“THE HIGHWAY THAT’S LEADING ME”: JONI MITCHELL’S ‘HEJIRA’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

“I’m not an evasive writer. You don’t have to dig under the words for the meaning… When someone asks what a song is about, I want to say, ‘Well, did you listen to the words?’”
- Joni Mitchell

”A Decade Full of Dreams”

We are here to talk about the 1976 Joni Mitchell album ’Hejira’. But if we take our time in getting to it, wind our way round some serpentine curves, wouldn’t that be the most *’Hejira’* way of going about things?

The NME Book of Rock, the first music book I ever read, described Mitchell as a “singer/songwriter with a pure voice, specialising in highly-wrought emotional ballads… notorious for various romantic attachments”. A widespread notion which reaches its nadir in the notion that her music’s ‘confessional’, like an emotional version of striptease. (Notably, its a term she always disliked.)

And some still see her through that frame, the epitome of a hippy-dippy Sixties artist, going gooey over clouds, getting wide-eyed about Woodstock and falling in love with passers-by every few minutes. But they mistake the overture for the act. It’s the early-to-mid Seventies where she came into her own.

It's the first two albums which most match that popular image, and while they do contain some great tracks there’s also times where she sounds like Phoebe from ’Friends.’ Mitchell herself later conceded “to me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.” It was the third try, ’Ladies of the Canyon,’ which first brought in the changes. Released in 1970, it meant that for Mitchell the Sixties ended right on cue.

A few numbers, such as the title track, could have come from the earlier albums. But mostly it pointed forwards. Which also meant wider. While the earlier albums had featured occasional bass, extra instruments came to be used more expansively. But perhaps most significant of all was the guitar-sporting folkie making greater use of piano.

It was followed by ’Blue’ (1971), which capitalised on all of this and is regarded by some as her best album. And where the title track made it clear which element she was channelling - “Blue/ Songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before”. Then on ’River’ she imagines the titular body of water as something she could “skate away on”. (Yes, skate. She was Canadian.) And her piano-based music came to flow like a river. Which went with something else…

Leonard Cohen, particularly on his earlier albums, set his songs in a heightened realm, full of slightly mystic characters doing richly symbolic things. It is something of a wrench to hear that famous lines in ’Suzanne’ may have been inspired by someone called Suzanne making him a cup of tea and putting bits of orange in it.

While other songwriters use a more straightforward, conversational style, directly addressing the listener in a way which feels immediate and involving. (Think of how many songs are sung second-person, to “you”.) As John Lennon put it: “say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.” Sinead O’Connor’s ’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ would be an example, with its payoff line “you asked for the truth and I told you.” If you were ever to find out that the song wasn’t a faithful description of her life at the point you couldn’t help but feel it was lessened.

And these are diverging approaches, branching off from each other. You need to pick one.

Well, maybe me or you would. And most people seem convinced Joni Mitchell picked the second. But she didn’t. Instead, she straight out refused to pick. And she seems able to slip between the two irreconcilable opposites within a single line. At times she’d deliberately juxtapose them for effect…

“She speaks in sorry sentences
“Miraculous repentances
“I don't believe her.”

…the punchy immediacy of the last line added like a pin to a balloon.

And this created a kind of double virtue. You feel like something significant is being imparted while, at the very same time, that she’s talking straight to you. ’Song For Sharon’ (which we’ll get to, promise) is written as if a letter to a long-time friend, casually mentioning Dora and Betsy as if we know them.

And the flowing piano enhanced this, enabled her lyrics to be more free-flowing and semi-stream-of-consciousness. Her tracks can have the buzz of meeting up with an old friend, where the torrent of conversation seems both effortless and endless, something to ride. It gives it a compulsive quality, the exhilarating feeling of being absolutely in the moment. (Yeah okay, she’s the only one doing the talking. It still feels that way.) And the immediacy of music, the sense that it’s all happening now, is always a positive feature.

And these go on to work as part of a triple whammy, with her Seventies shift in subject matter. ’California’ starts:

“Sitting in a park in Paris, France
“Reading the news, it sure looks bad
“They won't give peace a chance
“That was just a dream some of us had”

…and this just one year after she’d written the hippie anthem ’Woodstock’! John Lennon, the one who’d coined ‘give peace a chance’, later sang “the dream is over.” Yet where he was rueful she was phlegmatic. Her tone is “remember when we thought that peace stuff? Boy, what had we been smoking?” From that point on the song moves on to other subjects, like waking and shrugging off a strange dream.

Mitchell has said she saw her generation as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the stultifying, conformist Fifties. “Out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it. [But] I was not a part of that.”

Except of course the writer of ’Woodstock’ was. Giving up on social change after finding out you won’t be given it seems pretty on-brand for that description. With Mitchell, as with many others, the dominant subject of her music became herself. On the afore-mentioned ’Song For Sharon’ she sang, out loud and upfront:

“Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
“And lovely landscapes to discover
“But all I really want right now
“Is... find another lover”

And its the self-importance of singer-songwriters which so often grates. The genre often feels like First Word problems recited over some strummed guitar. Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck once called it the “privileging of individual angst”, while Mclusky recorded an album acidly titled ’My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours’.

All true. Except there’s a crucial difference between Mitchell recording ’Hejira’ and Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker. An artist’s first responsibility is to find what they’re good at and do that. There’s not a lot to be gained in demanding they write a song calling for the military-industrial complex be dissolved if their talents lie elsewhere. Mitchell was made to sing about the bittersweet richness of life, in all its complexities and self-contradictions. If it took her a little while to get round to that, she still got there. And anyway, personal relations, aren’t they part of life too? Or should we be stamping down Jericho full time?

As she said herself: “A lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on ’Hejira’ could only have come from me.” Or as she sang herself…

“People will tell you where they got
“They’ll tell you where to go
“But till you’ve got there yourself
“You never really know”

Besides, in her case that free-flowing, semi-conversational style mitigates against self-absorption. (Or at least too much of it.) She sings less like she’s shining a spotlight on her personal dramas and more like she’s catching up with us.

And also, for someone supposedly so self-obsessive, Mitchell could be acutely observational, pinning people with a phrase…

“Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure its stricken from your uniform
But you can’t get it our of your eyes”

And once more, there’s a companion musical shift. As said, post-’Blue’ she started the move to a fuller band. The music grew more intricate, bringing in brass and strings. This grew slowly, but was unmistakable by 1975’s ’The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, which even incorporated the jazz standard ’Centrepiece’.

