The Children of the Stones

     I think this may be the first time I have written a post about a children's television programme.  It certainly is the first time I have done so about a programme made by ITV. 

      'The Children of the Stones' is a seven part drama for children - part sci-fi, part occult - made by the now defunct ITV company HTV, which broadcast to the West Country and Wales during the Golden Age of British broadcasting.  (The 'H', by the way, stands for Harlech, after Lord Harlech the Conservative politician and diplomat.) The series was made in 1976, the year of the drought.  Interiors were shot in the HTV studios in Bristol and location filming in the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, which, for those who don't know, sits within the remains of the largest henge monument in the world.  The script was conceived and written by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray, and the producer & director was Peter Graham Scott, the executive producer Patrick Dromgoole.  The composer Sidney Sager wrote the atmospheric, unsettling avantgarde score, which was performed by the Ambrosian Singers.  Apparently, the music alone was enough to scare some of the young audience.  The series was first broadcast in the January and February of the following year, the year of the Silver Jubilee, 1977, with a repeat in 1978.  And it was then, I suppose, I watched for the first time.  It was, if I remember correctly, a chance discovery, but one that fired my imagination.  I have always been fascinated such topics - how could one not been growing up during the Occult Revival of the late 1960s and early 70s?  The Children of the Stones came towards the end of this revival, which, like the whole Hippy schtick, was essentially a cack-handed attempt at re-enchantment.  It is an example of how 'Folk Horror' - an anachronistic term here - was adapted for a wider audience.  Indeed some of the elements found in that seminal film of the genre 'The Wicker Man' of 1973 reappear in The Children of the Stones: the remote and isolated rural community; the charismatic and dominating leader; the invention of folk customs,   It has to remembered though, that the Children of the Stones was made and broadcast at a moment of cultural change in the UK, for 1977 was also the year of Punk, and Derek Jarman's film 'Jubilee'.  'The Children of the Stones' belongs to a totally different era, or so it seems.

       And so to the plot.  The series relates the events that occur in the small fictional village of Milbury somewhere in southern England over one summer, sometime in the mid 1970s.  Into the midst of this isolate rural community arrive the widower Adam Brake and his young son Matthew.  Brake is a middle-class professional, an astrophysicist and is there with his son for thee months to undertake research into the vast megalithic stone circle in which the village rests.  Father and son, however, very soon find themselves amidst some strange and unsettling occurrences that challenge their scientific worldview.  They both, for instance, receive disturbing visions of the future from touching the stones.  In some ways what follows is rather like a classic detective novel - they share the same spatial and numerical finitudes after all - in which the main characters, along with two other outsiders, Margaret Smythe and her daughter Sandra, attempt to solve the mystery.  It gradually becomes apparent that the village is under the malign control of the arriviste Lord of the Manor Rafael Hendrik, like Adam Brake a scientist, a former astronomer at Cambridge no less.

     The cast is exceptionally strong for a programme that was scheduled to be broadcast at 4.30 on a weekday afternoon.  Gareth Thomas & Peter Demin star as Adam and Matthew Brake; Veronica Strong & Katherine Levy as Margaret and Sandra.  The Welsh actress Ruth Dunning plays Mrs Crabtree the Brake's housekeeper.  And then there are the mysterious Dai (a sort of Holy Fool), played by Freddie Jones, and Rafael Hendrick by Iain Cuthbertson, two charismatic British character actors of great talent.  Cuthbertson in particular dominates virtually every scene he's in; not simply because of the heft of the man but his charisma; managing to project both great charm and a sense of existential threat.

     The strength of this series not only in such a quality cast, but in the script - one that refuses to patronize the viewers, whether they are children or adults. It makes no intellectual concessions, the audience must sink or swim.  The writers seem fully aware of potential adult viewers - parents and the like - by giving the adult characters a 'hinterland', and an emotional and social life of their own (like down to the local pub); Adam and Margaret are even allowed to become fond of each other, to hold out thereby the possibility of a happy ending.

 

Happy day!

     Just after posting this post, it struck me that both the 'Children of the Stones' & Nigel Kneale's 'The Stone Tape', of 1972, imply that the Church's historical role is that of protector of the people from a very real and recurrent evil.  I believe it can be argued that in the case of the 'Children of the Stones' evil has only recured at Milbury because of the de-consecration of the village church.  It's almost as if the old social order of village was its protection.