more spooky kids telly i never saw at the time...

blurbs for Sky

  "Sky is a mystically-oriented children's science fantasy television serial made for ITV by HTV and broadcast in seven parts from April 7 to May 14, 1975.  The story of a mysterious youth and his attempts to rejoin his own time and dimension, and the three teenagers who discover him and set out to help.

 "A mysterious alien boy with strange solid blue eyes, the eponymous Sky (Marc Harrison), finds himself on Earth. He uses his psychic powers for achieve his goal of ensuring a way back home. Sky finds the very world soul of Earth in the form of nature, only to reject him the way an immune system might an infection. In his quest to return home, he joins his destiny with that of three human children. The serial was written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, also known for their scripts for Doctor Who and a fantasy television series for children, Into the Labyrinth."

Into The Labyrinth? Another one I missed.

There's this novel I read as a child, I recall neither the title nor the author, but it involved children who discover a whole underworld of tunnels and passageways beneath the fields near their home, inhabited by, I dunno, elf-people or malign beings of some sort or other. They have to thwart them or go to war with them in some way.  That's as much as I can remember. Think it was a pretty well-known, 'for older kids' type book at the time. Any idea? 

More Sky...

 

 

I really should hand over my Hauntologist Credentials forthwith... for the shameful truth is that I have never seen The Stone Tape, or The Owl Service

Nor did I watch Sapphire and Steel (just reminded of this series by reading an advance of Mark Fisher's excellent collection Ghosts of My Life , forthcoming on Zero Books)

(And why, oh why, has nobody reissued the incidental music and "special sound" FX and underscores from Sapphire and Steel?)

Stone Tape and Owl Service can probably be explained by the fact that we didn't have a TV set for a good chunk of my early childhood (something like age 2 to 8). Not sure why (money? different parental priorities later reneged upon?), but that probably was the making of me in terms of getting the bug for reading and being a precocious reader (Lord of the Rings aged 7 etc).

As for Sapphire and Steel - not sure why I missed the earlier ones, but this can partly be explained by me being a student in the early Eighties. First and second years, the only one TV in proximity was in the student common room, which I would brave only for Top of the Pops. In the third year I was in student digs and didn't own a set. So I would watch the box only in the holidays, when I was back home, and not much then either. Missed many iconic TV series of the first half of the Eighties, e.g. Boys from the Blackstuff)

I do obviously remember vividly (see previous posts) both Children of the Stones and The Changes (although the latter doesn't seem quite so central in the hauntological canon of spooky telly as Stone Tape, Owl Service, Children of Stones, Sapphire)

I do also remember this series, which never gets mentioned as part of the canon, but certainly represents a ghost of my own life....

why has the music for this not been reissued?

Jonny Trunk, get on the case!*

some nutter's put the entire Children of the Stones series on YouTube in one big bloc of vintage telly!

story of the CotS music via A Sound Awareness blog:

"The music was composed by Sidney Sager who used a combination of a cappella vocalizations of a single, repeated Icelandic word ("Hadave") to create a terrifying and dissonant score. The vocals were provided by the Ambrosian Singers who during their long career have provided choral work for both Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota. The series was filmed at Avebury, Wiltshire during Summer 1976, with interior scenes filmed at HTV's Bristol studio. "


* Trunk have been quietly releasing all kinds of mad stuff in in the last year or two - lots of musique concrete avant-electronic stuff -- Lasry Bachet, Structures Sonores ; 1st Panoramaof Musique Concrete LP; Tom Dissevelt, GRM's Musique experimentale II --  but also albums by Terry Thomas and Bernard Cribbins and Charlie Drake and Hayley Mills. Look out also for the forthcoming Classroom Projects, a collection of 'incredible music made by children in schools'

Children of the Stones in bite size portions...

turn to watch the strange The-The Changes

They showed this to children! Children that had just come home from school! Sitting on the carpet with their McVities and Jaffa Cakes and Penguins and their mugs of milk and cups of tea!

BBC advised it was "for older children" - but how do you prevent the little 'uns from watching? I was eleven when I saw it, my brothers were nine and six... 

youtube blurb: "The Changes, broadcast every Monday from 6th January to 10th March 1975, was one of the BBC's first post-apocalyptic TV programmes (barring Peter Watkins' The War Game (see below)). The children's TV series depicted the breakdown of society after people are compelled to reject and destroy technology of all kinds including the simplest machinery. This violent reaction and people's subsequent desertion of the country is triggered by a sound seemingly emitted by electricity pylons. schoolgirl Nicky Gore (played by Victoria Williams) is caught amidst the chaos and gets separated from her parents who are heading to France in the hope of finding safety. The series follows Nicky's journey to be reunited with her parents and seek an answer to the cause of The Changes. The series was an adaptation of The Devil's Children - the first of three novels in The Changes trilogy by author Peter Dickinson which also included Heartsease and The Weathermonger. Filming took place over the summer of 1973 and was shot in the West Country, namely Bristol, the Forest of Dean and Sharpness. Although playing a schoolgirl in her early teens, Victoria Williams celebrated her eighteenth birthday during filming."

Telly scholars discuss The Changes

 Robin Carmody on The Changes

 

 

and the final episode in bits