’Ladies of the Canyon’ had, clearly enough, been her Laurel Canyon album, the backpackers and freewheeling hippies who passed through it drawn from her own crowd. Songs are like quick snapshots of life happening around her, friends caught in character poses. While ’Summer Lawns’ is definitely her take on LA – “the city of the fallen angels”. Its like a film, with a cast list full of larger-than-life figures. Which means the most inventive, the most musically rich Mitchell album is the one most concerned with artificiality. (“Beauty parlour blondes with credit card eyes/ Looking for the chic and the fancy/ To buy.”)

But then there’s a bend in the road.

By this point the ‘studio album’, rich with effects and overlays, had become a thing you did - cemented in the popular mind with ’Sergeant Pepper’. And, as with that example, there wasn’t much to do once you’d gone there but reverse back out again - go back to what you were doing before. And at least in part ’Hejira’ does this, goes back to the simpler and more direct songs of ’Blue’. Precisely one track has more than four players, most have three.

But at the same time the sound became more jazzy. Mitchell had always been as much a Jazz as a Folk fan and, feeling Rock musicians lacked finesse, she started to work with Jazz players. Perhaps starting off with LA Express playing on her 1974 album ’Court and Spark’. Which ended with the Jazz cover… yes cover, ‘Twisted’. But ’Hejira’ was the first of her albums to incorporate the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius, and involved her singing evocatively about “strains of Benny Goodman”. So the album which went back simultaneously went forwards. 'Summer Lawns’ had worn its sophistication on its sleeve, while ’Hejira’ held it closer to the heart.

Now Jazz to me is like chilli or garlic. You wouldn’t want to taste it on its own too much, but it can serve well when added to other things. And when added to Folk it creates a kind of sweet ’n’ sour. (Just think Pentangle.) This fretless playing just went with her lyrics, free-form music to give wing to her free-form narrative. (Not unlike Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.)

”Porous With Travel Fever”

Also, if the element running through ’Blue’ had been water, and the instrument piano, this changes too. This album featured not a note of piano. On ’Amelia’, she sees the vapour trails of six planes in the sky, and likens them to guitar strings. A track named, of course, after the aviation pioneer. Elsewhere she paid tribute to those “who’ll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline.” The music doesn’t seem even as bank-bound as ’Blue’, but passing in jets and flurries like air streams.

As is often, the immediate reason for the switch was simple and practical. It was largely written on a road trip across America, from LA to Maine, and a guitar had simply gone in the van easier. At one point she describes coming across a piano mid-journey, and falling on it like an ex-lover. But that necessity was fortuitous. When she picked up a guitar again, it was as if it was a new instrument. The result was, if not in the standard sense, a classic air guitar album.

And, yes, travel… The observant reader might want to point out she had written about travel before. Often, in fact. ’Blue’ had opened with the line “I am on a lonely road and I’m travelling”. But those travel songs tended to focus on place. ’California’ was sung to California, as if to a person. Here the travel itself was the thing, the road runs through the whole album. One track is titled *’The Refuge of the Roads’* and the highway appears on the cover superimposed over her figure, as if it’s what she has inside - a space where you’d expect a presence. She said herself: 

“I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”

The title track opens with “I’m travelling in some vehicle/ I’m sitting in some cafe”, and its the “some” which sticks out. It’s the smooth transience of the road which soothes you, like rubbing a succession of freshly laundered hotel towels across your cheek. Freedom is the absence of snags and ties, passing through places the way a ghost walks through walls. On ’Coyote’ the road offers odd-couple romances and one-night-stands, inoculated against entanglements. Because all the time you’re in some place you’re just some person, unencumbered by the associations and expectations of those who ‘know’ you.

She sang “Your life becomes a travelogue/ Of picture postcard charms.” And the songs are like travelogues, flitting from one incident to the next, passing a farmhouse on fire or a couple sitting out on a rock.

The result’s an album that’s literally as free as air. Not in the sports commentator sense of “I literally don’t know what literally means”, but literally as free as air. Drums, which usually play a grounding role in music, are so sedate you pretty much need to check the track listing to know when they’re there. (They appear on four tracks, percussion on three, while two feature neither, seeing as you asked.)

But then there’s a curve in the road.

Like a yin/yang sign, pursue one course for long enough and it’ll bend and turn and become its opposite. And with that in mind it would be tempting to take songs as antonyms, set the floaty, gossamer-light title track and ’Amelia’, the world seen from “clouds at icy altitudes”, against ’Song For Sharon’, with it’s more distinct pulse, and self-confessed hankering for human attachment. But, as is often the way with Mitchell, nothing is so clear-cut…

Faulkner wrote the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. He probably wasn’t thinking about Joni Mitchell, but he might as well have been. She writes not like she’s providing some summation of her life, where it all led to this, but mapping the beats of her heart. And ’Hejira’ frequently returns to her conflict between this wanderlust and a desire for the most tied of all knots. Described by her as ”the strongest poison and medicine of all.” Brought on not by a love affair, a one night stand or even a crush, but by spying “the long white dress of love” in a Staten Island window.

“In our possessive coupling
“So much could not be expressed
“So now I am returning to myself
“These things that you and I suppressed” 

But later in the same song she adds:

“I’m porous with travel fever
“But you know I’m so glad to be on my own
“Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
“Can set up a trembling in my bones”

And this is (as promised earlier) ’Song For Sharon’, sung as a letter to a home-town friend. Notably, Sharon’s possessions are material, Mitchell’s metaphysical…

“Sharon you've got a husband
“And a family and a farm
“I've got the apple of temptation
“And a diamond snake around my arm”

The concluding track is ’Refuge of the Roads’ as if Mitchell never really returned from that trip. But ’Song For Sharon’, the longest number, feels like the album’s centrepiece. Ultimately she doesn’t resolve any of this, or even try to. She just tells us it like it was.

To sum up… Heading for another drudgeful and demanding day of work one Monday morning with ’Hejira’ playing in my head, I figured that whatever transpired after I arrived, in that moment I was in free transit. An album that even makes Monday mornings more bearable. Who could ask for more?

’CHILDREN OF THE STONES’

Happy days! Our look at Teatime Dystopias, when kids' TV went weird (starting here), continues with a well-remembered if rarely repeated classic. We foretell PLOT SPOILERS!

