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.

An afternoon of 'Folk Horror'

     Well, the warm, rosy glow of the exhibition has faded over the intervening weeks and I'm back to unhappy. Work is hardly progressing. Thursday afternoon I ended up watching two BBC dramas with occult/paranormal themes: 'The Beast', 1981, and part of the 'West Country Tales' series and the remarkable 'The Stone Tape' of 1972.

    'The Beast' is a tale of haunting - of sorts. The agent is not spiritual but something quite physical and quite, quite ancient. A survival. A wildman, occupying the space between the human and the bestial. A cryptid, but also, simultaneously, a creature from out of the depths of English and European folklore. A Wodewose. Perhaps even from the dark corners of our own collective sub-conscious. The story is set on a farm deep in the Cornish countryside. The first encounter with the creature occurs within the wild wood, leading one to think that perhaps the wildman was merely the genius loci of the woods, a pan-like creature; however the second encounter takes place in the domesticity of the farm itself several years later. 

     And on to the main feature, the confrontational and quite disturbing 'The Stone Tape' written by Nigel Kneale who also, and famously, wrote the Quatermass series and the controversial, but prophetic  'The Year of the Sex Olympics'. 'The Stone Tape' is something that has come down to us therefore from the Golden Age of British broadcasting. Like 'Quatermass and the Pit' before it 'The Stone Tape' attempts to provide a rational explanation for paranormal activity. 

     The setting is a nineteenth century Gothic country house. Quite an outlandish place. (The decidedly wilful Horsley Towers in Surrey) The place has stood empty for years and has been recently bought by an electronics company. The action centres on the R & D department, which is under the gimlet eye of the demanding, maddening, driven Peter, played by the admirable Michael Bryant. A rare appearance on the small screen too for which we should be grateful. He was a great actor but worked almost exclusively on the stage. And there is Jill Greeley, played by Jane Asher, she is a sensitive - 'the type that hurts easily'. But then they are both characters on the edge. Around them is an excellent ensemble of actors including Ian Cuthbertson, Michael Bates and James Cosmo.

     Almost immediately things begin to go wrong. Cuthbertson's character, Roy Collinson who has been on site for months, it is soon apparent knows a lot and guesses the rest but is 'economical with the actualite'. Events follow events in rapid succession. There is a relentlessness, a constant intensity, to this drama that must have been exhausting work for the actors. The paranormal activity centres in a single room in the house - part cellar, abandoned. An ancient space. The builders working on the restoration of the house refuse to work there. Both Peter and Jill become obsessed with what it contains. Peter's attitude is purely utilitarian, all surface; he quickly assesses (correctly) that the room acts as some sort of recording device. He thinks it might be of some commercial value. And unhappily it is as much Peter's attitude, as it is the paranormal activity, that drives his team members to madness even death.  With possible exception of Jill, Peter and his team fail to recognize the 'recordings' represent some sort of trauma, that they are not merely chance events but are caused by another, as yet unseen, agency.

     It is perhaps unsurprising that 'The Stone Tape' shares certain themes with another of Kneale's work 'Quatermass and the Pit' of 1958/9; the abandoned property; the sensitive, slightly neurotic, female assistant; the decent into madness of individuals and groups; the intrusion of the deep past into contemporary (post-war) Britain. Both films do indeed find a logical explanation for the horrendous events, but fourteen years is a long time and the narrative of progress has collapsed; in the end 'The Stone Tape' can only offer a partial explanation. Certainly no rational explanation, because the boundary of science has been reached and beyond lies the realm of the spirit.