In the world of The Tripods, England is an outlying island of little account. The continental mainland is the arena in which the future is decided. It’s also under tighter control. But whereas the books portray that control as a loose Roman Empire-style rule, the show imagines a much more Second World War-like occupation. The Black Guards, who do not exist in the books, suggest the paramilitary Milice of Vichy France, Frenchmen acting for an alien power. Inventing the Black Guard was a major plus because they can act as stand-ins for the greater enemy, and because they have dialogue, whereas the Tripods can never speak. Generally shown in series one as subtle and intelligent men (and they are always men), they can be infuriatingly considerate. Black Guards, but not blackguards.

Though The Tripods (1984) was broadcast forty years after the liberation of France, it was roughly contemporary with Secret Army (1977-79)[1] and The Fourth Arm (1983),[2] BBC shows in which English secret agents or downed pilots trek across this same northern-French terrain, pursued by black-uniformed adversaries. So for viewers of war dramas, this would all, in both senses, have been familiar territory. Familiar, too, was the idea of the Alps as a place of safety. Switzerland, having been neutral in the war, was the goal of all Allied escapers; and besides, its other-worldly terrain made it the Tibet of Europe. “In the mountains, there you feel free,” as Eliot had written in 1922.

Published in 1967-69 when the United Kingdom was aspiring to join the European Economic Community, the novels valorise cooperation between nations — albeit in secret, and by individuals. Having crossed the English Channel, the Parkers will never meet anybody English again. By allying themselves with Jean-Paul Deliet, the Parker cousins begin to join a pan-European movement — which is what the Free Men, in effect, are.

“Jean-Paul” is a very French forename — the hyphen alone is exotic to an English child’s eyes, and the novel amps this up with the phonetic spelling “Zhan-Pole”, just as, a little later on, Will can make no sense of chemin-de-fer and has to render it as “Schmand-Fair”. And I suspect “Jean-Paul” is not just any choice, but makes a little nod to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), at the height of his fame in 1967. Young readers will probably not have been up to date on their rebel French intellectuals, but then, they probably didn’t notice the buried quotation from W. H. Auden’s poem “Danse Macabre” in Chapter 2, either — writers, even of children’s books, must have their literary fun. What readers will certainly pick up on, if not trip over, is Jean-Paul’s strange new nickname: “Beanpole”. This is very much a private nickname, because only the Parkers ever use it, but the Parkers have the lion’s share of the dialogue, so it sticks. But the point of this renaming is not to make Jean-Paul less exotic, it’s to make him more so. Here is a boy so strange that even his name is unpronounceable.

“Beanpole” is also a little archaic. As a nickname, it evokes the sepia world of the Edwardian school story — compare Kipling’s “Stalky” or “Beetle”. As a noun, it belongs in a lost world of cottages and kitchen gardens. The OED records beanpole first in 1798 — “one used for beans to twine round”, but also, “figurative: a lanky fellow” — and last in 1900. Antique as it sounded in 1967, when The White Mountains was written, it was a little hard to take seriously in 1984, when The Tripods was filmed. The script repeats it several times just to make sure we’ve got it, and even then it has him explain.

“Beanpole” is not even the first misunderstood name in the story. We never learn the true name of the man the boys call “Ozymandias”, so we have no idea of his country of origin — names, in the Tripods books, being almost the same thing as nationalities. William and Henry are the names of the first kings of England after 1066, so they couldn’t be more English. The old-fashioned contraction of William to “Will” hardly seems accidental, either, in a book about freedom of choice. Eloise, who will appear in episode 5, is perhaps named for the Héloïse whose love affair with Abelard may be the most famous doomed relationship in French history, ending with her taken to the cloister — just as the Tripods will take Eloise to their City. When the second book introduces a brave, if emotionally cool, German boy, he’s called “Fritz” — the insulting nickname much used by war comics like Commando or Battle, which filled newsagent stands for boys long after the second world war. The autocratic leader — some might say, the Caesar — of the Free Men will turn out to be called “Julius”. Minor characters among the Free Men include an Ulf, a Carlos, and a Mario: Dutch, Spanish, Italian. Together they form a sort of concert of Europe. The Parkers are not at all the leaders of this movement, though an important sub-plot of book three is Henry’s sense of a future vocation as a politician — not perhaps something you would guess from the BBC show’s portrayal of him as a teenager.

But much of that happens later. If book 2 is about Germany and the Netherlands, and book 3 about the Balkans and America, book 1 is French and Swiss. That cultural difference is critical to the TV show, but also poses a challenge to it, since it’s filmed in England and Wales. Costume and well-scouted locations help enormously, and even the soundtrack may assist. Jean-Michel Jarre’s symphonic albums Oxygène (1976), Équinoxe (1978) and Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) had broken through in the UK and established the minor-key ethereal synthesiser as one of the defining sounds of French music.

But above all, the show conveys the cultural otherness of France by having an increasing amount of its dialogue spoken in French. In episode 3, we are intended to be thrown by this, just as the runaways are. Later, we have to keep up, just as they have to. Most British television of the time followed a convention where actors speak French and German lines as lightly accented English. But in The Tripods true French dialogue, and without subtitles, can often be heard right through episodes 3 to 13. Often these are dimly-heard lines thrown away in the background of events, more texture than script, but not always. It’s a radical choice, possible only because so few scenes ever cut away from the English protagonists — the result of adapting a first-person narrative — and it’s done remarkably well, giving the on-screen France a genuine feeling of difference. Just as, at time of writing, a few American shows bravely throw in Spanish dialogue from time to time, Spanish being the one non-English tongue which American viewers might have a smattering of, so The Tripods can only get away without a translation convention because the exotic language is French. It makes no attempt to do the same with German in series two.

It’s in episode 3, in the commandant’s office, that we learn for the first time a key piece of vocabulary: the French word for the Cap. “Ils ont la calotte?” This, in the real France, is the word for a clerical skull-cap, such as worn by priests. It doesn’t appear in The White Mountains, which has only “He touched his head and said a word in his own language.” It doesn’t appear in Les Montagnes Blanches, the French translation of the novel by Michèle Poslaniec, either. Here’s part of the publisher’s blurb:

Quand Will reviendra, il sera Coiffé de la Résille d’argent et fera alors partie du monde des adultes. […] Un Vagabond lui a appris l’existence des Non-Coiffés, un groupe de rebelles cachés dans les Montagnes blanches. Pour échapper à la Cérémonie, Will est prêt à s’enfuir pour les rejoindre.

Poslaniec, the translator, opts for résille rather than calotte for the Cap, literally a hairnet, though it can also mean a metal tracery on a window. But the verb coiffer means the process of being Capped — a word which has connotations of still a third noun, coiffant: a chef’s hat, or sometimes a fashionable hat for women. So the Uncapped are Non-Coiffé. Another key word, Vagrant, is translated as Vagabond in Les Montagnes Blanches, but as the slightly more contemptuous Clochard at the BBC. But both book and show do agree on one thing, which is that Capping is la Cérémonie.

Happily for our heroes, now a multinational trio, there isn’t going to be any Cérémonie just now. They are going to explore a lost world instead, one in which Beanpole will initially act as a sort of guide, but which will lead them to the most foreign country of all: the past.

Works cited:

  1. Secret Army (BBC, 43 × 50 minutes, 1977-79), produced by Gerard Glaister. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  2. The Fourth Arm (BBC, 12 × 50 minutes, 1983), produced by Gerard Glaister. Wikipedia; IMDB.

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