Where There's Stone There's Strange

Like all great TV shows, ’Children of the Stones’ starts with a great credit sequence. And, like all TV shows made in the Seventies, it starts off with a very inexpensive credit sequence (see end). In fact, it’s just a bunch of close-ups of some old stones.

Of course, it’s the disorientating music that makes it, that gives it that eerie effect. It was described by Stewart Lee as “the most inappropriate children's TV theme ever penned.” (In his Radio Four documentary 'Happy Days'.) Needless to say he meant it as a compliment.

Admittedly composer Sidney Sager may have been at something of an advantage. In those staid days, science fiction and fantasy were permitted more out-there music and sound design than the norm, just by invoking that catch-all heading ‘weird'. I genuinely think that throughout my childhood, the only time I heard any music other than pop fodder was through science fiction shows. As a sensitive youth, I found that fear was more easily triggered by sound than by vision, particularly the uncannily ‘causeless’ sound of soundtrack music. When it all got too much, don't shut your eyes - cover your ears.

But the music comes to affect and infect the visuals, in a kind of sinister synaesthesia. As you listen to the voices (provided by the Ambrosian Singers) rising and falling, undulating and unpredictable, you start to see the misshapen stones the same way. In fact as the show progresses, great play is made out of their inscrutable shapelessness. Those undulations become like Ernst’s famous frottage artworks, when you were never quite sure what you were seeing and what you weren’t. (I suspect that at points fake stone props were deliberately used to suggest semi-subliminal clues of this kind.)

But perhaps most magnificent is the image above, where they’re held in contrast to the electrical boxes and measuring devices which our protagonists heroically take to them – the measuring rod held up against the defiantly askew. In many ways the image acts as a microcosm of the whole series, and much like the show it seems to pack in so much. As I once said of Paul Nash’s megalith paintings: ”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.”

As with ’Sky’ you could diminish 'Stones' by reducing it to a formula; it’s at root a mash-up of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with ’The Stepford Wives,’ with a dash of 'The Wicker Man' thrown in for garnish. But that would be to mistake the recipe for the taste, and the taste of that eerie opening remains.

Broadcast in 1977, only two years after ’Sky’, Children of the Stones’ is more insistent still on the fundamental weirdness of the English landscape, and is often cited as an example of the Old Weird Britain. This is less a genre (a set of rules which more or less associate with a mode of thought) than a mood. And this lack of specificity gives the concept a flexibility, a resistance to hard definition.

And 'Stones' knows how to play this ambiguity. Though both it and 'Sky' were ITV shows, we who grew up in the shadow of our parents’ snobbery cannot help but see ’Stones’ as an honorary BBC production, ’Blue Peter’ to ’Sky’s ‘Magpie’. This difference is there even as those credits roll. <i>’Sky’</i> is full of filters and post-psychedelic effects, here we’re just shown some stones. (It is hard now not to see 'Sky' as a period piece, while the lesser use of special effects allows 'Stones' to seem more timeless.)

While much of 'Sky' is chase-and-run, ’Stones’ has a more complex storyline which develops quite slowly. Clues marinade, events accumulate. (In fact co-author Trevor Ray had been an associate script editor on ’Doctor Who’, with which ’Stones’ shares both strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, it lasts seven episodes when it could easily have fitted into five or even four.) Those who think of Brit SF TV as extras in rubber suits shouting “boo!” at the screen will be somewhat nonplussed by all of this.

While Sky has some iconic force to his performance, the series’ acting in general is at best adequate. By contrast ’Stones’ has some name actors in chief roles, including Ian Cuthbertson and Freddy Jones. (Though admittedly that does expose the poorer child performances somewhat.)

Let's go back to 'Stepford Wives' a moment, because the similarities are so strong they throw an emphasis on the differences. Both used location filming heavily, but used quite different locations to quite different effects. 'Stepford Wives' is set in an idealised suburbia, as if a gleamingly pristine advert for a newly built estate sprang to life, so was shot in small town and suburban locations wherever possible. It's a bit like the way Portmeirion works in 'The Prisoner', you're aware you're looking at something simultaneously real (not a set, a real space) and artificial (an un-place with none of the feel of the lived-in).

While 'Stones' is set in a village. The makers based their fictional Milbury closely on the actual geography of Avebury, a Wiltshire village genuinely nested inside a stone circle. (From today’s perspective Milbury can seem pretty idyllic; with a population of fifty-three it can claim its own Post Office, museum and pub. In fact the pub seems to survive on precisely three customers. They must have been pretty heavy drinkers...) And this distinction between suburb and village is significant. Here it's the rootedness, the connection of everything to its own history which is the cause of all the problems. These aren't plastic people. These are stone people.

You can read in any book on Romanticism how Britain’s early and rapid urbanisation led to the veneration of the rural. The heart and soul of the country, clearly it wasn’t where we were. So by default it must be where we weren’t. As a child I was taken to see twee English villages in much the way I was taken to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower. It was worth seeing because it was so unfamiliar, yet at the same time supposed to be our heritage. This made it ripe for inverting.

And stone circles, aren’t they ideal for this? They’re kind of just <i>there.</i> They’re used as emblems of Britain, appearing on tourist posters and the like. But at the same time as being quaintly traditional, like country pubs and cricket greens, they’re foreign objects, sitting loftily on our landscape like they own the place, despite the fact we know little about why they were put there - defying our supposed smartypants modernity. We construct theories to explain away how and why “they” built them, like a kind of intellectual comfort blanket.

”Complete the Circle”

The story's central conceit is that Hendrick, Lord of the Manor, is using ancient magic to brainwash the villagers into docile happiness. He’s been at this a while, since roundabout the dawn of humanity. The main image of this is the circle, a word which comes up in every episode’s title. When the outsiders Adam and Matthew arrive, the circle vies with the straight line - the primary relationship of parent and child. In that earlier image it’s their magnetometers and other paraphernalia which are pointed hopefully at those old, weird stones.

In a key instance of the show's 'Blue Peter'-ness there’s none of 'Sky’s working class protagonist or its suggestions of the generation gap. Adam and Matthew are a father-and-son team, with Adam in the finely middle class job of academic researcher. (An astrophysicist, albeit one who seems confused between his own job description and that of a geographer.)

