FUTURE TENSE: British Science Fiction Television
Part Two / 1970–1975: ‘Waiting for the collapse’ — From Doomwatch to The Changes
Originally posted on the Moviemail website (now sadly closed), this was a series of blogs tracing the apocalyptic themes of British science fiction television. It was published between August and December 2014 to tie in with the BFI’s major retrospective and celebration of the science fiction genre Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder. Part Two tied in with the BFI’s DVD release of The Changes, hence its concentration on that production.
In the 1970s, British science fiction television became something of a reflecting mirror held up to a society emerging, bleary eyed from the heady, optimistic rush of the 1960s. The morning after the night before provided a stone cold dose of reality as Britain struggled with a declining economy; a growing anxiety about the environment and diminishing, blighted resources; questions about class, nationality, race and immigration; and, in the shadow of the Cold War, worries about whether the future and scientific progress would ever deliver utopia.
Yet, the counter cultural revolution of the previous decade really took hold in the 1970s and civil rights and liberal political movements gathered strength and emerged from this adversity. As the musical Hair had announced, this was the ‘Age of Aquarius’ and its message of ‘harmony and understanding’ was reinterpreted in some rather startling ways. There was a revival in the occult in the 1970s with many embracing alternative faiths and religions as orthodox beliefs struggled to survive the secularism that emerged in the 1960s.
Everything Arthurian, Atlantean and Crowleyan was popular and as Britain strained under industrial disputes and power cuts and the economy spun out of control, audiences seized on the escapism found in the television and films, music and fashion of the period. A key figure like David Bowie, for example, borrowed all the science fiction and occult trappings that dominated the early decade and filtered them into his music and appearance. Glam rock, married to science fiction and fantasy both aesthetically and thematically, appealed to a generation weary of the dire political and social disruptions of the period. It was a contradictory period, where the gleaming surfaces of futuristic design belayed the fears, uncertainty and changes in the present.
‘We’ve grown up now — and we’re frightened’
Sensing this uncertainty Doomwatch, a series created by scientist and environmentalist Kit Pedler and writer Gerry Davis and who had both worked together on Doctor Who, featured the exploits of a government quango set up to investigate man-made environmental disasters including the adverse effects of viruses, pharmaceuticals, genetics, waste, pollution and nuclear terrorism. It interrogated the cost of rampant military-industrial scientific progress and often targeted the figure of the scientist or the politician as the cause of unchecked, unethical experimentation.
First transmitted in February 1970, Doomwatch’s team, led by the highly opinionated and dedicated Spencer Quist, uncovered shadowy dealings within the government they worked for and Quist often found himself at loggerheads with the mandarins of Whitehall. The series, which ran for three seasons between 1970 and 1972, rejected untramelled scientific progress as the route to utopia and brought the concerns of the environmental movement to a mass audience. As Davis told the Radio Times: ‘The days when you and I marveled at the “miracles” of science are over. We’ve grown up now — and we’re frightened. The findings of science are still marvelous, but now is the time to stop dreaming up science-fiction about them and write what we call “sci-fact.” The honeymoon of science is over. That’s what Doomwatch is all about!’
The darker side of a utopian technological future was also expressed by Gerry Anderson’s UFO (debuting in September 1970). When it began filming in April 1969, this was his first live action series after a decade of producing hugely successful puppet shows for Lew Grade’s ITC. The relative failure of his last puppet series, The Secret Service and the promise of the more adult themed live action film Doppelganger that Anderson had made for Universal, convinced Grade that Anderson should make his long desired move into live action television production. Indeed, cast and crew members, props and sets transferred from Doppelganger to UFO.
UFO was concerned with the defence of the Earth from aliens, who travel from a dying world to harvest the bodies of human beings, by a secret organisation called SHADO, hidden beneath a film studio. UFO repeated many of the tropes of previous Anderson puppet series and their fetishisation of technology through the hyperbolised presentation of a collection of super-vehicles. In UFO the Earth is protected by submarines capable of converting to jet planes, missile-carrying interceptors housed beneath a moon base and tank-like ground vehicles. All these ships reflected the production team’s remit to make the futuristic setting of UFO one based in reality. Although set in 1980, the series was more of an extension of 1970s styles and design, particularly in the costumes and sets, and much of SHADO’s hardware was inspired by Cold War Soviet designs.
