The aliens invaded too long ago to make The Tripods an alien-invasion story, and society is too rebuilt to make it regular post-apocalyptic fare either. But the ruins and lost powers of “the Ancients” — humanity before the fall — add a rich layer of genre fiction, in a technological form of H. Rider Haggard-like discovery of lost temples.[1] In episode 4, corresponding exactly to chapter 5 of the novel, that’s presented to the full. Remarkably, the three travellers are the only speaking parts, and the France they explore is a depopulated ruin. “No people, and no Tripods,” as Beanpole says. And yet the mood shades progressively through the episode from early optimism, with cheerful guitar licks busying the music, to eventual unease, and finally to nightmare. Most memorably, this is the episode which goes to Paris, a brave venture for 1980s television technology, and a remarkably successful one.

We open on Beanpole poking through a derelict air traffic control tower of white-painted brick in what’s now a cornfield, climbing uncertain stairs to find nasty-looking jags of glass at long-broken windows. The camera finds interesting angles as he talks to the Parkers below. This whole episode will be driven by Beanpole and his curiosity, so it’s an apt start. For the first time, it is unclear what day this is, but the conversation, Will’s pointing at the map and the proximity of Paris all suggest an inland walk of anything up to a week. This is television, though, so Will and Henry now have the sort of conversation you might have with somebody you’ve only just met, in order to re-introduce Beanpole to the viewer. The party keep up a good pace, and the camerawork follows a traditional visual grammar. When making progress, the boys walk always left to right, the direction of reading. This is why the Parkers were walking west along the beach toward Rhymney back in episode 2: to walk east, as would make better geographical sense, would have meant crossing the screen right to left. Similarly, to give a sense of finality there’s nothing like allowing actors to walk out of shot with the camera position fixed, which is what they do here.

Morning on — oh, let’s call it 14th July, always good to be in France on the quatorze — sees us having sheltered in a barn of what Beanpole says is the farm of his uncle and aunt. Quite the coincidence that it lies on their route, but sure, why not, it allows us to glimpse a sadder side of his upbringing. Then we are off to the chemin-de-fer. A standard trick of the novel is to portray as alien something completely familiar to the reader, such as a cash register, or a car. Here, it’s a train. This passage of the novel evokes not just any train, but a known and beloved one: the boat-train from Calais to Paris which was a nearly universal experience for English travellers of the twentieth century. (The Channel Tunnel, though planned in 1975, did not begin construction until 1988, and seems not to exist in the Tripod-verse.) The carriages are horse-drawn in the book — in Europe, rails existed for nearly two centuries before locomotives — but the TV show pegs human technology at about 1850 not 1650, well into the age of steam, and this gives us a charming interlude with a fully-practical steam train pushing a wagon of felled trees. At this point in the book, the runaways ride the roofs of box-cars, but that’s clearly not going to work with such a small logging engine, and so on television they instead find the strangest conveyance of the whole show — a rail-mounted handcar with a walking beam on a pivot. Henry calls this “fast”, but handcars typically run at 8mph, so Will’s subsequent complaint about being “days out of our way” suggests they stick at it for a good while. An incidental beat has the Parkers remembering similar lines “behind Stone Farm”, back in Wherton. “I never knew what they were for.” I love this moment, and don’t quite know why. I suppose an aura of nostalgia clings to abandoned village-branch railways in England, which are now as compatible with a rural idyll as a hay-wain. Their presence in a post-apocalyptic drama feels quite natural.

The boys pull cobs of corn from a field. Living off the land is only rarely shown on screen, perhaps because the camera is reluctant to see the skinning of a rabbit. The Tripod sighting for episode 4 is only a distant one across this farmland, but it’s our best look yet at their spidery, awkward gait. Having three legs works well for standing still, but not for forward movement, as the television model-makers soon discovered. A whirling motion would be symmetrical but silly-looking on camera, so the BBC Tripods favour a one-leg, two-legs alternation of strides. It looks ponderous, but given their scale it still makes for about 30-40mph. That agrees with the books, where a Tripod and a horse at full gallop are about evenly matched for speed.

