”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...
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