‘They look upon us not with animosity, but callousness.’
The utopian futurism/realism and excess of action, visual effects and design elements in Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, reflecting the ‘space age’ modernity of the late 1960s, were tied to much darker, adult stories in UFO. Therefore broadcasters were confused as to whether it was a programme for children or adults or both and its erratic scheduling confirmed this dilemma. Certainly the definition and interrelationships of the characters were mature, highlighted by many human interest stories — attraction between co-workers, non-alien threats to the command structure of SHADO as well as the disintegration of Commander Ed Straker’s marriage and the death of his young son. SHADO’s personnel, led by the haunted but icy Straker, were regularly confronted by situations that challenged their own notions of individuality and identity.
Often characters were subjected to altered states of consciousness, the perception of their roles in SHADO affected by alien and human intervention using brainwashing, drugs or the creation of doppelgangers. The preservation of human identity was a strong, recurring theme throughout the series and the aliens were intent on either dismembering humans to extend their own physical lifespans or possessing and operating through them. The final nine episodes made in 1970 concentrate on the possession theme and constantly attack the characters’ sense of their own reality. Their anxious, hallucinatory quality make UFO a far more interesting series than it is usually given credit for.
The future being not all it was cracked up to be lay at the heart of the short-lived satire The Adventures of Don Quick, a six episode studio based situation comedy produced by London Weekend Television in 1970. Starring Ian Hendry and Ronald Lacey as two space faring maintenance men and based loosely on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the series was drenched in psychedelic design and colour and boasted an impressive array of guest stars. One of the first sit-coms to venture into science fiction, its social satire was aimed at the ‘hippie’ counterculture, the so-called permissive society, at class and gender consciousness. A ratings failure, with the final three episodes consigned to a later slot, it could now be seen as a precursor to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf.
A much more sober affair was London Weekend Television’s The Guardians, co-created by Rex Firkin and Vincent Tilsley, a 1971 drama series unafraid to deal with the soiled laundry of the political and social fall-out of the late 1960s. Tilsley and Firkin suggested a very radical and dystopian alternative to the unemployment, industrial unrest and inflation their viewers were about to face up to.
At the heart of the drama was the notion that in the near future the UK is run by a private police force, the titular Guardians, headed by the mysterious General. They represent the instrument of power, appearing as a morally dubious fascist force. Each episode became a moral debate over various issues such as the constitution, European federalism, capital punishment, political assassination, democracy and criminality.
A major theme in the series was how far the resistance, formed to oppose this totalitarianism, should adopt the tactics of their oppressors in order to replace them and whether this fragile alliance could survive internal conflicts and disagreements. Many of the series themes would also later be reworked in 1977 with Wilfred Greatorex’s under-rated 1990 series for BBC starring Edward Woodward.
Hybrid forms of science fiction and fantasy were also present in single dramas in the early 1970s, such as Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (BBC, 1972), which extended his common themes of science’s attempt to control the ancient and unknowable, and David Rudkin’s exploration of sexuality, primal forces and English myth in Penda’s Fen (BBC, 1974). Children’s drama also tackled the science fiction and fantasy genre with great success in the same period. ITV stole a march on the BBC and produced some memorable series. Like their adult counterparts, these dramas were unafraid to articulate similar contemporary fears and, simultaneously, focus on the power of landscape, myth and folklore.
‘It is only together they are destroying each other.’
The first of these, transmitted over the Christmas and New Year of 1969 and 1970, was The Owl Service. Granada Television’s striking avant-garde adaptation of Alan Garner’s book was a very powerful story of sexual jealousy between three teenagers who inadvertently revive a mythical, ancient legend from The Mabinogion through the tracing of owl designs from an old dinner service. Shot entirely on film, its potent imagery and storytelling set a standard for tougher, more mature children’s drama and its use of ancient curses and Celtic mythical figures tapped into the 1970s occult and folk revival.
