“A lonely woman in a decaying mansion… a young stranger on a big, black bike.”

We’ve been here before - miserable old widow keeps middle aged daughter at home far too long and creates a bitter, twisted old maid. Enter young man to upset the applecart, and murder a few people along the way.

The script for this was breathed on by none other than Roald Dahl, so it does mean that although the plot is a tad hackneyed, The Night Digger does occasionally spark into darkly comic life (usually when Graham Crowden's waspish old gossip appears on the scene).

Mother and daughter take on a young biker to look after their crumbling family pile, but what they don't know is that he's also a serial killing nutter.

Both mother and daughter take a shine to him, and begin competing for his attentions as he begins tarting the old place up. But it's not long before he's up to his old tricks, tying women up, raping them (or maybe not - his sexual inadequacy is sledgehammered home), murdering them and burying them under the nearest half-finished road.

After a couple of murders (victims include Bridget “Likely Lads” Forsythe), people get suspicious (but not as suspicious as they should) and we're given an insight into the sexual inadequacies which are apparently driving this frankly unacceptable behaviour - in a couple of black-and-white flashbacks we see him raped by gipsy women on his way home from school, and later abused by a girlfriend for being “up for it”. Unfortunately, it's taken a very, very long time to get to this point. At some point near the end it appears that Dahl packed up his typewriter and went home, so we get a frankly ludicrous and open-ended finale which seems to say that it's okay to murder a bunch of girls and bury them under concrete as long as you find the love of a solid, middle-aged woman. It then adds that the love of a solid, middle-aged woman is enough to give any young lad his libido back and enable him to enter into meaningful relationships with younger women without killing them and burying them under concrete afterwards. And finally, we're told that driving your motorbike off a cliff into the sea is a very, very silly thing to do. But then again, you probably already knew that.