KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER Before Mulder and Scully only one man stood between us and the forces of darkness - Carl Kolchak, the acknowledged inspiration for The X Files. After years in the wilderness this short lived series is now showing on The Sci-Fi Channel.

Kolchak - The Night Stalker told the adventures of a lonely journalist who kept stumbling upon the supernatural. The problem was, as with The X Files, that nobody believed him and the police and the authorities were always intent on a coverup. Whenever it looked like Kolchak would finally get one of his stories published the police would turn up to lean on his editor.

For virtually the whole series, or at least so it seemed, Kolchak never came out in the daylight. He wondered through the badly lit back allys of Chicago trying desperately to find his latest quarry. If the programme had one flaw, it was that it wasrather difficult to believe that every murder in Chicago was the recult of vampires, or zombies, or headless motorcycle riders.

It was equally hard to believe that everywhere Kolchak went he ended up falling over a nightmarish entity. Even when he went on a cruise one of the passengers turned out to be a werewolf. Some of the stories had there flaws. It was never explained exactly why the alien invaders had decided to try and steel all the stereos in the city or how the headless Hells Angel had managed to return from the grave.

What the series did well was to take the normal but unfathomable things that exist in any town or city and give them a horrific dimension. In Kolchak the weird looking, sick man on the bus was a zombie, the unused cellars of office blocks contained giant reptiles, vampires live in disused tube stations. The things that trigger our imaginations as we're waiting for a bus or a train, the grating with a disused staircase beneath it, the door no one seems to use, they all have rational explanations, donít they? Kolchak was like the child who can see a ghost in every wardrobe.
Kolchak, played by Darren McGavin, was an isolated figure. His only friend was an elderly crossword compiler known as Miss Emily. He had a cheeky sense of humour that he used against his boss, the despised Vincenzo, a paranoid hypercondriact played by Simon Oakland. But, most of the time, Kolchak was alone and so it was easy to believe that he could become the victim of whatever monster he was chasing without anyone noticing.

The series monsters were, in special effects terms, not always it's strongest point. The werewolf, in the episode of the same name, was rather to cuddly. The headless motorcycle rider in Chopper was clearly a man with a leather jacket over his head, and the robot in Mr R.I.N.G. looked distinctly over weight. Having said that the way they were shot often made them look superb. Kolchak worked on the theory that what you can't see is far more scary than what you can. Often all we see is the monsters hands or a quick glimpse in the shadows or even nothing at all.

The series also had a strong sense of humor laced with irony. The title sequence (which BBC2 hacked to pieces when they showed it) began with Kolchak strolling breezily into his office merrily whistling the theme tune. As he began to write about mysterious goings on this was over taken by an over the top orchestral score. Kolchak becomes more and more convinced that there is something behind him and the sequence ends with a look of real fear on his face. There is nothing there.

Kolchak first appeared in 1972 as a TV movie entitled The Night Stalker, which the broke TV ratings records. It became something of an embarrassment to ABC because of complaints about itís high level of violence and the fact that it had beaten all of the other shows on their network, which prided itself on it's highbrow output. It appeared again a year later as another TV movie, The Night Strangler and the series followed in the Autumn of 1973.

The series lasted for just one season before being cancelled. There were a number of reasons for this. The series was at the forefront of the violence on TV debate that lead to the networks introducing guaranteed 'family viewing' the following year. ABC found itself with four episodes that it could not repeat because of the number of complaints they had received. Also ABC were also being sued by the writer of the novel on which the first TV film was based on the grounds that he had not given permission for a weekly TV series to be made.

Finally, Darren McGavin, who was 50% owner of the rights to the show, decided that he had had enough after months of chaotic night shooting. It was allegedly on his orders that Kolchak was cancelled.

Anthony Forth