Weird 1970's Kid's TV: The Changes

In the spirit of HTV's barking mad kid's dramas, the BBC produced something equally insane for Bronze Age kids in the '70's:
Post apocalyptic teenage odyssey on a Monday teatime? That'll be The Changes then.
One day, a sudden madness infects the population of the UK, and everyone becomes inexplicably terrified of machines. One minute, teenager Nicky is enjoying a quiet afternoon at home with her Mum & Dad, when they all hear a strange noise that drives them all crazy, causing them to smash up the TV, the radio, the toaster and every other 'wicked' machine.

Out in the streets, everyone else is doing the same thing, and anarchy and chaos rules. In one moment, the world we knew is gone, and with no idea what's happening, the family join other refugees on the road to the sea, hoping to escape the madness on a boat to France.

In the riots, Nicky gets seperated from her parents, and with a callousness you can only describe as breathtaking, her dad forces her pregnant mother onto the boat, with a vague promise that he'll come back for their daughter when they're safe.
Alone, she wanders through the wasteland, staying away from the big cities and the threat of plague. Nicky's a great heroine, resourceful, intelligent and decent, you're with her all the way. As Stewart Lee has said, what a breath of fresh air from the kind of lowlifes that infest teen shows today, like Skins for instance.

Eventually, she falls in with a Sikh family, also travelling on the road, who are strangely unaffected by the madness. In time, they take over an abandoned farm, and set to creating their own pre-industrial version of the good life. In the scenes everybody remembers, Nicky now has to navigate past the ( to her ) terrifying electricity pylons that dot the English countryside, now called The Bad Wires.

If The Changes has a fault, it's that Nicky spends too much of the story down on the farm with her new pals, but it's easy to forget that self-sufficency was a big thing in 1970's Britain ( see also Survivors, which is the adult version of this story ), and immigrants from India were also a fairly new thing back then, making Nicky's new family exotic, colourful and mysterious.
In fact, the Sikh men are painted as kind of warrior priests, both protecting and guiding her, which is useful when they come up against the inevitable marauding gang of bad guys out for all they can steal.

The madness seems to continue, as on her travels, Nicky is regularly threatened by minor despots who rule over village fiefdoms, and it feels as if England has been completely thrown back into the Dark Ages, as in one episode where she's accused of being a witch and sentenced to death by stoning.

Ultimately, after several more adventures, and in a mind stretching finale, Nicky is led to where, how and what actually caused The Changes, and we discover what's in that cave in the end credits we've seen every week.

The Changes, unfortunately, doesn't have the budget to fully show the end of everything, but it comes damn close, and the actor's give it their all.
If only you could see it: Alas, it used to be on youtube, but has unaccountably vanished off there, but it is available on DVD, so if you ever get the chance to see it, do.
It's got it's flaws, but has more ideas in one episode than a whole series of most thing's these days.

Weird 1970's Kid's TV: Raven

Following Sky, HTV went all out and updated the Arthurian legend in this, the first big break for professional cockney geezer Phil Daniels.
Daniels is Raven, a bad kid freshly released from a young offenders institution, and an orphan who was found as a baby lying in an ancient earthworks, guarded over by a mysterious raven.
As the story starts, he's placed with his probabtion carers, grumpy old professor Young ( Michael Aldridge ) and sweet and slightly dotty Mrs. Young ( '70's sitcom queen Patsy Rowlands ), and initially sees them as easy marks, before getting unnacountably interested in the professor's work.

Young is an archeologist, currently excavating a network of caves that were supposedly used by King Arthur. Unfortunatly, the nasty old government want somewhere to bury their nuclear waste, and the professor has only a short time to convince the Man From The Ministry of the caves' historical importance, before they'll be ruined forever.
Raven is intrigued by Young's claims that Arthur may not've been one man at all, but a title bestowed on various chief's who rose up to defend England in times of peril.
He soon takes the professor's side against the government and, with the help of local reporter and dolly bird Naomi ( Shirley Cheriton ) mounts a campaign to stop the desecration of the caves.

