70s Children's TV Fantasy - Part Three

King of the Castle (1977)

King of the Castle turns away from the ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ ethos of much 70s fantasy, with its rural backdrops, and strands its central character in the unforgiving urban environment or a poorly managed and ill-maintained high-rise block; The type of building which came to seem emblematic of the failure of post-war utopian dreams and far more in keeping with the spirit of place of Britain as it hobbled towards the declining years of the decade. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin referred to it as Kafka for kids, although they could equally have gone with Ballard for boys, as this is a drama which sets the controls for inner space. The opening episode takes place in the ‘mundane’ world and introduces us to all the characters and elements which will go towards creating and populating the world of the imagination into which the protagonist, Roland, is plunged. The mannerisms and characters of people in the real world get translated into their names, status and symbolic roles in the world of the imagination. So Fulton Mackay’s scornful, authoritarian headmaster at the cathedral choir school, with his birdlike head movements and interrogatory prodding, becomes Hawkspur, a Frankensteinian scientist whose experiments set out to recreate his own ideas of what is right and good. The bully whom Roland has to confront, identified only by the nickname Ripper spelt out in studs on the back of his jacket, becomes the functionally named Warrior, the guttural, monosyllabic guardian of the stairways between the levels of the castle of the mind.

Gormenghastly

The series draws upon many literary influences and there are allusions to various of them throughout. There is a nod to Susan Hill’s novel I’m the King of the Castle, with its depiction of childhood bullying, in the title. Roland is tormented by Ripper, the tyrant of the high-rise stairways and his cadre of cronies in the opening episode, which plays out in deceptively straightforward social realist style. Kafka is, however, the writer whose influence is most explicitly referenced. The narrative drive of the story can be seen as an inversion of that of The Castle. The protagonist of that novel, K, is attempting to gain access to the inner sanctum of the castle as opposed to Roland, who is inside looking for a way out. The pointless maze of officialdom through which Roland is forced to run in order to progress is akin to the bewildering bureaucratic processes and indeterminately menacing interrogations to which Josef K is subjected in The Trial. There is an atmosphere redolent of the absurdist theatre of Pinter and Beckett too, with its gnomic, evasively circling dialogue and sense of existential angst combined with a vaguely vaudevillian air. The white faced, top-hatted vein could certainly have stepped from the pages of a Beckett play, and the deadpan double act of the lift engineers/basement chefs, with their repetition of each other’s phrases and obfuscatory language, are very Pinteresque. There is much of the topsy-turvy logic and linguistic legerdemain of Alice in Wonderland too, with its feel of a world where madness is the norm. Roland shrinkage to a diminutive self after drinking the queen’s proferred draught (or ‘squash’) and observation of sudden shifts in scale echoes Alice’s similarly disorienting experiences at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Indeed, his fall down the lift shaft can be seen as a modern variant of Alice’s dream descent. Roland’s name is probably chosen for its allusion to Robert Browning’s visionary poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, in which that title provides the tantalising final line, as if the whole narrative is a prelude to the real adventure. If Browning leaves Roland at the gates of the tower, Bob Baker and Dave Martin plunge him straight into its dark depths.

Roland’s confrontation with the bully Ripper and the subsequent retreat from the police who intervene lead him to run into the lift which we have learnt from several previous encounters is out of order and in the process of being repaired. Roland’s pressing of the button shuts him in its confined space and sends him plummeting down to the bottom of the shaft and into a strange imaginary world. The series predominantly takes place within this world, but the occasional insertion of scenes from the real world follow the efforts to reach him and the reactions of his parents and the other characters involved to his predicament. These interludes underline the correlations between the worlds, and the parallels between inner and outer realities, with progress in each being of equal importance. The inner world reflects that of the outer, but as in a distorting mirror which recasts everything into grotesque forms of exaggerated symbolism. Just as he is confined in a literal sense within the claustrophobic space of the lift, so Roland’s imaginary world is contained within the walls of the castle tower in the basement of which he finds himself after his accident. The castle takes its form from the tower block and its architectural cues from the stone corridors and arching roofs of the cathedral school which Roland attends, as well as the dream structures from the fantasy posters which adorn his walls. Of these posters, one is by Rodney Matthews and depicts orc-like creatures running up the staircase winding around a turret; and the other is by Roger Dean, the cover of a Greenslade LP, which depicts a multi-armed, green-skinned man with a ramshackle city of precipitously stacked dwellings receding into the distance behind him. The camera lingers over this roofscape for several seconds, as if to fix it in our minds and suggest to us the building blocks which go towards constructing Roland’s interior world.

