Blog-o-ween 2022: Beyond Midnight

For today's second installment of Blog-o-ween 2022, let's take a look at a specific radio program. Beyond Midnight is not one of the hallowed members of the Golden Age of Radio - that slice of time running from the birth of commercial radio (thank you, KDKA in Pittsburgh!) through to the 1950s, when television took hold of the public's imagination (and wallets). Running on Springbok Radio in South Africa from 1968 to 1970, Beyond Midnight was the brainchild of Michael McCabe, who acted as producer and writer for the series. McCabe and Co. produced 78 30-minute episodes of supernatural horror. Many of these stories were adaptations of tales by authors such as Ray Bradbury, Charles Dickens, A.M. Burrage, Robert W. Chambers, W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson, and Edith Nesbit.

Almost as scary as the stories featured on Beyond Midnight were the adverts from show sponsor Bio-Tex. The laundry soap and pre-wash powder manufacturer's tagline "Just soak, just soak, just soak in Bio-Tex" is often spoken in a deadpan manner by the show's host, giving the words a more chilling feel than was probably intended.

You can find many of Beyond Midnight's episodes at the Internet Archive, as well as the excellent old time radio resource Relic Radio. We will be featuring one of Beyond Midnight's episodes later this month, A.M. Burrage's Christmas ghost story "Smee." For now, enjoy this adaptation of English writer and poet Edith Nesbit's snort story "Man-Size in Marble." Here is "The Marble Knights."