A Thrilling Development: Nurse Will Make It Better (1975)

“Thriller”, season 4, episode 2

Charley (Linda Liles), the daughter of Edgar Harrow (Cec Linder), an American diplomat in England living in quite the country manor, is a bit of a firecracker. She’s breaking hearts left and right – particularly those hearts her more seriously minded sister Ruth (Andrea Marcovicci) seems invested in – and goes through life with the clear conviction everything in it belongs to the rich and hot like her by rights.

So it’s not much of a surprise that she can’t cope at all when a riding accident she’s at least half responsible for herself leaves her paraplegic. In fact, her behaviour is so extreme, it’s not terribly easy to feel much compassion for her. It is also driving away one nurse after the other.

Until, that is, Bessy Morne (Diana Dors) arrives. Bessy easily – and with a bit of magic – manages to build a rapport with Charley, and, like an evil Mary Poppins, soon starts to exert a rather negative influence on the rest of the household, too, particularly the youngest sister Susy (Tiffany Kinney). And look, if Charley is a good girl, reads the nice big book of witchcraft dear old Bessy is going to provide and agrees to a certain pact, she might even manage to walk again.

Only Ruth and Harrow’s chief of security Carson (Ed Bishop) seem to understand that something very bad is going on, but they won’t really start to do something about it once the body count starts. On the plus side, there’s also an alcoholic priest (Patrick Troughton) in play who might eventually come in useful.

In the coming weeks or months (I’ve never been too great at planning, I have to admit), I am going to dip into episodes of the British 70s TV show Thriller (not to be confused with the US 60s show, of course). Produced and to a large degree written by the great Brian Clemens (of the Steed and colleagues Avengers and so much more fame), this was an anthology show with episodes of about seventy minutes length each, usually with some American actors involved to make it easier to sell the show there, and generally with thriller (what a surprise) and – more irregularly – supernatural horror plots. There’s an obvious debt to Hitchcock style thrillers on display, of course, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised by an influence of the – often great - non-supernatural thrillers made by Hammer which were of course themselves inspired by Hitchcock.

This being a British TV production of its time, the show does tend to some of the visual weaknesses TV production in the country was already starting to lose when this was made, namely the often slightly confusing contrast between 16mm exterior shots and interiors shot on video, which does tend to make even the best set look a bit more flimsy than it should.

However, thanks to usually fun acting and clever and unapologetically pulpy scripts, that sort of thing is rather easily overlooked in the better half or so of the episodes I’ve seen by now.

Nurse Will Make It Better really is a case in point there. This is one of the absolutely supernatural entries in the series, with no improbable last act reveal to make things “realistic”. Instead, this one ends in a scenery chewing duel between Patrick Troughton (in what feels like a bit of dry run to his character in The Omen) and Diana Dors absolutely made-up as evil Mary Poppins (though she is in truth the devil herself, which is pretty awesome). A duel that Dors absolutely wins with a performance that manages to be so camp and silly that it actually becomes creepy again.

Which really is the way the script handles most of its business. Clemens is not at all afraid of using every simple and cheap (that is, affordable on his budget) trick in the books to make his tale of a sexless seduction of the not so innocent interesting and fun, first building the family up in short and deft strokes, and then letting it implode via the obvious fault lines once Bessy gets her claws in.

There are some genuinely creepy scenes here, in particular most everything concerning Bessy’s influence on Susy, a couple of cleverly staged murders, and some neat business where characters see something horrible Bessy hides in a little chest, but the audience can only go by their reactions on what it actually is, making a virtue of the fact the show couldn’t effort many special effects. The acting is very on point, too. Marcovicci makes a very likeable heroine who wins out in the end because she loves a family that gives her a lot of reasons to hate them, and channels this love into practical action, and Liles and Kinney really seem to have fun witching it up.

While the direction – by Shaun O’Riordan, a British TV stalwart – certainly can’t go all giallo or 70s cinematic horror on us thanks to the problems of mostly shooting on video under very constrained budgetary circumstances (the lighting in the show as a whole tends to be rather bland, too), there’s quite a bit of clever blocking and framing to produce tension or demonstrate the lines of influence here.

It’s a fun little film – given its running time and structure, that does seem the proper word rather than episode – giving dear old Bessy her due very nicely.