In this episode we discussed the Children of the Stones BBC TV series from 1977.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Extra thanks to our guest and standing stone correspondent, Ali Kay!

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we have returning guest Ali Kay to talk about the TV series Children of the Stones from 1977.

Ren: Good evening, Adam!

Adam: Happy day!

Ren: Happy day! Happy day Ali!

Ali: Happy day Ren!

Ren: Welcome back! It’s very good to have you back, as our regular correspondent on standing stones for Still Scared.

Adam: So last time Ali was here, you were talking about Paperhouse and Marianne Dreams, which both have standing stones, but of a slightly more anthropomorphic bent in the original book.

Ali: Yeah, it seems like a long time ago now. I just remember them being quite sinister.

Adam: Yes, they have eyes and peer in at windows.

Ren: And stomp along.

Ali: They’re definitely pretty mobile.

Ren: But this tone we’re talking about Children of the Stones, which is a seven episode British TV series, which was first broadcast in 1977, re-broadcast once in 1978, and then never played again on the BBC.

Adam: Stricken from the records!

Ren: Apparently. How did we come to this? How did this happen? Why are we here, what’s going on?

Adam: Okay, let’s not start with the big questions.

Ali: I think it might have been because of Stewart Lee.

Adam: I think it is because of Stewart Lee, actually. Stewart Lee has resurrected Children of the Stones —

Ali: — singlehandedly —

Adam: — for a millennial generation. Basically, on Charlier Brooker’s Screenwipe some years ago, maybe a decade ago now, which is horrible to think about, Stewart Lee was complaining in his grumpy old man way, about the first season of Skins. Remember Skins?

Ali: Not really.

Adam: Well, my brother liked it. I remember when it used to be on, and complaining to him and saying ‘it’s nothing like my life’ and my brother saying ‘It’s just like my life!’. Which made me feel very bitter and alienated.

But this is precisely what Stewart Lee was saying about Skins, and why he liked Children of the Stones. He related to these slightly outcast nerdy kids.

(Clip of Stewart Lee from Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe: ‘If you look at depictions of teenagers today, they’ve all selfish and avaricious and out for themselves. They’re also kind of confident and sassy and cool, and they’re really really at home with sex and drugs. If you look at portrayals of teenagers in the ‘70s, in something like Children of the Stones or The Changes, they’re really terrified of the world, and they’re uncomfortable and alienated and alone. And I think that’s much truer to what it’s like to be a teenager than the way you see them in Skins.)

So yeah, it’s very low-key and British in some regards. But then it also has these very campy elements, and it’s a folk horror, basically. In as much as we’ve got these two characters, Adam Brake who’s an astrophysicist —

Ali: snorts

Adam: — and his son Matthew. Are you laughing at him being an astrophysicist?! He’s a real astrophysicist!

Ali: (deadpan) A real astrophysicist. Doing a real job.

Adam: An honest to God astrophysicist, and he does astrophysicist things like measuring the electricity of stones, actually.

Ali: (deadpan) Which is exactly what astrophysicists do.

Adam: As far as I know, yeah.

Ali: It will eventually become useful that he’s an astrophysicist, but it Is a complete coincidence.

Adam: No, no, it’s not a coincidence! It’s fate! It’s all fate, it’s the law of the stones.

Ali: (unconvinced) Hmm. Yeah. Okay.

Adam: So these two characters played by Gareth Thomas —

Ali: — who I think is later in Blake 7. I think he was Blake. So you know, he did alright. I don’t think Peter Demin was in much after this, and you can perhaps see why.

Adam: Insulting poor Peter Demin!

Ali: Sorry Peter.

Adam: If this was his only acting job, he might be listening! I was going to cut this all out, but I think it’s good stuff.

Ren: Insulting the actors?

Adam: I thought he was rather good myself. But anyway we can get into that. So I call it folk horror in as much as we have these two characters, we don’t know if they’re city slickers, I imagine they come from a more urban environment.

Ali: It’s not really clear where they come from.

Adam: But they’re outsiders, and they come into this rural folk community with their weird traditions like Morris dancing.

Ren: And as you’ve said, the father, Adam is there to measure the electromagnetic energy of the stones, with his special box.

Adam: Well, he’s a scientist of course.

Ren: Yes.

Ali: (doubtful) Yes…

Ren: And the ominousness starts early. We’ll talk about the soundtrack, the wailing overlapping choral music begins the show.

Adam: It’s great, because I reckon we could have a good go at it. Because it doesn’t really have any rhythms as far as I can tell, it’s just kind of…. (Baritone warbling) Ahhhhh. Ahhh-ahhh, Ohhhhhhh. Just overlay that a few times.

Ren: Wait ’til Texture of the Week Adam.

Adam: And whispery bits too. I kept trying to work out if they were saying ‘Happy day’. (Whispers) Happydayhappyday happydayhappyday.

Ali: I thought it was ‘Run Away’ (whispers) Runaway runaway

Adam: Happydayhappyday runaway.

Ren: I thought it was ‘Happy day’.

Adam: (whispers) Milkywaymilkyway

Ren: We’re in House of Stairs now! *

So we start with this choral music and images of the stones.

(Clip from Children of the Stones: Several voices warbling and wailing at once, leading to a half-screamed crescendo)

This was filmed in a village in Wiltshire, which has these standing stones. And they’re pretty impressive looking things.

Ali: Have either of you ever been to Avebury?

Ren: No.

Adam: No!

Ali: I haven’t either.

Adam: Oh, I thought you were going to be our roving reporter.

Ali: It looks pretty good though, doesn’t it? _

Adam: The camera really gets up in there. There’s some shots that look like they’re meant to be point of view shots, but if they are the kid’s pushing his head right up against those stones, because the camera’s really tracing the stones’ contours.

Ren: I went on a little Google Earth visit this morning.

Adam: Aw, that’s nice! Did you do street view?

Ren: Yeah, yeah. You can just have a little nosy at the stones in their field.

Adam: Was there anything creepy captured by the Google cameras? Any half-cats?

Ren: No half-cats, no. No unconscious people lying at the foot of the stones having experienced the psychic energy.

Ali: A bit suspicious, you’d think there would be one.

Adam: You’d think that they’d at least stage it for the Google cameras, wouldn’t they.

