I was well aware of the influence and significance of The Twilight Zone before I knew much about the show itself. Luckily I grew up in the 1980s, when classic black and white television was still repeated on UK TV (unlike now), so I was able to get to know this strange little American show. My parents divorced in the middle of the decade, and every other weekend I would find myself sleeping on my Grandma's sofa (my dad was too busy down the pub on a Friday night to spend time with us!), so I would watch TV and eat biscuits. Sometimes I'd get lucky and find something vaguely pornographic on one of their foreign satellite channels, but mostly I'd watch horror films and repeats of the Twilight Zone. From the opening credits to Rod Serling's introductions, I knew I was watching something that was going to be important, weird, but above all entertaining. Even at a young age I knew that these stories were allegorical. One that chilled me, and has stuck with me to this day, was episode 68, The Shelter. We were still convinced that the Russians were going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any time in the 1980s, so this story had a particular resonance for me. As these former friends and neighbours tore each other apart fighting to get into the bomb shelter, I felt sick to my stomach. It is something I have never forgotten. I wasn't to know then that this was actually a rehash of a much better story, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which was a thinly-veiled attack on the HUAC anti-Communist witch hunts. I was only about eight years old after all. I took The Shelter at face value. My mum had told my sister and I that when the bomb dropped, she would just take us all outside to die in the heat blast. I would rather have fought to get into that shelter.
Later on I discovered some of the more famous, and perhaps sillier, episodes, such as Shatner's madness in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, and whilst I enjoyed these as well, for me Twilight Zone will remain a sobering look at humanity, what we are capable of, and a warning of what we may become. Whilst other TV shows have come and gone, The Twilight Zone is the one that is still referred to again and again for its power and influence. I have collected episodes on VHS and DVD, and I discovered a few years ago that there had even been a Twilight Zone radio show. I have collected dozens of episodes thanks to their repeat airings on BBC radio and just can't get enough. I even used The Twilight Zone as reference material for both my degree and Masters Degree, the latter in a symposium on politics and the use of fear to drive neo-conservative policies. I have one of these pieces available on my blog:
Science Fiction Television. As a media lecturer I now look for opportunities to use Serling and The Twilight Zone whenever I think he could make the point better than I can. And he usually can. If I won these blu rays I could use them in class thanks to our recent addition of a PS3, and I think it would enhance the student's education and appreciation of Twilight Zone as the precursor to the kind of television they are familiar with now.