Since the boys are talking about how many Tripods there are, here’s an answer of a sort: maybe not as many as they think. England has about seven thousand villages, and can support about four million peasants working the land. A cadre of just fifty Tripods could feasibly give each settlement its own annual Capping day, with an average of two or three boys and girls presented every year. Extrapolating from that, all of Europe could be controlled by a force of only a thousand — about the number of tanks in a real-world army. (If their service lifetime is 25 years then about forty new Tripods would have to be built annually. That seems feasible enough — at time of writing, Airbus and Boeing each turn out that many passenger jets every month.) If evenly spread out, Tripods will typically be about 100km apart from each other, but each one will be visible for about 20km around. So on a long walk you might indeed expect to see one or two at a distance every day or so.

Throughout the episode Beanpole has been deliberately veering the party off course, first east rather than southeast to meet the railway, and then towards Paris via the rails. The scene of the boys arguing over this really exists to demonstrate that Henry sides with Beanpole and not Will. Throughout this chapter of the novel a dominance-game is playing out among the three teenagers, with the pairing of Will and Henry destabilised by a strong-minded third party.

The Great City of the Ancients, a set-piece sequence in The White Mountains which book reviewers immediately latched onto as a highlight, is realised by the BBC with a patchwork of vision mixing, matted-on art, derelict location filming and darkly-lit studio sets. A sense of expanse is lent by the quite large number of short scenes as we traverse. While the runaways have no idea what they are looking at, we certainly know. The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré Coeur, and the Opéra all appear. The car Beanpole finds in a garage is a Citroën deux chevaux, a design going back to 1948. Like a lot of what we see, it’s modern and it’s not. When the show was made, France projected a more technological face than England: it was the land of Minitel, of the TGV and the Ariane rocket, and of the glass pyramid in the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre and the Grande Arche de La Defènse. Paris had a sort of futuristic chic as compared with London or New York, which were then both looking tired. But we don’t really encounter that modernity on screen, except perhaps in the clothing of the Vagrants. Unlike, say, Paul Gillon’s post-apocalyptic bande dessinée La Survivante (1985),[2] the BBC has chosen to sack and destroy a charming art-nouveau Paris, rather than the contemporary one.

But they certainly have made a comprehensive wreck of it, and the matte paintings echo the famous photographs of broken windows taken after Paris was all but destroyed in the War of 1870. The trees sprouting out from every shattered wall also show nature reclaiming it, a motif in the novel which you could say echoes the many classical paintings of Roman ruins, but was more likely borrowed from a scene late on in The Day of the Triffids[3] where London has similarly begun to decay. The synthesised music pushes to extremes of pitch and of effect in this environment, making it feel considerably less cosy than it otherwise might. The novel’s vague threat of feral dogs becomes an actual threat from the fashion-victim Vagrants, who look like refugees from a new romantic music video: these Vagrants are highly territorial and regard the goods of the City as their own. A modestly Hitchcockian suspense is lent by the fact that we see this danger coming and the boys do not.

The department store is a terrific sequence, shot in a huge echoey space with a still more echoey soundtrack, and with so much physical expanse that the actors can wander far enough away to be distantly miked. There’s broken glass crunching under foot, and dust and rubble are everywhere, with repeated shots of things falling or being smashed. Beanpole discovers professionally-made glasses, so that’s the last we’ll see of his home-made spectacles. Will and Henry, uninterested in the jewellery, are fascinated by the mechanical watches. Note the “Michel Herbelin - Paris” logo, a rare instance of a commercial brand visible in the show: Herbelin, founded 1947, was and is a French luxury watch-maker.

