The Machinery of Dread

What strikes you, coming to Suspense cold, is how little of it is shouting. The programme's reputation is all knives and screams, but listen to a run of them back to back and the dominant sound is a room going quiet: a clock, a kettle, one person deciding not to say the thing they were about to say. Bernard Herrmann and the composers who followed him understood that an orchestra's real power on radio is the ability to stop.

It helped that CBS could hire anyone. Film stars who would not touch television took a Monday night at the microphone because the scripts were good and the work was over in an hour, and you can hear them enjoying themselves — playing against type, mostly, which is why the comedians are so unnerving in it.

The formula is a trap that closes at the pace of a domestic conversation, and the best entries barely raise their voices while it does. Not every night lands. Twenty years is a lot of Mondays. But the hit rate is extraordinary for a weekly show, and the good ones are still, genuinely, frightening in a car at night.