ATV quickly followed in 1970 with Timeslip, a surprisingly sophisticated children’s science fiction series, despite the somewhat immature depiction of the two leading characters Liz Skinner and Simon Randall. They discover a time barrier which shows the children two possible futures: a scientific research centre in Antarctica in 1990 where Liz meets her adult self and her mother during experiments with a longevity drug and an alternative 1990 where Simon meets his adult self and witnesses how a scientific Master Plan has triggered the world’s climate into complete environmental collapse. Not only did the series deal with such concepts as cloning and immortality but in a similar way to Doomwatch it warned about mankind’s drive to progress through science and technology and its potentially disastrous effects on the world.
After working on Timeslip, producer and script editor Ruth Boswell pitched a serial based on Catherine Storr’s book Marianne Dreams to Head Of Children’s TV at ATV, Alan Coleman. The serial, entitled Escape Into Night and transmitted in 1972, concerned a young girl, bedridden by a riding accident, who occupies her time by drawing in her scrapbook with an old pencil.
Strangely, whatever she draws she subsequently dreams about and it seems to become real. The drawings of a house, an unhappy young boy, stairs, bed and food all materialise in her nightmares. Uncannily, the boy, Mark, also exists in the real world, and his illness is related to Marianne by her home tutor, Miss Chesterfield. A rather antagonistic relationship develops between the two children as they meet in her dreams and in a blaze of anger she draws bars at the window of the house and huge one eyed boulders as a barrier around the house to prevent him from escaping.
It’s an evocative blurring between nightmares and reality, creating a striking atmosphere where Marianne’s ‘dreams’, in the empty house she creates, are heightened by stark sets (suggesting the crudity of Marianne’s pencil drawings), moody lighting and sound effects (the muttering and whispering of the stone watchers, the singular ticking of a clock). The surreal, eerie quality of these scenes could quite easily be seen as a precursor to the similarly haunted environments of that other ATV classic, Sapphire and Steel.
It deals with often dark and problematic themes: mortality, illness, fear. But it also explores the connection between dreams and reality, the consequences of your ill-informed actions and how they will affect others. The dilemma for Marianne is to find a way of helping the dream version of Mark to recover enough from his illness (for the real world Mark it’s eventually stated as polio) and help him escape from the house and the encroaching row of stone cyclops. In doing so, she’s also exorcising her fears, frustrations and boredom, perhaps linked to not just her own and the real Mark’s passage through a serious illness, but also through the choppy waters of adolescence.
The adolescent’s potential for what Bowie referred to as ‘the coming race’ or ‘homo superior’ was briefly captured in Ace of Wands and The Tomorrow People, two popular series made by Thames that provide appropriate bookends to the glam rock period.
In Ace of Wands, first shown in July 1970, occult symbolism and magic powers were foregrounded in the opening titles and the stories. Its mysterious central character Tarot, a flamboyant telepathic Übermensch, stage magician and escapologist, solved bizarre crimes with his team of acolytes. As the series progressed, the fantasy elements became more prominent within the intelligent, subversive and witty scripts and Tarot was required to combat a ventriloquist’s dummy which sent children mad, evil magician Mr. Stabs, an hallucinogenic gas that induced deadly nightmares, extra terrestrials capable of controlling machines and defeat a nemesis who turned people into dolls.
At the height of its success in 1973, Thames decided not to continue with Ace of Wands and its replacement The Tomorrow People was a decidedly less sophisticated, low budget affair. Created by Roger Price, the premise concerned the next stage in mankind’s evolution and depicted a group of ‘special’ teenagers who realise the potential of their telepathic and telekinetic powers. The true legacy of the Aquarian age, this new generation aimed for world peace and harmony and, early on, the series attempted to address a number of contemporary concerns: racism, xenophobia, consumerism and climate change. Despite a decline in quality, the series endured and although its original run ended in 1979 it was revived for three more series by Thames in 1992 and returned in 2013 for one season of 22 episodes produced by CBS/Warner channel in the US.
‘they frighten me, they’re evil and wicked and dangerous!’
