The BEST episodes written by Robin Chapman
#1 - The Hitch-Hiker
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 4
Paul Duveen gives a lift in his ultra-fast new BMW to an elderly hitch-hiker on his way to Epsom for the Derby. Duveen, cajoled into taking the car to its limit, is promptly booked for speeding. In the course of the remaining journey, the passenger reveals his astonishing skills as a professional pickpocket - his name for himself is a fingersmith - and before they finally part, the fingersmith has a little present for Duveen...
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#2 - The Flypaper
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 3 - Episode 1
A young girl is being followed by a stalker and is glad to take shelter with the elderly Miss Harrison, who lives in a caravan - but the girl is still in danger, and she disappears.... what has happened to her, and who was the stalker? At the end of the programme, an old man joins Miss Harrison in her caravan, and we see that it is near a lake...
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#3 - The Illustrious Client
Sherlock Holmes (1984) - Season 5 - Episode 5
Colonel James Damery calls on Holmes when the rich and beautiful Miss Violet Merville announces her engagement to Baron Gruner, a dangerous Austrian. Gruner has persuaded Violet that he is not a killer, and Holmes has to establish the truth and foil the powerful baron.
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#4 - The Mugger
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 7 - Episode 14
Gerald Overton is an ambitious politician with the tough job of cracking violent crime. But a chance encounter with a beautiful woman at a dinner party leads him into a nightmare, and his whole career is threatened... Gerald surprises himself when he decides to take the law into his own hands.
#5 - The Orderly World of Mr Appleby
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 15
Arthur Appleby's orderly world centres on his quiet antique and curio shop. He has just married for the fourth time, and his new wife, Martha, discovers Appleby's dark secret - he murdered all her predecessors. But the new Mrs Appleby has a plan to turn the tables on her husband.
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#6 - The Vorpal Blade
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 6 - Episode 8
A tale of love, honour and murder in Germany in the 1930s, looked back on many years later. The elderly von Baden, one of those who witnessed a long-ago duel to the death at Heidelberg between Macker and the bully Cassan, reveals a shocking secret...
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Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 2
Donald Henderson gives his wife, Moira, a unique watch, and then it goes missing, so Donald offers to replace it. As a result, Moira is in a store looking for a similar watch when she overhears a young woman telling a friend about her affair. It seems the stranger is meeting a married man - and she goes on to show her friend the beautiful watch he has given her. Unhappily, it looks just like Moira's. Moira puts two and two together and gets herself into a rage, and things soon get terribly out of hand...
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#8 - Lamb to the Slaughter
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 1 - Episode 4
An enraged detective's wife kills her husband by smashing in his skull with a heavy blunt instrument - but no murder weapon can be found, and the police are baffled. The answer to the riddle lies under the detectives' noses - or, rather, it did...
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#9 - Operation Safecrack
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 3
Retired safe-cracker Sam Morrissey is approached by Jack Harrison, an advertising man representing the Holdwell Safe Company, with a proposition. Jack wants Sam to try to break into a Holdwell safe on television - and, of course, he firmly believes it can't be done. However, inside the safe there will be twenty-five thousand dollars, and the money is Sam's to keep if he can crack the safe within three hours.Sam accepts the challenge - but he is not a man who likes to leave things to chance.
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#10 - Never Speak Ill of the Dead
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 8
David Rankin is a country doctor with a flighty young wife. Irene's affairs with other men were the talk of the town before she was married - and they still are. No one knows for sure if the gossip has reached the doctor. And then no one knows where Irene has gone... Sim and Bob accuse Dr Rankin of killing his wife and burying her in the cellar - but they have made a big mistake.
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#11 - The Dead Don't Steal
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 9 - Episode 7
Lilian Brett, a beautiful air hostess, is having an affair with Ken Johnson, the boss of a charter firm. Ken sets up a drug smuggling operation to cover the cost of their affair, but Lillian is in turmoil. She says she wants to end their affair and life of crime, and Ken has to work out what to do about it.
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#12 - Pattern of Guilt
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 8
Pathologist Keith Briscoe has a problem. He has had enough of Elaine, his selfish and expensive second wife, and wants to re-marry Faye, his first wife... but Elaine has given Briscoe five years of her life and doesn't want to let him go. Then the pathologist finds himself working with a police team to catch a serial killer. The man they are after poses as a door-to-door salesman and kills women for their small change, and Briscoe realises how much he loves Faye when she agrees to act as a decoy to trap the killer. And then he has an idea...
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#13 - Bosom Friends
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 14
Nell and Emma were best friends at school, but after a reunion weekend they find things more difficult. Emma, who is retired and poor, asks Nell to rent her a spare room in her house. Nell agrees and Emma moves in, but she quickly proves to be completely penniless and seems willing to drag Nell down to poverty, too...
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#14 - Completely Foolproof
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 12
The very rich Joe Brisson is a self-made man with a number of enemies - including Lisa, his elegant but dangerously dissatisfied wife.
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#15 - Hit and Run
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 6 - Episode 12
Roger Ashburn is a young hospital doctor with a beautiful but selfish wife. They hold a dinner party for Steve and Carol Hutchins, but the party is ruined when one of the men finds his wife's wedding ring in his dinner - her ploy to signal that the marriage is over.When Roger's wife disappears, he is desperately worried - but there is a surprise in store for him.
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#16 - Vicious Circle
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 2
An old lady catches Rex Tobin, a young burglar who was planning to rob her, and makes friends with him... but what is she really up to?
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#17 - Poison
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 5
Harry Pope is a reformed alcoholic working in Kashmir, India, and hoping to go home to England soon. One hot night, Harry is reading in bed, when he feels something moving on his chest. He looks down to see a deadly little snake, a krait, which slides under his pyjamas and goes to sleep on his stomach. All Harry can do is to wait for his friend, Timber, to come home. When he arrives, Timber sends for a local doctor...
