emma relph

The Day of the Triffids on Blu Ray

archivetvmusings BBC Drama - 1980's , ,

When The Day of the Triffids came out on Blu Ray late last year it was greeted with a chorus of disapproval. Having recently acquired a copy, I was intrigued to find out how the various reviews published at the time addressed the hotly debated picture issues.

Some quick Googling later, it appears that whilst most of the reviewers were aware of the negative comments, they went on to dismiss the concerns raised – either because they hadn’t watched the serial since its original broadcast and so were unaware of how it had always looked or they simply believed that VT interior shots would never have the same quality as the film exteriors.

The arguments against the BD were basically threefold. Firstly the film sequences (which make up approximately 60% of the serial) had been oversaturated, lending some sequences a bright, sunny feel (rather at odds with the gloomy feel of the original). Next, the VT studio shots had all been “filmised” – but unlike various previous releases where this had been done accidentally, apparently this time round it was an artistic choice. Hum.

Lastly, the credits were remade. This is something that happens regularly on the Doctor Who DVDs and BDs, but they take extreme care to find fonts which match the originals – whereas on the Triffids BD a close approximation was used. Good enough for most, but an irritation for those who have lived with the serial for forty years ….

I could cope with the titles issue, but the grading and filmising are the sort of things which raise my hackles. We’ve been here before with grading problems – some of the Peter Davison Doctor Who DVDs looked a little odd (Black Orchid springs to mind) whilst accidental filmising has bedeviled various DVDs such as Softly Softly: Task Force series one (eventually fixed) and Grange Hill series one – four (never fixed, alas).

Modern televisions tend to handle filmising better than old ones (when I rewatched the early Grange Hill DVDs recently I found that it didn’t look quite as bad as I’d remembered) so the VT scenes in Triffids aren’t totally horrible, although knowing that they could and should be better is a tad irritating.

The film sequences are certainly dazzling – Jo’s yellow boiler suit leaps out of the screen, for example – but I think overall I prefer the more muted feel of the DVD. When I come back to Triffids in future it might be the DVD I’ll reach for, rather than the more glossy BD. What’s certain is that unlike some BD upgrades, I’ll be hanging onto the DVD.

Irrespective of how you watch it, you certainly should. John Duttine is very solid as the everyman cast in an almost impossible situation, with Emma Relph (an actress with surprisingly few credits) offering him strong support. Maurice Colbourne is always watchable whilst there are plenty of vividly sketched cameos (from the likes of Jonathan Newth, Stephen Yardley, David Swift and John Hollis).

With a limited budget, director Ken Hannam managed to effectively depict a London in turmoil during the early episodes (it’s amazing what a few sound effects and a handful of extras can achieve). There are some drawbacks – it was a pity that Bill (John Duttine) didn’t witness Dr Soames’ suicide as he did in the book – but having Bill return to find Soames’ body did mean that the production was saved the cost of an expensive stunt ….

Coming up to its 40th birthday, Day of the Triffids has lost none of its power to discomfort (amazing to think that it was deemed to be acceptable pre-watershed fare).

The Day of the Triffids (BBC 1981). Episode Six

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triffids 06

Six years have passed since the events seen in episode five.  Bill and Jo now have a young son and Susan, the girl Bill effectively adopted, is growing up.  They, together with a blind couple who live with them, have managed to keep their small community ticking over.

There are problems though and these are mostly Triffid related.  Although they regularly destroy them, the Triffids always come back.  Bill has built an electric fence – but powering it constantly isn’t possible.  There’s a very effective sequence early on, when Jo opens the curtains to find a group of Triffids right outside.  Just the small glimpse that we can see of them makes them even more disturbing.

The unexpected arrival of Coker offers a way out.  He’s established a community of several hundred people on the Isle of Wight and since it’s an island, it can be defended against Triffids.  Coker asks Bill and the others to join them and work on a way to eradicate the Triffids once and for all.  He then talks a little about how the community functions.

Those of us all over there have all agreed we’re not out to reconstruct the world as it was.  We want to build something new, better.  Some people don’t agree with that, they want to keep a lot of the bad, old features.  If anybody doesn’t like us, or we don’t like them, we ask them to move somewhere else.

Shortly after Coker leaves, they are visited by a number of people in military fatigues headed by a man called Torrance (Gary Olsen).  The book makes it explicit that he’s the same red-headed man who shot at Bill and the blind people earlier in the story,  This doesn’t happen here, so you could be forgiven for thinking they’re two separate people.  Torrance wants to move another eighteen blind people into Bill’s community and whilst he admits that it’ll be hard work for them all to survive on the land for the next few years, after that he tells them they’ll be able to relax a little.

Bill comes to realise that Torrance is effectively inviting him to become a feudal lord.  Torrance, like Coker, is given a chance to outline how their community operates.