While ’Sky’s Arby Vennor has to abandon his regular work to get involved in the adventure, here it’s the father’s job which takes him there. Being “very clever at working things out” Matthew helps his father in his researches, and is essentially a junior version of him. As Adam gets rather pally with Margaret, the museum creator, Matthew does the same with her daughter Sandra. Generations don't gap here. They recur. 

It’s an unstated but fundamental rule that, when people go to Hendrick to be converted, they go two by two. In Matthew’s case, there’s a brief explanation that his mother has died. There may also be one for Sandra but if so I missed it. But notably everyone seems to be in a one-parent family, for example the Doctor and his son. This rule is upheld by Hendrick’s table/altar (below) only having three chairs. For a family even of three would risk counterposing the bigger circle with a smaller one.

The sole exception is the solitary Dai, who survives by avoiding the village, clutching his magic amulet and going into endurance bouts of loony mumbling. Alone he cannot fight the circle, so instead he continually dies and is reborn, the show’s equivalent of Kenny from ’South Park’. (There may even be a sneaky pun in his name.) Unlike others he’s not an outsider to the village, his exception just proves the rule.

Hendrick himself is not exception but variant. At first he’s rather like Goodchild in ’Sky’ an ominous presence prone to turning up unannounced, his urbane charm merely part of what makes him chilling. (Though he’s more the series’ answer to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle from ’The Wicker Man.’) Though it’s often spoken of as the circle’s centre, we don’t get inside his manor house until the fourth episode, when we first see it through Adam’s eyes. From that point we are enabled to follow Hendrick from his own point of view. We find that instead of the standard parent and child relationship he has a butler, reinforcing his separation and authority. He is outside and at the centre of the circle he creates, his is the burden of command.

As Matthew points out, and like all great bad characters, the fantastic and terrible thing about Hendrick is that he genuinely believes he’s working for everyone’s good. His spell runs ”return to us the innocence that once we knew. Complete the circle. Make us at one with nature and the elements.” By making the villagers docile he purges them of all capacity to do evil, and in return gives them harmony and (in an interesting twist) intelligence.

Despite my heading it’s arguable how dystopian this series actually is. While ’Sky’ boldly tells us our whole way of life is doomed, ’Stones’ has a set-up which tacitly assumes that everything outside the village circle – in Adam-and-Matthew land - is okay. True, the village itself turns out to be a faux utopia, if one seen through almost from the start. In fact, at its most basic level, the series is about the conformism of closed communities. (This was the element picked up in the comedy film ’Hot Fuzz’, which is simultaneously tribute to and parody of the series.)

In this way, it’s tempting to see it as Enlightenment values trumping pagan superstitions, religion casting out the unknown versus science trying to understand things. Adam and Matthew represent a virtual roll-call of scientific rationalism – inquisitive thinking, individual identity and all the rest of it. They’re like science fiction characters trying to navigate through the tropes of a horror story, their magnometers like crucifixes against the strangeness.

Given the date, it would even be tempting to see it as a parting kick to the already waning back-to-the-land rhetoric of hippie subculture, with their feelgood mantras. Couldn’t Hendrick’s spell be the founding statement of some well-intentioned Home Counties commune?

And yet… Hendrick is himself a scientist, holding banks of computers in the deconsecrated church’s crypt. If the stones themselves are the dominant image of the series, this seems the broadening point, the image which connects it to the science fiction of the era. See the amp monoliths of the gatefold sleeve of the first Hawkwind album from 1970, above. Author Arthur C Clarke famously claimed “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Sixties and Seventies were the point where that became true of our technology, where our lives became besieged by an ever-increasing supply of devices and accoutrements - with us lacking the faintest clue how they really worked.

Also muddying the occult/rational waters, and with shades of ’The Tomorrow People’, Matthew develops psi powers. (Adam has a strong reaction when he touches one of the stones, suggesting he too is ‘sensitive’ but it is Matthew’s powers which develop.) So, rather than opposing Hendrick's magus with rationalism, their chief counter-weapon is itself a kind of shamanism.

The series might seem to resolve more neatly into good guys versus controlling baddies than the cosmic moral ambiguity of ’Sky’ or the conflicted wish at the heart of ’The Changes’, but the autochthonian is still given its seductive appeal. As the Wiki entry for the concept in Greek myth says, "they are rooted and belong to the land eternally.” Folk horror often uses protagonists as interlopers, going somewhere else within the UK (here less than a day’s drive from London) but finding it foreign soil. Yet unlike say *’The Wicker Man’* the incomers are seen not so much antagonists as the sick who need curing. Newcomers are incorporated until they belong. Milbury’s danger is through being someone else’s utopia. Welcome, friend.

Ultimately, circle versus line manifests as the conflict between circular and linear time. Events happen less in a causal than a fatalistic manner. The painting, found off-screen by Matthew before the series even starts, is an inbuilt plot spoiler - demonstrating almost everything that will happen. Dai lives a prisoner of circular time, living (and dying) the same events over and over. As Rob Young wrote in ’The Magic Box’, “when narratives engage with paganism and ritual, actions get stuck in a loop.”

Whereas Adam and Matthew are the champions of linear time; they must enter the village, complete a project and then leave. To Hendrick leaving is a non-concept. Notably they arrive by road, their journey interrupted when they (think they) see a strange stone figure jump out at them. And they defeat Hendrick through manipulating linear time, like it’s their element. (Check out the denouement for what I mean.)

Yet circular time is also, in a sense, accumulated time. Instead of the present arriving to replace the past, events recur, deepen like a coastal shelf. In an earlier piece, we looked at how Henry Moore’s sculpture explored his own fascination with the autochthonian. As the show’s name suggests, here this fascination becomes a phobia. The number of villagers not only equals the number of stones, in the end they turn into them. Perhaps the stones grow like coral, thickening with each iteration.

And the series does a good job of suggesting the vast timescales involved, rather than succumbing to attempt an inadequate literalisation. At one point, Hendrick takes umbrage at Adam's jibe at our primitive caveman ancestor. The inference is that he has good reason to take the insult personally. The “magus” he insists the caveman was, that's him.

Like ’Sky’, there’s no sense that victory is in any way complete. This war of linear versus circular time isn't really resolved – each just returns to its respective corner. And perhaps the point is that it can’t be. The picture, we should remember, predicts their escaping the village. Which it does by portraying a previous occurrence. And the coda suggests that circular time may already be reasserting itself and will always recur, like the seasons, no matter how many times it is defeated. This is a Manichean war, opposites endlessly attracting and then repelling one another.