Ren: Get all the village to line up and hold hands?

Adam: That’s what people want! Surely that’s the main thing Avebury’s known for. Tourist board missed a trick that day.

Ren: ‘Kids! Get your flares on!’

But yes, as the father and son are driving into the village, they see for a split-second an image of a standing stone in the road, that’s almost in the shape of a person with their arms up, but then it materialises into a real person, who is Mrs Crabtree, the housekeeper who’s come to meet them.

Adam: I guess it would be too obvious if they called her Mrs Crab…stone or something.

Ren: ‘Mrs StoneLady’. No, it misleads you with both a crab and a tree, which don’t have anything to do with her deal.

Adam: It’s a real pull-back and reveal. You’re like: ‘Okay, there’s something going on here with the crabs, it’s them that are sending out trick magnetic rays’.

Ren: But when the father and son settle into their cottage, they show Mrs Crabtree a painting they’ve brought with them —

Adam: Urgh.

Ren: — Showing a standing stone circle that looks a lot like the village of Milbury.

Adam: Well, you say a lot like. Can we call it a daubing rather than a painting? I think painting suggests a higher quality than it really has achieved, in the representational state at least.

Ali: It has a weird cartoonish aesthetic. It’s very ugly.

Adam: Oh, it’s horrible. It looks like an illustration out of one of the bad Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Like, number 87 or something.

Ali: I guess it’s that sort of high fantasy/sci-fi style that you see on book covers.

Ren: Very brown.

Adam: By the looks of it, number 87 is Exiled to Earth, illustrated by Frank Bolle, and it’s got these two kids with space suits, alighting through a space portal onto a kind of Aztec or Mayan temple, and it’s better than the painting.

Ren: It shows the villagers holding hands in a ring around a massive column of light issuing from the centre of the circle. And when Mrs Crabtree sees this, she faints instantly.

Ali: There’s a lot of that in this. People faint at the drop of a hat. Whatever’s going on in the village seems to cause people to faint all the time.

Adam: Well, if I for one saw such an ugly painting, I’m sure my aesthete sense would cause me to faint too.

Ali: My favourite thing about the painting is that everyone treats it throughout as almost documentary evidence of what happened in Pagan times. Despite it quite clearly being a pretty modern style painting.

Ren: He just found it in a charity shop! Someone’s discarded GCSE art painting.

Ali: But that’s the first hint that Matt’s got some sort of special powers, which he later manifests more. But also, it tells us his mother’s died and Adam mentions that he had to stop Matthew from handling his late mother’s possessions, because he had these very vivid memories. So that’s some foreshadowing.

Adam: Or maybe he didn’t want his son’s sticky fingers all messing around with his late wife’s possessions.

Ren: Dripping his horrible sandwiches all over them.

Adam: Has anyone tried any of the sandwiches? Because last time we did the podcast Ren tried the posset from Box of Delights. So I don’t know, Ren, if halfway through you’re going to go and make one of these sandwiches?

Ali: Ham and apple crumble.

Ren: I’d rather not.

Ali: We haven’t got onto Dai yet, but he does have quite a good recipe for roast chicken.

Ren: I think all of Matt’s horrible sandwiches are like ‘beef and blancmange’

Ali: I think they all start with ham. They use ham as a base. There’s ham and banana with gherkins and honey, which isn’t the worst one. And then there’s ham, mint jelly, mayonnaise and apple crumble.

Adam: That’s pretty vile.

Ren: Good reporting.

Ali: But yeah, this just sort of comes in. It doesn’t really come up until the third episode where he has this weird sandwich thing where he has weird sandwiches. I feel like it wasn’t established enough to make sense as a character quirk.

Ren: So, pretty soon after they arrive, Matthew’s sent off to explore. And he meets Bob, who’s a local kid who shows him around.

Adam: I really liked Bob early on, he really lost his way! He was a great kid. I was really pro-Bob early on. Phoebe was like ‘this kid’s weird’, but I was like ‘no, come on, give him a chance. I like Bob’. He’s got a sunny disposition.

Ali: Well, he’s brainwashed.

Adam: Well yeah, he may have been brainwashed. But I like to think that that’s just Bob.

Ren: So odd little things happen, like they’re racing their bikes and Matt sees an oncoming lorry that Bob seems to ride right into, but when Matt opens his eyes again the road’s clear.

Adam: It’s just Bob!

Ren: They stop at the corner shop and Matthew meets Sandra for the first time and she says some cryptic things about new people having to stick together. When Matthew observes that Sandra’s a bit strange, Bob says ‘that’s because she’s not a happy one!’. So this is our first introduction to the happy folk.

Ali: And does the shopkeeper do the first ‘happy day’ when they leave?

Ren: Or Bob greets her with a ‘happy day’. But I think it’s in the shop.

(Clip from the first episode of Children of the Stones: Shopkeeper: ‘Happy day, boys!’ Bob: ‘Happy day, Mrs Warner!’.)

Ali: Sandra’s previously appeared in a sinister way at the window as well. She’s quite good at being spooky, Sandra.

Ren: Quite like a little girl in The Wicker Man, just to get out first Wicker Man reference in there early.

Adam: Although there is more Morris dancing in Children of the Stones than in The Wicker Man. Although there’s a hobby horse in both.

Ren: Adam meanwhile meets Sandra’s mum, Margaret.

Ali: In the pub. They’ve gone to the pub. They’re always in the pub.

Ren: A very dank little pub.

Ali: With a bartender whose face we never see…

Ren: It’s true!

Adam: I never noticed that, is he hidden by a screen?

Ali: No, he’s just always got his back to the camera. I don’t know, do you have to pay extras extra for their face?

Adam: You have to pay them extra for their voice, so I guess that makes sense.

Ren: Maybe he has a stone face?

Adam: Arghggghhhhh!!

Ren: Margaret and Sandra are also recent arrivals to Milbury, and Margaret also has theories about the stones.

Ali: They were introduced by Hendricks, which is important. When they’re still in the cottage and Mrs Crabtree suddenly faints, she’s revived by Hendricks appearing behind her, from nowhere, even though they’re all in the cottage between Mrs Crabtree and the door. So he just sort of manifests, touching her on the shoulder and then she comes back to life. And then Adam is like, ‘we have to do business chat, off you go Matthew’, so from the start Hendricks is quite sinister. I really like Hendricks.