That’s the only time the word “Paris” actually appears on screen, but two other place-names follow. As the travellers approach a Métro station — an ingenious succession of five different mattes enabling this to be shot from multiple angles — a faded sign above the stairs reads ABBESSES. Some little care must have gone into this choice. Abbesses is the deepest station anywhere on the Paris Métro, which seems fitting for what turns out to be an abandoned resistance base. It is just down the hill from Sacré Coeur, which was the exact route shown in one of the mattes. It has one of only two surviving “glass dragonfly” édicules, the most picturesque of all Métro entrances — which is painted accurately into the TV show, as is the ruined apartment building behind it. And its northbound platform is indeed “Direction — Chapelle”, the sign just barely visible in the interior set.

What happens down there is, like so much else in this exploration of Paris, played out on two levels: what the characters understand, and what the viewers understand. To the travellers this is just a man-made cave — to the Parkers, a predicament which Beanpole gets them into. They take the “goose eggs, made of iron” without asking who put them there: to them, the city is full of random stuff. But what viewers see is the base of a resistance group from the time of the coming of the Tripods, with sleeping-cots and weapons. It all evokes another Paris legend, of the French Resistance living in the catacombs in 1944. Whoever these first of the Free Men were, they left in a hurry, because the safety catch of the sub-machine gun is off. With a tremendous racket it fires wildly around the enclosed space, and, superbly, knocks the glass clear out of the station clock, one large shard falling and smashing just after the magazine empties. That slight shaking of the image as the gun fires is caused by sound pressure waves in the air inside the camera tubes: a sure sign that real guns were fired on set. All that business with the weapons dovetails with two plot elements already in motion — the unresolved “who’s our leader” issue, and the stalking Vagrants, who are held off only by the sounds of exploding grenades, thus buying the boys just a little more time. But the real story is the one told by the props alone. When the boys take the eggs, it’s a symbolic passing of the torch from the old freedom fighters to the new. Though the Paris resistance cell lost out, the iron eggs they left behind will eventually save the boys, and so in due course the world.

Camping out for the night in a bed-and-bath store leads to a peaceful minute or so of inaction, lulling viewers into thinking the episode has passed its peak moment of sound and fury. Henry hums “Yellow Submarine” in the bath (whose water has come from where?), so the tune must somehow have survived. Time slips forward: it’s late, a storm is coming on in the night. Beanpole and Henry play chess with a gorgeous set of tall jade pieces, but they’re still in the middle game when a huge thrown cobblestone smashes the board, and suddenly the Vagrants are attacking. Cobblestones are the mob weapon of choice in Parisian history, from the Revolution to the student uprising of 1968, and they come across as heavy and dangerous in this brief but surprisingly violent clash. Henry and Beanpole beat the Vagrants off but only after the intruders succeed in reclaiming most of what the boys took from the city, not to mention the last of Ozymandias’s gifts — the map and the compass. The loss of the map, which has no analogue in the book, was probably thrown in to increase their jeopardy, and in particular to make it harder to leave the Chateau in subsequent episodes.

And so we cut to a nightmare sequence — this is Will’s point of view, and he is delirious — in the open landscape south of Paris. It’s at least the next day and more likely the day after, so let’s call it 17 July. Henry and Beanpole drag the intermittently conscious Will on a farm cart through almost lavishly bad weather. The rain pools everywhere, and suddenly there are hunting dogs, shot from a low camera, and horses — the first since episode 2. We have our first sight, through Beanpole, of the turrets of Chateau Ricordeau, and through Will, of a new villain: the Duc de Sarlat.

It’s hard to fault this episode, which traverses the whole of northern France and is jammed solid with visuals, ideas and character-moments. The novel is broadly followed but Paris is given a much more action-based, less ghostly, treatment, which was a wise choice. It’s a slight shame to lose the feeling of mourning in the novel where, for example, we find the grave of a teenaged girl in Père Lachaise. But the Vagrants and their cobblestones make far better television than simply having Will contract typhus from bad water.

Works cited:

  1. King Solomon’s Mines (1885), by H. Rider Haggard. Wikipedia. Or, really, any of his Allan Quatermain novels, or their many imitators.
  2. La Survivante (1985-91), by Paul Gillon. French Wikipedia.
  3. The Day of the Triffids (1951), by John Wyndham. Wikipedia

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