Back in 1979, the BBC produced what some of us consider to be one of its finest “occult”-influenced dramas: The Omega Factor.
I’m very pleased to note that the series has at last been released on DVD in the UK.
Tom Crane, a journalist, is writing Sunday features about the supernatural. He has obsessive, inexplicable dreams. His wife and brother are mixed up in something opaque, and are guiding him towards going to Edinburgh – whose spooky architecture, and surrounding crags, make an implacable, wintry backdrop to events. He seeks out an Aleister Crowley-like man, the genuinely sinister Drexel, who is accompanied by an eerily ghost-like woman called Morag – very much Lilith to Drexel’s Satan. In a stand-out sequence, Drexel says he will give Crane a single, solitary warning not to get involved. Crane walks away into the night, and as he does so the street-lamps behind him begin to go out, one by one. The darkness approaches. It’s… uncanny. People who get close to Drexel commit suicide, unpleasantly. For a very thorough and impressive review of the DVD release and the series itself, including the social setting in which the series was made, click here to visit DVD TImes.