The series as a whole is nicely open-ended; rather than being spoon-feed, you are left a lot of plot points to tie up yourself. However, there are times where you can’t help wonder whether those points do fit together, or whether you’ve been set a fool’s errand.

For example, it's debatable how much sense the conceit of stone people actually makes. Are they stones brought to life through these ancient magical forces? Have those people been in the village all these centuries, so the stones are their natural calcified form? But of course it’s there because it makes a great deal of symbolic sense - the stones quite literally have no free agency and are locked in a circle.

There's similar problems with the black hole/ supernova element. It’s originally a mystery what the stones are aligned with, it seems an empty section of sky. Then it’s revealed as a black hole which, back in the day, was a bright supernova. But Hendrick’s whole shtick is to dispel the villagers’ ‘evil’ into the repository of the inescapable black hole. If time is circular, how was that possible with the supernova? The star's collapsing seems there merely as a measure to indicate the vast timespan rather than a piece of internal story sense.

However, if not every piece fits perfectly, that’s no reason to throw away the whole picture. This series assumed its child audience were intelligent enough to follow it’s not-always-straightforward plot, run through some quite philosophical concepts and (at times) cope with being quite thoroughly spooked! Do they write ‘em like that any more? I’m not at all sure that they do...

The first five minutes, including that eerie opening...

'SKY'

(The first part of Teatime Dystopias, our look at SF in Seventies Kids shows, on ‘The Changes’, lies here. Though they can be read in any order.)

”It is like this. The truth that men once saw was a window of many colours, now the window is shattered and lies in glittering shards across the floor. But the fragments you pick up cannot be the whole and the wind of chaos begins to blow through the open space.”

When middle-aged men blog about old TV shows its normally because they have youthful memories they wish to indulge. But this post is appearing precisely because when the ITV children's series 'Sky', by Bob Baker & Dave Martin, was first shown back in 1975 I didn't watch it.

I mean, I didn’t miss it either. I was home from school and plonked before the telly every evening. This was the Seventies, after all, there was bugger all else to do. But truth to tell, my young brain found it all too much to take. Some weeks I'd try risking it only to find myself hastily changing channels. While with others I didn't dare put myself through the ordeal at all and I'd stick to the altogether safer realms of the BBC.

Of course, times were simpler then and I certainly was. But it wasn't just that I found it scary. Worse, I found it unsettling, reason-defying, literally uncanny. It was like a bad dream. It seemed almost impossible to figure out what was going on, even who the good guys were.

I'd now be less likely to reach for the word 'scary' than 'Seventies'. It seems like the elements from every other Seventies SF show distilled into one - someone's overlaid, composite memory of them all. Strangely blonde alien messiahs, psi powers, cosmic pontificating, ecological themes, visions of armageddon, Stonehenge-is-really-sci-fi, a spaceship as a wicker man… all seen through a filter of spacey music and post-psychedelic screen effects. Even Glastonbury hippies get a look-in.

Part of what so fazed my young brain was the title character (up top). With his synthesised unearthly voice, spaced-out eyes, spectral presence and general all around alien-ness, was he hero or villain? He had recognisably human sidekicks, but unlike the good Doctor seemed far too otherly to be the hero. He didn't look so far from the scarily superior aryan kids from the film 'Village of the Damned' (above). And yet he simultaneously seemed so vulnerable, so haunted. Without that sort of pole to set your compass by, how could a young child be anything but lost?

I knew it not at the time but, also archetypically for the Seventies, the character was channelling a great deal of David Bowie. Actor Marc Harrison was encased in a blonde wig and blue contact lenses. (Which ironically made him look most like Bowie in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth',, above, a film not released until the following year.) And of course blondeness and whiteness was a general signifier of futurism in the Seventies, in fashion and design as much as SF.

Bowie had repeatedly used the metaphor of aliens to represent generation gaps, with youth as the nascent “homo superior” who were becoming increasingly unknowable to their own parents. (Which, as we’ve seen, was a phrase instrumental in developing another ITV children's SF series,'Tomorrow People', in 1973.) Yet the Tomorrow People didn't wear weird all-blue contact lenses but smart jumpsuits, and behaved quite properly – as if the cast of 'Blue Peter' had developed psychic powers, which they'd decided to utilise to defend the Earth when they weren't busy on bob-a-job week.

'Sky', conversely, was almost the anti 'Tomorrow People,' the point in the schedules where the uncanny just erupted. And one component of this was its incorporation of generational conflict, albeit in an unusual way. It's almost a staple of children's SF that its young protagonists are as beset by everyday travails as by extraordinary ones – they're set detention at school or grounded at home, and always on the night when they need to meet the passing space rocket. (Of course appealing to the young mind, with whatever it had fixed on to do that evening feeling as important as meeting a space rocket.)

'Sky' has a school, true, but one seemingly without any teachers to it. In general, adult characters are weak and marginal - an alcoholic Major, ineffectual yokel cops. But this just allows adult authority to be bundled up inside one figure – Sky's antagonist, the ironically named Goodchild (above). Played in an almost absurdly melodramatic way by a black-clad Robert Eddison, like Dracula but with less redeeming features.

The patriarchal Devil was a staple of Seventies horror (albeit in horrors more normally aimed at adult audiences), and Goodchild is a chip off this block. After a first line “I'm looking for my charge”, he spends almost the whole series chasing Sky around the place. He often explicitly takes on roles of adult authority, such as that of a Doctor at the hospital.

More unusually, class makes an appearance alongside age. With Sky so strange and remote, the primary audience identification character is Arbie (above). He's not just working class, but surly and widely distrusted as a tealeaf – James Dean meets Ed Grundy. His family lives next door to the more middle class Roy and his Major dad, not out of any Seventies egalitarianism but the better to juxtapose them.

In a seemingly perpetual plot point the natural word is constantly turning against Sky, like antibodies against a foreign intruder. Which was perhaps the main source of my youthful disquiet. Firstly, it found horror in what was all around you – the English landscape, the stuff more commonly used for pretty backdrops. And worse - if this was the hero, how could the very Earth turn against him? Which is actually quite a good question. Despite Goodchild's panto villainy, there's a sense that the two are locked in some endless Manichaean dualism.