Vertiginous distance

The stairs in the castle coil around upon themselves as they rise into the vertiginous distance. They bring to mind the stairway in A Matter of Life and Death as it threads across the starry gulfs of space, its diminishing perspective creating a sense of vastness, or in this case an interior space which contains a whole world. This idea of the castle as a self-contained world unto itself is very reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, a resemblance further enhanced by the distorted gargoyle faces carved into the rock around the stairway passages and the grotesque and theatrically exaggerated nature of its inhabitants. As in Gormenghast, there are different social zones in the castle, areas which serve the needs of a large enclosed community. This reflects the mechanics of the social and administrative workings of the tower block and school, but also, by extension, of the British Isles in their isolationist, Little England fashion. The castle is both high-rise and cathedral school, reflecting both modernity and tradition, and bridging the opposite ends of the social spectrum. The royal crest of the castle, with its crenellated tower, is the same as that of Roland’s school. His ascent to the top of the tower (to be King of the Castle) is an emblematic reclamation of the badge which is torn from his blazer in a self-characteristic act by Ripper, the stairwell bully.

Gothic Vein

In the fashion of video games yet to come, Roland must work his way from the basement in which he awakes and ascend through various levels until he reaches the top and finds the way out. With each encounter on the way he will learn something which will provide him with the key, both literal and figurative, to find his way to the next stage. By implication, his escape will lead to his re-awakening to consciousness in the real world. But it will also be a form of rebirth. His ascent to self-awareness in this inner castle will help him to define his place on the outside. He is guided in his quest by the ambiguous figure of Vein, a character analogous to the testy, grudgeful caretaker Vine in the real world. As Vine seems to regard the high-rise as his domain, so Vein may have motives of his own behind his offers of aid. He resembles a funeral director who has applied his own techniques upon himself. This fits in with the general gothic cast of the inner world, an atmosphere which is given justification by the horror comics which Roland reads and the model of Frankenstein which he has in his bedroom. This was a time when the spirit of Hammer and Universal horror films lived on in plastic model kits and bubblegum cards which made them common currency in the playground amongst children who’d probably never seen the pictures from which they originated.

The structure of the series, following the initial establishing episode, follows Roland through the various levels of his ascent of the tower and the trials which he undergoes at each in order to learn, which, as Vein repeatedly informs him, is the purpose behind his progress. Each episode takes place on a different level and serves to reflect a particular aspect of the outside world which has seeped through into Roland’s subconscious to spread fear and anxiety. The first level finds him encountering the mad scientist Hawkspur and his pitiful creation Ergon, figures analogous with his headmaster at the cathedral school, Spurgeon and his nervy, subordinate lacky Hawker. Hawkspur’s laboratory centres around a sparking piece of machinery in the traditional Frankensteinian syle which is designed to remove a voice (in this case Roland’s) in order to imprint it upon his dumb, childlike creation. This expresses Roland’s anxieties about his singing and the scholarship it has granted him as a chorister, something to which he is not as committed as those who would use his talents (all the while telling him how grateful he should be for such a privilege). He teaches the monster Ergon to defy his master, and its half-absorbed, electronically distorted voice utters nothing other than the idiot phrase ‘I won’t’. It’s a fairly useless rebellion, limited in its reflexive nature, and the creature sustains cumulative injuries as it repeatedly plunges down the shaft of the tower in the course of its lumbering attempts to break free, never learning better. For Roland, this is a start, a piece of displaced defiance. A refusal to be moulded through the imposition of another’s values, to allow his voice to be appropriated for their ends.