Ren: He certainly does a lot of eye acting.

Adam: So Hendrick is the kind of… I was going to say owlish, he might be an owl crossed with a stoat maybe. He’s the lord of the manor, I suppose.

Ali: He introduces Adam to Margaret and makes a point of how she’s a widow, and has a daughter —

Adam: — Oh so he’s a bit of a matchmaker! Although to be fair, later on he’s talking to his loyal butler who says ‘there is much to be said for a celibate children’ and he replies ‘and yet, I have my children’.

He considers them all his children! They’re all his children!

Not in a dodgy ‘70s cult way. I mean, this is a dodgy ‘70s cult —

Ali: — I think that is how he means it.

Adam: Is he mostly in it for the power, do you think?

Ali: Well, he explicitly says that power is the only human goal.

Adam: That is fairly explicit, yes. A fair point well made.

Ali: He does also seem to think that people will be better off when he’s absorbed all their…

Adam: psychic energies?

Ali: Sin, or whatever it is.

Adam: Yeah, I think sin’s treated in a pretty nebulous way in this programme. There’s a bit of debate, like is sin the equivalent of free will in his mind?

Ali: It’s more like negative energy, and negativity. And somehow taking that away makes you really good at math.

Adam: So I don’t know if the energy being configured as negative energy ties this to a critique of ‘70s free love cults. If it’s critiquing that kind of hippie ideology at the time?

Ren: I was reading something recently about something called the Human Potential Movement, which I think started in the ‘70s, and was a kind of proto-The Secret, like giving out the positive energy and the world will bring you what you need. That sort of thing.

Ali: That seems closer to what’s going on here. There’s no real aesthetic of hippiness or free love.

Adam: There’s no psychedelica. I suppose it plays into the folk revival, but that’s not quite the same.

Ren: I think it’s a bit more like a horrible business. A horrible work thing, where the boss is like ‘we’re all one big happy family, everyone’s so happy’.

Adam: Ah, but you’re not!

Ali: But they are.

Ren: But they are cause they’re the boss.

Adam: It’s a bit like, I’m going to have to be careful here because I am employed, it’s like the vice-chancellor of a certain university I may or may not be affiliated with came to give an introductory talk.

And it was generally quite good, but one thing he did say was that ‘We’re all of equal value here, no-one is more important than anyone else. The cleaners are just as important as me in my role’. And I kind of felt like saying ‘Are we all going to be paid the same then?’. I didn’t say that obviously, I’m still employed.

Ali: He was very much opening himself to that, with that statement.

Adam: But yeah, you do get that kind of rhetoric within businesses.

Ren: That’s my reading of it, that Hendricks is a kind of terrible boss.

Ali: He definitely does see himself as being in charge, and an authority figure. Exactly what his motivations are, and what his plan is… I’m not totally clear on.

Adam: He’s sometimes referred to later on as a magus or a priest, and I don’t know if the show is sceptical about the role of the priest. It’s an interesting show, right, because it’s got this kind of dialectic between faith and reason.

There’s the question of are leylines responsible for this buildup of psychic energy, and are there things beyond the sense that control our destinies?

Ali: And the answer is definitely yes.

Adam: But our heroes are scientists, essentially, and tend to go ‘right, I want to use my oscilliator to solve the problem’.

Ali: They get persuaded pretty quickly though, really.

Adam: Kind of, but then it’s just folded into the scientific paradigm. So they’re like ‘right, leylines, how are we going to study that then?’. Any mysticism is rendered quite scientific and rational by the protagonists quite quickly.

Ali: I think that’s a feature of a lot of actual new age stuff though. The way they talk about leylines, energy, forces, and electromagnetism they do get this kind of language in new age approaches to the supernatural.

Adam: Like, ‘this is the crystal you need to solve such and such problem’?

Ali: I don’t feel like they are being sceptical, they’re quite accepting of the idea that Matthew is psychic. They don’t really do anything to work out how he can see into…

Adam: other people’s experience or psychic energies —

Ali: — through objects that belong to them. Which is the power that he ends up having.

Ren: One of the first examples of the psychic energy is on their first meeting, Margaret invites Adam down to the stones to touch a stone —

Adam: — touch it! Touch a stone!

Ren: — to see if ‘he’s the kind of man that she think he is’.

Adam: My sister was laughing all the way through this scene, found it very funny indeed.

Ren: It was quite a coy way of putting it. But, the kind of man he is, I guess, is that he touches the stone, sees florid visions and falls unconscious.

Adam: He doesn’t just fall he flies backwards!

Ren: He flies unconscious, yeah. And Margaret’s very apologetic and is like ‘oh yes, I was wondering if you had some psychic sense from these stones because I saw some things when I touched them, but it wasn’t as strong as that’. And Adam says ‘oh surely it’s magnetism’ and they have a little argument about that.

Adam: Although as the Insane Clown Posse say: effin’ magnets, how do they work?

Ali: That is the central question of this show, really. What is a magnet?

Adam: We just don’t know.

Ali: These stones really shouldn’t be magnetic, but Adam is going to do some astrophysics on them to work it out.

After he falls unconscious he has one of my favourite lines. As he’s coming to Margaret offers him some water and he says: ‘this is no time of day for a bath!’ And then demands whiskey. But it’s pretty jarring, because it’s such a weird response.

Adam: You’re right, there is quite a lot of boozing in this programme. Does the son drink as well?

Ali: No…

Adam: I’m sure there was a bit where he half-jokingly offers him some whiskey as well?

Ali: That definitely sounds like something that could have happened.

Adam: But the son’s a good kid.

Ren: I’m surprised we don’t see anyone smoking, actually.

Ali: But yes, Matt is an obnoxiously good kid. Which is why he’s so resentful of all the happy day children because they’re better than him, and can do maths better than him.

Ren: Yeah, we should mention the school. When he turns up at the school on the first day, one of the boys tries to antagonise him and trip him over, to check that he’s human. The kids are split into two groups: the quiet, obedient, supernaturally clever children together at one table, and the four normal kids each at their own mini oak tables.

