Oct 28, 2026 · 20 min · 8 segments
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When the TV show was made, the story had only recently been published in Playboy magazine.
That's back in 1983.
That's where Graham first told me about it.
Yeah, right.
It wasn't published in book form until 1985, when it was included as part of the Skeleton Crew collection.
The TV version was remarkably faithful.
Richard Hangstrom, played on TV by Bruce Davison, is the nominal hero, a writer whose marriage is a disaster.
Wife Lena, played by Karen Shallow, treats him with contempt.
His teenage son, Seth... played by Patrick Piccinini, who looks, and I kid you not, old enough to be Bruce Davison's brother rather than his son, is even more disrespectful, bloody teenagers or bloody fake teenagers.
Life proved to be against Richard many years prior to this, when the love of his life ended up marrying his bully of a brother.
So he married the miserable Lena on the bounce.
Nice one.
Coming back to the present, and we learn of a family tragedy.
Brother Roger had a drunken car crash, killing him, wife Belinda, and their son Jonathan.
It turns out that just before he died, Jonathan had built a word processor for his writer Uncle Richard's birthday.
What would have passed for a state-of-the-art word processor back then, Graham?
If you're talking state-of-the-art, it would definitely be a Wang system.
Wang.
Yeah,
Wang.
They got a lot of stick in the UK, especially when they named their service centre Wang Care.
And you'd phone them up and they'd go, good morning, Wangcare.
So anyway, so Wang were the dominant office company at the time, and they had really expensive word processors.
You have to be a company to buy one.
When the TV show was made, the story had only recently been published in Playboy magazine.
That's back in 1983.
That's where Graham first told me about it.
Yeah, right.
It wasn't published in book form until 1985, when it was included as part of the Skeleton Crew collection.
The TV version was remarkably faithful.
Richard Hangstrom, played on TV by Bruce Davison, is the nominal hero, a writer whose marriage is a disaster.
Wife Lena, played by Karen Shallow, treats him with contempt.
His teenage son, Seth... played by Patrick Piccinini, who looks, and I kid you not, old enough to be Bruce Davison's brother rather than his son, is even more disrespectful, bloody teenagers or bloody fake teenagers.
Life proved to be against Richard many years prior to this, when the love of his life ended up marrying his bully of a brother.
So he married the miserable Lena on the bounce.
Nice one.
Coming back to the present, and we learn of a family tragedy.
Brother Roger had a drunken car crash, killing him, wife Belinda, and their son Jonathan.
It turns out that just before he died, Jonathan had built a word processor for his writer Uncle Richard's birthday.
What would have passed for a state-of-the-art word processor back then, Graham?
If you're talking state-of-the-art, it would definitely be a Wang system.
Wang.
Yeah,
Wang.
They got a lot of stick in the UK, especially when they named their service centre Wang Care.
And you'd phone them up and they'd go, good morning, Wangcare.
So anyway, so Wang were the dominant office company at the time, and they had really expensive word processors.
You have to be a company to buy one.
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