A few minutes with Google will be enough to turn up that many people do not much rate this show, though they sometimes express regret about that. Scenes like the two-hander moments on the beach and in the Harbour Inn, introspective and played a little shakily by the young leads, have not pleased critics of telefantasy. The action is too slow, and the actors too inexperienced to carry it. This seems as good an opportunity as any to examine those criticisms, and to look at what we might call the case against The Tripods.

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Let’s start with youth. The text of the novels is unambiguous that Will and Henry are thirteen years old at the opening of the trilogy, and Will is said to be small for his age. But as we have seen, the narration is by an older Will, and the covers of numerous editions vary wildly in how the boys are depicted, so it’s a story which has been imagined with a certain flexibility. Sixteen was awfully old to be still in school in a pre-industrial society, but all the same the BBC raised the age of the characters by around three years. And so, what had been a children’s story became a young adult one.

Of course, just because the characters are sixteen and seventeen, it doesn’t follow that the actors need to be. Television conventions have changed enormously on that. In the British original of The Tomorrow People, 1973,[1] the point-of-view schoolboy Stephen was played by a skinny 15-year old whose voice hadn’t broken. In its American 2013 remake, basically a kickboxing show with a little light teleportation thrown in, the actor was 25 and ripped. American TV has never found this problematic: the four sixteen-year-olds in the first season of Gilmore Girls, 2000,[2] were played by actors aged 19 (Rory), 18 (Dean), 23 (Paris) and 27 (Lane). But expectations were different in the UK. As late as 1995, it caused considerable public amusement that fifteen-year-old Lydia in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice was in reality a woman of 27.[3]

Today it seems almost certain that early-20s actors would be cast in the lead roles. A more open question, though, is whether this hypothetical 2024 remake would have them behave as raw teenagers — the gangling, awkward, self-questioning, earnest teens you might meet in real life — or make them confident beyond their years. Friday Night Lights, 2006,[4] stocked its Texan high school with actors born around 1980, who swanked across the screen with the moxie of young lawyers. But while this is great for feel-good entertainment, it can’t tell any genuine sort of coming-of-age story. And that, like a lot of children’s fiction, is what The White Mountains unquestionably is. Capping serves as a metaphor for puberty, much as similar devices do in other young-adult fantasy novels: Harry Potter’s developing magic, for example,[5] or the daemons of children in His Dark Materials becoming fixed into a permanent form.[6]

The only way to remain true to such books is to make the characters at least a little bit adolescent, and the makers of The Tripods took that seriously. Alick Rowe, the script-writer for series one, was known for unflinching stories about teenagers coping with the adult world. Two People (1979) is about a forbidden young relationship.[7] Morgan’s Boy (1984) follows a city kid sent to live with his uncle on a hard-scrabble farm in Wales.[8] Claire (1982), about a perhaps abused fifteen-year-old taken into foster care, has more in common with The Tripods than might be guessed.[9] Will’s headlong run into the woods, in episode 1, is a teenage reaction not unlike Claire’s when she runs from her new parents in the local park, where they’re trying to teach her to ride a bike. Henry’s unproductive jealousy of Will in episode 5 is a little like Claire’s reaction to her adoptive brother. And the episodes of Claire are captioned “January” to “May”, the succession of months charting her journey into adulthood of a sort — the same convention followed throughout series 1 of Tripods.

If those teenage life stories sound a little bleak, they’re of a piece with some of the horrid childhoods shown in British drama of the 70s. Often controlled by women, like Anna Home or Ruth Boswell, children’s television had different concerns from its adult counterpart, largely run by men. Many of the dramas they commissioned were taken from books in which abandonment, and the helplessness of being only a child, are long themes. Consider Follyfoot (1971-73) — girl abandoned by rich parents sent to a farm for broken-down horses;[10] The Secret Garden (1975) — girl whose parents die of cholera in India sent to hostile country house in England;[11] Kizzy (1976) — Romani girl treated as subhuman by villagers forced to look after her;[12] Flambards (1979) — another orphan girl, another country house;[13] and on, and on. Our heroines are all somehow the same character, and have to learn self-reliance and resilience. Once again, The Tripods has more in common with this trope than first appears. Will Parker runs away from his parents. When adopted by new parents, he abandons those too. Henry “can’t really remember a home of my own”, and Beanpole is an unwanted orphan used as a servant.