Warrior of the stairways - jazz collage backdrop

After a confrontation with the warrior on the stairs, who repeatedly obstructs his upwards progress, the second level involves an encounter with the ‘Lady’ of the castle, who is analogous with Roland’s step-mother June. He is seduced with the temptation of luxury and an enveloping care, the promise that all his needs will be met. A drink of the Lady’s ‘squash’ reduces him to a pocket-sized figure for whom her doll’s house awaits. She offers a suffocating, imprisoning form of possessive love. In the real world, June is tentative in her approach to Roland, anxious as a new member of the family not to impose herself on him and attempt to replace his mother, or to act as a go-between for Roland and his father. Her cautious concern and worry over how she should treat Roland are reflected and inverted in her mirror self, which is also a projection of Roland’s uncertain feelings about this new mother figure. The third level is that of authority, represented by the Governor of the castle, who derives from the police sergeant who sent him running into the lift and thus to his imprisonment. Roland is literally sent down to hard labour at meaningless drudgery in the kitchen dungeons. Here, everyone goes through repetitive cycles, neither knowing nor caring what they are producing or who, if anyone, will actually get to eat it. The child labour all derives from the kids on the high-rise estate, the cohorts and hangers on of Ripper. They are at the bottom of the pile here in the castle, and represent a condition of aimless, unquestioning serfdom, of an acceptance of predestined fate which Roland is determined to rise above. His efforts to set them free are greeted with resentment, since they are comfortable in their slavery, relieved at not having the burden of choice thrust upon them. In a wider political sense, the kitchen dungeons stand for a Britain in decline, overcome with apathy and despondency, and which no longer offers any meaningful labour. It is a place whose old-fashioned values seem increasingly hollow and tokenistic.

Bureaucratic maze

The fourth level is a bureaucratic maze in which any request for information or civic permission leads to a proliferating paperchase of self-generating forms issued by self-important clerks until eventually you begin to lose sight of what you were after in the first place and your identity becomes ever more worn away. The bureaucrat, encountered in many thinly disguised forms, is identified by his desk placard as Voysey. His counterpart in the real world is Voss, the harried-looking building manager for whom everything is too much trouble. His evasion of responsibility ensures that the environment in which Roland lives continues to deteriorate and become the territorial kingdom of violent gangs. He is a representative of a social order which has slipped beyond the control of the general populace and into brute survivalism. He castigates the individual for his own entrapment whilst administering the mechanisms which ensure that such a state endures.

Headphone crown

The final level, the pinnacle of the tower, finds Roland confronting and usurping the power of the Lord of the castle, having first defeated his warrior guard, the samurai version of Ripper who appears once more before the last set of stairs. The Lord is analgous to Roland’s father, Ron, a deliberate similarity in names suggesting the centrality of their relationship to the story. Roland thus completes the reversed (and slightly watered down) Oedipal path which had begun with his encounter with his new mother. In the outer world, Ron is a musician wholly pre-occupied with his ‘sounds’ who lives largely in a headphone world, cut off from communication. In the castle, on his throne, his crown incorporates his headphones and he initially dashes off before Roland can ask his advice. Prompted by a seemingly duplicitous Vein, he forces him to give up the key around his neck at swordpoint, thus acceding to the position of king of the castle. The next episode follows Roland as he attempts to exercise his new found power to make right all the injustices and inequalities which he has encountered along the way. He finds that there is considerable resistance to the imposition of his new systems, logical and enlightened though they might be. His predicament addresses the problems of what to do once have earned the freedom of choice; how do you go about introducing your ideas into the world and affecting change, and what happens when it chooses to resist. The adult world, with its responsibilities and requirements, has to be navigated through negotiation and compromise.

The invisible jury - addressing nobody

The last episode sees Roland put on trial, held responsible for the trail of consequences which lie in the wake of his progress through the tower. This trial scenes conjure a particularly absurdist world and are perhaps what Bob Baker and Dave Martin had in mind when they coined their Kafka for Kids caption. There is certainly an air of Kafka’s Trial about this one. It is also vaguely reminiscent, albeit on a far less grand scale, of the trial at the climax of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. As with David Niven’s airman in that film, who is simultaneously undergoing a critical operation on his brain, the implication is that Roland’s own safe return to the world is dependant on the outcome. The trial ultimately forces Roland to confront himself and be the judge of his own worth, as the vanishing jury suggests.

