In the mid-to-late 1960s, the anthology series showcasing a run of stand-alone teleplays was a popular one: Armchair Theatre, Armchair Mystery Theatre, House of Mystery and Tales of Mystery all used the format to serve up a regular diet of thrillers and chillers to British audiences. When ABC Television (ITV’s Midlands and Northern franchise) decided to make another such series, but one with a distinctly Gothic flavour, no doubt influenced by the continuing success of the Hammer horror films, they hit upon a happy marriage of old and new.

As its title suggests, the starting point for the series was the work of Edgar Allan Poe, in the words of producer John Alwyn “the epitome of gothic gloom”. But as Alwyn and story editor Terence Feely soon discovered, transferring Poe’s tales, with their emphasis on poetic atmosphere and mood rather than incident, was none too easy. They claim to have then worked their way through over 400 Victorian horror stories in an attempt to both “soak ourselves in the Victor­ian writers’ craftsmanship” and to find material that would transfer happily to the new medium. “We combed second-hand bookshops, ransacked libraries, raided our friends’ bookshelves, pumped Oxford dons,” recalled Alwyn.

The result was a series that went back to the golden age of the supernatural story, a fountainhead of material perfectly suited to the modern hour-long television slot, a technological equivalent of Poe’s ideal, captive reader. After all, argued Feely, such tales “were written to be read aloud in the security of the family circle. In re-establishing the family audience, television has enabled us to re-create almost exactly the conditions in which their long-gone authors intended these stories to be heard and to have their effect”.

The result was three seasons of classic British tales of terror adapted to the one-hour play format, a compendium ranging from the familiar classics – Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart), Stevenson (The Body Snatcher), Wilde (The Canterville Ghost), Le Fanu (The Flying Dragon, Carmilla) and Scott (The Devil’s Piper) – to the somewhat obscure – J Meade Falkner (The Lost Stradivarius), Mrs Oliphant (The Open Door), Mrs JH Ridell (The Beckoning Shadow), Vernon Lee (The Phantom Lover) – and the relatively modern – MR James (The Tractate Middoth, Lost Hearts, Room Thirteen, Casting the Runes) Algernon Blackwood (The Listener), Osbert Sitwell (A Place of One’s Own), LP Hartley (Feet Foremost).

Quite a mouth-watering collect­ion; but if there’s one reason why Mystery and Imagination is something of a legend, it’s this: only two of these 18 plays, and a tiny fragment of another, survive.

The series, though succesful, suffered from unpredictable scheduling and various shake-ups within ITV. It returned in a changed format for two final series of three longer, bigger-budget 90-minute plays that allowed the programme makers to tackle some of the longer literary genre classics. It’s these surviving episodes, originally broadcast in 1968 and 1970 (the latter in colour) that fill three discs of Network’s set of all the officially surviving Mystery and Imagin­ation material, offering excellent transfers of Frankenstein, Dracula, Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Stevenson’s The Suicide Club, Sweeney Todd and Curse of the Mummy (based on Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars). As adaptations, these tele­plays stick more closely to their literary originals than many film versions, although tending to tele­scope events and characters to fit the limited time-slot. To modern audiences they might seem rather talky and leisurely in pacing, but they remain highly effective visions of the texts, especially given the budgetary constraints and tight schedules involved. And there are some notable performances to enjoy, from the fabulous Denholm Elliott as Dracula and Ian Holm as both Frankenstein and his creature, to a splendidly twitchy Silas Ruthyn from Robert Eddison and Freddie Jones’s memorably demented and OTT Sweeney Todd.

The final disc provides the only surviving examples of the earlier series – The Fall of the House of Usher (Elliot again, with Susannah York) and The Open Door (Jack Hawkins and John Laurie) and a badly degraded five-minute fragment of Casting the Runes; tantalising stuff, and connoisseurs will probably feel deeply frustrated by the thought of what’s been lost.

To ease the pain, this excellent set includes a gallery featuring pict­ures from the lost episodes and a 40-page colour booklet of viewing notes with detailed inform­ation on every one of the plays. Even in its tragically incomplete form, Mystery and Imagination remains a key example of the long­evity of the British gothic imagin­ation and its paradoxical engagement with modern­ity. In Terence Feely’s words: “These stories were written, in my view, as a protest against the increasing dominance of the machine – to show the triumphant engineers that there were more things in heaven and earth than could be pinned to a blueprint or sketched in steel. Yet, ironically, it is the machine – in the shape of television – which restored to these tales their original magic and power.”