Though John Shackley, Jim Baker, and Ceri Seel, the lead actors of The Tripods, were indeed young, they were a shade older than their characters, they all had prior television experience, and they knew what they were about. When all three characters are together, the actors bounce off each other very watchably: it’s when only two are in a scene that there’s a touch less conviction, and occasional flat line readings. Even then, though, in their self-doubting manner the cast are performing the script as written. These roles just aren’t the breezy, blokish characters of typical sci-fi from the period — best seen in Blake’s Seven, 1978-81.[14] In episode 2’s beach scene, for example, Will and Henry sound naive because they are naive, and are coming to terms with a difficult new life. Just as one of the touching things about Claire is her lack of vocabulary, and her struggle to say what she wants to say, so the early episodes of The Tripods feature boys in a situation they’re unequipped for.

So should we praise, rather than criticise, The Tripods for showing us more or less realistic teenagers, played by late-teenaged actors? It all depends on what we want the show to be. Do we want a committed telling of the original story, as the producer Richard Bates certainly did? Or is that just a distraction from the “battle to free the Earth from alien control” we were promised by Radio Times?

I think the same applies to the other main criticism of the programme, i.e., that it’s slow-moving. A screen time of around 5 hours 20 makes series 1 of The Tripods longer than an unabridged reading of The White Mountains, the book it came from. But the same can be said of plenty of other unhurried adaptations of the period — Brideshead Revisited (1981),[15] say, or To Serve Them All My Days (1980).[16] It probably is fair comment that, for scheduling reasons and to spread the cost, The Tripods had about three episodes more than it needed in series 1. But it can hardly be said that nothing ever happens in it. The hero runs away from home, is press-ganged, breaks out of prison, discovers a lost city, falls dangerously ill, has a love affair, and is ennobled, all in the first two hours.

The trouble is that these events are only advancing the story if we think the story is about teenagers growing up on their travels. If we think it’s about overthrowing the silver monsters, no progress seems to be being made. It cannot be denied that the Tripods themselves do very little in what is supposed to be their own TV show. Strictly speaking, only episode 5 has no form of Tripod sighting at all, but a lot of those views are incidental and at a distance. In episode 2, a Tripod is on screen for less than twenty seconds, and even that is our closest look until episode 7.

Obviously, the effects shots were difficult and expensive, so some rationing was only to be expected. But that isn’t the reason. The show dramatises every Tripod encounter in the book (with one picaresque exception right at the end, dropped for narrative reasons). If anything, it adds to them — on a strict reading of the text, no Tripod should have appeared in episode 2 at all. In The White Mountains, Tripods are the context and not the story. It’s a novel which shared library shelves with wartime tales like The Machine Gunners (1975),[17] Carrie’s War (1973)[18] or The Silver Sword (1956):[19] books about the lives of children dislocated by events much larger than themselves. Carrie, for example, is a ten-year-old evacuee from the Blitz who goes to live with a rural shopkeeper. The television version (BBC, 1974) played that straight, and viewers knew that what they were getting was a story of a child cut off from her family. Nobody expects Carrie to win the Second World War personally. But imagine if that same show had been broadcast under the new title The Battle of Britain, and trailed in the newspapers as “Carrie is caught up in a battle to free Europe from Nazi control”. Viewers might reasonably want to know why planes are so rarely seen, and when the battle was going to start. In that sense, The Tripods was a misleading name for the television show, and of course it hadn’t been the name of the book.

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In seeking to explain why criticisms of the show came about — and to a limited extent, I think they were inevitable — I’m not disputing them. If viewers found the story slow, or not to their taste, that’s always valid. But we do need to remember that something bitchy and candid can be said about every programme worth watching, even the most wildly popular. Colditz[20] never owns up to the complete unimportance of POWs escaping in the larger picture of war. The sets in I, Claudius are rudimentary and its crowd scenes laughably thin. The 1996 Pride and Prejudice populates an England that never was with cartoonishly exaggerated characters. Doctor Who[21] in the 70s was a show in which white men work out their feelings about the second world war and the loss of the British empire. The psionic children in The Tomorrow People have such preposterously strong powers that every week there’s a fresh reason they can’t use them, and every week they’re surprised. And so on. These defects, if they even are defects, make good knockabout comment when we want to lay into a show; but they are seldom the actual reason we didn’t like it, which is more personal and alchemical.

