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...
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