Upon returning to the real world, Roland goes about putting the lessons which he has learned into practice, facing up to the twin bullies of the headmaster in the cathedral school and Ripper in the high-rise and establishing the possibility of a closer relationship with his father. He also puts away childish things, which in this case consists of his monster models and magazines (including a copy of Hammer House of Horror magazine, I couldn’t help but notice. I wonder if he enjoyed John Bolton’s Father Shandor strip). It is through the resources of his imagination that he has come to feel stronger and more self-reliant in the world at large, however, so they have served their purpose. In this sense, the story is at least in part an argument in favour of the value of the literature and fiction of the fantastic. It acknowledges the dangers of a wholesale retreat into escapism, whilst suggesting that a temporary retreat into an imaginary world can help bring a renewed perspective to the real. He’s also got rid of his Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews posters. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s tempting to read this as a rejection of the fag-end of the prog-rock triple-gatefold era, particularly with Roland sporting a punkish sleeveless T-shirt. Anyway, having asked his dad whether he minds calling him Roland rather than the non-committal ‘son’, the frame freezes (in Quatre Cents Coups style) on his face, and we are left with the image of him smiling. There is a feeling that in the end is a new beginning

King of the Castle

King of the Castle is a remarkably ambitious piece of writing by Baker and Martin, a series whose coherence and thematic richness bears repeated viewing. The inclusion of all the elements which will go into the construction of the fantastic world in the first, real world episode is very skilfully and unobtrusively achieved. The direction is interesting at times, too, particulary at the ends of episodes, where a shot is held and an element of the scene zoomed in upon in short incremental steps. The acting is a little variable, which is understandable given the youth of much of the cast, but serves its purpose. Talfryn Thomas is particularly excellent as Vein (in many ways the major character besides Roland) in a role which gives him a break from his customary comedy Welshmen (he’s good in Doctor Who and the Green Death too, mind). The theme tune is a good, off-kilter version of the I’m The King of the Castle nursery rhyme, with crashing, Messiaen organ chords intruding when the lift is seen to malfunction in a shower of sparks at the end of the credits. King of the Castle was nominated for a BAFTA in 1977 but lost out to another type of children’s story entirely: Oliver Postgate’s colour retellings of the tales of Ivor the Engine. At least they lost out to the best. Bob Baker would eventually collect his BAFTA some twenty-two years later for a similarly hand-crafted piece of animation featuring the characters who he had helped to create (and whose adventures he had scripted from the start): Wallace and Gromit in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’. Baker’s writing partner Dave Martin sadly passed away in 2007, but their co-creation K-9 looks set for a revival in the near future. Find out more, and read about his other projects, at Bob Baker’s entertaining web site.

70s Children's TV Fantasy - Part Two

Sky (1975)


Sky, like Catweazle, is a children’s fantasy series whose title comes from the name of its central character who, again like Catweazle, is a visitor from another time who falls inadvertently into the present era, although Sky’s trajectory is from some ill-defined space beyond time rather from the past. The setting is, once again, rural, with a farming background, although this time with a West Country locale. The series was produced by HTV West and written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who had met and now worked in Bristol, where Baker was born and raised. There is a definite sense that they have a feel for the area, and this grounds the more fantastical elements of the story. The countryside is here painted in a very different light from that in Catweazle. We are no longer in a summer idyll. It is winter, and the trees are bare, the skies overcast and the tracks and fields churned and muddy (the children wear wellies throughout).

Roy, Jane and Arby, with Landy at the ready

The story begins with a pheasant shoot, which is observed in almost documentary style. There is a clear division established between the young protagonists, with the brother and sister Arby and Jane (a variant on Darby and Joan?), the former of whom acts as a beater and fetcher of the shot pheasants, seen as being on a lower social scale than their friend Roy, who participates in the shooting. Arby is something of an outsider and is considered to be an untrustworthy delinquent by those on the shoot. Suspicion is cast on him by default when things go slightly awry, and it is assumed that he is bagging the odd pheasant for himself and his family. Roy is the son of the retired army man Major Briggs, who runs the shoot from his manor house. The Major is another single parent bringing up his son on his own. But unlike Carrot’s father in Catweazle, who was a well-meaning if somewhat dazed and bemused man doing his best to keep his life and business afloat, the Major is seen as a pompous military buffoon. With his African masks on the wall suggestive of old school colonialism and his pom-pom-pomming of marching tunes while he pours himself another solitary gin, he seems lost in his own world. Actor Jack Watson’s familiar granite features help to physically convey the sense of a man who won’t listen to anything which falls outside of his narrowly defined view of the world and its workings. Roy seems only too happy to hop onto his trailbike and join his friends in their escapades alongside their dad’s landrover.

