‘Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself…’

If you add together the elements I liked in the previous two choices – the humour, the horror, the bookishness, the authorial control, the anthology setting and the twist at the end – and add a burgeoning adolescent sense of cosmic injustice, this is what you get.

It’s not fair.

First broadcast as an episode of The Twilight Zone, CBS TV, November 20th 1959, adapted from the short story ‘Time Enough at Last’ by Lynn Venable, If magazine, January 1953. Available online here