Children's TV, page 4 of 5

Hawkwind’s 1999 album In Your Area is a bit of a hodgepodge, being half live, half studio, and with most of the original material consisting of instrumentals rather than original songs. As a result it never really creates that unique identity, that particular atmosphere an album needs to bring you back to it again and again. But after buying it I had it on pretty much constant play for a couple of weeks, largely because of a 44-second track halfway through, called “The Nazca”. A typical Hawkwind weirdie, it consists of the usual electronic synth wooshiness and what I thought, at first, must be a sample from some classic sci-fi film:

“Intelligent life is so very rare. The rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Something about that quote grabbed me. It seemed cosmic, tragic, and hopeful all at once. I really wanted to know where it came from, but for once a Google search turned up absolutely no results, and despite having seen a good many classic SF films (and having read about a good few more) I couldn’t imagine which one it might come from. (The title was no help. It refers to the Nazca lines in Peru — those large-scale ground-doodles made, about one and a half thousand years ago, for the amusement of the gods, or any other sky-flying entity that happens to be passing.)

Things got even more intriguing when the same voice (and therefore, I assumed, an extract from the same quote) appeared in a few more Hawkwind tracks, speaking some different lines. One version of Tim Blake’s solo piece, “Lighthouse”, for instance, has:

“We are a very old people, from a very old planet compared to yours. If we are to survive we must colonise…”

Finally, a couple of months ago, I got the answer. The quote wasn’t from an old SF film, it’s from John Wyndham’s 1968 novel Chocky.

Assuming it was from the 1984 TV adaptation (which I missed at the time it was first shown, probably because it was on ITV, and I tended to watch BBC), I put it on my LoveFILM rental list. But that turned out only to feature a very shortened version of the “Intelligent Life” speech, and in a totally different voice. (It had good theme music, though. A little reminiscent of Brian Eno’s “Sparrowfall (2)” from Music For Films (1978), but excusably so, because I suspect the melody was designed to echo the word “Chocky”, and it’s the melody that makes it sound similar to the Eno track.) There’s also a 1967 BBC radio adaptation (which can be found at Archive.org), but there the “Intelligent Life” speech is equally short.

I’m going to keep searching, but I suspect it must have been recorded by Mr Brock and co. themselves. Either way, here’s some more of the quote from the novel (all the dot-dot-dots are present in the original):

“But intelligent life is rare… very rare indeed… the rarest thing in creation…

“But the most precious…

“For intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. It is a holy thing, to be fostered and treasured.

“Without it nothing begins, nothings ends, there can be nothing through all eternity but the mindless babbling of chaos…

“Therefore, the nurture of all intelligent forms is a sacred duty. Even the merest spark of reason must be fanned in the hope of a flame.”

Which I absolutely agree with.

It’s a nice little novel, mildly satirical of the comfortable middle-classes it is also so obviously addressed to. Although ostensibly about a little boy who is contacted telepathically by a far advanced alien being, Chocky could equally be taken as a tale about the emergence of a creative talent, and about the way the conventionalities, and even the kindnesses, of a civilised society do their best to stifle, embarrass, disapprove of, and generally shut it up.

In a previous Mewsings I wrote about King of the Castle, one of two kids’ TV series I had vague but persistent memories of seeing in the early 70s, but which I hadn’t seen or heard of since. The other one, The Changes, isn’t out on DVD, so I didn’t think I’d get a chance to revisit it, till Paul left a comment to my King of the Castle post, directing me to SurrealMoviez, which has links to download all ten parts (from one of The Changes‘ rare reruns, on UK Gold). I duly downloaded them, burned them onto a pair of DVDs, and have just finished watching them.

First off, the main thing I remembered about the show (which was broadcast between January and March 1975, meaning I’d have been three and a half years old at the time — amazing that I remember any of it at all, but then again I remember Tom Baker’s first Doctor Who episode, which was a few months earlier) was a shot, from below, of an electricity pylon, along with some weird music, which I found particularly scary at the time. I thought, from the way this image had stuck in my head, that it was going to turn out to be part of the title sequence, but actually the pylons only really feature in one of the early episodes, along with a brief reprise in a psychedelic montage in the final episode. It’s funny to think how one very brief (and, in the story, not particularly important) moment can stick with you for so long. (Though it was at the end of an episode, so it may just be that it was left hanging, with all its attendant anxiety, in my young brain.) Something similar happened with Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which I read for the first time at primary school. For years after, I had a distinct memory of there being a long, involved chase through some rhododendron bushes, but rereading the book in my twenties, I was puzzled to find that rhododendron bushes were only mentioned very briefly. I have the sneaking suspicion that, at that young age, I didn’t so much follow the stories of TV programmes and books, but just used them as a springboard for creating my own fantasy worlds and stories… (And as far as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is concerned — a book, incidentally, which is celebrating its half-centenary this year — I wonder if it was just the encounter with that wonderful word, rhododendron, so peculiarly yet aptly spelled, that caught my imagination!)