The BBC, meanwhile, were looking to redress their lack of original children’s drama. It had disbanded its Children’s Department in 1963, merged it with Women’s Programmes to create Family Programmes and even removed its remit to produce the Sunday afternoon serial. With increasing competition from ITV and the start of colour broadcasting, the Department was reinstated in 1967 with Monica Sim as its new head.
She and producer Anna Home commissioned an original drama from acclaimed children’s author Peter Dickinson. The six-part Mandog, filmed on location in Southampton in 1971 and dramatising the power struggle between two factions who arrive from the future, led to Home’s ambitious attempt to mount an adaptation of Dickinson’s books The Devil’s Children, Heartsease and The Weathermonger, known as The Changes trilogy.
After Home had optioned the novels in 1971, bringing the ten-episode adaptation to the screen was fraught with budgetary and scheduling problems. Cancellation of the project was prevented in 1973 when Home pointed out not only would it be a waste of resources but that in the face of competition from ITV, the BBC’s reputation would be diminished, especially its capacity to produce quality drama for children. The decision to shoot the production entirely on film also reduced costs.
Dickinson’s trilogy depicts an England regressing back into feudalism after an apocalyptic event — the Changes — possesses the population to reject and destroy machines and technology. The original trilogy spanned a decade, featured a number of central characters and the last novel, The Devil’s Children, took the story back to the origins of society’s collapse. Home decided to condense the narrative and use the main character of The Devil’s Children, Nicola Gore, for the entire length of the ten episodes.
The television version, finally transmitted in 1975, expertly captured all of Dickinson’s themes and motifs, pulled together narratives from all three books into a linear story and improved upon the rather sensational ending of The Weathermonger where its heroes Geoffrey and Sally discover the source of the Changes is a drug-addled, reborn Merlin whose revival and refutation of the modern world had regressed Britain into medievalism.
What marks The Changes out is its mature grasp of the themes in Dickinson’s books. Indeed, prior to transmission on BBC1, the continuity announcer flagged up that the serial was suitable for older children only. The opening episodes unflinchingly depicted the arrival of the Changes phenomenon, scenes that Home added to the adaptation of The Devil’s Children, with impressive filming on location in Bristol showing gangs of people smashing up machines as Nicky Gore attempts to leave the city with her parents.
Separated from them she joins a group of displaced Sikhs looking for farmland on which to settle. The Changes was willing to unpack many issues and attitudes about race and nationhood without resorting to jingoism or condescension. The Sikhs’ beliefs and social codes are explored within the framework of racism and immigration, central to political debates of the 1970s particularly in the aftermath of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech of 1968.
The Changes apocalyptic scenario also promoted a strong environmental message and sounded a cautionary note about technological progress. Visually this is also accomplished through the exteriors, beautifully shot on film by Henry Farrar and Peter Sargent, as Nicky leaves the urban chaos behind and wanders through the countryside. This allegorical return to nature is not without its problems as Nicky encounters the fiery, religious zealot Davy Gordon, promoting an ideology within his isolated village that any human connection with machines is to be considered as witchcraft.
Later, she strikes up a friendship with Jonathan and escapes from the village in an old tug boat and they both locate the source of the Changes. Deep in an ancient cavern, a primordial force has been woken from its slumber and has set the world out of balance. The Merlin of Arthurian legend in Dickinson’s books is barely referred to in Home’s adaptation but the notions of the cursed land, Grail mythology and Gaian theory regarding environmental chaos do percolate through.
Balance — whether it is between past and present, urban and rural, progress and retrogression, male and female, English and Sikh — is the major theme of the series and Dickinson’s ‘state of the nation’ allegorical novels. It’s even expressed in Paddy Kingsland’s prog-rock score and its mix between traditional instruments and the Radiophonic Workshop’s synthesisers.
The Changes was an influential precursor to many adult and children’s dramas that immediately followed, and its themes of progress, environmentalism, ancient myth and self-sufficiency prominently featured in television science fiction for the rest of the decade.
Next time: Part Three / 1975–1980: ‘A new hope’ — From Space: 1999 to Sapphire and Steel