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#18 - Kindly Dig Your Grave
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 11
Madame Lagrue runs a smart but commercial art gallery in Montmartre, Paris, getting rich at the expense of struggling artists. Then one of her victims falls in love with Fatima, an artist's model, and Madame Lagrue is up against someone even more cunning than she is.
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#19 - Blue Marigold
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 1
Marigold is a dream girl supermodel, but she is wrecking her career with drink and other excesses. Paul Foster, her dismayed lover, slowly sees how much greed for fame lurks behind Marigold's beautiful face. Sophie Trent is a more easy-going newcomer, but she sets off a jealous and dangerous reaction when her more dulcet tones are used to replace Marigold's voice on a television commercial.
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#20 - Galloping Foxley
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 3
After more than sixty years, William Perkins is still haunted by memories of being bullied at an English private school... One day, he is annoyed by a swaggering passenger on a train and is sure he recognizes him as Foxley, the school prefect who made his life so miserable, long ago. And Perkins makes a mistake.
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#21 - Georgy Porgy
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 9
George is an English vicar with a fantasy life. He sees naked women during his sermons. One day, he finds he is suddenly irresistible to the opposite sex, and a beautiful woman throws herself at him on a river bank. What is going on?
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#22 - A Time to Die
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 9 - Episode 9
Yves Drouard is a romantic French electronics expert whose love life has become rather too complicated. His marriage to Marthe has cooled, and his young mistress, Violette, has announced that she is pregnant. Yves is forced into a decision - but something he failed to foresee leads to an outcome he did not reckon on at all.
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#23 - Cunning Old Fox
Dalziel and Pascoe - Season 5 - Episode 2
Dalziel and Pascoe have to investigate the murder of a member of the Harlesdon Hunt - tensions are high anyway with the anti-hunting element causing problems but Dalziel is not convinced a hunt saboteur is to blame, WDC Shirley Novello goes undercover amongst the hunt to try and find out thier secrets.
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#24 - Run, Rabbit, Run
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 4
Just after the Second World War, Robert Simpson was a young U.S. Army interpreter stationed in liberated Paris and living in the house of Jacques Vareille, a hero of the French Resistance, and his downtrodden wife, Nathalie. Robert had no idea why the hectoring Jacques never set foot outside his house. Now, ten years after the war, Robert is back in Paris to write a book about the Resistance, and he pays a call at his former digs. Only Nathalie is still there - and she has a story to tell of a very different kind. It seems that she sought revenge on her bullying husband, with unforeseen consequences.
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#25 - The Landlady
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 1 - Episode 5
Billy Weaver, a seventeen-year-old Londoner, arrives in Bath late at night to take up a new job. He finds a room for the night at a bed-and-breakfast house run by a sweet old woman. As he signs the guest book, Billy feels sure he recognizes the names of the two previous guests. Where on earth can he have heard them before? As he drinks a cup of tea with a curiously bitter-almond flavour, the owner of the boarding house is telling Billy she is an amateur taxidermist...
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#26 - The Creeping Man
Sherlock Holmes (1984) - Season 5 - Episode 6
Spinster Edith Presbury asks Holmes to investigate when she is frightened by a large hulking figure silhouetted in her bedroom window - a presence which causes her dog to howl. Holmes is convinced the prowler is something out of the ordinary, but Watson at first finds the case trivial.
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#27 - Decoy
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 5 - Episode 7
Pretty policewoman Mary Bryan is out to get her man, in seductive, skin-tight silver pants. And it's all in the line of duty, as Mary is the bait to trap a suspected serial killer who has been murdering young women around the city. But things do not go according to plan.
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#28 - Skin
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 2
Drioli, a penniless old tattoo artist, has a fabulous work of art by his friend Soutine and is offered a huge amount for it. He desperately needs the money, but how can he deliver the picture to the buyer while he is still alive? - the masterpiece is tattooed on his back.
#29 - Royal Jelly
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 2 - Episode 1
In a cottage surrounded by the drone of honey-bees, the bee-keeper's baby daughter is ailing and losing weight. The corner is turned when Albert begins to feed his daughter on Royal Jelly, but a curious transformation is under way...
#30 - Neck
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 1 - Episode 6
Unworldly art collector Basil Turton inherits his father's publishing empire (and his title) and marries Natalia, an East European with a decidedly Machiavellian streak. Six years on, the new Lady Turton is not just wearing the trousers but also being far from discreet about her lovers. Sir Basil's butler, Jelks, strongly disapproves of it all. Then Lady Turton gets her head stuck in a valuable work of art...
#31 - The Finger of Suspicion
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 9 - Episode 8
American safe-cracker Steve Baker is married to a beautiful Arab, and they are leading an idyllic life together in a Middle Eastern country - but then Steve is threatened with extradition for a crime he says he didn't commit.
#32 - The Boy Who Talked with Animals
Tales of the Unexpected - Season 4 - Episode 3
David, a nine-year-old boy, talks his father into getting him a giant turtle. And there is more to David's desire for this unusual pet than meets the eye. Then Sam Jenner, a rugged American, gets drawn into David's holiday adventure in Jamaica.
#33 - By the Pricking of My Thumbs...
Doomwatch - Season 2 - Episode 5
A school chemistry lab and some unsupervised senior students, MacPherson and Jenkins are preparing a prank on one of their own... However, a friend of theirs, a very tall boy called Stephen Franklin is worried if they have calculated the amount that the others are pouring into a test tube... Paignton, a rather obnoxious Billy Bunter type victim of the prank gets a face full of test tube fragments and scalding liquid as it explodes in his face. The boys watch in horror as Paignton screams and screams and screams....
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