This week on my podcast, we were talking about The Clifton House Mystery. Shown on Sunday tea-times in 1978, this drama serial aimed at children told the tale of an ordinary family who moved into a most extraordinary house, one with a troubled history and ghostly goings-on galore!
The series was co-written by Daniel Farson, who around this time was penning a series of volumes for younger readers on all things weird and wonderful - such as
The Beaver Book of Horror, and lavish volume on ghosts, horror and monsters for Hamlyn. So perhaps it is no surprise that he also would get the gig writing the novelisation for the TV series. As was often the case with tie-in novels for films and TV shows, the book was released just as the series was airing which meant that if you had the pocket money available, you could read the book and find out how the show ended before the last episodes aired! However the real value of such tie-in tomes back in the day, was that these novelisations were the only way of reliving a TV show or movie you'd seen in the days before video recorders or on-demand services. Of course now, you can buy the series lovingly remastered courtesy of
Network DVD, but for many decades the only was to go back to this haunting series was by getting hold of a copy of this paperback...
