Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Roald Dahl's very brief - but peculiarly horrible - short story is adapted to television with some difficulty. Although the story itself is actually rather shorter than the usual running-time, occupying somewhat less than twenty minutes, it has to be padded with an irrelevant new sub-plot about a burglar to take up the first few minutes. Our suspicions that the Dean Stockwell character will prove to be the man responsible (which would at least make his ghastly fate a sort of punishment) prove unfounded. Stockwell uses the same very posh English accent he used the previous year in "Sons And Lovers", whilst the emphasis on taxidermy in the story's later stages must have reminded a 1961 audience of "Psycho".