Adam: It’s weirdly similar to that Simpsons episode when they move to the model town when Homer gets a new job, and Bart gets put in the class for slower students. Because all the students are really far in advance, and he’s put with the kids who aren’t up to speed. An oddly similar situation.

Ren: Also, an aside, but at the school on their noticeboard they have these orange pamphlets which are from the Metrication Board when Britain switched over to the metric system, and I have some of those framed on my wall because my parents found them in my great-aunts piles of stuff when she died.

Ali: That’s a good spot.

Ren: I tired to get a picture but it was (mock disgusted) focusing on the characters and what they were doing, for some reason!

Adam: Disgusting! So watching the scenes in the school did you feel really homely, like this was like being in your room.

Ren: Ah yeah, the metre, the litre, I know those.

Ali: The teacher’s really cutting about all the normal non-happy kids as well. ‘You’ll never be able to do this, there’s no point asking you!’

Ren: They’re all in the naughty corner.

Adam: And poor Bob gets straight-up punched in the face!

Ali: Oh yeah!

Ren: laughs

Adam: Oh I see how it makes you laugh! Poor Bob.

Ali: He’s very smug about it!

Adam: No, he’s like Jesus! He’s not smug.

Ali: He is! He gets punched and then he’s like (smugly) ‘See, it didn’t solve anything, did it’.

Adam: Nah, he’s like ‘consider the lily!’

Ren: He is quite smug, Adam.

Adam: Well, I’m just saying, if he’s smug maybe Jesus is a bit smug. And I wouldn’t say that. I’m not saying Bob’s Jesus, but he’s the closest thing we have to Jesus in the show.

Ren: In this godless village.

Adam: In this godless village. They should worship Bob.

Ali: I mean to be fair everyone, well, nearly everyone, including the heroes, are very smug.

Adam: That’s true actually!

Ren: So we get some histories of the stones because Margaret is the curator of the local museum, and Adam goes to visit her. She shows him a skeleton, which is a nice date.

The skeleton is a barber surgeon who was buried under once of the stones. Well, he was crushed under one of the stones when they were trying to bury the stone.

Adam: So what is a barber surgeon? Is this a historical thing?

Ren: Ohh yes it is! Back in the day before surgery was its own profession, it was done on the side by barbers.

Adam: What???

Ali: Oh yeah.

Ren: They didn’t have any anaesthetic or anything, so it was just chopping.

Adam: What, so you’d have a line of people having their beards groomed, and then someone else would come along like ‘Ohh, I’ve got a really bad kidney’ and they’d be like ‘Oh yep, I’ll just use my scissors’.

Ren: I don’t know if they’d do a kidney, but they’d chop a leg off.

Adam: Jesus Christ, with the same implements they used to do hairdressing, you’d get all blood in your hair?

Ren: I don’t know, they might use a meat cleaver or something. It was just a side gig for a barber.

Ali: They used to do teeth as well, I think they carried on doing teeth for a bit longer.

Adam: I heard about those barber poles that are red and white, and that signifying blood and I don’t know, foam. And I always thought ‘who are these terrible hairdressers with all this blood?’. I guess if they’re also surgeons on the side that explains it. Jeez.

Ali: I mean, what isn’t explained is how they know this skeleton was a barber surgeon. My DVD skipped a bit at this point, and I thought I’d missed some sort of explanation, but I hadn’t.

Adam: He had some scissors in one hand, and a cleaver in the other, I guess.

Ren: Unexplained, yeah. But apparently they used to bury one of the stones a year, for good luck.

Ali: Oh, I missed that.

Ren: But then how are there any stones left, but I guess if people turn into stones you get more stones?

Adam: I guess it’s the natural cycle of life, bury stones, people turn into stones, the beautiful cycle continues.

Ali: The perfect ecosystem.

Ren: She also tells him that there used to be two more avenues of stones extending from the circle, that formed the head and tail of the solar serpent that was the symbol of inner truth.

Ali: It turns out she’s been reading this from the sign that’s behind his head.

Adam: Are you a fan of the solar serpent, Ali?

Ali: I don’t know that I’ve really encountered the solar serpent in the form that it seems to be described.

Adam: Do you think it’s quite a spurious thing?

Ali: I don’t know.

Adam: This is what the internet’s for, I suppose. (Typing noise) Solar…serpent.

Ali: I think it’s a bit ad-hoc.

Adam: I don’t know, here it says red serpent is your conscious self, who you are and who you’re becoming, I am the flint and tinder of the sacred fire, reads the meditation of the red serpent. And that’s from astrodreamadvisor.com

Ali: Well, they should know. But at the same time I think you can put basically any two words in…

Adam: Solar Weevil!

Ali: I tried solar bear, but that’s an ice hockey team.

Adam: But what an ice hockey team!

Ali: Their logo was a bear wearing sunglasses.

Ren: That’s a pretty cool bear.

Ali: Anyway. That’s a digression.

Adam: That’s the internet for you.

Ren: They didn’t have that in the seventies, that’s why they were so concerned with maps.

Adam: And good at maths.

Ren: And they had to put pictures of bicycles in rabbit snares, to meet people.

Ali: We haven’t really talked about Dai yet.

Adam: Okay, whose main means of communication is the exchange of a picture of a bicycle on a piece of paper.

Ren: ….Yeah. I can’t really explain that in a way that makes more sense, because that’s literally what happens.

Adam: So Dai is the possible reincarnation of the barber surgeon?

Ren: Ohhhhhhh.

Ali: Or, so. What happens to Dai is that he wanders around giving the kids mysterious warnings and is pretty much the only person in the village who is not a Happy One.

And this is apparently because he lives at the Sanctuary, where people are safe, although it seems really because he has a special amulet with a picture of the snake on.

Adam: Oh yeah, it’s definitely the amulet because it shatters before he dies.

Ali: The Sanctuary doesn’t really seem to do anything helpful. Even though it’s lauded as being a special safe space.

Adam: More like a Sucktuary!!

Ali: So the amulet gets broken, and then Dai just dies, really.

Adam: As per his name.

Ali: And then the kids are running to see what’s happened to him, and there’s just a big rock on the ground. My understanding is that the rock that originally crushed the barber surgeon, and the barber surgeon is Dai having gone back in time? His dead body having gone back in time? And that’s why it has the other half of the amulet.