Sky's white coding goes against Goodchild’s black, not just foes but primary antagonists. Upon age versus youth and white versus black the show then places every other dualism – authority versus rebellion, custom versus innovation and earth versus... well, sky. Only some way in do we discover the SF-sounding Juganet which Sky searches for is actually Stonehenge, which of course is some time machine/ astral portal sort of thing. (The original purpose of Stonehenge was almost certainly to link earth and sky rather than oppose them, the builders abundantly aware how deep those stones had to be sunk just to stand up. But let's not fret.) In fact the moralistic name Goodchild is perhaps not entirely ironic, for he ultimately represents the natural order.

Nor is this just a matter of painting Goodchild less black. Contemporary viewers watching the opening scenes would most likely assume Arby to be the sidekick to pheasant-hunting posh kid Roy – at which point he promptly drives off on his own. But there's a sense in which by finding Sky he merely swaps one bossy rich kid for another.

Arbie's sister Jane seems inserted into the script at a late stage, to give the girls someone to relate to. And as she mostly just follows Arbie around as he follows Sky, it's doubtful that strategy was particularly successful. Yet at one late point its she who not unreasonably suggests Sky is simply using them. And certainly nothing happens to dissuade us of this. The war of earth versus sky seems to have little interest in the human jam sandwiched between them. One way of reading things would be to pursue the Bowie metaphor, where Sky is the star with his head full of visions and mouth dispensing significant statements, and Arbie his lowly earth-bound fan.

As we discover, while Sky is a saviour he isn't really our saviour. Because of reasons he's shown up at the wrong time and, while he expects and accepts human assistance, he shows a right royal lack of gratitude for it. Not being meant for us, he's consequently not able to tell Arby anything particularly useful. What he does have to say basically boils down to “I'm not your messiah, I just took a wrong turn. Actually, you lot.. well, you're all buggered. Sorry about that.”

Which seems the mood of the moment. To go back to Bowie, the year before ‘Sky’ was broadcast he tried explaining what the ‘Ziggy’ album was all about: “Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe.” This is clearly a post-hoc construction, almost entirely unrelated to the album made a couple of years before. But the remarkable thing is how close it is to ‘Sky.’ 

One intriguing aspect of this is that neither Sky nor Goodchild wants the world as it is now. If Goodchild represents nature, it doesn't follow Sky is in hock to the white heat of technology. Despite his name he's not here to predict any media empire branding, explaining things have been on the wrong track since the time when “with the first flint man bent nature to his will”.

As stated at the opening, psi powers were a staple of Seventies SF, mind control battles about as common as bell bottoms. Yet what's interesting about 'Sky' may be less than it's yet another iteration, but the way it knocks out what often seems a core component of them. Think again of 'Tomorrow People’ and their jaunting belts, human evolution and technological development so aligned as to be almost symbiotic. Whereas in 'Sky' it's all just got to go.

What Sky's mission means in practise, or how it even differs from Goodchild's vision, is... wait for it... ill-explored. Insofar as it's possible to tell, his psi powers – and in particular his telepathy - represent a kind of nouveau spiritualism. Using them makes us at one with the world, while tools and even speech just separate us from it. Or something. Yet while there is something New Agey about this it doesn’t have the feelgood factor that seems central to New Age ‘thinking’. We get to visit Arbie’s post-tech future and it’s not much of a utopia. (Despite the telepathy it’s not unlike the world of ‘The Changes’, including the sense that we’re in somebody’s utopia, just not ours.

Though there is a sense this is fitting. We see all this from our perspective, from a fallen, lesser world. So of course what we see is fragmentary, and hard to interpret. And perhaps what's really significant is what's absent. In a quietly brilliant scene, when Arbie finally gets back home he doesn’t rush back into the arms of his family but goes round the kitchen switching on lights and taps – refamiliarising himself with familiar things. But we’re supposed to do the opposite. The ambiguous dualism essentially tells us soon there’ll be no more water in that tap, the whole thing is up the spout and we need to sort it out for ourselves.

Producer Patrick Dromgoole later said “What we were trying to say to the children was their normal definition of good and bad was not going to work because they were suddenly confronting one of the great mysteries of the universe and a very simple definition wasn’t available.” (So yes, they were screwing with my young mind!)

And perhaps that’s what's significant. Nowadays we fancy ourselves as dystopian connoisseurs, like a drunk boasting he can take his booze. But would we countenance anything so bleak, strange and challenging as this on contemporary children's TV?

True there may be films which have taken on this mantle. ’The Hunger Games’, based on teen-lit novels, may be something of a sibling. But they’ve mostly been overwritten by apocalypse porn. A genre where, while the disaster may even be pulled from the headlines, it is always rendered as something known and explicable. Both characters and audience will be aware what they’re up against. Even horror variants, such as zombies, are normally subject to quite rigid rules. And, however much they fetishise the spectacle of destruction, at heart they’re Robinson Crusoe stories. Even when stripped of our lattes and i-phones, we Westerners will find within ourselves the will to survive.

But most of all… Wilfred Owen once said “all a poet can do today is warn.” And when you’re issuing a warning, it makes sense to direct it at the young, those least inured in the bad habits. I’ve now lived through many of the dates they used to flaunt so ostentatiously in science fiction in those big futuristic fonts. We passed those warning signs. So inevitably they now seems prophecy. I’m not surprised that things have skirted so close to disaster. What I’m surprised about is that they haven’t tipped over yet.

’Sky’ is not particularly well-acted or even necessarily that well-written. As Goodchild chases Sky from one hidey-hole to another, as the super-intelligent alien hides in another country setting (“you'll be safe here”) then belatedly remembers nature has it in for him, it quickly becomes repetitive. And its boldest defenders would have to work hard to claim it's in any way coherent.

But it's got the sort of qualities that analysis can miss. It throws up interesting concepts and memorable images, which can stick in your brain. (In my case, over decades. Despite the fact I didn't even watch it.) You're never sure what are flaws or weaknesses, or what are deliberate ambiguities and clever devices. (For example, the rather wooden performances of the others throws into relief the larger-than-life nature of Sky and Goodchild.)

