Children's TV: Sky

HTV for ITV, 7 April 1975-17 May 1975. 7 x 25 min episodes.

Produced by Patrick Dromgoole: executive producer (7 episodes, 1975), Leonard White: producer (7 episodes, 1975). Directed by Patrick Dromgoole (3 episodes, 1975), Derek Clark (2 episodes, 1975), Terry Harding (2 episodes, 1975).

Writing credits: Bob Baker & Dave Martin (7 episodes, 1975). Read more here.

Cast: Marc Harrison (Sky), Richard Speight (Roy Briggs), Stuart Lock (Arby Vennor), Cherrald Butterfield (Jane Vennor), Robert Eddison (Goodchild), Jack Watson (Major Briggs), Thomas Heathcote (Mr Vennor), Frances Cuka (Mrs Vennor).

"Eerie, unsettling and a benchmark production for children's television in the 1970s, Sky was created by Doctor Who stalwarts Bob Baker and Dave Martin as one of the run of outstanding children's dramas HTV produced in that decade. Filmed in such richly atmospheric locations as Avebury, Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge, Sky is a mixture of ecological fable, science fantasy and good, old-fashioned peril. Marc Harrison stars as Sky - an ethereal boy who materialises on an Earth that is as unprepared for him as he is for it. He soon realises that he's been brought to the wrong time and must seek out the Juganet to return to his correct place in reality. With the help of tearaway Arby Venner, his sister June and friend Roy he must race against time as Nature rejects Sky and the Earth's immune system creates the evil Goodchild, who is out to stop him at all costs... "

Episode titles and original air dates: 1. Burning Bright - 07/04/75. 2. Juganet - 14/04/75. 3. Goodchild - 21/04/75. 4. What Dread Hand - 28/04/75. 5. Evalake - 05/05/75. 6. Lifeforce - 12/05/75. 7. Chariot of Fire - 19/05/75.

Further information here & here. Video content here & here. Images from Time Screen magazine, issues 17.

Children's TV: The Tomorrow People

Thames Television for ITV. Original run: 30/4/1973-19/2/1979. 68 episodes in 8 seasons, colour. United Kingdom.

Created by: Roger Price. Writers: Roger Price, Brian Finch and Jon Watkins. Directors include: Paul Bernard, Roger Price, Darrol Blake.

Regular cast: Nicholas Young (John), Peter Vaughan-Clarke (Stephen Jameson), Sammie Winmill (Carol), Stephen Salmon (Kenny), Elizabeth Adare (Elizabeth M'Bondo), Dean Lawrence (Tyso), Mike Holoway (Mike Bell), Misako Koba (Hsui Tai), Nigel Rhodes (Andrew Forbes), Philip Gilbert (Voice of TIM).

Teenage children who have reached a new level of evolution, Homo Superior, develop telepathic powers and fight alien evils on behalf of the Galactic Trig...

Roger Price created this science fiction adventure series, inspired equally by Dr Christopher Evans' mind-expanding psychology book The Mind in Chains and a meeting with David Bowie on a TV pop show. The Tomorrow People were teenagers who had reached the next step in human evolution to become 'Homo Superior' (a phrase taken from the Bowie song 'Oh You Pretty Things').

Such special teenagers went through a painful process known as 'breaking out' - a clear play on puberty - to emerge with powers of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation as agents of the all-powerful Galactic Trig. Led by senior Tomorrow Person John and bio-computer TIM, numerous appointed teens helped protect Earth from marauding aliens. It was a clever piece of wish-fulfilment by Price on behalf of his constituent audience, one that allowed children to become superior to parents, teachers and all other forms of authority.

This was a broad action-adventure series, with escape and capture routines familiar from Enid Blyton dressed up not only with sci-fi trappings of rayguns and teleport 'jaunting' but 1970s fashions, a glam rock design sense and a dose of liberal casting (the Tomorrow People admitting black and Oriental characters to its London-based team).

The series rarely dabbled with deeper science fiction concepts, though one story, 'The Blue and the Green', about warring factions of schoolchildren, drew parallels with conflicts in Northern Ireland. There was the odd scare (the genuinely creepy 'The Living Skins' saw synthetic fashion garments spearhead an invasion by giant bubble aliens), but also many jaunts into rather camp playing from guest casts. Price revived the series in the 1990s, helped by American finance. It retained the sense of fun and adventure from the original but with inevitably more advanced special effects. Nonetheless it failed to help define the decade as its predecessor had done.

The Tomorrow People Theme - Dudley Simpson

Text: Alistair McGown.

Further information here, here and here.

Buy the soundtrack here.

Additional screenshots here.

