BJ's EWTBCD Guest Season Continues! 'The Tripods', by my friend John!

Now, I have been having a mad busy fortnight, so the Guest Season is slightly extended.  This is fine, because we are all having such a fun time with it!  My friend John's previous entry here, on the Rise and Fall of the Ferengi had such a nicely high hit rate that I have bothered his brain again, and he has written me this.  He's astonsihly punctual - I asked him to do me another piece, and he had it to me with illustrations, within 24 hours (he is always this good), and now I have made him wait a week and a half before I put it up here.  Apologies, John, I can only claim job interview and volunteering time madness - oh, and a couple of 3 hour commutes because the trains have suffered in the heat don't help.  But the time delay is all mine.  

Now!  No waiting any longer!  Read on, and remind yourself of a vintage UK 80's TV series for teen/tween viewers, that you will NOT have forgotten if you ever saw it, or will be wanting to see if you missed it...I remember it as weird and wonderful, specially the dodgy series 2!  Over to John...

The Bad Guys Won: The Tripods on TV.

A tripod! 

 

In 1984 the BBC decided to shake up the schedule: ‘Doctor Who’, now in his sixth incarnation was told to hang up his multicoloured coat and the Saturday afternoon slot was given over to ‘The Tripods’.

This new series was based on a trilogy of books by John Christopher published in the late 1960s about a future ruled by terrifying three legged creatures and the young boys who set out to defeat them. The books are still in print today and were joined in 1993 by a prequel.

The series starts in a village in England and we are told it is the late c21, however it looks like the mid c15. This is the future under the control of the Tripods. The people are happy and content with their simple life in the fields and everything seems fine. A giant round foot then plants itself in the millpond as a Tripod arrives in the village, one of only five times they are seen on screen, ready for capping day.

The ‘cap’ is a piece of technology attached to the head that the Tripods use to control the population. It is fitted as people reach adulthood. It is fear of being capped after seeing its effects on an older friend that starts two cousins on their journey.

Will and Henry decide that they don’t want to go through the capping ceremony, and run away from home. They have heard from a passing stranger of a group of freemen who live in the White Mountains somewhere in France. So that is where they head. After crossing the channel they encounter a tall French boy, with Bristol accent, named Beanpole and we follow this journey through series one.

 Heroes: left to right - Will, Henry and Beanpole

The first series had a lot of hype. You could not escape Tripods, they were on the cover of ‘Radio Times’, there were features on ‘Blue Peter’ and ‘Tomorrows World’, plus the three young stars that were all picked from open auditions were interviewed across the BBC, from ‘Breakfast Time’ to ‘Newsnight’.

But there were problems: the plot of series one did roughly follow that of the first book. However there were some distractions. Two lines about a vineyard become two episodes of the boys falling in love with French peasant girls. There were also other non science fiction asides that some felt distracted from the plot. Not least the fact the fact that for most of the series the titular Tripods were conspicuous by their absence.

Part of this was due to the way the effects were handled. Computer matting is now very common, and very simple, but in 1984 it was cutting edge and the equipment was very expensive. The BBC only had one computer set up for this, and its primary function was to create the graphics for the weather forecast. Well this is Britain after all.

During office hours the weather forecasters had total control over the computer. It was only between about 6 and 10 at night that the ‘Tripods’ team could get in and work. But their work was effective. So much so that many people thought the BBC had built a life sized Tripod.

In spite of the problems season one ended with reasonable ratings, up on where ‘Doctor Who’ had been in the Spring, and series two was given the green light.

Suddenly things became very camp.

The second series follows Will on his journey into one of the Tripod cities, where he meets the masters. The beings that control the Tripods, his mission is to gather information to help the freemen defeat them.

All sounds fine.

The model for the city was the largest model ever made for a UK TV production, and took up a whole studio floor of Elstree, around 100 square meters +. Real effort was made on getting the perspective right and it worked.

It was once inside the city that things got a little weird.

The humans, all male, are put into tight shorts and harnesses then sold as slaves to the Masters. Will is told that he will soon forget about girls, and that because of the environment he will not live much past 25. When not serving the Masters the slaves all hang out at a bar called The Pink Parrot, and most of them look like extras from a ‘Frankie Goes to Hollywood’ video and are led by a Freddy Mercury look-alike complete with moustache.

Now as Jerry Seinfeld would say, ‘Not that there is anything wrong with that’, and all of the innuendo seems to have been unintentional. But the tone just didn’t seem to sit well rest of the series. It was also very different from the book it was based on. It didn’t help by this time the series was struggling to hold on to its audience. 

So while Will was having a bona time trolling about the Master’s city the office of the Director General was having a vader at the numbers. The costs were through the ceiling and the viewing figures were through the floor. Michael Grade, who didn’t like Science Fiction anyway, pulled the plug.

The series ended on a cliffhanger as the Tripods destroyed the hideout of the Freemen, ending with Will and Beanpole looking over carnage and the bad guys victorious.

Instead of the proposed third series ‘Doctor Who’ was revived, and promptly put on trial in redressed sets left over from ‘The Tripods’; the BBC have always been keen on recycling.

So what went wrong?

One thing to remember is that the books are written for young readers. They are not full-length novels and they have a lot of adventure but the writing style is brief and to the point. They are books that a seven year old can read alone with out much trouble. Where the BBC went wrong was to try to pad them out too much. There aren’t 13 episodes in each book, there is probably at most eight, and two series of 10 could have told the whole story.

Part of the reason for the additions is to add in some female characters. There are no girls in the books, Christopher himself says that this due to the belief in the 60s that while girls would read books with male characters boys wouldn’t read book with girls as characters. To rectify this the BBC added the French girls. Although by the time we get to the city it’s an all male affair. 

Also the production didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be. Was it Science Fiction, or was it period drama. While this confusion seems to work for ‘Doctor Who’ here it just seems muddled. Plus it probably added to the spiralling costs. All in all a series that started out with a lot of promise ended up as a bit of a mess, and we never get to see the end.

Although the BBC story ends there it might not be the end of ‘The Tripods’ on screen. Disney acquired the rights in the mid 2000s and had planned to make a film version, set in America, however this seems to have been shelved once they bought Marvel. Meanwhile the series has a huge fanbase in Germany and a ‘Tripods’ convention was held in Hamburg to celebrate 30 years of the show.

The DVD of the complete series one and two was released after much fan pressure in 2009, it is well worth checking out. The books on which the series is based are also readily available and a new edition was published in 2013. 

 The Master's City