Uniquely, episode 8 flows continuously into episode 9. The new material doesn’t pick up the story days later, or next morning, or a couple of hours later, it resumes the exact same scene. That’s tricky, because The Tripods never opens on a repeat of the footage leading up to the cliff-hanger, in the way Doctor Who or The Tomorrow People used to do. So to provide the necessary recap for viewers, the script needs to establish the situation using dialogue. And therefore Will and Beanpole, who have just reached an unhappy conclusion in an intense conversation, suddenly take a step back to restate the obvious with a couple of stilted lines. Perhaps because that isn’t quite the natural thing to say next, it rings a little awkwardly. But it’s the only sticky moment in an otherwise well-produced episode.

By children’s book standards, The White Mountains is a tough-minded tale of privation and loss. The resolution of episode 8’s cliffhanger is an operation without anaesthetic by somebody who isn’t a doctor: Beanpole is going to cut the device out of Will’s side. Henry’s horrified reaction underscores the gravity. “That knife should be boiled, or burned, first.” The knife is a folding blade from the Paris department store, and Beanpole sharpens it on the tunnel wall, the sound of the scrape ominous. Henry’s squeamishness neatly permits the camera not to show the actual cutting, because it can follow Henry instead as he explores the tunnel, candle in hand. He finds a cobwebbed wine cellar, an oil lamp to upgrade his candle, and a door onto a new valley. But when he returns to see the button-device with its circuitry all stained, held in Beanpole’s bloody fingers, and an ashen Will wadding up a considerable wound, these are still images on the edge of what was broadcastable. In the book, Will is even now not done with suffering: “The days that followed were hard. For me, particularly, because my arm had festered. In the end, Beanpole cut it again”. I tend to agree with the television production that we don’t need to see that, though curiously Beanpole’s use of wild herbs as medicine does eventually appear in series two.

So here we part ways from the book, and also from that most unexpected co-star of episode 8, Will’s white horse. The Tripod lowers its tentacle — we see the rotating mechanism of the iris which releases it — and gropes into the tunnel-mouth, the centre of its grapple (inevitably, three-pronged) lighting up as a searchlight (inevitably, green). Beanpole places the button-device where it can be seen, and the Tripod makes a Nintendo-like recognition chirp, freaking the boys out. Henry makes a straw dummy using old railwayman’s overalls, attaches the button, and mounts it on the horse: which rides out of the tunnel, and is followed by the Tripod. That’s the last we see of either. Had this action appeared in the book, I’m pretty sure the Tripod would have killed the horse in some gruesome way, so I’m kind of glad this scene is new to television.

The passage through the tunnel takes us from the show at its grittiest to the show at its most warm-hearted. We have now reached the Alpine foothills southeast of Dijon, a landscape of slopes and escarpments, and — since the best wine comes from grapes starved of nutrients — vineyards. We will spend a gentle mini-serial here, only two episodes long, set among the family Vichot. This whole dalliance is extrapolated from a single sentence in The White Mountains: “Toward evening we climbed up through fields closely set with plants, supported by sticks, on which were clusters of small green grapes.” If you’re thinking that this sentence may not strictly require 45 minutes of screen time and a cast of twelve to dramatise, you’re not wrong. The BBC’s grapes are in any case black.

The vineyard, accompanied by its calming guitar melody, sings to us. But first the littlest of the Vichot family, Lucy, gives a scream which is allowed to echo right over our new valley. It makes for a perfect cut to a wordless confrontation of the seven Vichot women — mother and six daughters — arrayed on the farmhouse stairs facing three boys on the far side of a kitchen table.

Though Mme Vichot talks first, dismissing these waifs and strays in no-nonsense French, Will quite wins her over — as always, his great talent is for being liked by strangers — and then it’s Lucie, hugging a rag-doll almost as big as herself, who steals the scene. Mme Vichot sends the girls scurrying on errands and then examines the wound under Will’s sliced-open riding tunic, lifting his rope-slinged arm. Lucie gives a sun-coming-out smile which, as if by magic, modulates the music into a major chord.

The ground storey of the Vichot farmhouse is a spatially intricate layout which we explore with our eyes even as the actors are talking. Its internal spaces interconnect by means of the staircase, the door onto the terrace, the far window looking out onto the loggia, the through-view of the terrace from the near window, and the pantry area. The kitchen wall is not the boundary edge of the set, as we would guess from the first shots, but its central axis. This indoor side holds a space broken up by upright beams, dressers, shelves, a mantelpiece, and an old and much-used oven. Anchoring the room is a table placed perpendicularly to the axis wall, an oak beauty which seats anywhere from three to twelve actors under a hanging brass lamp.

Henry and Beanpole wash at a fully practical water pump in the half-inside, half-outside loggia beside a rather covetable white-painted wall-cabinet. They are the object of fascinated staring from the Vichot girls, who lean out of what was the left window in the previous shot, and is now the right window as seen from the other side. Note the leaning pushcart, and all the greenery, from shrubs to window-boxes, selling the idea of this face of the kitchen wall as being out of doors, even though the lighting is hardly changed. “I’ve never seen so many girls,” Henry says in a dazed sort of way, as if he’s in the Castle Anthrax skit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it cannot be denied that six daughters is a lot of daughter — one more even than in Pride and Prejudice — nor that Mme Vichot is Will’s third mother-figure of the series. Some may feel that the script has over-compensated here for the male bias of the novel. On the other hand, the girls fill the farmhouse with life, and make it a place where the travellers let their guard down.

