Tony Earnshaw: Uncanny appeal of a return to visionary world of The Twilight Zone

When I was a kid I was a sucker for old black and white movies and TV shows, the kind of stuff that the BBC played as late-night horror double-bills on Saturday nights. One show that was a magnet for me was The Twilight Zone. This was the early 1980s, and The Twilight Zone was old then. Nowadays the anthology show and its writer/host, Rod Serling, have rightly passed into legend.

So I was irrationally excited to learn that Serling’s life is to be given the Hollywood biopic treatment. No word on casting yet but names have been mooted, from David Strathairn to George Clooney.

Now I suppose one has to be of a certain age to recognise what Rod Serling, the 5ft 4ins ex-boxer and paratrooper, meant to early ’60s audiences – and, via re-runs, to audiences in the ’70s, ’80s and beyond. Forget the lame 1983 movie, memorable only for the tragic accident that claimed the lives of three actors on one of its segments. No, The Twilight Zone reached out to imaginative teenagers everywhere. It was timeless, visionary and ground-breaking. And it lasted just four years.

As for Serling, well he’s been described as “just another womanising blow-hard” by one less than charitable observer. And he did have his faults. But during that brief period in the early Sixties he created something unique: 156 episodes of premiere class sci-fi, fantasy and horror that stand up as often skewed, but telling, comments on the human condition.

As a seminal fantasy show it was an exemplar. Its stable of writers included Richard (I am Legend) Matheson, Ray (Fahrenheit 451) Bradbury and Serling himself. Always a prolific writer on TV and, later, for movies – he scripted Planet of the Apes – Serling was the captain of this particular ship to the extent that by series five in 1963/64 he was exhausted.

Was Rod Serling television’s greatest storyteller, as some attest? From his earliest screenplays he allowed his liberal, anti-war, anti-fascist sentiments to take root. He was said to be deeply misanthropic – perhaps a mood born of his wartime service in the Pacific where this dreamer was thrust into the deep end of combat. He was also fond of telling life lessons in his stories. All of it seemed to connect with average America, and further afield.

Rod Serling was only 50 when he died in 1975. Said by wife Carol to be stressed and angry for much of his life, he succumbed to a heart attack.

But for a brief shining moment he created something matchless, extraordinary and long-lived. I for one would love to see it all brought to the big screen.