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US distributors thought that the original print of the film was too long. Therefore, the golfing tale and the Christmas ghost tale were cut. This confused American audiences who could not understand what Michael Allen, from the Christmas ghost tale, was doing in the linking story.
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Parratt and Potter, the very-English characters portrayed by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in the Golfing Story are derivatives of Charters and Caldicott, created for Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. The double-act proved to be so popular that Radford and Wayne were paired up as similar sport-obsessed gentlemen (or occasionally reprising their original rôles) in a number of productions, including this one. The name-change neatly sidestepped any copyright issues.
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Cosmolgists Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, developed the Steady State theory of the universe, an alternative to the Big Bang, after seeing "Dead of Night". They said that the circular nature of the plot inspired the theory.
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Spoilers
The "Christmas Party" ghost story is loosely based on a real life murder mystery. In 1860, Francis Saville Kent (aged nearly four years old) was murdered. His sixteen-year-old half-sister Constance later confessed to the crime.
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