This full-on adventure episode, adapting chapter 4 of the novel, completes the foundations of our imaginary world. Most obviously, it introduces the third of the three travellers, Beanpole, and the fourth of our four categories of adults, the Black Guards. So far all obstacles have been passive ones, but now we have an actively opposing force. And as well as completing the stock of people, we make landfall in France.

We open at sea, on what is now 10 July 2089. Again, working lives: Will swabs the deck, and Henry peels potatoes for the ship’s cook, who has a nicely-done cameo to recap their situation. In the line-up scene later, the camera makes just a little too much of this actor’s dwarfism — gratuitiously, the tallest man on board is put next to him — in a way that it would not do today. Meanwhile, though, the Parkers are called below, and the action flows into an interior, the Captain’s cabin.

This seems a good moment to draw attention to something we do not see. An unusual feature of this production is that videotape was used for both location and studio footage, rather than shooting exteriors on film stock, which would have different grain, detail and lighting range. The Tripods wasn’t unique in that: indeed, its producer had worked on Love for Lydia (1977),[1] which had also combined heavy location work with video-tape filming, though the 1976 heatwave hadn’t helped. Survivors (1975-77)[2] had also been videotape-only, borrowing outdoor cameramen who normally covered football matches. Even Doctor Who[3] was to make the transition to all-video in 1987, a shift which noticeably changed its texture and the typical screen-breakdown of its scripts. Shooting on video made the budget for a long, outdoorsy serial more feasible — filmed serials tended to be much shorter, with film stock itself being a major expense. On the other hand, video tape complicated how effects were composited, since the technology for digital editing was in its infancy. So it was a trade-off, but for The Tripods, it turned out to be a good one. On most British productions of this era, the jump every so often from location film to studio VT or vice versa is as conspicuous as the difference between a portrait photo and a Polaroid. If the Parkers had been going below not on the Orion but on the Charlotte Rhodes, the sailing ship which starred in the The Onedin Line,[4] the viewer would have seen an abrupt cut from a wide-angle view of a rain-lashed deck in washed-out, natural colours to a bone-dry brightly lit interior room seen through a warm, faintly blurry lense. Instead, it’s easy to believe that the action on the Orion really is continuous between deck and cabin. Deft camera-work in the studio helps to sell gently tilting decks and swaying lanterns. The light-well in the cabin is below a grating, which is right because the real ship’s deck did have one. Foley work makes the soundscape coherent from inside and out, too. All the same, the use of consistent video-tape stock throughout the show is a part of what makes the seam between location and studio filming invisible.

The cabin turns out to be that of… Captain Curtis, the very man they were looking for! But Curtis is a more malignant and ambiguous figure than in the novel (where he’s a member of the Free Men in good standing). Two of Ozymandias’s four gifts from episode 2 — the money bag, and the charcoal drawing — are disposed of, so now the Parkers have only map and compass left. The cabin is another dark set, Curtis retreating to the light-well as louchely as if it’s a couch in an opium den. On the desk is an old chart of a harbour approach; there are naval bookcases with bars, and a dark wood sink-cabinet with a mirror. As in the novel, a shriek is heard from Tripods. We have to establish that they can cross open water, since otherwise there could be no Cappings in England. Fully aquatic Tripods are hard to convey on screen, and indeed even the novel isn’t wholly convincing here, but the episode gives it a game enough try, which just about works for a short shot. What this really presages is a raid by the Black Guard who, with motor-boats unavailable, use racing catamarans instead. Menacing music crowds into the soundscape. The bosun hides our runaways in the still darker hold — Will, it may be noted, had been coolly taking the opportunity to go through Curtis’s papers — when a catch-your-breath shot reveals the Orion’s cargo of pitiful, manacled Vagrants. This is a slave ship, and as the dialogue on deck makes clear, the port commandant is the buyer of these slaves. But just as Curtis is ambiguously evil, so the commandant is ambiguously benign. He’s another strong character and the dialogue crackles, because for once we have conflict between opposing adults. The Guard have orders to find two runaways… and they do, but it’s a different pair. The identification-line-up scene is a great bit of jeopardy.

Cut to full night — proper, ink-black night filming, not day-for-night camera filters — as the Orion awaits the dawn tide, moored in a French harbour. Will and Henry re-establish the map prop, because it will be important later in the episode, and then make a creditable escape against the sound of suspenseful electronica and further heavy Foley work. Four bells chime from a clock on shore: so it is now 4 a.m., French time, on 11 July. They slip to shore in the Captain’s jolly-boat, Will single-oaring it improbably well for a landsman — but then, his childhood home does have a jetty into a lake. Extras playing the sailors do the muffled, purposeful work of unloading, while the camera catches red-orange braziers and Curtis’s salt-and-pepper beard out of the darkness. The night feels close and has the intensity of people trying to be quiet. Up the stone steps of the harbour wall, and our heroes have made it. “So this is Calais, then?” Henry’s incautious remark in English gets them noticed by Black Guards, who challenge them in French. One thing you can say for teenage actors: in a run-like-hell scene, they really go for it. The night lends mystique to this unknown shore and we want them to escape into the seductively dark continent so close to hand, but no. They are cornered.