So what was it that rubbed some viewers up the wrong way about The Tripods? Some felt let down — it hadn’t been what they expected, for the reasons sketched out above. But I think most people were thrown as much by its oddity as by any more specific criticism. It lies in some no-man’s-land in between adult and children’s television. It is in between a one-off teatime serial like Beau Geste, 1982,[22] and a repetitive, flowing drama like The Onedin Line, 1971-80;[23] in between sci-fi and historical; in between espionage and coming-of-age drama; in between a familiar mythology like Robin Hood, and something entirely fresh to viewers. The makers were drawn deeply into the fascination of the world they were showing us, and went about it in a no-compromise way. That’s why those who do like the show tend to like it a lot. But perhaps those makers also lost sight of the sheer strangeness of what they were making.

A decade later, writers on genre TV — writing on genre TV itself became a genre in the 1990s — found themselves surprised that one of the most complex and expensive productions in the history of television (up to then) could ever have been given to a project so peculiar. A rare opportunity to make a new BBC sci-fi show had, as it seemed to them, been squandered. The unspoken fear of those writers was that all British telefantasy would go the way of Doctor Who, whose cancellation had come as a shock. But of course that didn’t happen. We are forty years on now, and vastly more telefantasy has been made since. Doctor Who turned out to be not as cancelled as we thought. The Tripods doesn’t need to be seen through that anxious lense, and can be re-watched on its own terms.

Works cited:

  1. The Tomorrow People (Thames, 68 × 30 minutes, 1973-79), produced by Ruth Boswell and Roger Price. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  2. Gilmore Girls (The WB, The CW, Netflix, 153 × 44 minutes + 4 × 100 minutes approx., 2000-07 and 2016), produced by Amy Sherman-Palladino. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  3. Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 6 × 55 minutes, 1995), adapted by Andrew Davies. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  4. Friday Night Lights (NBC, 76 × 44 minutes, 2006-11), produced by Peter Berg. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), by J. K. Rowling. Wikipedia.
  6. Northern Lights (1995), by Philip Pullman. Wikipedia.
  7. Two People (London Weekend Television, 6 × 50 minutes, 1979), produced by Paul Knight. IMDB.
  8. Morgan’s Boy (BBC, 8 × 55 minutes, 1984), produced by Gerard Glaister. IMDB.
  9. Claire (BBC, 6 × 50 minutes, 1982), produced by Ron Craddock. IMDB.
  10. Follyfoot (Yorkshire, 39 × 30 minutes, 1971-73), produced by Tony Essex. Wikipedia; IMDB. From Monica Dickens’s 1963 novel Cobbler’s Dream.
  11. The Secret Garden (BBC, 7 × 30 minutes, 1975), produced by Dorothea Brooking. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
  12. Kizzy (BBC, 6 × 25 minutes, 1976), produced by Dorothea Brooking. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1972 novel by Rumer Godden.
  13. Flambards (Yorkshire, 13 × 50 minutes, 1979), produced by David Cunliffe and Leonard Lewis. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1967-69 trilogy of novels by K. M. Peyton.
  14. Blake’s Seven (BBC, 52 × 50 minutes, 1978-81), produced by David Maloney and Vere Lorrimer. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  15. Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 11 × 1 hour approx, 1981), produced by Derek Granger. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh.
  16. To Serve Them All My Days (BBC, 13 × 50 minutes, 1980). Wikipedia; IMDB, produced by Ken Riddington. From the 1972 novel R. F. Delderfield.
  17. The Machine Gunners (1975), by Robert Westall. Wikipedia.
  18. Carrie’s War (BBC, 5 × 30 minutes, 1974), produced by Anna Home. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1973 novel by Nina Bawden.
  19. The Silver Sword (1956), by Ian Serraillier. Wikipedia.
  20. Colditz (BBC, 28 × 50 minutes, 1972 and 1974), produced by Gerard Glaister. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  21. Doctor Who (BBC, 695 × mostly 25 minutes, 1963-89), produced by Verity Lambert and many successors. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  22. Beau Geste (BBC, 8 × 30 minutes, 1982), produced by Barry Letts. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1924 novel by P. C. Wren.
  23. The Onedin Line (BBC, 91 × 50 minutes, 1971-80), produced by Cyril Abraham. Wikipedia; IMDB.

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