This essay is an attempt at close viewing, published on the fortieth anniversary to the day of a BBC drama called The Tripods which had its first broadcast on 15 September 1984.[1] Produced by Richard Bates, and adapted by Alick Rowe for a mixed-age audience but from a children’s book by John Christopher called The White Mountains (1967),[2] The Tripods was highly ambitious, but it is a divisive show, which is hard to categorise, and there is no single opinion about it. The story, though compactly told in a short book, has an epic, and vague enough to be mythic, quality. The novel, which was almost immediately acclaimed, has been continuously in print for nearly six decades now; and for all that the television show played to mixed reviews, that too has been continuously available since 1994, first on VHS and then DVD. But catch it while you can, because in the age of streaming it may disappear entirely.

Biologists like to say that, as a first approximation, all species are extinct. Equally, as a first approximation, all television dramas are forgotten. Leave aside the many, many shows which are lost, so that all we really have left is a title and date of broadcast: plenty of fully-archived dramas sleep undisturbed in their vaults. The Collectors (1986),[3] a customs and excise procedural set in a Dorset harbour, dismally failed to make viewers care about such horrid abuses as unlicenced falconry. It vanished after ten episodes and I’ll be surprised if I’m not the only writer since 1986 ever to mention it. As sentimental as I can be about the ugly ducklings of television, I’m not going to go out on a limb for this one. Much less of a fool’s errand was Telford’s Change (1979),[4] in which an international finance man — engagingly played by the inimitable Peter Barkworth — rediscovers his roots in local banking. That one was nominated for Best Series at the BAFTAs. This did not earn it a DVD release in decades to come, and there is now no legal way to watch it. Television, born of theatre, was for much of its history almost as ephemeral.

But The Tripods was a telefantasy, and even the least watched of those are almost always remembered. So in writing about it I’m far from “rediscovering” a show that is “forgotten”. Fantasies, supernatural or sci-fi, and especially those with a hook for children, are the programmes which somehow live on in memory. So while most straight dramas of the era have never been looked at again, most so-called cult shows from the 60s to the 80s have by now been extensively documented. I feel that that frees me from having to write the standard behind-the-scenes guide, taken episode by episode.[5] But I’m not really doing the professional thing, either, as a TV critic. There has been a slow rise in respectability for doctoral theses on British television history, but the art of those is very much not to get fannish about any one programme in isolation.[6]

My project here, such as it is, is just a personal response. I take the point of close viewing to be to answer the question: what do we see, when we watch this programme? Most things in life are more than just what they look like, but a television show is exactly that. Or perhaps, it is what we see, and what it evokes in us — if it’s fortunate enough to evoke anything in us, of course. This one at least made me reach for my keyboard, which is not the worst accolade. I have become sceptical about screenshots, which always show too much at once, and which deceive by being so weirdly out of their element when sliced up into paragraphs of commentary. Words, I’ve come to think, do a better job.

If that’s my main question — what’s going on, on screen? — then I do have a few other, fuzzier, enquiries as well. Why does this particular show have a powerful grip on some viewers, given that it has none at all on others? How is it telling its story, and come to that, what is its story? What I won’t talk about is how or why it was made: nothing about special effects or filming locations, and little even about cast and crew. I mostly avoid naming the hundreds of personnel because that distracts from reading the show for what it is. Every programme is filled with choices, and choices are made by people, to be sure: but not always consciously, and not always by the people we think. Set design, lighting, camera, costume, props and effects can be as instrumental as acting or direction. Even writing is a team effort here. Also, once you tell the story of the making of a show, you’re often writing about what it was intended to be, rather than what it was. At any rate, no big lists of credits, all of which of course are faithfully recorded at IMDB anyway. But if anybody should ever read this who took some part in the making, large or small, then please — take a bow. You absolutely deserve credit for something remarkable.

Though I stay on the viewer’s side of the screen, that still has to mean frequent returns to the novel, the source of the mystery. For viewers who had read it, the BBC version will have been experienced as a sort of overlay, so I don’t think that breaks my rule. That the programme was an adaptation from a book is also useful, in that it’s a forensic tool to investigate them both. Comparing the two as I watched, I increasingly came to feel that the TV show and the book each probe out secrets from the other. As with all secrets, most are trivial but some are profound.

One last disclaimer: I’m structuring this essay entirely around series 1 — so I really only look at the first 13 of the 25 episodes broadcast. In part that’s because it’s too long already (the essay, not series 1, though we’ll get to that). But also because this first series, and the trilogy’s opening book, are the Tripods myth at its purest. They are where it came from. Besides, if I’m honest, series 1 has the subtler undercurrents. On the face of it the plot is simple enough. Escape from society before it forces you into conformity, go on a quest for the rumoured place where you’ll be free. That could have been given a stylish, camp, wildly colourful, but basically empty treatment on screen, like the movie of Logan’s Run (1976).[7] That too was taken from a 1967 novel, which — though set in California and populated by swingers — has an oddly similar premise to The White Mountains. The two key creators of series 1 of Tripods, though, weren’t into monorails and miniskirts. Both were, on this occasion, certainly trying to make an adventure story for a prime-time audience. But behind that goal they had other motives. The producer was committed to presenting a mid-century novel whose choices must be respected, while the screenwriter was reframing it as a story of vulnerable orphans looking for family and trust. Series 2 had more spectacle, and far more high-concept ideas were thrown in — which I’m not knocking at all — but it’s a very different piece of writing. Besides, it isn’t the anniversary of series 2 yet.

Watching the show again after many years during the second Covid lockdown, I was struck by how much I hadn’t noticed before, and by what an intricate cultural object a television drama can be. I wondered if I would end up thinking that The Tripods was less interesting than I’d remembered, and was in the end a typical product of its age. But for better or worse, and there are people to argue both sides of that, it remains unlike anything else ever broadcast. When I first wrote about this show thirty years ago, I called it a minor masterpiece. A little to my own surprise, I still say so.

— 15 September 2024

Works cited:

  1. The Tripods (BBC, 25 × 25 minutes, 1984-85), produced by Richard Bates. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  2. The White Mountains (1967), by John Christopher. Wikipedia
  3. The Collectors (BBC, 10 × 50 minutes, 1986), produced by Geraint Morris. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  4. Telford’s Change (BBC, 10 × 50 minutes, 1979), produced by Mark Shivas. Wikipedia; IMDB.
  5. For example, Jaunt (2013), by Andy Davidson, which gives a useful account of The Tomorrow People, or Prophets of Doom: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doomwatch (2020) by Michael Seely and Phil Ware; or the About Time sequence of studies of 1963-89 Doctor Who by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, now described by their blurbs as a “dissection” and as “constituting the largest reference work on Doctor Who ever written”.
  6. We do undoubtedly need more studies like James Chapman’s Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (2002). But I know my limitations.
  7. Logan’s Run (1976), directed by Michael Anderson. Wikipedia; IMDB. From the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. There was also a short-lived TV spinoff from the movie which… well, no doubt somebody out there is willing to call it misunderstood, and in solidarity with that luckless person, I will say no more.

Next: Episode 1