Adam: So Dai’s a zombie?

Ali: No… the barber surgeon is just his body that’s gone back in time. Posthumously.

Adam: Okay, that kind of makes sense.

Ren: We’re trying our best with this plot, it’s not the easiest thing to explain.

Adam: The problem is, this plot has time loops in it, and time loops make plots quite difficult.

Ali: It’s definitely the time loops, and not holes. I’m sure the creators understood exactly how everything connected together.

Adam: It’s a great sleight of hand though, if your script is full of plot holes, turn them from plot holes to plot loops!

Ren: cough Stephen Moffat.

Ali: Dai’s pretty good though.

Ren: He’s Welsh? Is he Welsh?

Ali: It’s a Welsh name.

Adam: He has the spirit of Welshness about him.

Ali: He is referred to as being Welsh by Adam at one point.

Ren: And he’s a poacher, kind of village persona. And he takes an interest in Matt from when they arrive, and the first time they meet gives him very sinister warnings about how no-one ever leaves the circle.

Adam: And Matt is absolutely there for it. Matt loves Dai. There’s one bit where his father says ‘why do you believe this hunch?’ And Matt’s like ‘Dai knew it, good enough for me!’.

Ali: He does earlier refer to him as being an old nutter. Which seems unfair because Dai’s not. He’s pretty lucid. Not that it’s okay anyway, but he’s just a bit cryptic.

Adam: He has a habit of popping up at windows, but I don’t think we can hold that against him. I liked Dai, one of the most likeable characters, mostly because he’s less smug than almost all of the other characters.

Ren: So, on one of Adam and Matt’s first nights in the village, everyone else in the village apart from the other new arrivals seem to disappear. Matt’s in his room working on plotting out leylines or something, and he hears chanting and goes out to investigate, and finds the villagers holding hands in a circle around the stones, and chanting.

Adam: Can we do some chanting?

(Begins warbly chanting)

Ali and Ren: (Join in with warbly chanting)

Ali: Yeah, it’s like that.

Ren: Just really eerie warbling.

Ali: The chanting also forms the theme tune and lots of the other soundtrack of the shows, and it’s definitely one of the creepiest things about it.

Adam: Yeah, the chanting just becomes flat-out screaming in parts.

Ren: Also when I was rewatching it on 1.75 speed this morning, it became even stranger.

Ali: Matthew goes outside because Dai has chucked a rock with the picture of the bicycle wrapped around it through his window, because that was how you had to communicate in the late ‘70s, so he goes outside and encounters the people singing, and then Dai knocks him out. I think?

Or he makes him touch a stone that knocks him out. And later on Dai’s like ‘Oh yeah, I saved him’. But if he hadn’t chucked the rock through the window, Matt would have been quite happy just sitting there drawing leylines.

Adam: Maybe he just didn’t think it through.

Ren: So there’s an ongoing thing where Sandra, Matthew, and Adam and Margaret are discussing how after people have been in the village for a while they change and become these Happy Day’ers, and what is it that makes them change.

Ali: Yeah, they figure out the thing that everybody is brainwashed quite quickly really. Obviously it’s only a seven episode TV show, and they’re not long episodes so there’s not much time. But most of it is trying to figure out how exactly people have been changed, than finding out that that has happened.

Adam: It’s a kind of similar setup to the Demon Headmaster, some twenty years later.

Ren: There’s definitely some parallel there, with the brainwashed kids and the normal kids.

Adam: And a bunch of outsiders trying to work out what’s going on with the evil adult instituton of power.

Ren: I thought the Morris dancing scene was really great.

Adam: Is Morris dancing implicitly creepy?

Ali: Yes.

Ren: Uhhh…. yeah.

Ali: I’m sure that people who do Morris dancing would accept that.

Ren: Lean into it?

Ali: I think so.

Adam: It’s definitely a curious dancing, because it’s one of the only dances that I know of that has very little rhythm. There’s not much ebb and sway.

Ali: It has a rhythm, it just doesn’t vary very much. There’s only so much you can do with bells and sticks.

Ren: Ankle bells, no less.

Adam: It’s good actually, in the Unitarian carol service I went to this year there was Morris dancing, and after that I read The Bells by Edgar Ellen Poe, which is loosely festive. It starts out Christmassy, and then Poe loses interest, moves onto wedding bells and then for most of the poem it’s just big gothic bells and people crying out in lament.

But anytime I repeated the refrain ‘The bells bells bells bells bells bells bells’ I got the Morris dancers to twinkle their bells. Which probably weren’t the kind of bells that Poe was imagining, admittedly.

Ali: Not the most gothic kind of bells.

Adam: But it did make the poem feel a little more appropriate for the occasion.

Ren: The Morris dancing is significant because Tom the farmer is part of it, who had previously been pretty openly contemptuous about Morris dancing, and is now merrily jingling away.

Adam: Along with his adorable son.

Ali: Who we already know has been brainwashed because he can suddenly do maths.

Ren: And it ends with them lifting the son, Jimmo, in the air and shouting ‘Happy Day!’, which is just great.

So it seems that there is celebratory Morris dancing after each new person is brainwashed.

Ali: Sadly we missed the other instances of that.

Adam: I mean Adam does complain at one point, like ‘seems like you’re Morris dancing every evening’

Ali: Well, there’s lots of brain washing to do.

Adam: Especially if people are turning into stones, you’ve got to keep up with that.

Ali: Got to keep making more.

Adam: Let’s be honest, what’s the use of a brain-washed stone? A serious ontological question, that.

Ren: So this is about where we come to Matthew being psychic, that’s we’ve mentioned. The remaining normal people convene and discuss about how people are being brainwashed, and whether this is planned or not.

And then the doctor leaves and says he’s going to visit one of his old patients outside of the village, but he leaves his gloves behind and when Matthew touches the gloves he can see what the doctor is doing.

So he sees the doctor in his car, trying to drive out of Milbury, but then something blocks his path, and then the picture fades. So we assume the doctor’s been stopped in some way, from leaving the village.

Adam: He’s been scrobbled!

Ren: It very much reminded me of The Midwich Cuckoos, at this point. Creepy children anyway, but the creepy children in The Midwich Cuckoos stop anyone from leaving Midwich in a fairly similar way.