This is France, so supper is served late. It’s full night outside by the time they sit to eat, four each side of the table, Mme Vichot at the kitchen end and her husband — a watchful man who speaks no English — at the wall we haven’t yet seen, where his head obscures a Romantic painting. The other image, propped up on the high mantelpiece by a blue model car (another 2CV), is an icon of Napoleon in his colonel’s uniform. It looks to be a copy painted from the famous Tuileries portrait by Jacques-Louis David, though the head angle is different. Will, eating from a tray beside the oven, is too woozy to take part. They have soup, French bread and rough red wine, and listen to a barely credible back story about Mme Vichot having been born in Leith as the daughter of a wine importer. Mme Vichot invites Henry and Beanpole to stay for the grape harvest, then has some fun with them. The boys relax.

Though perhaps they shouldn’t. A wordless scene in The Tripods is always an opportunity for the music to comment on the action, and it finds the sight of the adult Vichots disturbing as they go through the baggage of the sleeping travellers, to find all manner of incriminating objects: handwritten maps, compass, the bloody knife, matches, and the hand grenades. What does that significant nod mean? But in daylight all seems innocence again, with Mme Vichot humming “sing a song of sixpence” as she hangs Beanpole’s trousers, Will’s riding clothes and Henry’s white jumper on a washing line. We’re looking at the exterior face of the kitchen wall once again, but are now on the opposite side from the water-pump, where the camera can see stacks of chopped firewood and a terracotta roof. Though basically a studio production, this pair of episodes is intercut with snippets of location footage up on the steep-sided vineyard above the farmhouse, and we get a longer one of those now: a back-breaking day of grape harvesting, filling buckets carried by a cart pulled by a big chestnut horse. Rocky, sloped vineyards like this one are still sometimes hand-harvested today, and 8 September would be an early but feasible harvesting date, so all of this makes sense. Beanpole and Henry (in borrowed, faintly female clothes) are already pairing up with Helen and Kirsty, the two oldest un-Capped girls. There’s hand-holding and significant-look-having. Will’s opposite number, down on the terrace, is little Lucie, and he bangs a supper gong with a wooden spoon, ending the scene. The continuity of the sound joins these studio- and location-shot scenes together elegantly.

And so 8 September, the first full day chez Vichot, ends in what is — surprisingly — the only indoor bedroom shared by all three travellers in the entire series. There are sloping eaves, two brass bedsteads with homemade quilts, a window-seat, an old doll’s-house, a stuffed toy, a wardrobe, and a coat-rack. The equipment is returned: “They’ve even ironed the map.” Henry floats the idea of staying for the winter, Will accuses him of being soft on Kirsty, Beanpole changes into what turns out to be a night-dress, and an argument defuses into laughter. This being television, what in real life would have taken a week or two of gradual habituation has been telescoped into a single day, but they are now part of the family.

Television now plays the opposite game with time, though, because it compresses numerous further days into just a minute or so of footage before Henry and Kirsty begin treading the grapes, in a great wooden vat in still another face of the farmhouse set, a barn filled with barrels and beams to the left of the washing-line area. (You can see the washing line still, but not the washing, which is correct because it would have been taken down days ago.) This scene is a lovely bit for both actors — he’s her first boyfriend, she’s his first girlfriend. The treading’s authentic enough, and ought to produce a decent pinot noir, though they maybe should destem the grapes first to reduce the 3-isobutyl-2-methoxypyrazine content. Strangely enough, Kirsty doesn’t discuss that issue, and instead teaches Henry to sing “Cadet Rousselle” as a work-song:

Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons,
Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons,
Qui n’ont ni poutres, ni chevrons,
Qui n’ont ni poutres, ni chevrons.
C’est pour loger les hirondelles!
Que direz-vous d’Cadet Rousselle?
Ah! Ah! Ah! Oui, vraiment,
Cadet Rouselle est bon enfant.

Originally a Revolutionary song local to this part of France — not actually a march, but it bounces along in 6/8 time and has an easy tune to pick up — it was written in 1792 to mock the simple-minded bailiff of nearby Auxerre. Cadet Rousselle (he was the bailiff) has three houses; they have no beams and no rafters, they’re for putting up swallows; what do you say about Cadet Rousselle? Ha, ha, ha, yes indeed, Cadet Rousselle, what a good kid. Or in fact Kirsty repeats the refrain, so as to go round and around. Shoulder to shoulder, bodies in a gently exciting contact, they march over the grapes.

The continuity of the barn with the work-table is established in a shot of Mme Vichot walking from the barn’s arched gateway (which is wide enough for the cart) along the outside kitchen wall, a rabbit hanging from her hand. It’s casserole night and Will is gamely cutting vegetables with his good arm, with Lucie pretending to help. “You’ll see Jeannie’s young man tonight, he’s coming over to meet you,” says Mme Vichot casually. There’s a nice shot of the Vichots coming home from the harvest in the dusk, Will now riding on the cart, and then we cut to another bedroom conference where the boys change back into their own clothes, which have by now been mended by the Vichot girls. And if you’re thinking, we’ve been in France for ages now, why has nobody played the accordion, here’s your moment: M. Vichot has one, and the sound drifting up from downstairs links this scene to a family dinner below. It’s somewhere around 12 September by now. There’s a cheerful mingle, Helen pulling Beanpole aside for some wine, Lucie monopolising Will, and then the accordion deflates as they hear hooves. Jeannie’s fiancé comes in from the night… and turns out to be Daniel, a uniformed Black Guard, who bows his Capped head. Not exactly a Gestapo raid, but it provides just enough jeopardy for a cliffhanger ending.

It really is hard to imagine any other television show which could take us in the same episode from cutting out an alien implant with a knife to a song about how Cadet Rousselle has three houses but that they’re only for birds to live in.

Next: Aside — Fair Stood the Farmhouse Kitchen ● Prev: Aside — Tunnelling Out of The White Mountains