Supreme authority is vested in the council.  It will rule.  It will also control the armed forces.  Then, of course, there’s the rest of the world to consider.  Everywhere must be in the same sort of chaos.  Clearly, it’s our national duty to get on our feet as soon as possible and assume a dominant role and discourage any aggressors from organising against us.

It is the diametric opposite of Coker’s community.  Coker wants to build something new and different, whilst Torrance is seeking to rebuild the new world very much along the lines of the old.  Given that there’s been a general feeling throughout the story that any rebuilding must be an improvement on the old ways, it’s no surprise that Bill and the others reject Torrance’s offer and they leave him and his men to deal with the Triffids whilst they head for the Isle of Wight.

Earlier in the episode, Bill and Jo discuss exactly how the catastrophe happened.  Jo, like many people, believes that the comet was a natural phenomenon, but Bill isn’t so sure.

Do you know how many satellites were going round up there?  How many weapons?  Or what was in the weapons?  They never told us.  They never asked us.  I suppose one of these weapons had been specially constructed to emit a radiation that our eyes couldn’t stand.  Something that would burn out the optic nerve.  Suppose there was an accident.  This weapon would operate at low levels, only blinding people they wanted to blind.  But after the accident, it went off so far up that anyone on earth could receive direct radiation from it.

Back in 1981 this would have seemed horribly possible, so when you realise that it was part of Wyndham’s novel (published in 1951, six years before the first satellite was launched) it’s an impressive feat of prediction for him to anticapte the weaponising of space.  Torrance’s aggressive militarism seems set to repeat these same mistakes, so it’s understandable that Bill and his friends reject him.

In conclusion, this is a creepily effective serial that has only improved with age.  It naturally had a limited budget, so in earlier episodes it couldn’t show the devastation of London in any particular detail – but it did manage to efficiently imply it via sound effects (gunshots, cries, etc).  If you want to watch a faithful adaptation of the novel, then this is the only one to go for – as both the film and the 2009 TV version veer wildly from Wyndham’s original.

Something of a classic, this deserves a place in anybody’s collection.

The Day of the Triffids (BBC 1981). Episode Five

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triffids 05

Episode Five concerns itself with Bill’s quest to find Jo, which leads him out of London and into the country.  Coker joins him for the trip.  One of the major plus-points of this episode is Maurice Colbourne, who was always such a watchable actor with a very strong presence.  Although he appeared briefly in a few previous episodes, he’s much more central in this one.  After he and Bill rest in an abandoned pub, it’s Coker who can clearly see the way forward.

We must be part of a community to have any hope for the future at all.  At the moment we’ve got all we need.  Food, supplies, everything.  But the food will go bad, the metal will rust, the petrol to drive the machines will run out.  Before that happens, we have to learn to plough and learn to make ploughs, and learn to smelt the iron to make the ploughshares.  We must learn to make good all that we wear out.  If not …. we say goodbye to civilisation and we slide right back into savagery.

Bill and Coker find the community at Tynsham, but Jo isn’t there.  A number of the survivors have also moved on, due to a serious disagreement.  The remaining survivors at Tynsham are led by Miss Durrant (Perlita Nelson) and they’ve rejected the notion that pro-creation is key to survival – instead they plan to exist by strictly Christian principles and they put their faith in God to save them.

Coker decides to stay with them, as he believes that he can make something of the community, and Bill travels on.  Along the way he effectively adopts an orphaned young girl, Susan (Emily Dean).  It’s interesting to see how this, like so much of The Day of the Triffids, was directly paralleled in Terry Nation’s Survivors.  Essentially Survivors is The Day of the Triffids writ-large, but without any Triffids.

Wyndham gave Susan more of a back-story (about the death of her parents and her fears and feelings) which isn’t used here, that’s a bit of a pity as without it she’s something of an underdeveloped character.

Together they eventually manage to find Jo (along with a few others) and they all decide to return to the community at Tynsham.  But disease has struck – many are dead and the others have left.  Of Coker, there’s no sign.  So they face the prospect of having to establish their own small community, whilst all around the Triffids are looming …..

There’s certainly more Triffid action in this episode.  Bill gets to shoot a few of them – with both a rile and a Triffid gun.  When Coker asks Bill if the Triffids frighten him he says yes, “and they sicken me, too.  And what sickens me the most is that inside this mess they are the only things that are going to fatten and thrive”.

Whilst there weren’t that many Triffids in London, there seems to be more of them in the countryside – whether they’re breeding or whether there were tens of thousands in captivity who’ve escaped is never made clear.  But they seem to be an ever-growing menace (even more so in the final episode).

A word about Christopher Gunning’s score.  It wouldn’t have been a surprise (because of period when this was made) for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to have provided the incidental music, but instead Gunning uses more traditional instruments (instead of the synthesizers favoured by the Radiophonic Workshop).

In episode five’s score, the piano dominates – and as Bill’s search for Jo reaches a happy conclusion, the music reaches an appealing crescendo.  Given how dark the majority of the story is, Gunning’s music helps to provide a sliver of light and hope.

