Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Three — “You Must Listen”

For those Blog-o-weeners out there of a certain age (I mean those of you who stare out into space trying to do the math in your head when someone younger than you refers to music from the Eighties as “oldies”), I have a question for you: how many phones numbers did you have memorized when you were growing up? Like as information straight-up stored away in your brain that could be accessed at a moment’s notice. Myself, I think I had close to two dozen phones numbers belonging to friends, family, and a pizza joint or two jammed away in my skull.

Follow-up question: how many do you have memorized now?

Me?

One.

And that’s only because my parents still live in the same house that I grew up in and have the same phone number — albeit with a different area code than we had then.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s awfully nice to have all that information stored on a pocket-sized device that allows me to get at it at the flick of a thumb. And for someone who moves around a lot, it’s great not having to have the phone company set me up with a new phone line and the number that goes with it every time I change my address. (My friends and family are happy about that, too.) Our phone numbers are no longer tied to specific phones in specific places which are also tied to other phones and phone numbers and their specific places by miles and miles of wires and cords and lines. We are just ones and zeroes zooming through the ether. Kinda like ghosts.

Kinda like today’s story. (See, kiddies, I’m not just waxing nostalgic for my health.) For day three of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, we are concerned with a particular phone number and its connection to a particular place and a particular person. The present owners of the number are getting unwanted calls from a voice from the past, a voice that insists that...“You Must Listen”...

Frank Wilson (Toby Jones) works for a telephone exchange in a small English town. The company he works for is by his own admission not very modern, nor is the town it serves. There isn’t much new construction happening. Old buildings are usually retrofitted with modern conveniences and put on the market as new offices. The strange story that Frank has for the listener happened in one of those.

Mr. Paley (Reece Shearsmith), a family solicitor, has just opened his new offices in one of these refurbished buildings. His new phone line has just been set up, and wouldn’t you know it, but there seems to be a bad connection. Every time his secretary Miss Prentice tries to speak to a client, another party can be heard on the line. And, boy, can “Passion Fruit” (as the ardent voice on the line comes to be known) be heard!

What starts out as a simple inconvenience for Mr. Paley and Co. becomes an insoluble mystery for Mr. Wilson and the phone exchange. Lines are checked and double-checked, clues in the one-sided conversation are followed up, and what Mr. Wilson and his team soon come to believe is...well, you’ll have to hear that for yourself.

“You Must Listen” was originally broadcast on BBC radio in 1952.  As with much of the BBC’s radio and television programming, no recordings of this broadcast were ever kept. Seventy-one years later — almost to the day — BBC Radio 4 recreated the program using Kneale’s original script. You can find it here on the Internet Archive collected with other BBC dramatizations (including Alien and Moonraker!).

Having a direct line to the supernatural is a trope that has been used by many writers, and there are tons more great stories that feature telephones to enjoy, if you are so inclined.

Richard Matheson’s short story “Long Distance Call” was adapted by Jacques Tourneur (director of such classics as Cat People, The Leopard Man, and Night of the Demon) for The Twilight Zone in 1964. (It was broadcast as “Night Call.”) You can listen to a reading of Matheson’s original story here on The Twilight Zone Podcast.

The English writer Mary Treadgold wrote “The Telephone” in 1955. In it, an already married man begins an affair with an actress. He and his wife divorce, but soon after he and the actress marry, he is informed that his first wife has died. Of course, in the best ghost story tradition that doesn’t stop her from calling him on the telephone.

And, naturally, Stephen King has dipped his toe (or would that be his ear?) in the telephonic waters. He wrote “Sorry, Right Number” for George A. Romero’s horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside. You can watch the show here on the Internet Archive (along with other episodes). That is if you can make it past the opening credits of the show — one of the scariest bits of television ever created! You can also read King’s teleplay in his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, which I am sure your friendly neighborhood public library has on its shelves.

It’s time to hang up the receiver for now, Blog-o-weeners. These long distance charges are gonna be murder when the bill comes in. Not to worry, however, because we’ve got more Nigel Kneale coming up tomorrow. Be sure to wear a comfortable pair of shoes, though, because we will be taking a nice long walk down...“The Road.”

Until tomorrow, Blog-o-weeners, watch out for yourselves, watch out for each other and…