Sky is a mysterious stranger from another time who is almost literally unearthed by Arby during the pheasant shoot. It’s as if he himself has been shot down in a hunt in some parallel dimension. He is the boy who fell to Earth, his Icarus-like crash an accidental visitation, as opposed to David Bowie’s Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, who arrives with deliberate purpose. Marc Harrison, who plays Sky, has many of Bowie’s vocal mannerisms and does in many ways seem like a junior version of his Starman. The Man Who Fell To Earth seems an obvious model, but Nicholas Roeg’s film was in fact released a year later in 1976. Sky appears a nature boy, buried beneath a drift of leaves and naked to the elements save for a covering of cottony fibrous matter such as might be found packing a seed case. This would seem to make literal his own later metaphorical account of his arrival as being akin to a seed landing in a medium in which it cannot germinate. His eyes are an unbroken blue, all iris, which adds to his air of unearthly detachment and inscrutability. He possesses supernatural, or in the context of his possible origins in a fundamentally different universe, perhaps supranatural powers. When he speaks, it is with an echo of aural shimmer, as if it is not a physical sound at all but a direct communication with the mind. Indeed, he is able to communicate telepathically with Arby, the outsider, and through patterns of colour with the mentally disturbed hospital in-patient Tom, whose madness is perhaps a result of his sensitivity to such processes.

Like Catweazle, Sky is in many ways an unsympathetic character who does nothing to disguise his feelings of superiority to those around him. The idea which he suggest at the beginning that he is like an as-yet ungerminated seed whose undiscovered powers are still growing makes him vulnerable and in need of help from those upon whom he calls, but such help is taken almost as a matter of course, the obeisance of acolytes. Unlike Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, he is not remotely seduced by the temptations of the consumer society or the technological pleasures of the present, all of which he considers and declares to be the product of a primitive culture which has chosen the wrong path. He brings a message of impending doom, issuing a curt jeremiad which condemns humanity for its disconnection from and destruction of the natural world. Whilst Catwazle is overawed by the differences between his world and this one, Sky observes everything with an overarching knowledge and draws his conclusions with a studied and emotionless neutrality.

Tor skies and prophet robes

Sky’s overview of the pre-determined pattern of time suggests a semi-divine omniscience. He resembles a Blakean figure from one of the artist/poet’s prophetic poem. The link with Blake is explicitly made by the episode titles which are derived from his verse: ‘Burning Bright’, ‘What Dread Hand’ and ‘Chariots of Fire’. During a quiet moment of refuge in a church hall, he notices a copy of Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, his depiction of Christ, the original of which hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Is this the lord God?’ he asks. Arby equivocates, trying to tell him that this is the son of God, to which he immediately replies ‘which God?’ and ‘when did he arrive?’ Sky’s suggestion that he is one of a series of travellers who come to impart wisdom to mankind, and is therefore in the lineage of Christ and other religious prophets, takes us towards Erich von Daniken territory. Such ideas were very much in the air at the time, promulgated through mass market paperbacks which exhibited little regard for the basics of science, history and archaeology. Here, however, they are part of a fiction, and are not dressing themselves in the shabby garments of ‘hidden’ or occult knowledge. Having likened himself to Christ, Sky goes on to berate his helpers and by extension humanity (it is an all-inclusive ‘you’ to which he refers) for their repeated failure to live by the wisdom which has been granted them time and time again. His authority is enhanced by the fact that he is by now wearing a white robe very much like Christ’s in the painting. Sky does in fact go through an evolution of costume, which seems to transform after he has undergone several deaths and resurrections. These reflect his growing power and his bridging of various religious traditions. At first, he is covered only in the leaf matter of the wood, a pagan cloak. From his white, Christ-like robes he graduates to a vaguely Indian fashion of dress, a modern manifestation of Hindu deities or gurus appropriate to an era which tended to look eastward for mystical inspiration.

