of lesbians. The grain of truth in that claim is that his parents divorced after his mother declared herself a lesbian. However, Mcnee was educated at Eton College, the top English public (ie private) school. He himself, now 86, claims to be a distant relation of Robin Hood.
Universal's lost films from the April fire largely recovered. There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?
The ever-patient Bob Birchard is probably sick of being asked about the films that were feared lost in the Universal Studios fire on June 1, but it turns out the material has been largely recovered. This is good news for Bob, as he is now confident of receiving 8 of the 10 Universal films he wanted for Cinecon at the end of this month. There were copies of everything, but the question was whether Universal would pay to copy everything that was lost, or even the films such as Bob's, that were on order. Universal's initial public stance was that it would be too expensive to restore everything, but as the fuss has died down the archives department has quietly started replicating most of the material lost in the fire. Sounds like it was largely down to money and office politics - as usual.
There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?

CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
I used to write with a quill - but the hedgehogs objected
Is that Rowan Atkinson on your t-shirt, or the Mona Lisa? Oh, both.
That was my brother-in-law on the phone -I haven't spoken to him for six years.
I could never do leapfrog, I always preferred to have people leap on me.
I hereby bequeath you my olives
Captions kept me away from Flash Gordon