The White Mountains may not be driving episodes 9 and 10, but two other mid-century novels pick up the slack. The family matriarch, Madame Vichot, is lifted almost whole from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), whose 1978 Scottish TV adaptation both the producer and the scriptwriter of The Tripods had worked on.[1] Miss Brodie is a vivacious Edinburgh woman who’s an unconventional mentor to teenage girls. When it is suggested to her that she could marry and have children of her own, instead of teaching, Miss Brodie wryly demurs that her one body could never produce a whole classroom-full; but Madame Vichot has very nearly done exactly that.

And while we’re teasing out sources, isn’t the abrupt arrival of the boys a little reminiscent of the corresponding scene in the 1980 BBC serial of H. E. Bates’s 1944 novel Fair Stood the Wind for France,[2] in which three downed RAF airmen — the leader with his arm badly gashed — have to win over a woman who lives at a French vineyard? If so, then we might notice other echoes, too: scenes down in the machinery of a water mill which are quite like the one in episode 1 of The Tripods; unsubtitled dialogue in French; a chance meeting with a Scottish-born woman. If those still seem like coincidences, consider that Richard Bates, producer of The Tripods, was H. E. Bates’s son, and was an indefatigable stager of his father’s works. (A consultant on Fair Stood… and Love for Lydia,[3] he went on to huge acclaim with his next show after Tripods, The Darling Buds of May.[4])

And if we want still a third latent source for this episode: once the boys have been given a form of temporary adoption by the Vichots, aren’t we watching moments owing a little to Alick Rowe’s other early-1980s scripts, fostering dramas about troubled teenagers — Claire, for example?[5] In theory the BBC Tripods places Will and Henry as fifteen, turning sixteen, and Beanpole a year older. In practice, how grown up they are varies with the needs of the script. At the Chateau they seemed fully adult, drinking champagne, getting engaged to be married. But in the vineyard, Rowe frames them less as adventurers than as homeless youths, or even as children who need care and support. Their foster-parents, so to speak, have them make do with girls’ clothes. Will and Henry sleep together in the same quite small bed. This is how people look after lost children, not how they receive mysterious adult guests. Will, in particular, is written for in quite a similar way to the character of Robert in Claire: her stepbrother, who is indeed fifteen, is sensitive, vulnerable, going through puberty and trying to understand what he should be. The almost extravagant sorrow of the Vichots when the boys leave at the end of episode 10 is perhaps also about the other side of fostering: that it can end just when a bond has formed. Claire almost destroys her foster-family, but it is when she runs away from them that they realise that losing her is even worse. Now, I’m not saying that the actors or the director lean in to this reading of the script — indeed, the one unambiguous shot of the boys in bed together is tracked past so quickly that you almost need to freeze-frame: after that, Will avoids being in Henry’s space by habitually sitting on the window-seat. All the same, the script in episodes 9 and 10 does feel to me to be written for emotionally younger boys than the rest of the series.

These three sources are not telefantasy material. They are not even for children, and very little about them rhymes with John Christopher’s conception. Nothing better demonstrates that the creators of The Tripods were not, when it comes down to it, science-fictioneers. The show was going to have to spend two episodes indoors at this point, for budgetary reasons and to provide variety. But it could have made some high-concept sci-fi choice of what to do with this time, or opted for a more espionage take. Instead, three serious works of adult fiction have somehow been folded into a modest but genuine story about family and belonging in la France profonde.

— ● — ● — ● —

Fair Stood the Wind for France makes a useful point of comparison with what the producers did make, in fact, because it’s very much television as film. It’s a slow, beautiful drama, sparse in dialogue. There are long, still shots of starkly decayed concrete and rusting iron. A harsh sun beats down on a broad sweep of wide-angle landscape. The farm is a haphazard mess, not clearly delineated off from a wider world, and its soul is in the river running through it, not the internal rooms, which feel claustrophobic. The visual texture of episodes 9 and 10 of The Tripods couldn’t be more different: a cartoonishly perfect French farmhouse and its yard are all boxed up into a tight rectangle where actors perform a stage play under studio lights. The difference is more than just texture, and more even than the stylistics of multi-camera versus single.