Accessing megalithic technology

Sky is not a particular compassionate or empathetic aspect of whatever godhead he claims kinship with, however. He uses the three children whom he calls upon for help, leaving them with nothing in return (the ‘healing’ of Arby and Jane’s mother aside). Even their memories are taken from them. He exploits his connection with the intuitively sensitive mind of Tom, a mentally disturbed patient in the hospital in which he is stranded, driving him beyond the routines which have become the stable centre of his life to possibly harmful long-term effect. Arby is left to disconsolately remind him ‘we did a lot for you’ as they are unceremoniously abandoned at Stonehenge. It is a moment of religious doubt, the realisation of a false messiah.

The series shares with much children’s TV fantasy of the early to mid-70s a fascination with the ancient landscapes of the West Country, and the idea of a latent power manifested through their megalithic structures and chalk hill figures. English science fiction writers exhibited a similar preoccupation at the time, as typified by such books as Keith Roberts’ Pavane and The Chalk Giants, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay, part of his White Bird of Kinship trilogy in which the West Country has been transformed into an archipelago by rising sea levels. Programmes such as Children of the Stones, The Moon Stallion and Raven drew on the potent magic of such sites as Avebury, the White Horse of Uffington and Wayland’s Smithy. Nigel Kneale’s wearily apocalyptic Quatermass, a belated return to his famous creation, seemed to be an emblematic end to the cycle as the 70s drew to a close. It was a drama originally written during the hippie 60s, casting a sour shadow over its euphoric mysticism, and ended up as a belated marker stone to its dissolution into violent chaos. Kneale invented his own megalithic site, Ringstone Round, which had its own local mythologies and folk rhymes attached. Quatermass was a pessimistic piece of adult SF which may have rung a bell in the minds of those who’d grown up watching children’s TV earlier in the decade, and Sky in particular. In Sky, the young protagonists drive their enigmatic charge to both Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge. The latter, unfortunately, features in one of the two episodes which have had to be sourced from off-air recordings, although these are of sufficient quality to render them perfectly watchable. It’s evident that one of these sites will be the all-important ‘Juganet’ about which Sky makes urgent enquiry as soon as he first encounters his helpers, and which will serve as the gateway through to the time in which he was intended to arrive. These megalithic circles and earthworks are markers, as they are in Kneale’s Quatermass, bearing witness to long silent alien technologies.

Disillusioned hippies

As for those who are drawn to the mystery of these places, their fumbling towards whatever truth they may reveal is blankly dismissed. The hippie couple living in a caravan in a field by the Tor, who await the return of a grail king figure foretold in ‘The Green Book of Myrddin’ (a made up tome, I assume) see him embodied in Sky. But he tells them in no uncertain terms that they are misguided, although it is good that they are seeking. He unwittingly draws the onslaught of the destructive powers of nature down on them and leaves them abandoning the physical, emotional and philosophical debris of their lives. They are seen walking along the road like refugees, with their meagre possessions on the chassis of a pram, the books which had previously inspired them left behind, their glimpse of transcendent truths now merely reminding of years of hollow hopes and wasted time. Not all revelation is welcome.

Dark force of nature

The cause of Sky’s crashing into the wrong time is never fully explained, but his presence is like a viral infection in the body of the world, and its natural forces gather themselves to reject and eliminate his unnatural presence. These forces are embodied and made manifest in the implacably malevolent form of a man who refers to himself as Goodchild. As played in an appropriate monotone performance of unnerving stillness by Robert Eddison, he is like a black-cloaked anthropomorphised raven, with pointed beard and piercing, fixed stare. Just as Catweazle is a creature of the woodlands, Sky is physically repulsed by it, pushed away. He is attacked by earth, root, leaf and branch, and the story becomes a pursuit narrative in which the children must help him get away from the Earth before it and its chthonic agents swallow him up. His violent treatment by these Gaian gangsters is somewhat ironic given the ecological messages which he brings. It’s as if his presence is an emblematic demonstration of the fate which awaits man. At one point, Roy is seen leafing briefly through a copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. The Whole Earth Catalogues were the essential manuals and ‘how to’ guides of the early ecology movement. The symbolism of this being the last one would seem to affirm Sky’s gloomy prognosis. It is alarmingly prescient of our growing state of pessimistic despair and sense of personal powerlessness in the face of ecological catastrophe some 35 years later.

