Children Of The Stones (DVD)

...the 'classic' TV programmes for children we watched when not running wild and unsupervised in the woods were all wonderful, original and groundbreaking, and that their modern equivalents are rubbish in comparison. The trouble is that most of these classics are now available on DVD and the temptation to revisit them, to eagerly span the misty divide, can be strong, sometimes overwhelming.

_Children of the Stones_ was a seven-part children's ...
...followed a scientist and his teenage son as they moved to a small village where dad was going to carry out some scientific tests on the stone circle that surrounded the village and brainy son was going to help him. As the series progressed, the pair found themselves caught up in some strange cultish goings-on and decided to get to the bottom of it all by the appliance of science. The series has always been well thought-of and it even featured quite ... more

Nostalgia can be a dangerous beast. It can convince us, for example, that those endless sun-drenched summers of our childhood never saw a drop of rain for months; that Mars Bars tasted better in 1971; that 1984 polar white / dark anthracite Vauxhall Cavalier SRi hatchbacks with custom alloys and chocolate-velveteen sports-interiors really were cool motors (weren't they?); and that freezing to death as a teenager with your mates on wet, open, litter-strewn terracing in the late-1970s surrounded by baying drunks was the true spirit of football. Above all, it assures us that the 'classic' TV programmes for children we watched when not running wild and unsupervised in the woods were all wonderful, original and groundbreaking, and that their modern equivalents are rubbish in comparison. The trouble is that most of these classics are now available on DVD and the temptation to revisit them, to eagerly span the misty divide, can be strong, sometimes overwhelming.

Children of the Stones was a seven-part children's drama first broadcast on ITV in early 1977, and it followed a scientist and his teenage son as they moved to a small village where dad was going to carry out some scientific tests on the stone circle that surrounded the village and brainy son was going to help him. As the series progressed, the pair found themselves caught up in some strange cultish goings-on and decided to get to the bottom of it all by the appliance of science. The series has always been well thought-of and it even featured quite recently in Channel 4's list of top 100 scary moments. But did those who voted it up watch it anew or did they just rely on imperfect memory when making their choice? Keen to get to the bottom of this mystery, I ordered the DVD to shake up those memory cells of my own that had been having it all their own way for far too long.

There are two distinct contrasts that are immediately apparent after wading through the three-or-so hours of this series: the story is complicated and quite clever; and the production values are cheap and cheerful. It's also interesting to note that this was a time when it was still possible to make a drama series for young teens without it being a none-too-subtle lecture on all of the 'issues' that we neurotic adults now feel compelled to heap on the shoulders of our youngsters at every opportunity in the hope of saving them from a lifetime of counselling. No, the kids in this series simply put their heads together to solve a mystery and seen happy enough in doing so.

When Professor Adam Brake (Gareth Thomas) and his son, Matthew (Peter Demin), arrive in Millbury (the real-life village of Avebury in Wiltshire) they quickly find the locals to be a little strange. Said locals are friendly enough, just a little remote and zombie-like and with a habit of beginning and ending every conversation with a slightly sinister "Happy day". Only the other recent arrivals - a doctor and his son, and the museum curator, Margaret Smythe (Veronica Strong), and her daughter, Sandra (Katharine Levy) - are in any way normal. At Matthew's school most of the pupils are oddly obedient and mathematically brilliant, with the bemused newbies relegated to the dunces table, though they are, by any normal standard, perfectly intelligent. Clearly something strange is going on.

And our intrepid dad and lad soon realise that the oddness revolves around local squire and retired astronomer Raphael Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson), whose influence on the locals seems to be absolute. His house is also at the very centre of the stone circle (the ley lines tell us this) and seems to be the focus for all the weirdness. The locals are also in the habit of engaging in moonlight ceremonies that involve much chanting and wailing (but no pagan hanky-panky, you'll be pleased to know). When the other new arrivals slowly succumb to Hendrick's mysterious power only the Prof and Matthew, as well as loopy-local Dai (Freddie Jones), are left. What on earth is going on, and will Prof and son manage to defy the odds and escape the sinister clutches of Hendrick before the stars are in alignment and Jupiter is in conjunction with Ursa Major?

The story is actually quite interesting, though it does borrow heavily from the 1973 movie The Wicker Man. The basic plot is the same in both: charmingly-deranged bigwig obsessed with ye olde ways manipulates simple locals for his own loopy ends. Children of the Stones obviously makes great play of the strong fascination we had (and still have) with the remnants of our mysterious Neolithic past - stone circles, burial mounds, ley lines, solstices, nature worship - though it does contrast this megalithic theme with much talk of black holes and astronomy generally. Even a computer makes a brief appearance, which is interesting, because this was a time when computers were the preserve of white-coated boffins and were the size of laundrettes, though with rows of large spool tapes in place of rows of tumbling smalls.