Almost immediately, weird things start happening. Raven is stalked by a Merlin, a bird not native to this part of the country and in one excursion into the caverns, experiences a vison of himself as Arthur.
Meanwhile, the professor is all sidelong glances and cryptic comments, leaving us in no doubt as to his knowledge of who he, Raven and Naomi really are.

Raven doesn't have quite as much strange imagery, nor is it as baffling as Sky or Children Of The Stones, and in fact you could take out all the Arthurian stuff and be left with much the same story.
But it belongs, like them, to what's been called The Age Of Aquarius / Gaia style of children's dramas. Stone circle's, ecology and astrology all play a part in the storyline, and Raven is definitely the most anti-establishment and political of the HTV serials.

And it does have a magical, bittersweet ending.

The cast are all great, and Daniels ( basically playing himself ) gets to utter some fantastic geezer-ish lines, like in the scene where the editor of the local newspaper refuses to help in the campaign because he went to school with Professor Young, and never liked him, Raven retorts: That's great, innit? Just 'cos 'e nicked yer ruler back in th' Dark Ages, you won't do th' right fing!
He also regularly refers to Naomi as: Oi! Tasty!
Only in the '70's.
It's on dailymotion right now.

Weird 1970's Kid's TV: Children Of The Stones

Another one of those fantastically strange kid's drama serials from the maniacs at HTV, Children Of The Stones freaked out a generation, and is regularly referred to as 'the scariest programme ever made for children.'
It's about astrophysicist Adam Brake ( Gareth Thomas off Blake's 7 ) and his son Matthew, who journey to the village of Milbury, the site of a neolithic stone circle ( played by Avebury, a site in Wiltshire that predates Stonehenge. )

Adam is there to investigate the stones, and Matthew, being actually cleverer than his dad but not too annoying with it, has tagged along to help.
Almost immediately, something is very evidently wrong with Milbury. Everyone walks around smiling at nothing, and constantly wishing Matthew a 'Happy Day'.
There are strange pagan rituals going on at night, led by Hendrick, the Laird of the village ( the magnificently urbane and chillingly charming Iain Cuthbertson )

There's a local madman wandering about, with more knowledge of what's happening than anyone, if only someone would actually listen to him ( played by ace mad actor Freddie Jones ).

There's also a painting of a neolithic ritual involving a black hole, and time seems to be not just repeating itself, but repeating itself into infinity. And anyone invited to the Laird's manor for supper, comes back.... changed.

Adam & Matt team up with Margaret, the curator at the village museum, and her daughter Sandra, to try and figure out what's going on, they being the other new arrivals seemingly unaffected by the psychic forces at play in Milbury.

Interestingly, Hendrick recognizes Matthew as his arch-nemesis straight away, and respects him as a worthy opponent, while Adam, being an adult, is sure he already knows all there is to know, so misses every portent that comes his way.
Like a lot of kid's TV at this time, Children Of The Stones freely takes in such subjects as mythology, leylines, the Gaia principle of the Earth, pseudo-science and the fate of humanity in it's seven episodes.
It's full of atmosphere and dread, and people glancing meaningfully at each other, not daring to speak the awful truth. And then there's the opening of the show, where the stones seem to be singing to you. Or maybe warning you away.

Children Of The Stones is a bit Wicker Man, a bit Stepford Wives, and a bit like The Prisoner, what with their seemingly innocuous phrases like 'Happy Day' and 'Be Seeing You'  given sinister intent, and with it's final ending where everything almost, but not quite, goes back to the beginning.
I'm guessing no kid at the time, and very few adults, understood the ending of Children Of The Stones, and the revelations given as to what it had all been about. But that's the mark of the HTV kid's serials, versus the pap children are fed these days. You actually had to think.

And it's all on youtube, so as you're not doing anything Sunday afternoon, put your feet up and watch the whole thing. But be warned. Once you enter Milbury, you might not ever leave.