Compare it to a dark psychedelic track, like something by Trees or early Pink Floyd. (Similar visual effects were, after all, regularly used on music programmes of the time.) The underlying structure may be of an overly familiar pop number, but that's simply not the part to focus on. The disorientating psychedelic effects leap up at you, take you by surprise, drag you into their realm. Similarly the spooky music, the photo-filter effects, the strange-looking characters aren't embellishments to what's going on, they are what's going on. As Sky says at one point, “What you read are symbols, and fragments of symbols.” My eight year old self was right. It can't be made sense of, and that's the key thing about it...

That very Seventies credit sequence...

Coming soon! Perhaps the best-known teatime dystopia of them all...

‘THE CHANGES’

(Here starts ‘Teatime Dystopias’, a three-part series on how science fiction was used by Seventies children’s TV. Which, primarily, was as a means to traumatise tots. Please BEWARE PLOT SPOILERS!)

Adverse Conditions Ahead

“We interrupt our regularly broadcast programme to bring you the end of Western civilisation...”

That’s not quite how ’The Changes’ started, but it’s not far off. If it's something like a junior version of ’Survivors’, it actually came first. (Both were broadcast in 1975, but it had been filmed two years before.) Except ’Survivors’ took a scientifically plausible explanation for social collapse, reiterated in its title sequence. While this took a fantastical one, as in its own title sequence. Speaking of which…

For the first but not the last time in this series, those highly effective titles are an example of restriction generating innovation. The repeat image of things just stopping is as effective as it is simple. To end life as we know it doesn’t require an epidemic to be unleashed, the nuclear button be pressed, resources to run out or the workers to rise up from the Lower City. In fact it doesn’t require anything. The lives we had been living weren’t even precarious, they were arbitrary. They could have stopped at any point, it just happened to be today.

And the soundtrack… it’s bizarre to think that little more than a decade later, electronic beats would be used to induce ecstatic states. Here its machine sounds to convey a machine sense - the regular, the humdrum heartbeat of the daily grind. Then that stopping.

There’s two things you can’t avoid saying about ’The Changes’, and they go together. First, it’s strong use of location footage gives it an immediate, verite feeling quite at odds with the staginess of much TV from this time. Added to which the camera is mobile, following the action around.

Second, it needs to be situated in its era, a time of power cuts and social upheaval. Our modern phobias are wrapped up in mighty CGI conflagrations, sometimes referred to as the spectacle of the end of the world, where we’re all inevitably going to die but at least it’ll be while watching a good show. While the Seventies was about the taps stopping working and the water going bad. Their apocalypse wasn’t just coming, it was going to get you where you live.

Peter Dickinson’s source novels predate this era, the last being written in 1970. Many scenes from them are excised, to be replaced by more budget-friendly alternatives. But there’s two significant points where the show adds scenes, and this is the first. All the books started after the Changes had begun. Whereas some of the show’s most memorable moments are in the first episode, where we see the actual a-changin’.

We first see young Nicky dutifully doing her homework in a setting of domestic quietude. Then a mere three minutes in, to quote the first episode’s title, the Noise starts. And the family are immediately reduced to a destructive frenzy against anything mechanical. As, it transpires, is everyone else. The motivation is moralistic if not actively religious, the machinery deemed “wicked”. (And not in the “well wicked” sense.) The first blood-and-thunder preacher has shown up mid-way through the first episode. While you’re probably not intended to think of it directly, it recalls the iconoclastic fury.

(If they why of this is taken up later, its somewhat unclear how people are affected. At first it seems it’s an intermittent madness, lasting only as long as the Noise sounds. Once it stops, people’s immediate reaction is to escape somewhere, as if the problem’s confined to others. But it’s also a permanent reset, bedded in people’s minds, where even mention of the wicked things by name can cause shock and outrage. Or for that matter what the limits of this wickedness are. For example, bicycles are bad but carts are okay.)

Nicky soon falls in with some Sikhs, travelling with them. Why Sikhs? The Seventies were the ‘look East’ era, with an increased interest in its mysticism. But that rarely took in Sikhism. Dickinson dedicated the book they appear in to a Sikh name, so possibly this originally stems from a personal relationship.

However, two things are striking. Firstly the Sikhs are accurately presented as, in the book’s words, “a warrior people”. When the distrust they’re met with spills over into hostility they are quick with self-defence, which makes them useful protectors for Nicky. (Note to self - when civilisation ends, don’t get yourself stuck with a bunch of aum-ing Buddhists if Sikhs are available.)

But a wider (if not unconnected) point is that they’re outsiders, that they were outsiders before any of this started, and they’d be scarcely any less outsiders if they were still in India. Which manifests within the story as their being unaffected by the Changes. In fact their initial reason to allow Nicky to travel with them is that she can be their ‘canary’ of wickedness, alert them to what’s considered wrong-doing in these new social mores.

Based on a trilogy, the series divides neatly into three. And it’s significant that even after Nicky parts company with them she takes up with Jonathon. Who is white but before the Changes was a keen engine tinkerer, and so any Noise effect has already rubbed off him. Meaning Nicky always has someone with her less changed than she is.

Why do this? She’s the audience identification character, if not our brave heroine. Why not show her as unaffected by the Changes as we are? Instead things are played very much the other way. She loses her parents when, rather than follow them, she joins a mob attacking a car. And at first she attacks the Sikhs, when one tries to start up an engine.

Before watching, I’d blithely assumed the Changes would only affect the adults. Who when I was a child always seemed strangely vexed about technology which I just saw as ubiquitous, rationing TV viewing, guarding telephones, fretting about amplified music’s ability to suddenly strike you deaf and so on. The story does suggest the Changes wear off with the children the quickest, but still has them affected initially.

Let’s segue into another question, as that may turn out to have the same answer. The Changes are shown as a terrible rupture, a “madness” which kills many and constantly throws Nicky into danger. England has descended into a kind of Home Counties Fascism, ruled by village despots and malevolent witchfinders. (Prone to saying things like “Wickedness! Right here in the heart of Shipton!”) Otherness is so feared it’s like the Daily Mail comments board comes to life. The reassuringly strangulated BBC voice-over at the start of each episode seems strangely jolting.

But at the same time the series demonstrates the way Sixties counter-cultural themes had by the Seventies gone mainstream, the critique of consumerism, the back-to-the-land movement and so on. Another show which premiered in 1975 was the long-running sitcom ’The Good Life', about a middle class couple who opt out of the rat race for “self-sufficiency in Surbiton.” And in their travels Nicky and Jonathon come across a remarkably similar couple, Michael and Mary, who had swapped London for “the simple life” of rabbit-hunting and bread-baking before the Changes even began. (They’re the second major invention of the show, with no correlative in the source novels.)