But the next day the doctor goes to see Adam and Margaret at the museum, and he says ‘Oh, I went out to see my patient, nothing happened out of the ordinary’ but then when he leaves he says ‘Well, happy day!’ And they’re like (foreboding) : dun dun dunnn.

Ali: All the evidence we need!

Adam: (mock-panicked) ’No I just meant I was feeling especially happy today!!’

Ali: I mean it is a bit weird at this point, because they don’t really know what’s happening and the only thing that’s sinister is that everybody’s really happy and good at maths, and nobody’s done anything bad?

Adam: Well, it is quite the dystopia.

Ali: Is it?

Adam: Yeah! I mean who feels happy when doing maths? I remember doing my GCSE maths homework, and I’m not even joking I did genuinely feel quite deeply unhappy doing it.

Ren: Yeah, same actually. I just remember staying up at night despairing.

Adam: Did you have to do nets? We had to do the folding paper into cubes and it became increasingly difficult.

Ren: All I remember is that our coursework involved a big grid, like 7x7, just lines and numbers and I couldn’t work out where the numbers were meant to go on the lines, and it was horrible.

Ali: So imagine how amazing it would be, if you had all the negative energy stripped away and you could suddenly do the transform or whatever is is that Jimmo suddenly knows how to solve.

Ren: I guess I might be pretty happy. But yeah, they haven’t really done anything…

Adam: But the point is, they haven’t got the free will to suffer.

Ali: I guess what I’m saying is at this point in the narrative, Adam and Matt and Margaret and Sandra are very freaked out about everything, but nothing the bad is actually happening around them. It does later turn out that everyone is being brainwashed, but.

I guess the main thing is how aggressive Matt is towards the people who have been brainwashed, and especially Mrs Crabtree, who mostly just offers him chocolate cake and breakfast. She’s basically quite nice, and he’s like (ungrateful brat voice) ‘I guess I’ll have sausages, and bacon, and fried bread and chocolate cake’.

Adam: That is true.

Ali: I know she is brainwashed, but you are being quite rude. Poor Mrs Crabtree.

Ren: This is about where things step up a creepy notch, because the children see the fallen stone with the image of the serpent on it, they go and tell Margaret and she says it’s the same location where the barber surgeon was crushed.

Then they go out to look and instead of a stone there’s Dai, dead, with the broken amulet next to him. Adam goes to Hendricks to call the police, and Hendricks says (lugubrious voice) ‘Well, I don’t think we’ll bother with the police. Just show me where this body is’. So Adam takes Hendricks to the body, but it’s disappeared and been replaced by a scattering of stones.

Ali: They’re sort of in a pattern, but I couldn’t work out if there was any significance to that?

Adam: I feel like you’re watching this like you’re playing an adventure game!

Ali: A badly constructed adventure game.

Ren: So Hendricks back at his house tells his butler that he wants to make everyone one big happy family, but he has to do it in the order in which they’ve arrived in the village, so Margaret and Sandra have to be invited to dinner first.

Meanwhile Matthew puts together some pieces of the amulet and gets a psychic vibe from it, and he starts getting visions and throwing words out, like: ‘village’, ‘circle’ ‘visitor’, ‘beginning’ ‘circle’ ‘shining’, sort of thing.

Ali: But more laboured.

Ren: And they puzzle about this for a while.

Ali: There’s just ages of Adam and Margaret constructing different sequences of words together. Like ‘priest… bright… visitor’ A visiting priest?

Ren: It’s like they’re doing a crossword.

Ali: One of the words is ‘beam’ and Adam looks at the painting and looks at the massive beam of light in the middle of it and says ‘could this be the beam??’.

I think it probably is the beam.

Ren: Eventually they strike on ‘visitor bright and shining’ and decide this means supernova.

Ali: Seems like a bit of a stretch, but yeah. The supernova has come up already though, cause they’re doing these measurements on the stones, and first Matthew thinks they’re all at an angle, and then he measures at them using Dai’s telescope and realises they’re all pointing straight upwards. It’s unclear to me which direction a stone is pointing, but anyway.

They’re all pointing directly upwards, and Adam’s like ‘they’re pointing at something directly above us! But nothing’s there’. So he telegrams off to the observatory in the US and they telegram back and say ‘there’s a black hole there’.

Ren: And then the big reveal where we find out that it’s Hendricks’ supernova/black hole, and he too is an astrophysicist!

Adam: There’s a bit where Adam tries to lecture him on what a black hole is and you can just see Hendricks waiting there to say ‘actually, it’s my frickin’ supernova’.

Ren: And also the stones are around an underground bowl, that is a kind of receiver dish shape. That’s the other tidbit we learn about the stones and their alignment.

Ali: So yeah, I hadn’t really thought about this but the whole sequence with Matt having the talisman, they go from there to supernova, but they already knew about the supernova so… I don’t really know why?

Adam: I think we might be potentially tying ourselves in knots. Possibly in reflection of the show’s plotting.

Ren: Anyway, there’s a supernova, it’s a black hole. Yep. We’re going with this.

Adam: So how is Hendricks using this back hole? Because there’s this whole thing where the leylines are part of a transmitter or something? Because there’s a whole bit where Adam’s like ‘no, we’re got it back to front! Actually this is the transmitter!’.

Ren: Right. Right. So.

They think at first that Hendricks is using the energy of the black hole to turn the villagers into happy-dayers. And that the supernova used to have a begin effect, but when it turned into a black hole the effect was reversed and it extracts the will of the people it’s used on.

But then, they realise in fact that the energy doesn’t come from the black hole, but from Milbury itself, from the stones and what it’s transmitting is ‘evil’.

Ali: (sceptically) To the black hole?

Ren: Yes.

Ali: Yeah. So. Mmm.

Have you got to the bit where Margaret and Sandra go to dinner?

Ren: We just skipped over that but we need to talk about it cause it’s pretty great. Adam decides that whatever’s doing this must be happening at Hendricks’ and he makes Margaret promise that she’ll come back and see him after her and Sandra go for dinner. And Matthew takes a scarf of Sandra’s so he can hopefully watch what’s happening through the psychic object.

