Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time for anoth­er episode in the land­mark radio dra­ma series The Black Mass, cre­at­ed by the late Erik Bauers­feld and his col­leagues at the Paci­fi­ca radio sta­tion KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, over fifty years ago. In 30 chill­ing tales of mys­tery, imag­i­na­tion and the human mind, The Black Mass brings you some of literature’s most haunt­ing sto­ries, by mas­ters of the craft — many of whom are best-known in oth­er fields. Our thanks as always to John Whit­ing, pro­duc­er of many of these record­ings, and of course to Erik Bauers­feld him­self. Today’s pro­gramme was orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1964.

Note that the episode will not start until the track play­ing at the top of the hour has fin­ished, so the actu­al start time of the episode will be a few min­utes after the hour.

Today: Oh, Mir­ror, Mir­ror by Nigel Kneale

Wikipedia says of Nigel Kneale:

Thomas Nigel Kneale (18 April 1922 – 29 Octo­ber 2006) was a Manx screen­writer who wrote pro­fes­sion­al­ly for more than 50 years, was a win­ner of the Som­er­set Maugh­am Award, and was twice nom­i­nat­ed for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.

Pre­dom­i­nant­ly a writer of thrillers that used sci­ence-fic­tion and hor­ror ele­ments, he was best known for the cre­ation of the char­ac­ter Pro­fes­sor Bernard Quater­mass. Quater­mass was a hero­ic sci­en­tist who appeared in var­i­ous tele­vi­sion, film and radio pro­duc­tions writ­ten by Kneale for the BBC, Ham­mer Film Pro­duc­tions and Thames Tele­vi­sion between 1953 and 1996. Kneale wrote orig­i­nal scripts and suc­cess­ful­ly adapt­ed works by writ­ers such as George Orwell, John Osborne, H. G. Wells and Susan Hill.

The Black Mass art­work was cre­at­ed by Ter­ry Lightfoot.