Roald Dahl, or then again…..

perhaps not.

When I was young and promising (well, hmmm, younger at least) I remember watching a short TV show starting with Roald Dahl sitting near the fireplace with a quilt over his legs telling us about tonights story. These shows always had a twist, and were often a little sinister. The title appears to have been “Tales of the Unexpected”. Just listened to the theme on an old Top Gear episode the other night, and that prompted me to start looking into my query. There is one story that keeps coming back to me, but when I searched Wikipedia and looked over their list of episodes I just couldn’t find it. So either they haven’t got the complete set of episodes, or the show I remember wasn’t in the “Tales of the Unexpected” series at all. Hopefully some of you can help me here when I try to detail the story. Some details might be a little sketchy, but here we go.

It starred a policeman (plainclothes?) on the scene of a car accident. The rescue people were trying to get the trapped driver out of the wreck but we don’t see the person. Suddenly a guy approaches the policeman and tells of having followed the crashed car for some time. Here I’m a little uncertain. He might have been the victim of road rage from this other guy or perhaps following him for some reason (infidelity, blackmail, etc?) and I think they drove the same type of car (a 1970s Ford Consul/ Granada). The show continues with this guy telling the policeman the entire history of the chase, or shadowing, or what we can call it. Eventually the policeman gets word from the rescue team that they are ready to open the car. As he approaches the car the other man is not with him, and as you’ve probably already guessed they find the driver dead, and the corpse is the very man he’s just spent several hours with.

Does any of this sound familiar?

T J