Hendricks has digital clocks around his house, because he claims he needs ‘absolute accuracy’, although he won’t say for what. And then he takes Margaret and Sandra into his cult leader dining room.

Ali: He’s so proud of this room.

Ren: He loves it.

Ali: With his special rotating throne.

Ren: It’s a stone room up in the top of the house with a big slab of a table and big stone chairs, but his chair is bigger than all the other chairs.

Ali: It’s actually quite a small room. Which makes it slightly less impressive.

Ren: He has Margaret and Sandra sit on either side of the table, and Matthew’s watching this happening. The villagers start their creepy chanting again, Hendricks says ‘bon appetite, my children’, which is just horrifyingly creepy. And then he does his little recitation ‘complete the circle, make us at one with nature and the elements’ and then Matthew sees a bright light and loses contact.

Ali: Yeah, he says ‘complete the circle’ and all of that bit, and then he goes ‘It is tiiiime!’ And rotates on his chair so he’s facing away from the table, and then the roof opens and the light comes through, but you can see when he’s rotating that he’s wheeling himself round with his legs, but his body’s completely bolt upright and he’s got this weird grin on his face. Ahh. It’s amazing.

Ren: It’s pretty glorious. And after this Margaret comes over to see Adam as they’ve arranged and says, ‘oh, I didn’t go to the house after all. I stayed in and nothing happened’. And Matthew catches up with Sandra, and Adam and Matthew have decided that they’re leaving the village —

Ali: — really abruptly, you don’t see them have this conversation or anything.

Ren: And Sandra’s like ‘we’ll be seeing you soon, you’re not really going to leave’.

Ali: Sandra I think is very good at being creepy. Even before she’s brainwashed, and is just trying to solve the mystery, she’s still a little bit sinister.

Adam: I think Katherine Levy does a good job of being sinister. She now works as an executive producer and director of business TV.

Ali: Okay. So she obviously kept the sinisterness up.

Ren: ‘Happy Day Business TV’

Adam: I really hope the cast of this show aren’t listening.

Ali: It’s just me.

Adam: She did a really good job.

Ali: Yeah, I think she’s really good.

Ren: So before they leave, Matthew sneaks into the basement of the old church —

Ali: — demands breakfast from Mrs Crabtree —

Ren: — one last time.

Ali: But then he sneaks off before he’s had his breakfast.

Adam: What a jerk.

Ren: And he slides down a coal chute or something, into the basement of the church and finds Hendricks with a vintage ‘70s, room-sized computer, which is quite exciting.

Ali: It’s one of the bits that I remember most about the first time I watched it. Even though it isn’t featured for very long at all, I very much remember the church having a computer inside.

Ren: What happens, I forget?

Ali: Hendricks is just quite sinister at him, and that’s it really.

Adam: He just takes him back home. I think Hendricks feels petty darn assured that his plan is going to come to fruition, so he doesn’t worry too much.

Ali: Yeah, he’s not worried.

Ren: So Adam and Matthew try to drive out of the village, the same road that the doctor took earlier.

Ali: There’s lots of jump cuts of people’s eyes, is mostly what happens.

Ren: And then they wake up in a spare bedroom in the big house, and realise that they couldn’t leave. Hendricks smarms into the room and tells that they they will have dinner with him in 45 minutes. Then Adam quite suddenly theorises that they’re in a parallel universe.

Ali: It kind of comes out of nowhere! He says ‘I think we missed the turning, the Time Turning!’

Ren: ‘…alright?’

Ali: Again, a bit of a leap. But then, he is a scientist.

Ren: And then this is when they do their theorising and the black hole and the energy and what direction it’s going in.

Ali: And they realise they’re trapped in the house, because it’s surrounded by villagers chanting and Matthew thinks that the thing they nearly crashed into on the road was actually Mrs Crabtree.

Adam: In her stone form.

Ren: Which seems to be her extra job.

Ali: Which is an interesting bookend, because they crash into Mrs Crabtree at the very start as well, when they’re arriving.

Ren: So they make up a last-minute scientific plan using their science skills, and decide that as Hendricks is using the digital clocks to time the exact alignment of his cult room with the black hole, if they change the clocks then he will process them at the wrong time, and they won’t be brainwashed.

Which works!

Hendricks does his whole spiel again and seems a bit put out —

Ali: — he’s very upset that Adam doesn’t like the room, he’s like ‘what about my throne?? Aren’t you impressed by my throne?’

Adam: Adam’s like ‘it’s what I’d expect from you Hendricks’

Ren: So the whole process happens again as we’ve seen, but the light does’t come down because it’s not the right time —

Ali: — but because Hendricks doesn’t turn around he doesn’t notice.

Ren: Adam and Matthew pretend that they’re happified.

Adam: (robot voice) We are happy. We’ve been brainwashed.

Ren: Beep boop. And Hendricks leads them out to join the rest of the villagers in the circle. But instead, when they touch hands with the villagers it starts to wake them up from their brainwashed state.

Adam: The spell is broken!

Ali: And things get pretty wild at this point. Everything goes quite blue.

Ren: The light comes down when Hendricks does’t have his back turned, and comes down upon him and turns him into a beardy man.

Adam: He becomes all old like a biblical prophet!

Ali: This is another interesting plot thing. Is he meant to be the bard or druid or whatever who originally saw the supernova in the ancient pagan times and he’s somehow been kept young by this mystical practice??

Is that what’s meant to have happened? He’s wearing robes and stuff.

Ren: I got that impression.

Adam: I think it’s like, we’ve got to be compatibalist about this, I think he’s the same person but not at the same time. I know that’s impossible, but you’ve got to keep that tension at work.

Ali: It’s hard to know exactly what’s happened.

Adam: Because at the end, right, because Hendricks has been aged and presumably killed, and the protagonists try and leave the village, we have a new man who is definitely played by the same actor as Hendricks, enter the village.

Ren: Suggesting the time loop is looping again. But before that, when the light descends on Hendricks the villagers start turning to stone, in a sequence that I imagine must have been terrifying to children watching it.

Adam and Matthew trying to escape and Sandra and Margaret are turning to stone, all the villagers are turning to stone. They flee the village to the Sanctuary, thereby completing the prophecy of that painting.

Adam: I shouldn’t have insulted it, the painting was right all along!