In his office, the port commandant warms his hands at a coal fire. The fires we saw in Wherton, a village in the forest, were of chopped wood, but northern France is coal-mine country. The clerk sits before a map of, I think, the Pas de Calais, while there is mention of a nearby Bonneville — there is an old town called that near Le Havre, but really it has the generic ring of an invented name. The colour of this scene is very much black: the black of iron, of night, and of uniform cloth. There are cells and coop-like cages. The commandant has the boys imprisoned overnight before a Capping ceremony to take place “demain, à sept heures”.

Vagrants from the Orion are being taken down a formidable oubliette-like manhole into a dungeon below the guard-house, and our heroes are put there too. We never learn why the Vagrants were transported here, which is all the more disturbing. Grudgingly tolerated in England, they are treated as sub-human in France, which again has that faint echo of Nazi occupation. This ill-treatment raises the stakes for our heroes — in a few hours they will be Capped, but their Cappings will surely fail, so a few hours after that, they’ll be Vagrants.

The prison is elaborately done for a set which is used just once, but that one time is a continuous 9-minute scene, so good value is got from it. What in the novel was just a cellar with a bolted door has become a complex split-level structure with multiple cells, a ladder, a bridge and a sea-water sump, and the walkways are given a good work-out by patrolling sentries. A sign on one wall is never legible in the half-darkness: two words, M-something R-something? Clanging sounds, exaggeratedly distant echoes and a low-mounted but moving camera all sell a feeling of spaciousness which, if ever we stopped to think about it, we would realise that the set cannot really have. The cells are matted with golden straw, but also have old gas pipes lovingly streaked with stains by the set designer.

Ozymandias had told the boys they would need “a lot of luck”. They were, let’s face it, already pretty fortunate to reach Rhymney on the very same tide that the Orion departed for Africa, and not, say, half an hour later. But the luckiest break they will ever get is right now, when they are flat-out rescued by a total stranger. First seen holding a lantern — one of the few details from the novel to be preserved in this scene — Jean-Paul is the nephew of the harbour’s innkeeper. I pity the innkeeper getting a teenager out of bed well before dawn for this menial job, but without complaint Jean-Paul brings the Parkers food (sausage, apple, bread, in a latched picnic basket) — and only them: nobody seems to care if the Vagrants are hungry. A nice reversal now is that the boys assume he can’t speak English, and are caught out once again when he does. This first trio conversation, the first of many, is rightly given more time than any other dialogue scene in the episode. (For a moment you can just make out the movement of a microphone-boom shadow on the spread white handkerchief, a rare technical error in this show, but you would need to be looking for it.) Jean-Paul, who is seventeen, is an inventor — he wears home-made spectacles, his “lunettes”, an eerie rather than comical prop — and has avoided Capping by faking illness. He is another orphan. He gives them the means to escape, but, in a nice demonstration of the boundaries of their new trust, has difficulty persuading them to give up the map. It’s good that he does because it means that, in the escape sequence, all three boys are in jeopardy: Jean-Paul has to get the map past the Black Guard searching him, while Will and Henry have to get past the iron grating in the sea-water sump without being heard or seen. Once again this is well executed, with the actors betraying no hesitation in the cold, clouded sea-water. Their escape is possible only because of the Vagrant-baiting of the Guard, which takes his attention away. The Vagrant being bullied does see the escape… and lets it happen, as his silent revenge on the Guard. All of which is far more interesting than the corresponding events in the novel, and the Parkers are made to work harder for their luck.

The final, wordless shots of episode 3 take the camera through a cave passage by candlelight and out blinking onto a dawn beach, where the boys unite and, at last, strike inland. Two aqua-Tripods in the far distance are matted a little crudely onto this shot, but it does compose the final frame pleasingly. For the first time, we end not on a cliff-hanger but a prospect. We have a fully developed show now, and all’s to play for.

Works cited:

  1. Love for Lydia (London Weekend Television, 13 × 50 minutes, 1977), produced by Tony Wharmby. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1952 novel by H. E. Bates, father of the producer of The Tripods.
  2. Survivors (BBC, 38 × 50 minutes, 1975-77), produced by Terence Dudley. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  3. Doctor Who (BBC, 695 × mostly 25 minutes, 1963-89), produced by Verity Lambert and many successors. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  4. The Onedin Line (BBC, 91 × 50 minutes, 1971-80), produced by Cyril Abraham. Wikipedia; IMDB.

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