And these can clash. The witchfinder chases Nicky across a whole episode, gaining knowledge of her whereabouts by threatening another with a knife. But the chase is a leisurely affair, a canter across the countryside set against repeat panoramas of bucolic England, taking in a visit to a village pub. The incidental music sticks to the Seventies synths, but to fit those views shifts into pastoral. (And there’s little that’s more Seventies than folky snyth.)

Laid out like that, it sounds like a weakness. Some popular trends have been tossed together, and what results is a mish-mash. And at times it seems that’s the case. But at others it turns out quite the opposite. It’s perhaps best summed up by the kindly old man Nicky meets in the first episode, before she’s left Bristol. Much like the tramp in ‘Quatermass II’, he acts as a kind of moral compass. He comments “it’s funny not having the noises, it’s like when I was a kid, nicer really, more peaceful”, even as he knows he’s dying. Let’s look at how that works…

The End of Civilisation And Its Discontents

First off, Nicky consistently under-reacts to all of this. After the initial outbreak of the Noise, to her parent’s shock she calmly gets dressed for the next day’s school. When they tell her not to go, she sneaks out anyway. She then seems strangely phlegmatic about being left behind by them, who seem strangely phlegmatic about leaving her. This may just be a narrative necessity, to avoid having multiple episodes where she’s just sobbing on her bed. But it’s referred to diegetically, she’s asked about this by the Sikhs and shrugs the question off. And children can be a strange combination of conservative and adaptable, adjusting to a new normal more quickly than adults.

It’s also noticeable that in both the first and second section Nicky is befriended by both a boy and a girl. There’s a scene where the camera stands with the Sikh girl Ajeet as she looks up at Nicky and the Sikh boy Gopal, who have climbed a tree. She’s asked if she doesn’t mind getting so dirty, but doesn’t seem to. Then later as she goes travelling with Jonathon his sister Margaret helps their escape, then returns to help her mum with the farm. The Changes of ’The Changes’ grant her what might, in Seventies terms, be called ‘boy’s liberties’. Had the Noise never happened, she’d probably have just stayed with her homework.

For some reason, I never watched this show at the time. However, I was a big fan of ’Here Come The Double Deckers’ (first broadcast 1970/1, but endlessly repeated). And what attracted me was the trope of Free Range Children. It showed kids living in a secret hideout, where adult authority would attempt to intrude with slapstick ensuing. No parental edicts about bedtimes or the tidiness of rooms, just endless hanging out with your mates.

And the first film I saw at the cinema was ’Lost In the Desert’ (1969), a tale of a young boy who got lost in the… well, you probably guessed. (It’s essentially ’Walkabout’ without the elder sister.) Watching a child about the same age as me strive to survive on that big screen was a demanding watch, a feeling amplified by the realisation that if I reacted too visibly I wouldn’t get taken to the cinema again.

Both stemmed from the same source. But it was an unspoken assumption that it was okay to feed kid’s desire to be free of adult authority and also stir their phobia of being without their parents, provided they were delivered via different channels - never the twain shall meet.

Except for ’The Changes’, which was (consciously or otherwise) all about them meeting. Nicky gets to climb her trees, but with that freedom comes the witchfinder who wants to stone her to death.

And that was in a sense a juvenile microcosm of the wider culture, which both fretted about what technology was doing while fearing it being taken away. There’s more to this than the love of adventuring, even if that becomes our route in. It’s the notion that technology has coddled us, disconnected us from the real world, to the point that life now lies elsewhere.

And popular cultural themes are normally conflicted. Quite possibly it’s that conflict which causes them to become themes. Dramas can seek to resolve them, which they’re unlikely to do to everyone’s satisfaction. Or they can opt to ride the turbulence, and perhaps even map some of it.

Deus Versus Machina

And what turns out to have caused the Changes? There’s a megalith-like stone, sitting in a cave, seen over the closing credits of every episode. That’s our culprit. It’s a kind of spirit of the land - “there in nature, deep in the root of things.” And it’s Nicky, not the unaffected Jonathon, who’s able to sense it, to realise what it is and to plead with it. (In a scene remarkably like the ‘talking down the maverick supercomputer’ trope Seventies SF was so fond of. This was the decade that truly wrapped science and mysticism up together.)

She saves the day by appealing to it’s better nature, which is an example of the ‘talking cure’ so beloved of liberal culture. But it makes more sense in this context than something like ‘The Quatermass Experiment’. 

Some while ago, we looked at ‘Day of the Dead’. Which speculated that the zombie rising happened because our hubris made God wrathful. But the Changes seems more like something so powerful a force would do. Take away our noisy toys, not give them back till we’re better behaved. (Though at one point lightning strikes Nicky and Jonathon’s boat, so the stone’s willing to do its own dirty work at times.)

They encounter Furbelow, who touched the stone and made a wish upon it. “I didn’t mean it to turn out like this, of course”, he cries, “I thought it was for the best.” And he’s like all of us at this point of history, concerned about something, not quite knowing why or what to do about it, in his befuddlement just making the whole thing worse. Which is echoed in the stone’s warning - “whoever touches me unbalances the world”.

Though how this muddled wish transpires as the Changes is, perhaps inevitably, in itself muddled. He wishes for world peace, a cure for cancer and the usual stuff. Perhaps the stone picks up on his underlying technofear, or on waking up sweeps the land of all the newfangled stuff its not used to.

Furthermore, we’re also told that the stone’s wake-up call was “too soon, too sudden”. (In which case it must surely have set the alarm clock for about now.) What its waiting for, or what this has to do with Furbelow’s befuddlement is anyone’s guess. (This confusion may be here because the book’s ending gets changed, without being entirely overwritten.)

Still, if you need to squint at the thing for it to work then let us squint. The upshot is - because Furbelow, one of us, has made this muddled wish which becomes more like a curse it takes Nicky, another one of us, to un-wish it. And with it un-wish her adventuring.

After which, there’s noticeably no happy-ending shot of Nicky being reunited with her parents. She explains to Jonathon that its all over. Then the end credits are essentially a mirror image of the opening ones, with motion restarted. The immediate problem is over, the stone’s gone back to sleep. But the underlying causes, they all remain.

Coming soon! Further teatime dystopias! (Same time, same channel...)