Back to The Changes. The series is very much part of that “cosy catastrophe” tradition of disaster SF, which I certainly have a fondness for, though it features one of the strangest types of “disaster” I’ve come across: people develop a sudden, uncontrollable hatred for all the products of technology, driven by waves of a strange noise that drives them to attack all machines. Even the mention of technology threatens to drive people into a rage. Some flee the country (it seems to be only Britain that is affected, though no help arrives from the outside), leaving the country mostly depopulated. The main character, a young teen called Nicky, gets separated from her parents, who manage to get on a boat to France, and so she is left to fend for herself in de-technologised Britain.

The story breaks down into three sections. (This turns out to reflect the series’ origin in a trilogy of novels written by Peter Dickinson.) In the first, Nicky accompanies a group of Sikhs, who are unaffected by the anti-technological rages, but who are shunned as “Devil’s Children” by the now superstitious English. In the second section, Nicky leaves the Sikhs to try and rejoin her parents in France, but finds herself waylaid and accused of witchcraft by a religious fundamentalist who’s gained a hold on one community. The final section sees Nicky discovering the source of the anti-technological rages that have been gripping the nation, and finally understanding why they happened. After nine episodes of build-up (in which the reason for the “Changes” is never really addressed), the potential for the final explanation to be a let-down was all too possible, but I was pleased to find the programme’s makers managed an explanation that answered all the questions but still preserved enough mystery to be satisfying on all counts (and which took a seemingly science-fictional series into fantasy territory, which may have disappointed some, but I always prefer it when the ultimate explanation isn’t entirely rational, or entirely resolved).

Watched today, it’s inevitable that The Changes seems slower-paced than what we’re used to seeing now (or even when compared to contemporaneous Doctor Who), but I didn’t find it quite as awkwardly paced as King of the Castle — perhaps because it was less reliant on just the one young actor, but also perhaps because the gentler pace fits the story’s theme of regression to a pre-technological age. There were a few genuinely gripping moments, for instance when I wondered how the characters were going to get out of this or that situation. Aside from the initial premise, there are no fantastical elements in The Changes, so all threats and challenges the characters face have to be solved by them thinking their way through and coming up with a plan, which I like in a story, because it allows me, as reader/listener, to think my own way through the situation, and try to work out what I’d do in the protagonist’s place. (Always a good way of involving the reader in the story, I think.) Plus, there’s lots of location work placing the story quite firmly in the English countryside — something I’ve always loved in UK film & TV shows.

Another good point about the show is that, despite the anti-technology premise, the series isn’t itself anti-technology. It may even have come from a sort of reaction against the rather fuzzy-minded hippie thinking that if only we could get rid of all that nasty modern stuff, everyone would be a lot happier. It’s quite obvious in The Changes that any such clearout would result in a lot less ease in our day-to-day lives, not to mention the potential to regress into superstitious, even fascistic, ways.

Now, next up on my long-lost wanna-see list: if only I could find a DVD or download of Fantastic Journey. All I remember from that is Roddy McDowall with a glowing fork, and I want to see more!

It’s been a while since I bought a book on impulse, but I came back from town last Sunday with Seeing Things: A Memoir by Oliver Postgate, partly because of the wonderful look & feel of the book itself. It’s a hardback, but it doesn’t have a dustjacket; the cover picture is printed directly onto the cloth, which as a result has a wonderful, and appropriately old-fashioned, canvas-like texture to it.

(As an aside, I hate dustjackets. They get in the way of reading, I worry about them tearing or getting scuffed, and the books often look better on the shelf without them, anyway. I actually used to take them off and throw them away (!) — which is what booksellers once did, or so I’ve heard, back when dustjackets were simply there to protect the book from wear in the shop — till I realised I was throwing away a good part of the book’s value, should I ever decide to sell it. Now I dutifully protect them in clear, non-sticky plastic, or store them away in a folder.)

