Children Of The Stones: A Look Back

Remember when the British countryside was a place where horror hid in plain view? Since the 1970s, it’s lost much of that mystery. What do the people of 2015 think of when they picture rural Britain? Matt Baker? The Countryside Alliance? Cow dung? Alex James and his cheese empire? Back in the 70s, rural Blighty was a place of dark superstitions, peopled by folk who looked at us through alien eyes. It was forbidding and strange, and seemed stuck in a cultural time warp, with little kinship to what was going on in the towns and cities that surrounded it.

What with the explosion of folk-horror cinema in the 1970s, it’s a wonder why anybody voluntarily travelled outside of urban Britain. The Wicker Man warned us that the pagan ways were alive and well on the island of Summerisle, while The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Witchfinder General found their devilish inspiration in the soil and grass of rural England. The most disturbing horror in British cinema in the 1970s wasn’t in industrial, built-up Britain, but in the green and brown patches in between.

In the real world, a pair of actor-cum-writers were about to let loose their own small screen entry in the folk-horror canon, a full-blooded children’s drama that would become one of the most insidiously influential shows of the 1970s, a series that is recalled with a sharp shiver by those who witnessed it in its innocuous afternoon ITV slot - Children of the Stones.

It seems hard to believe now that one of the most blazingly original and haunting series of the decade came not just from ITV, but from its children’s arm. These days, original kids telly is all but dead on the third channel, while the BBC seems to have virtually given up on self-produced dramas for the under 16s. The 1970s now looks like a precious golden age of kids drama, where both BBC1 and ITV produced series that were bold and provocative and rarely spoke down to their audience. It’s hard to imagine a series that demands of its school-age viewers a working knowledge of pagan ritual and astrophysics. If Horrible Histories is the GCSE of children’s programming, Children of the Stones is the BSci.

Jeremy Burnham had been a jobbing actor who’d stumbled into writing after guesting in an episode of pop art spy series The Avengers. He went on to pen five episodes of the show’s final run in 1968-9 before he pitched a script for the BBC series Paul Temple, which was being script-edited by another on/off actor, Trevor Ray. Near-neighbours in North London, they soon struck up a deep friendship and decided to try writing together. “From then on we tried various ideas on the fools that ruled,” Ray says.

“Neither of us can remember where the idea of Children of the Stones came from,” Burnham tells Sci-Fi Now. “It was just serendipity.”

Burnham and Ray’s story focused on a father and son who travel to the Wiltshire village of Milbury. Adam Brake is a recently widowed astrophysicist, a tweed-jacketed rationalist who has come to the seemingly sleepy village to study magnetic fields around the neolithic stones that pepper the area. But why are so many of the townsfolk so keen for the Brakes to stay, and why do they all go around chirping “Happy day!” at one another? They soon discover, with the help of the village’s curator and her daughter, that the quiet hamlet has a dark secret, connecting the stones to a black hole in space, the power of which is used by the town elder Hendrick, to control the villagers.

“‘Happy day’ isn’t a phrase that isn’t used [in real-life],” Burnham says. “Nobody says ‘Happy day’ to each other. That’s what makes it a bit eerie, and that’s what we wanted, that this place isn’t normal.”

That sense of unease, and of an oppressive threat, pervades all of Children of the Stones. There are narrative cribs from The Midwich Cuckoos and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, but the story Children of the Stones tells is thoroughly unique, weaving hard science into a story about ancient traditions, occult rituals and the cyclical influence of the past on the present.

“We did quite a lot of research into leylines, supernovas, etc,” Burnham tells Sci-Fi Now. “We found an astrophysicist expert for the series. He was the father of a boy our son went to school with.” That expert - Dr Peter Williams - came on board to ensure the scientific details were watertight, and it’s true that it’s probably a series that would pass the Brian Cox boffin test. But the story’s ancient, pagan themes were a natural fit for HTV, the ITV company whose reach took in Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and Avebury, where the series was eventually filmed.

“Because of the standing stones, we knew it had to take place in Avebury, so the obvious market for it was HTV,” says Burnham. “When we went down there to do some research, and the first thing we saw was a crow standing on a sheep’s head, both immobile. So it seemed like the right place for our story.”

Avebury is a small village in Wiltshire that is built around a neolithic stone circle. While the interiors were filmed, somewhat obviously, in the studios of HTV in Bristol, Avebury stands in for the exteriors, and director Peter Graham Scott gives the place a cinematic sense of menace and foreboding. From the show’s ominous opening titles, where the stones are filmed, using a handheld camera with a fisheye lens, against the wailing groans of Sidney Sagar’s atonal avant-garde musical score, it’s clear that this is a series that wants to get under your skin and into your soul.

“I thought Peter Graham Scott did a great job,” says Burnham. “At first, I thought the ‘music’ was way over the top, but I later changed my mind.”

Thirty-one-year-old Gareth Thomas, still a year away from his signature role as curly-topped terrorist Roj Blake in Blake’s 7, was cast as the atheistic Dr Adam Brake, with Peter Denim (whom ITV viewers would have recognised from a series of Terry Scott-headlined adverts for Curly-Wurly) as his precariously gifted son, Matthew.

