London: Anglia TV, 1978

61 yellow mimeographed pp. bound in director's black spring binder, home-made title label to spine. Very well preserved in the director's binder.

DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER MILES' WORKING COPY OF THE SHOOTING SCRIPT OF NECK, THE SIXTH EPISODE OF THE FIRST SERIES OF ROALD DAHL'S TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. WITH MILES' EXTENSIVE ANNOTATIONS AND DRAWINGS THROUGHOUT.

Neck began life as a short story in Dahl's collection Someone Like You (Knopf, 1953). This TV adaptation, starring Joan Collins as an over-sexed lady of the manor and John Gielgud as her axe-wielding butler, was first broadcast on 28 April 1979, and features an introduction by Dahl himself. The film was shot in ten days at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk in September, 1978.

Neck was directed by Christopher Miles, whose career began in 1963 with the Oscar-nominated short film The Six-Sided Triangle, starring Sarah Miles, Christopher's sister. He went on to direct D.H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), Jean Genet's The Maids (1974) and the D.H. Lawrence biopic Priest of Love (1981), an early screen success for Ian McKellen.

Miles' shooting script for Neck carries his ownership signature to the title page, is extensively annotated, and carries several hand-drawn diagrams illustrating the intended shot list for some of the more complicated scenes. The camera shots themselves, printed alongside the text, have been ticked off by Miles as shooting progressed, and he has also made a number of hand-written changes to the text.

After two series Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected began to cast its net wider for stories, and Dahl's name was dropped from the title. As Tales of the Unexpected, the show eventually ran for nine series, clocking up a total of one hundred and twelve episodes.