The Day of the Triffids (BBC 1981). Episode Three

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triffids 03

After Bill and Jo escape from the maurding pack of blind people, they find a place to hole up for the night.  After enjoying a good meal and a decent mug of wine, they both learn a little more about each other – although Jo says, “but all that, all the details of my life, they were yesterday. It’s the same with you.  I think I’d like to know you from today and you know me from today.  You might not like what I was yesterday.  I might not like what you were”.  The sense that yesterday is a closed book and that the future starts today is a theme that is picked up again later in the episode.

They then discuss what to do next.  Bill is keen to get out of London as he tells Jo that soon, “the city will begin to stink like a great sewer.  There are already corpses lying around.  Soon they’ll be more.  That may mean cholera, typhoid.  God knows what”.

But a light in the distance changes their plans and the next morning they meet a group of thirty or so survivors who all have sight.  They see another sighted man, called Coker (Maurice Colbourne), who’s leading a group of blind people.  He asks the others for help in finding food, but they refuse.  This is a debate that has cropped up before and Bill and Jo discuss it again shortly afterwards.  Bill says that Coker is right and wrong.  “We could show some of them where to find food for a few days or for a few weeks.  But what happens afterwards?”.

They then meet the leader of the sighted group, Beadley (David Swift).  He proposes moving out of London and establishing a community that will isolate itself for a year (in order to protect against disease).  One of the other members of their ad-hoc committee explains how the community will function.

The men must work.  The women must have babies.  We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see.  We cannot afford to support men who cannot see.  In our community, babies will be more important than husbands.  It follows from this that the one man/one woman relationship as we understand it will probably become an illogical luxury.

As for the Triffids, they only appear in a single scene (where they attack an old couple who we’ve never seen before).  As their appearance (although it’s very nicely shot at night) is divorced from the main narrative, it seems to have been put in simply to remind the audience that they’re still out there.  And since they don’t feature much in this episode, it helps to make their sudden reappearance in episode four even more striking

At the end of this episode, Bill and Jo (along with the rest of the potential community members) are settling down for the night when a fire alarm is raised.  Bill rushes down the stairs, trips over and awakes to find himself tied up …..

The Day of the Triffids (BBC 1981). Episode Two

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triffids 02

After leaving Dr Soames in an office, Bill tells him that he’ll go and find some help.  Soames knows there’s nothing to be done and he’s right – everyone else in the hospital is blind.  Along the way, Bill meets a patient in one of the wards who asks him to draw the curtains and when he has, the man tells him to stop playing about and draw the curtains.

This is another scene taken directly from the novel, although it might have been a good idea to omit it.  It’s impossible to believe that somebody couldn’t tell the difference between it simply being dark and being blind.  Even in the dark, it’s possible to distinguish shapes and outlines.

Elsewhere, he sees groups of people milling about anxiously and when he returns to the office he finds Dr Soames has jumped to his death.  As Bill ventures out onto the streets he finds no better news, until he spots a girl who can see.  He follows her into a house and meets her father, John (Stephen Yardley).  John and his wife are blind, but their daughter can still see.

John vacillates between believing that the problem is only local and temporary and pondering the implications if the majority of the population are now permanently blind.

Well, everybody will be like us at first. They won’t know what’s happened. They’ll be too frightened to move. Then they’ll get hungry and start looking for food. I mean this town’s nasty at the best of times. In two or three days it won’t just be hooligans, it’ll be people you thought butter wouldn’t melt killing each other for scraps of food.

There’s a great deal of truth in this, as we see pockets of the blind fighting each other for food, whilst one woman sits on the ground with a packet of washing powder in the mistaken belief that it’s edible.  Elsewhere, a group of football supporters are led by a sighted man and they grab a woman.  Their intentions are obvious and although Bill tries to intervene, it’s probable that his attempt was fruitless (we don’t see the conclusion).  As we witness other examples of people in distress, how will Bill decide which ones to help and which ones to leave?

Earlier in the episode, Josella (Emma Relph) was captured by a blind man and forced to be his eyes.  Bill discovers them and frees her.  Together they seek refuge in a pub and when she decides to find her father, Bill asks if he can come with her.  Jo agrees instantly and tells him it’s “not because I’m afraid of getting caught again.  I’ll watch out for that.  It’s just the dreadful sense of loneliness, being cut off from everybody else”.

Jo’s father is dead, killed by a Triffid and Bill and Jo only manage to escape after Bill kills another.  This the first major Triffid attack scene in the story and thanks to some tight framing and intense acting from Duttine it works well.  Whilst they’re not the most mobile of creatures, the occasional glimpse of them (as well as the eerie sound they make) is quite effective.

The episode has already discussed how the vast majority of the population could, because of their blindness, be turned into a mob – and this looks like it’s coming true at the end.  Bill and Jo’s car is surrounded by a group of blind people and whilst none of them are intrinsically evil, their desperation to hold onto any sighted person is somewhat disturbing.

triffid