The Tripods is not based on watching your favourite stars, in the way that, say, the movie Where Eagles Dare is. Geoff Dyer’s excellent little study of that film can freely call the characters Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood because they make no effort not to play themselves. They have almost gone as far as Cary Grant, who had developed a sort of supra-character — “Cary Grant” in inverted commas — appearing in each of his movies, with only the names and costumes changing.

Notable actors do appear in The Tripods — whatever you think about the casting of teenage actors as the leads, the fully adult cast is undeniably solid — but it is ensemble television in which the actors subordinate themselves to the story, as they should. So I don’t think it’s useful to unmask them. Who was the Comte de Saclay, for example? Why, that’s Roger Hammond, indignant buffoons a speciality, active on television for nearly six decades. Does Sarlat seem a bit Fascist, a bit public-school? Robin Langford had been both a Gestapo officer and one of Tom Brown’s schoolfellows in earlier BBC productions (surprisingly, he did not play Flashman). It’s interesting, up to a point, to spiral off into the resumés of actors, but in the end it’s all fairly extraneous. For a fan of British sci-fi television, it’s amusing to note that Jeremy Young, playing the Count, had been a caveman in the first ever Doctor Who story, in 1963: he was, in fact, its very first guest star. It might be more relevant to talk about his lead role as Athos, noblest-born of the Three Musketeers, in a 1966-67 show now largely forgotten. And who doesn’t love our Countess, Pamela Salem? Her voice, her assurance. She’s authentic in everything.

But does any of it matter, in the end? None of these acting biographies really changes our experience as viewers. These were solidly credentialed actors, and all we can really say is that they sometimes played roles which were similar, and sometimes played other roles which were not. Besides, when you unmask characters, and begin to think of them as their actors instead — to see Clint Eastwood and not Lt. Morris Schaffer — so the characters slip away from you.

Just the same, we might look more carefully at the minor part of Trouillon if we know that he was played by Terry Forrestal, who also arranged all the fights in this episode. In the small world of English stunt-men, Forrestal was royalty. He appeared in Bond movies, in Indiana Jones, and Titanic. He was killed base-jumping from a cliff overlooking a Norwegian fjord in 2000. To know that does give his handsome and assured performance here a certain pathos, and certainly the quality of the action sequences says much for his abilities.

But it is the lot of adventurers and stunt-men to be lost to us in the end, when their luck runs out. That cannot be said of the awful fact that only a few weeks after the filming of episode 7 Charlotte Long, who really doesn’t put a foot wrong in playing Eloise, would be hit and killed by a lorry. To have a star turn on a Saturday night BBC drama was huge for a young actor in 1984, and she died eight days too soon to see it. To know that really does change our experience of watching the episode, as the last minutes of her screen time tick away to nothing.

Next: Episode 8 (first half) ● Prev: Episode 7