Tales of Unease (1970) was a British anthology drama series adapted from stories originally published in three anthology horror-story books edited by John Burke and published between 1960 and 1969.
The series currently has a limited distribution and availability: it was released as double-bill episodes on video cassette back when, hasn’t had an official digital release and only a couple of episodes seem to have been unofficially distributed online. In 2022 it was released on a now fairly rare on the used market DVD by Network Distributing Ltd, which specialised in the DVD and Blu-ray of older (generally) British film and television, much of which has never had an official home release in any other form and so the company’s closing in 2023 has left a big gap in the cultural landscape.
Ride, Ride is the first episode in the series which is set at the turning point of 1960s hippy aesthetics and it’s a great period piece that features a number of distinctive period signifiers including hippie-esque 1960s fashion, wonderfully self-indulgent art school projects and a psychedelic oil light show at a student dance.
Its main character is a young male art school student who is drawn to a strangely distant seeming young woman at the student dance, who harangues him into giving him a lift home on his motorbike. However, the next week his fellow students tell him that the dance hasn’t happened yet and it’s actually on next weekend, after which he subsequently finds out that the young woman had died in a motor crash three weeks before.
He has an impending sense of doom and the next week at the dance when the young woman appears again, he tries to avoid her but also seems somehow aware that there is no avoiding fate and when he gives her a lift home again, they crash and die.
It had already been indicated that there was something preternatural about the young woman when she had previously mysteriously suddenly appeared on his motorbike as she waited expectantly for a lift home and, though not explained, she appears to possibly be an almost Sapphire and Steele-esque supernatural guardian tasked with ensuring the correct flowing of time and events.