Post-catastrophe swamp dwellers

The future time which was Sky’s originally intended destination is briefly visited by a hapless Arby, who, unwilling to be just left by Sky without any further explanations, passes through the juganet gateway with him. The pattern of the previous episodes is inverted as he becomes the reviled stranger in a strange land, telepathically hounded and threatened with ritualistic sacrifice. The inhabitants of this future are first encountered huddling around fires in the mire of a woodland hollow, a cheerless locale which reminds us of the swamp from which Sky claimed his fellow travellers had raised humanity in the past. Sky hails these people for having regained a simple way of living and direct connection with nature that the society of Arby’s time had lost through its over-reliance on technology. And yet, their world is a depressingly grey place. They are organised around a primitive cult which worships before the shrine of a ramshackle mock-up of a rocket capsule, to which their priest intones nonsense words devolved from the language of the Apollo moon missions, which were reaching their golf-drives on the craters fag-end at this point. The chant with which all join in is a monotonously repeated NASA, with its sibilant S turned into a buzzing z, a transformation which pushes it half-way towards nazi-fication. This is perhaps appropriate given that one of the chief architects of the Saturn V launcher was Werner von Braun, who cut his teeth on German V-2 rockets before graduating to IRBMs in the USA. These scenes are reminiscent of those in Beneath the Planet of the Apes in which the mutants who live in the subterranean ruins of New York worship the atomic bomb, the progenitor of their fallen state. Sky is the demi-god of this post-catastrophe world, pledged to lead its people into a brighter future. ‘They will follow my prophecies’, he predicts. He is like a Gnostic deity whose ultimate aim is to encourage the rejection of the idea of gaining control of the world of matter, rather to transcend it altogether. Moving outwards to the stars without the use of rockets, as he puts it.

hippie facist of the future

Sky is essentially a harsh, unsparing angel, although mad Tom points out that he is ‘not on fire’ in the traditional sense, as the angel in the picture to which he points is. His visitation brings no comfort or consolation, however, no annunciation of immanent salvation. His is an unpitying insight into the final days of humanity, for whom he offers no hope. It is a vision to which those who meet him may wish they had never been exposed, and the forgetfulness which he grants them is a mercy, the bliss of continued ignorance. Only Arby is given the possibility of remembering after he has followed Sky into the future, inviting him to become his John the Baptist in the face of the coming storm. Perhaps understandably, he seems to shy away from this burden, for the time being at least. He agrees to join Roy and his sister Jane on the next pheasant shoot. Like the game hunt in Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, this now seems to be a symbolic precursor to a wider catastrophe. The memory of his encounter with Sky remains latent, but the possibility of it being re-awakened is there.

Ultimately, Sky leaves many questions unanswered, but its air of ambiguity, of mysteries left unpenetrated, and of free-floating pessimism are strengths rather than weaknesses. It is the kind of intelligent, challenging (but also exciting and scary) children’s TV fantasy with which the 70s seemed to be so richly strewn. Eric Wetherell’s score is notable too, and also indicative of the way in which these series provided and introduction for young ears to modern classical and electronic branches of music. His Bartokian theme and his harsh electronic evocations of the wintry outdoor environment both add much to the atmosphere. The electronic sounds seem to come from the EMS synthesiser, the same variety which was nicknamed the Delaware at the Radiophonic Workshop HQ, and from which Malcolm Clarke had wrenched alien sounds of the deep in the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils. The opening scenes of the first episode, with the swaying branches of bare trees and the wind-like wash of synthesiser noise reminded me of the Julian House film Winter Sun Wavelengths as soundtracked by Broadcast on their recent tour. The duo have indeed talked about the series as an influence in recent interviews. The young amateur cast is a bit awkward at times, but this creates a hesitancy which fits in with the natural wariness of their characters towards the events which are unfolding. It’s nice to see characters with West Country accents as protagonists, too, rather than providing background yokelry signifying rural backwardness and village idiocy. Again, Bob Baker’s Bristol childhood probably ensured that such stereotypes were given a wide berth. Baker and his writing partner Dave Martin would leave the countryside for their next non-Who fantasy, heading for the city where they would plunge their troubled young protagonist into the symbol-strewn corridors of inner space in their piece of ‘Kafka for kids’, King of the Castle.