Night Call

Who is the driver of the Black Ford Granada saloon? There's a shade of Tales of the Unexpected to this polished, Gothic-tinged road safety film, in which a driver's obsessive quest to learn the identity of the 'perfect driver' he spots on the motorway has deadly consequences. Viewers might see the twist in the tail coming, but there's plenty of atmosphere, real 70s style and a dash of humour (intentional and otherwise) in the telling. Intriguingly, Night Call borrows a trick or two from Steven Spielberg's tense early thriller Duel (1971).

Director Ferdinand Fairfax had worked on several features as an assistant director to the likes of Don Chaffey, J. Lee Thompson and cult trash auteur Pete Walker. As a director in his own right, Fairfax worked for the National Coal Board and Shell film units before moving into filmed television drama in the late 1970s. Two years before Night Call, he turned in a similarly idiosyncratic road safety film for the Department of the Environment, The Motorway File (1975), presented by Edgar Lustgarten. This government film is a public record, preserved and presented by the BFI National Archive on behalf of The National Archives, home to more than 1,000 years of British history.