'If It's A Man-Hang Up'-among very best

'If It's A Man-Hang Up' is my joint favourite of all the Thriller episodes (the other one being 'Screamer'). It is among the blackest of all the tales (although 'Screamer' is darkest of all, in my view). The dark atmosphere of brooding menace is brilliantly maintained from the start and throughout. For me, the most effective technique doing this is the portrayal of only the stalker's hands, clad in black leather looks, as he slowly and deliberately dials the phone number of the object of his obsession.

The use of slow, heavy breathing by a menacing caller would nowadays be considered a little cliched, but is still effective in establishing a sense of a menacing predator attacking his victim psychologically, and harbouring an urge to molest her physically: it would at the time of broadcast, in 1974, have been a relatively new televisual device to convey menace, as at this time, television had only relatively recently emerged from the trammels of strict censorship, and so a heavy-breathing phone call would, until fairly recently, have been soon as too overtly sexual in its connotations to be portrayed on television. The stalker speaking a voice artificially distorted to sound deep and hollow now invites derisive comparison with Darth Vadar-but is effective if one puts Star Wars out of our minds. The episode aired some three years before the George Lucas film.

The climactic sequence in the isolated cottage is superbly suspenseful and frightening-and the series of twists in this part of the story are dazzling and brilliantly written, with the author continuing to shock and surprise us up to literally the very last minute.