Stone-cold Chills
Children of the Stones on DVD
A quick confession: I approached this DVD release through a haze of other people’s nostalgia. It’s a seven-part chiller from 1977 which is often fondly remembered by fans of TV horror, but I was just six when it was originally broadcast and so failed to catch it on original transmission. Happy days, though, because Network’s mission to curate all sorts of genre TV has brought Children of the Stones round again. And in many ways it’s easy to see why the serial has had such impact. With its notable music score from Sidney Sager, and often eerie visuals, it languidly and beautifully builds up atmosphere. Horror has latterly become an exercise in shock effects, but Children of the Stones belongs to a more gentle era of unsettling ambience, and though some may say it is rather slow-moving, I’d argue that Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray’s scripting is in fact perfectly paced. The sort of chill that it depends on requires slow accretion. A careful prefiguring and repetition of images, words and ideas is called for so as to gradually construct a sense of other-worldy forces. This is partly achieved through dialogue – “happy day”, intone the affected villagers of Milbury – and partly through the detailed painting owned by young Matthew Brake (Peter Demin) which gives viewers a sense of what’s to come thanks to its vivid image of the stone circle.
The seven-part structure is also very effectively used to gradually isolate Adam (Gareth Thomas) and Matthew Brake, slowly removing other sources of help until only father and son remain to battle against the strange powers at work. The 1970s’ production context enables and facilitates this storytelling pace, being well attuned to the creative needs of cosmic horror. Were such a drama to be made now, it’d no doubt be a 45 or 90 minute effort, reduced in resonance and less able to linger through spooky iterations of image and sound. The moment of Children of the Stones‘ production is present in a number of other ways, not least in quirks such as the fact that actors are required to hold their facial expressions in camera shots leading into an ad break. Presumably this was to allow some leeway for different ITV regions to cut to adverts. Yet the effect is sometimes uncannily appropriate, suggesting that characters have been abruptly frozen or rendered immobile, and further emphasising the series’ threatening blend of inanimate/animate. Of course, the show’s time of production is also evident in the relatively youthful appearance of lead actors: Gareth Thomas looks for all the world like a time-travelling Roj Blake dressed in the tweeds of the eleventh Doctor, and Iain Cuthbertson as Hendrick fruitily steals any scene he’s in.
Best of all, Children of the Stones plays somewhat against plot expectations. It could all too easily have been a science versus religion tract, with olde worlde rural English folk pitted against the modernity of Gareth Thomas’s astrophysicist researcher and his boxes of scientific stuff (all of it looking amusingly retro to the 2011 viewer: a hefty digital clock represents the gleaming height of techno-gubbins). Instead, the script complicates this trad binary, making Iain Cuthbertson’s character another astrophysics expert who embodies an amalgam of superstitious ritual and scientific regimen. Black holes and standing stones collide in a potent imaginative mix, and the ideas on show here must have fired up many a young child’s mind, especially as rather than fully explaining the evil forces in operation, they are left elusively implicit. I’m tempted to ponder whether the series’ long shadow and ongoing cult status have a lot to do with the respect it accords its audience. Big ideas are thrown in without condescension and without fear of losing the viewer, including playing with circularity and eternal recurrence in a way that echoes both the stone circle’s shape and each episode title’s inclusion of ‘Circle’.
The village of Avebury in Wiltshire provides the story’s backdrop, and location filming gives much of this show a realism and a solidity sometimes lacking in its studio-based scenes. Rather than being effects-driven, however, this is very much location-driven telefantasy. As a result, its fantastical elements feel strongly grounded and rooted in the everyday world of the HTV region. As well as Matthew Brake’s prophetic painting, good use is also made of a miniature model of the stones, meaning that we get representations circling within representations, and symbols within symbols.
The production’s child actors are generally sound, with Peter Demin working particularly well alongside Gareth Thomas. Children are depicted as inevitably spirited and rebellious, with the docile uber-swots of the village school representing a loss of “natural” childhood. But despite this suspicion of intellect and prodigal ability, it’s the scientific reasoning of Matthew and Adam that ultimately allows them to escape brainwashing and a “happy” fate. Where audiences watching now might expect a more spiky relationship between Adam and Matthew, it’s refreshing to see different generations working peaceably and affectionately together, with father and son united in their struggle against the Milbury mystery, albeit without any cloying, sentimental ‘bonding’. In an oddly programmatic piece of gendered structuring, the relationship between Adam and Matthew Brake is paralleled by a mother-daughter couplet of Margaret (Veronica Strong) and Sandra (Katharine Levy), implying that these two different family units should be integrated. But the narrative’s structure isn’t really interested in a conventional (romantic/familial) resolution, instead challenging watchers by circling back to a new beginning and a whole new story cycle.
Children of the Stones stands as a confluence of 1970s kids’ TV production contexts and thoughtful, well-written creepiness. Offering cosmic scale and scope filtered through Milbury’s modelled/painted microcosms, this is a series unafraid to inspire an audience’s desire for knowledge. It’s kids’ TV in the brightest, best sense: television drama that leaves viewers asking questions and wanting to find out more about black holes, or history, or even the local museum. I approached this DVD release through a haze of other people’s nostalgia. And now, at last, I can properly appreciate the affection with which Children of the Stones has been encircled.
Children of the Stones is released on DVD by Network on 17th October, 2011