Oliver Postgate is, of course, the man who, with Peter Firmin, created Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and other perennial favourites of children’s TV. But it was only in 2008, when he died, that I realised those programmes I’d loved watching while growing up were made by the same person. Back when I was actually watching them, I didn’t think about TV programmes being made at all, and if I had, I’d have found it bewildering that one person could make two different ones, let alone a whole slew of them. (In fact, Postgate & Firmin created twelve “worlds” altogether, as Postgate puts it.) But if I had thought about them being made, Postgate’s would be the method I’d have expected them to be made with. No large, white-floored studios with multiple technicians and a lot of high-tech equipment, just one man in a converted cowshed, using equipment he’d either invented himself or adapted for the purpose with plenty of odd-sized brass screws, strips of Mechano, and a liberal application of sticky-backed plastic.

Postgate’s memoir reveals him to be primarily an inventor, in whose world no problem is too small to be pondered for a practical solution, nor too big. So, he invents goggles with mini windscreen wipers for bikers (and wears them), and mechanical skeletons to fit inside knitted Clangers; or, in the 1980s, he invents a whole new way of thinking about nuclear weapons (they’re not weapons — you can’t use them to defend yourself or attack others, you can only use them to initiate mass suicide), which makes such simple sense, it’s a pity the anti-nuclear movement didn’t take it up and popularise it.

I couldn’t help but feel, while I was reading this book, that Postgate was the sort of creator we’re likely to see much less of nowadays. (Or at least find more rare & valuable when we do.) I remember, when we got our first home computer (a ZX Spectrum), feeling that this was a great leveller, that it gave the hobbyist as much power as any corporation — and for a while that was true, which was how you got such weird and wacky games as Manic Miner, created by weird and wacky individuals at home (and, quite often, after school). Nowadays, with games being a corporate industry on the same level as the movies, you’ll never have that again. Postgate seemed to exist in a similar relationship to early TV. He got into the medium by building mechanical props (“I hear you can make a collapsible soufflé?”), and then, when he had an idea for a story, simply went to the BBC, proposed the idea, and got taken on.

Thinking back on the programmes of his that I actually watched, the main thing I remember is the narration. Postgate’s voice was calm, friendly and understated, presenting the weird world of the Clangers, or the fact that Ivor the Engine had a baby dragon in his furnace, with exactly the sort of low-key authority required to make the fantasy believable. His, and Michael Hordern’s (who narrated Paddington Bear), are the two voices I remember most from my early TV watching. In his introduction to Seeing Things, Stephen Fry says, “During bouts of childhood theism, I always supposed that if God had a voice it would be that of Oliver Postgate”. While I’d certainly like to live in any world where God had the voice of Oliver Postgate, I think that if there is such a world, it isn’t this one. If anything, it’s the very unobtrusiveness, the un-God-likeness, of his voice — which has a storyteller’s authority, but nothing as oppressive as Divine Authority — that made it work so well. Far too companionable and human to be god-like, it was like a parent reading you a story, and was instantly not that of a stranger.

What became of Postgate and Firmin’s brand of children’s tellyfantasy? At some point, they were told that “impeccable American educational sociologists had established that in order to prevent a child switching channels (and thus transferring the rating to another channel), a programme had to have a hook (i.e., an incident sufficiently violent to re-attract the attention) every three and a half seconds. Our programmes did not have this characteristic and consequently, whatever other qualities they may or may not have had, they were not to be considered suitable for television transmission.”

But the thing that kept you watching Postgate’s films was the story first of all (surely hook enough), and the atmosphere, which certainly wasn’t one of loud, fast whizzbangs, but was quiet, understated, companionable whimsy. It wasn’t trying to be flash and impress you, it was just telling you a story, and that’s where its power lay. The style of TV described in the above quote sounds more like hypnotism than entertainment, and I can’t help lapsing into “things ain’t like they used to be” mode when I read it, because the simple reliance on storytelling — and, preferably, subtle storytelling, which engages the imagination and emotions instead of merely stimulating the relevant brain-centres — is something I miss even in adult TV nowadays, most of which I find unwatchable because of the constant (and frankly distracting) demands it makes, like a boorish show-off always trying to impress, rather than a genuinely interesting person who actually deserves your attention. Which may be why I tend to turn off altogether — switching channels just gets you the same sort of soup, served with a slightly different flavour. Thank heavens for BBC4, where they at least show some nice documentaries — including, recently, one about Oliver Postgate, funnily enough.