The cardinal rule of studio television is that the set must itself be a defining feature of the programme. On The Tripods, the “Designer” credit ranks fourth in prestige, right after the producer, director, and authors. The construction of BBC sets had come a long way since the days of arranging theatre scenery at one end of a long room: as cameras became lighter, more manoeuverable, and with greater ability to shoot up or down, so designers responded by building steadily more ambitious spatial layouts. Dead voids of studio space can drain the joy right out of a drama — the early runs of the BBC Television Shakespeare (1977-85) are a case in point — so lines of sight need to be obstructed as often as opened, and some of the best sets are maze-like. But that in turn is demanding. With multi-camera filming, little can be hidden in shadows, so every surface in these mazes, horizontal or vertical, must look functional. (The worst-looking Doctor Who sets are not the cheap ones, but the ones where the designer just couldn’t imagine how the space was lived in or used.) Because both actors and cameras need to hit their marks more or less perfectly, furniture and walls must be exactly placed to make the choreography work. The French farmhouse kitchen in Fair Stood the Wind for France, by contrast, suffers from being a real farmhouse kitchen: its bulky furniture gets in the way and constrains the camera angle. At some level we do know that studio-built rooms are a charade, that they did not exist eight hours ago, and that four hours from now they will never exist again. But a well-made set is so trustworthy to the eye that we find it convincing.

Or perhaps the word should be “appealing”. The lushly detailed interiors of the Vichot farmhouse are not just well laid out spatially, they are as busy with detail as museum dioramas. The designer set out to make the ideal French vineyard, not one that simply happens to exist. This style of exaggeration, or caricature, gives studio drama something of the texture of the graphic novel. Those evenly-lit backgrounds offer the same undertone of reassurance which neatly inked green trees and white stone roads lend to the adventures of Asterix the Gaul. Perhaps this is why the Vichot scenes, taped in a fake farmhouse, are more comforting to view than the Ricordeau ones, which were filmed in a real chateau. Sometimes a blanket fort is more fun to be in than a castle.

One reason that older studio productions are sometimes written off as second-rate, compared with filmed ones, is that many were rather indifferently directed. The cameramen in the big 1970s studios knew their business well enough that obtaining a competently-filmed scene needed no particular flair or panache on the director’s part. The director’s key contributions came earlier: in casting, in partitioning studio floor space, in planning camera angles ahead of time, and in the rehearsal room. This particular production was assigned to Christopher Barry, a veteran staff director with a reputation as a safe pair of hands rather than an innovator. (You can get a sense of his style from the BBC staff training film he presented, even though that was from nearly twenty years earlier.) In these two episodes he did well to coax relaxed performances from so young a cast. Studio days were stressful for actors, who were physically outnumbered by a harassed crew in a confined space. There was very little time for second takes, and none at all for second thoughts. But if the director knew his business, those run-throughs in the rehearsal rooms would have given the performances time to bed in, and that does seem true here. Our stay with the Vichots rolls out as confidently as a stage play in mid-run, rather than a jittery first night.

In any case, the interval is over now, so let’s resume with the second act.

Works cited:

  1. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (STV, 7 × 50 minutes, 1978), produced by Richard Bates. IMDB. From the novel by Muriel Spark (1961): Wikipedia.
  2. Fair Stood the Wind for France (BBC, 4 × 50 minutes, 1980), produced by Colin Tucker. IMDB. From the novel by H. E. Bates (1944): Wikipedia.
  3. Love for Lydia (London Weekend Television, 13 × 50 minutes, 1977), produced by Tony Wharmby. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the novel by H. E. Bates (1952): Wikipedia.
  4. The Darling Buds of May (Yorkshire, 10 × 100 minutes, sometimes broadcast as 20 × 50, 1991-93), produced by Richard Bates. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the short series of novels by H. E. Bates (1958-63): Wikipedia.
  5. Claire (BBC, 6 × 50 minutes, 1982), produced by Ron Craddock. IMDB.
  6. The BBC Television Shakespeare (BBC, 37 × various lengths, 1978-85), produced by Cedric Messina, Jonathan Miller and Shaun Sutton. Wikipedia; IMDB.

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