Ren: And then they wake up in the Sanctuary, but Dai doesn’t seem to recognise them, and instead of being a poacher he’s a blacksmith.

Ali: And alive!

Ren: And alive, furthermore! And he chucks them out of his house. Adam and Matthew find their car and leave the village again, and this time it lets them go.

Ali: They see Sandra and Margaret and people who have been turned to stone before they go as well. It basically seems like they’ve ended up in a parallel timeline where none of the negative energy is being sent to the black hole.

Adam: Ohh I thought it was just that it had been reset. That it was just a time loop, and new figures came to fill the roles or something?

Ali: I mean that does seem like the implication, because as you say, the Hendricks reappears but with a different name, driving back into the village as Matt and Adam drive away.

Adam: In some regards it’s no less cryptic than the ending of the new Twin Peaks. Watching it I was almost expecting Adam to go ‘What year it is?!’

Ali: I mean, I guess if that’s our standard… I liked the bit where they leave Margaret and Sandra because they’re like ‘Oh well, it was nice meeting you. Again’

Ren: ‘Hope you liked being a stone’

Phewww. Right. That’s all the plot now, we’ve done it.

Adam: There was so much plot!

Ali: It took a while!

Adam: It’s like everything happened and yet nothing at all!

Ali: There’s quite a lot of things that don’t go anywhere… like, the font in the church has a snake on it, and that doesn’t get tied back in.

Ren: Well, I think that’s relevant because it’s the same emblem that Dai has on his amulet, and it’s protecting him like it’s protecting the church from the paganism? I think.

Ali: I thought the serpent represented paganism.

Ren: Yeah… I don’t know.

Adam: Shall we do Texture of the Week? Okay, I’ve got an idea for the song. I think we should do it in the round, like in choral. So if I start with a ‘Texture of the Week’, then Ren if you start on the ‘of’, and then Ali you start on the ‘of’.

Ali: Okay, I’ll try.

Adam: I’m gong to try and do it in a chanty way, like in the programme.

Adam, Ali, Ren: (Chanting, warbly) Texture…. of….. the…. Week…. (Whispers) Happydayhappydayhappyday

Ren: Oh that was excellent.

Ali: Well, what is it?

Adam: I just went with a simple one. Mine’s the brass rubbing they do. There’s a bit where to get the snake symbol they do some brass rubbing on a piece of paper, and that’s just a very nostalgic texture of that for me. The texture of brass rubbings, I associate with primary school. Going to Ipswich museum and getting to go round and do brass rubbings of various exhibits.

Ren: Nice! Ali?

Ali: I mean, I did feel like it would be a bit wilfully contrary to say anything other than the actual stones.

Ren: We’re relying on you for that.

Ali: They’re so prominent. The beginning sequence is obviously all focusing on the stones and zooming in on them, but they’re also in lots and lots of shots incidentally. People are always walking around the stones, and they’re very gnarly and craggy and stone-y. I think they’re the most important texture.

Ren: Mmmhmm.

Adam: Ren, do you have any even more important texture?

Ren: My texture is the clanky-mouthed horse puppet that’s part of the Morris dancing scene. It’s a full-body costume with a clacky horse mouth and it goes ‘clack clack clack clack’. And there’s one of those in The Wicker Man as well.

Ali: The repeated sequence of all the villagers around the church and all their faces in the blue aura, that’s a pretty good texture.

Ren: That’s pretty spooky.

Adam: Are we going to do our new segment?

Ali: Is that where we have to eat ham and apple crumble sandwiches?

Adam: No, no, the segment introduced last time: ‘Claim of the week!’

Ren: Oh yes! Do you have one, Adam?

Adam: No, I was wondering if you had one, Ali, because of all the science claims.

Ali: I should have thought of it more, because I’m sure there are some claims.

Ren: Shall we just put the general character of Adam as claim of the week?

Adam: Claim maker general. I mean, there’s a claim about the painting where they’re talking about the atmospheric effect, and one of the characters says: ‘I imagine this is just the effect the artist was after’, which I thought was quite a claim frankly, that the artist was after any deliberate effect.

Ren: Good.

Adam: Do you have any final thoughts?

Ren: I would just like to say that it is actually very good. We might have made it seem a bit arduous with all the plot stuff, but you don’t really notice that when you watch it and it is just good and atmospheric.

Ali: It does move quite quickly as well, it gets through all that in a pretty short amount of time. I think the things that are good about it, is the general atmosphere and the soundtrack, which is amazing and really spooky, and Hendricks’ performance is great, and so on.

It’s not really something you watch for the narrative, I think. I think this time because I was trying to follow the plot properly, so I could talk about it, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way of watching it.

Adam: Yes. Watch it in the Autumn when you’re slightly drunk, not if you’re a kid, drunk on cocoa maybe. Late at night, tucked up, maybe slightly sleep-deprived. Just take it in as a spooky atmosphere rather than trying to make any sense of it.

Ali: Cool.

Ren: Yeah.

Adam: Yeah!

Ren: Alright!

Adam: Okay.

Ren: Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam: I think I’m just going to keep it simple this time, and say ‘Happy day creepy kids’

Ren: Happy day creepy kids!

Ali: Happy day.

Ren: And thank you again Ali for joining us!

Adam: Next time we do something with standing stones, we’ll have you straight back.

(Outro music plays)

• Call-back to an earlier episode on House of Stairs, in which all the children interpret a sibilant whispering as saying different words.

“I know!” Blossom cried. “They’re saying, ‘Food will be coming soon. Food will be coming soon.’ Listen, can’t you hear it?” Her eyes were darting widely, and she clasped her hands together. “Oh, I hope they’re right, I hope they’re telling the truth! It’s been so long since we’ve had any food.”

“Shhh!” said Lola, waving her hand at Blossom. “I’m just getting it…. And you’re wrong,” she went on suddenly. “That’s not what they’re saying at all. They’re saying ‘Nude in the house of the doomed.’ It’s obvious.”

“But why would they say that?” Blossom cried shrilly. “It’s meaningless.” She spun around to Peter. “You can hear it too. They’re saying, ‘Food will be coming soon.’ Aren’t they? Aren’t they?”

Peter shook his head. “I… It, it sounds like… ‘Be careful in Oliver’s room.’”