Häxan - Witchcraft Through The Ages

Born in Denmark in 1879, Benjamin Christensen had a varied career before he entered the Danish film industry as an actor and writer in 1912. The first two films he directed, The Mysterious X (1913) and The Night of Revenge (1915), have a visual sophistication that has led some historians to hail him as an innovator comparable to D. W. Griffith, Louis Feuillade, and Maurice Tourneur. Häxan (pronounced “hek-sen”), Christensen’s third film, was made in Sweden at the invitation of Svensk Filmindustri and released in 1922. It’s one of those legendary films that many people have heard about but few have seen. It should be better known. With vivid depictions of witch persecutions and medieval sorcery, frank physicality, and fluid and detailed mise-en-scène, Häxan surely has more chance of pleasing contemporary audiences than 95 percent of surviving silent films.

In bringing together witch-finding judges, convent misdeeds, and black magic, Häxan prefigures no less than three cinematic genres that would become popular (for an example of each, see Michael Reeves’ 1968 Witchfinder General, Domenico Paolella’s 1973 The Nuns of Sant’Arcangelo, and Terence Fisher’s 1968 The Devil Rides Out). Häxan also has ties to F. W. Murnau’s Faust and later films based on the Faust legend, to demonic-possession movies like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and to the many movies in which the devil comes to Earth in human form, of which George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a pertinent recent example.

Read more here.

Häxan had its world premiere in Stockholm, on September 18, 1922. The score that accompanied the film was compiled from preexisting compositions, the names of which have unfortunately been lost. But, thanks to a published list, we do know what music was used for the Copenhagen premiere in November, and it is from this list (compiled by musical director Jacob Gade) that our version has been prepared. There is a good chance that it was the same music as that from Stockholm—the compositions for the most part were well known, and would have been readily available in both cities.

In an interview published shortly after the Stockholm premiere, director Benjamin Christensen spoke enthusiastically about that score:

Read more here.

Radiophonic Workshop: John Baker

"John Baker was my hero. When I was a boy, he was the person I most wanted to be. He was clever, talented, witty, fashionable and greatly popular. John Baker was my brother. We were born into an East End working class family, which, since 1780, had earned its living by making fireworks. Early in the twentieth century, the Bakers sold out to Brocks. The next in line, William [Bill], found another way of entertaining people. He took the name, Will Keogh, and became a minor music hall comedian basing his act on the eccentric Billy Bennett, whom he greatly admired..." - Richard Anthony Baker.

Born on October 12, 1937, Baker grew up in the East End of London and displayed musical talent quickly, sight reading and playing the piano skillfully while still in his early teens.

At the Royal Academy of Music, he studied piano and composition, becoming a GRSM (Graduate of the Royal School of Music) and LRAM (Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music).

After graduation, Baker joined the BBC in 1960, beginning as a studio manager and sound mixer, working on radio programs ranging from the news to music shows to broadcasts of plays. Three years later, he transferred to the Radiophonic Workshop, where he crafted distinctive music and sound effects using meticulous tape editing and manipulation and recordings of everyday sounds such as pulling the cork out of a bottle.

At the same time, Baker was also providing music for commercials and performing with jazz groups, and that jazz background made his work among the most rhythmically interesting Radiophonic Workshop output. The way he combined electronic music with live performances also set his work apart.

However, his busy working schedule sparked a drinking problem and depression that eventually led to his dismissal from the BBC in 1974, after which he didn't compose or perform in public again. After his mother's death, Baker's health worsened, and he moved in with Daphne Walker, an old acquaintance. They moved from London to the Isle of Man, where Baker contracted cirrhosis of the liver, and to the Isle of Wight, where he developed liver cancer in 1996; he died from it on February 7, 1997.

One of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's most prolific and inventive composers, John Baker helped define the sound of the BBC with his themes and sound effects - Heather Phares.

John Baker - Structures:


John Baker - Tomorrow's World:

TV: Sapphire and Steel

ATV for ITV, 10/07/1979-31/08/1982. 34 x 30 min episodes in 4 series, colour.

Producer: Shaun O'Riordan. Created & Written by: P.J. Hammond, Anthony Read and Don Houghton.

Cast: David McCallum (Steel), Joanna Lumley (Sapphire), David Collings (Silver), Val Pringle (Lead).

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned"

Created by P.J. Hammond, Sapphire and Steel (ITV, 1979-82) was an exhilarating, frequently bizarre series whose striking originality remains undimmed since its initial screening. Although originally devised as a children's series, what emerged, with its sophisticated and enigmatic storytelling and emphasis on an atmosphere of fear, was clearly aimed at older audiences.

Ever-glamorous Joanna Lumley and a saturnine David McCallum played the mysterious title characters, elementals with special powers who were able to communicate telepathically. Much of the series' strength derived from the interplay between them, their scenes together charged with sexual energy, a factor enhanced in the two stories featuring the flirtatious Silver, played by David Collings.

