Chilled to perfection

Do alcoholics drink Resolve each morning to cure the booze-induced hangover they've created the night before, or are they drinking wine each evening to cure the Resolve-induced hangover they've acquired during the day? This conundrum is similar to that posed by the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu, who said that he didn't know if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly at night, or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man by day. Well, not until a Pekingese giblet seller called Hu Flung Dung hit Chuang with his shoe, separating his brightly-coloured wings from his thorax, pounding his tubular proboscis into the mud, and instantly removing all further doubt from the Chinese thinker's head. No more fancy anthro-lepidopterous philosophy for him after that, the silly sod.

George Hackett (played by Chris Langham) found himself in a similar existential dilemma last night, in BBC3's gripping tale of the supernatural, Spine Chiller. George was trapped in a recurring dream in which he was ordered each night to drive to Bradford, knock on a door, hand over a briefcase to a woman he didn't know, then drive back home to London, a nocturnal ritual that left him so knackered that he could barely function during the hours of daylight.

In despair, he went to an old-style psychiatrist (complete with beard, couch and thick Viennese accent), who immediately interpreted the dream sexually, asking pointedly why it was that "you never penetrate the house?" and "she never offers you succour?" In short, the doctor was a typical Freudian who simply couldn't accept that we are not all obsessed with sex, the living embodiment of the old joke about how many analysts does it take to change a light bulb (the answer is, of course, two - one to change the bulb, and the other one to hold the penis, I mean ladder).

With a mixture of creepiness, surrealism and humour that recalled The Twilight Zone at its best, the exhausted Hackett was forced to realise that he just couldn't hack it. First his girlfriend left him (suspecting that he was taking heroin or, worse, having an affair), then his boss threatened to fire him for his drowsiness and, to cap it all, the therapist died, to be replaced by a much younger and less dogmatic shrink.

That proved to be a lucky break, because the new therapist advised George to phone him in his dream ("I hate to do myself out of a fee, but..."), so that they could share the driving as they motored up the M1 together, thereby allowing George to curl up on the back seat, and catch up on his sleep during his own dream. A suggestion that would be completely impossible in reality, of course, partly because one person cannot enter another person's dream, but mainly because no self-respecting psychiatrist would ever willingly do himself out of a fee.

As the story unfolded, there were plenty of traditional horror film touches, such as the use of a swooping ondes Martenot in the quietly menacing score (just as the tuba is the instrument of comedy, so there is nothing quite like an ondes Martenot for conveying understated fear). But a decidedly unconventional twist was the bizarre notion of letting George sleep in his own dream while his shrink drove him home, thereby enabling him to awake refreshed, win back his girlfriend and emerge as a hero at the office.

The ending was too weird and perplexing to precis here, but Langham's performance as the bemused Hackett was as naturalistic and believable as his recent masterly portrayal of George Orwell. Come to think of it, I've only ever seen him fail lamentably in one TV programme, and that was in a small part that I wrote for him many years ago in one of my own shows, a lapse (mine, not his) for which I would like to apologise, now.

Unlike BBC4, which hit the ground running on its first evening of transmission, BBC3 hit the ground limping, but with programmes like this, it is clearly now finding its feet and getting well into its stride.

A generation ago, television bristled with imaginative and quirky one-off stories like these (in memorable series like Out of the Unknown and Tales of the Unexpected), and in an era when most drama departments now churn out nothing but soaps or multi-part thrillers, the Spine Chiller strand is proving that the single play can still keep an audience spellbound. The interaction of dreams with waking reality recalled the work of the great French absurdist, Marcel Ayme, and Hackett's attempts to describe the Chuang-tzu-like paradox of his existence to his psychiatrist reminded me of the case of a man who went to his doctor, complaining that he kept thinking he was a moth. "You've come to the wrong place," said the doctor, "you need a psychiatrist. Why did you come to me?" "Well," said the man, "your light was on."