For the show’s Big Bad, the sinister lord of the manor Hendrick, Burnham and Ray cherry-picked Iain Cuthbertson, then most famous as Adam Faith’s conniving Glaswegian crony Charlie in Budgie, while Burnham’s wife, Veronica Strong, won the role of museum curator Margaret, a fellow village newcomer who has yet to be sucked in by the ‘Happy Dayers’. Finally, the ever-great Freddie Jones, now better known as Toby Jones’ Pa, was signed to play Dai, the simple-headed poacher.

Children of the Stones was only ever shown twice (it was repeated a year after its initial transmission, in 1978), but its influence looms large. It was one of a small group of children’s shows to be given an early, pre-BBFC video release (albeit in a pruned down 117 minute version), and it was deemed worthy of a special Radio Four documentary, fronted by comedian and journalist Stewart Lee, in 2012.

“The proof that it still stands up today is that I continue to get letters from all over the world saying things like, ‘Thanks for ruining my childhood!’, which I take as a compliment,” Burnham tells us. “Also, we have recently had two offers to remake Children of the Stones and follow it with the sequel, but we are currently in dispute with ITV about the rights.”

That sequel is a Burnham-penned literary follow-up, published by Fantom Films, where a now grown-up Matthew returns to Milbury, this time with his own son, Tom, and his now elderly father Adam in tow.

“Trevor and I had discussed the possibility of a sequel, but we hadn’t got very far with it when we had an amicable disagreement about how it should go,” says Burnham. “So Trevor relinquished all his rights in the story and characters to me. He gave the result his enthusiastic approval.”

There are nods to Children of the Stones in Simon Pegg’s similarly West Country-sourced Hot Fuzz, while Russell T Davies has spoken warmly of the series’ influence on his early CBBC serials, Century Falls and Dark Season. And as Burnham recalls, the fans of Children of the Stones come from the most unexpected places.

“When Veronica was acting in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus in Israel, the British Ambassador came round after a performance,” he says. “He’d read in the programme that she was married to me, and his kids wanted to know what happened in the last episode of Children of the Stones. They’d had to leave the UK before it was aired! He offered to buy us both lunch at the Athenaeum when he returned if we could fill him in. So that’s what happened: he gave us an excellent lunch, and we gave him a signed copy of the book!”

Whether Return to the Stones ever gets that television sequel, or whether the remake ever happens is, naturally, up in the air. Whether there’s the trust there now to give a children’s television audience such a fruity mix of hard science and ancient pagan faith, is a moot point. “TV was still run by adults, poets, war heroes in those days,” says Trevor Ray, regretfully. “We were never asked to dumb it down.”

HTV’s best of the rest

ITV’s regional broadcaster in the 1970s, HTV, made their name in well-remembered fantasy series. Here are just a few of the great ones…

Sky (1975)

Cooked up by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who were often to be found on the other side in the 1970s as writers on Doctor Who, this beautifully odd little fantasy gem focused on a blond-topped and blue-eyed alien, the eponymous (and androgynous) Sky, who crash lands on Earth and who must return to his own time. Filmed in a variety of iconic West Country locations, such as Avebury, Glastonbury and Stonehenge, this SF-infused ecological fable still packs a powerful dramatic punch.

The Georgian House (1976)

Dan and Abbie are two students who work at a reconstructed georgian house in the centre of Bristol. All seems pretty ordinary until they discover an African wood carving which sends them back in time 200 years, where they meet a young black slave, who it seems is the key to getting them back to 1976. Only three episodes exist of the broadcast seven, which are now out on DVD, courtesy of Network.

King of the Castle (1977)

"Kafka for kids" is how co-writer Bob Baker described this fizzily inventive fantasy about a teenage boy who, after an accident that should have killed him, is reawoken in an alternative reality, filled with gruesome replicas of the people he knows from the “real world”. Intended as a nightmare journey into the subconscious anxieties of its teenage protagonist, it’s a series rich in weirdness, from the insanely-angled camerawork to the hysterical musical score.

The Clifton House Mystery (1978)

A deeply affecting supernatural serial set in present day Bristol, The Clifton House Mystery’s ghostly goings on are the dramatic equal to anything from Alejandro Amenábar or J. A. Bayona. Set almost entirely within the claustrophobic confines of the Clare family’s home, The Clifton House Mystery takes full advantage of its studio-bound trappings.

Into the Labyrinth (1980)

Not, perhaps, HTV’s greatest fantasy triumph, Into the Labyrinth suffered from an over-reliance of CSO, meaning that while the writing was often good (the show counted such Doctor Who stalwarts as Robert Holmes, John Lucarotti, Anthony Read and, yes, Bob Baker, among its writer posse) the presentation was often woefully shabby. Ron Moody played the magician Rothgo, who is continually thwarted in his quest to regain the Nidus (a magical object of limitless power) through time and space by the swoonsome witch Balor (Pamela Salem).