The second story, set in a deserted railway station, is perhaps the best and best-remembered, due at least partly to the fact that at eight episodes it is by far the longest, and because it was halfway through its run when the 1979 ITV strike hit, keeping the channel off the air between August and October.

When transmission was resumed, the story restarted from the beginning, climaxing with a chilling and cruel finale in which Steel sacrifices the innocent and blameless Tully (sensitively played by Gerald James) without the slightest compunction. Although the third story included some location filming on the roof of a high story building, the series was otherwise wholly studio-bound, which gave the programme its distinctively claustrophobic feel, combining limbo sets, atmospheric lighting and clever use of minimalist music and augmented audio effects.

The fifth story, broadcast in the summer of 1981, was written by Don Houghton and Anthony Read to give Hammond a well-deserved rest and was a neat metaphysical reversal of a standard Agatha Christie scenario, with members of a dinner party killed one by one before vanishing out of existence.

The sixth and final story ended on a cliffhanger, with the protagonists trapped in a window in space, left to wander in time for eternity. Hammond has said that a further story was planned, but by 1982 commissioning company ATV had lost its franchise and interest in the series had waned.

Sapphire and Steel, across 34 episodes, brilliantly combined science fiction, horror and fantasy with the time plays of J.B. Priestley and the absurdist work of Beckett and Pinter into a unique melange that in its imaginative writing and obscure plotting is still unrivalled.

Sergio Angelini, 2003-10 © BFI Screenonline.

Further information here and here.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

"You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.... -- a heap of sawdust, so far its intellectual work in this world is concurred: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the forms of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten years are over, into fireside humanity" – John Ruskin.

John Ruskin Self Portrait 1861


The Arts and Crafts Movement was one of the most influential, profound and far-reaching design movements of modern times. It began in Britain around 1880 and quickly spread across America and Europe before emerging finally as the Mingei movement in Japan.

It was a movement born of ideals. It grew out of a concern for the effects of industrialisation: on design, on traditional skills and on the lives of ordinary people. In response, it established a new set of principles for living and working. It advocated the reform of art at every level and across a broad social spectrum, and it turned the home into a work of art. The movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1887, but it encompassed a very wide range of like-minded societies, workshops and manufacturers. Other countries adapted Arts and Crafts philosophies according to their own needs. While the work may be visually very different, it is united by the ideals that lie behind it.

This was a movement unlike any that had gone before. It's pioneering spirit of reform, and the value it placed on the quality of materials and design, as well as life, shaped the world we live in today.

The Guild of Handicraft, The Glasgow School and the Cotswold School are among the best known Arts and Crafts branches in Britian, but there were others. As well branches in the form of Guilds or Schools there were other smaller artistic communities such as Newlyn and Keswick which specialised in metalwork which also made a significant contribution.

Other branches of the movement can be identified with individual designers, Archibald Knox is perhaps the most revered at the moment, but there are others such as Leonard Wyburd who, like Knox designed for Liberty and Ambrose Heal who designed for Heal and Son. In ceramic design William De Morgan, the Martin Brothers and William Moorcroft are perhaps the best known and there is enormous interest from collectors for their work.

More information here, here and here.

The Golden Bough - A book by Sir James Frazer

"It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return"

Ever since its first edition in 1890, The Golden Bough has been considered a major influence in the development of western thought.

In this book Frazer outlines ancient myths and folk legends, proposing that all civilizations go through three stages of development: belief in magic leads to organized religion, which eventually leads to faith in the powers of science.

Frazer’s literary style raised interest in the ideas of other world cultures at a time when western societies considered the peoples of Africa and Asia to be the products of ‘‘primitive’’ thought. In addition, his attempts to identify the basic story motifs to which all human beings respond was carried forth in the twentieth century by psychologists such as Carl Jung, who developed the idea of the collective unconscious, and by such literary masters as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

Frazer went on to expand the original book, first to a two-volume set and then to a total of thirteen volumes, before editing it down to one concise volume, which is the one that is most commonly read today.

Over time, the book’s reputation has changed. While it was once considered to be an important study in comparative anthropology, many social scientists later found fault with the methods that Frazer used in collecting materials: he never spoke directly to people of the cultures about which he wrote, but instead he relied on other researchers’ findings and on questionnaires that he gave to people who traveled to other lands.

Frazer’s conclusions are generally considered unreliable because he did not follow sound scientific procedures, but The Golden Bough is still revered as a wellwritten introduction to the subject of comparative religion.

Source: Nonfiction Classics for Students, ©2012 Gale Cengage.

Read it here.

Further information here, here and here.

Thanks to Paul Bareham. Without whom.