We're familiar with the danger of ghostwriting political lives. Think of Robert Harris' fine novel, The Ghost, and the film Roman Polanski made of it. But spooky ghost writer stories go back pretty far. Here's one you might enjoy. It will take half an hour of your time.

The film is from the 1950s TV series Tales of Tomorrow, a surprisingly well-made collection of speculative stories. This episode, called Ghost Writer, stars Leslie Nielsen as a struggling fiction writer who meets up with a really unsavoury collaborator. His writing partner has a hidden agenda, but the money's awfully tempting…

Breaking update: archive.org appears to be undergoing server maintenance today. If you can't get the video to come up there, try it at this Youtube link.

If you enjoyed this tale, you might want to explore the idea of TV devils. Obviously, they've been around as long as TV itself. My personal favourite version of Old Scratch is the inimitable John Glover. Glover played the Prince of Darkness in a delightfully snarky way in the (alas) short-lived series Brimstone. Here's a short clip where he struts his stuff. I wish there were more of this series available: it was elegantly done. The premise was that 113 evil characters had escaped from Hell. To retrieve them, the Devil sent a New York cop – condemned to eternal damnation for killing his wife's rapist. The cop has a chance at earning redemption, but it won't be easy, and he has to live in a fleabag hotel on the West Coast. Unfortunately, the series lasted less than a season, largely because North American audiences prefer their supernatural entities to be cuddlier than this. Think Touched by an Angel or Highway to Heaven.

I hope you enjoy this devilish excursion.