I suppose the use of the 'science versus superstition' angle was a neat way of creating dramatic conflict, though neither science nor superstition seems to be the winner in the end and the writers clearly did not intend one to be seen as superior to the other, at least not for dramatic purposes. Each episode ends with a cliff-hanger, though the endings are quite clunky; and I was reminded, for some weird reason, of the episode endings of that notorious soap-opera of old, Crossroads (ahem... my Mum was a fan), when the actors would stop a little too soon and there would be an awkward moment of group self-consciousness before the closing credits rolled. But all in all the story is tight, intelligent and enjoyable and the writers clearly had no wish to patronize the youthful viewers.

The leading performances are competent enough, though such competence is largely displayed by the adults only. The kids are all pretty hopeless, actually, and as I've never seen any of them in anything since, it can only be assumed that they chose some profession other than acting to occupy their adult years. That said, their performances are not so bad as to affect the drama, and in some ways their amateurism is quite endearing and somehow suitable for a series such as this, aimed as it was at other children. Perhaps time and money were so tight that there were no opportunities to re-take the odd scene where someone at the edge of the action glances furtively at the camera before quickly realising that such things are frowned upon in the world of TV drama.

Gareth Thomas hogs most of the scenes and is tweeded-up sufficiently enough to convince us he's a scientist. He's really very good. The way he twiddles the knobs of his various scientific instruments is quite impressive, as is his confidence when talking about black holes. There is a moment when he seems to suggest that energy simply "disappears", not something energy normally does, but it doesn't really matter as the whole premise of this series is that the action just may be taking place in a different dimension, and in different dimensions anything is possible. Professor and son spend much time working things out mathematically at the kitchen table, though both father and son take the occasional time-out to gaze longingly at Ms Smythe and daughter respectively. For those of a certain age, it's difficult to watch Gareth Thomas here without thinking of the seminal role he would land a couple of years later in the sublime Blake's 7, the BBC's bold attempt to recreate Star Wars on a budget less than that enjoyed by Blue Peter.

Iain Cuthbertson is as lofty and mysterious as Thomas is stocky and scientific and his imperious and sinister demeanour probably provoked a shudder or two in the original audience. His posh-Scots-school-master routine was something that he had effortlessly perfected by this time, which was actually quite a pity as he was a good actor yet never seemed to appear very regularly on our screens. Hendrick it is, then, who stands at the centre of the action, and the dramatic finale takes place within his walls. We soon discover that there's more to the man than at first meets the eye. He it is too who appears in the very last scene, which adds a clever twist to all that precedes it.

The whole production is a little creaky, with the very cramped and plywoody interiors (filmed at the HTV West studios in Bristol) contrasting starkly with the light and airy exteriors at Avebury. The links between studio shots and exteriors, such as someone looking out from a studio doorway and talking to someone on location looking in, are also a little disconcerting but not a major problem. It's also useful to pretend that some of the large standing stones clearly made of polystyrene are in fact real and sarceny and massive in order not to let the dramatic tension slacken. The sun also seems to be shining gloriously at all times when we are outdoors, but as this series was shot in the summer of 1976, the driest on record, this is no surprise. The production is perfectly adequate.

The music of the series deserves a mention too, if only because its creepiness is what has probably stuck in the memories of original viewers and led them to praise this series without revisiting it. Composed by Sidney Sagar, the theme is a very strange hotchpotch of moaning and chanting and is genuinely weird. It sounds like a cross between the low bass (and electro-sounding) mantras of Tibetan monks and the mindless chatter of my aunties when herded together when I was a kid. All in all, a strange theme for a strange series.

Revisiting such a series is probably only something that those who watched it originally, and who are now possessed by the demon of nostalgia, will do. In fact the release of such a series on DVD is probably only done to cash in on the nostalgia market. I suspect that most teens nowadays prefer their dramas a little more hard-boiled, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, though most of us devote much of our teenage span to the pursuit of sex and drugs and rock and roll in various degrees and forms, at least in our imagination, series like Children of the Stones do remind us that teenagers are more than capable of using their brains creatively when they have to (and equally capable of enjoying the process) and are not just an explosion of deranged appetites to be manipulated at all costs, as the socio-political movers and shakers of the present would have us believe.

The DVD

The DVD is a fairly basic package containing the complete series as well as photo stills, production notes, and interviews with Gareth Thomas and series director Peter Graham Scott. The interviews are short, but they are quite interesting in the way they give an insight into the haphazard nature of the production of TV dramas of old; especially those for children, which were often made on tiny budgets and therefore necessitated some creative thinking (and accounting) to complete.

The series is presented in the original 4:3 format with mono sound and has been fully restored, so the picture quality is perfectly adequate.

 

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