Be Excellent To Each Other

Many forumites are probably aware of Children of the Stones, which sits as some famed kids show or other of the before-time, lauded by Charlie Brooker and Stuart Lee and Kim Newman and others. Oddly, I've never seen it. But now that a bearded colleague of mine has seen fit to lend me a copy, I can sit back and enjoy what should hopefully be something classic. These reviews will be a cripplingly detailed immediate reaction blow-by-blow ramble of my findings. Will I be enthralled or flabagasted by shonkiness craftily hidden by the rose-tinted editorials of column writers? Let's see, shall we...?

THAR BE SPOILERS....



West HTV!

Children of the Stones opens with looming, lunging, spiralling images of weathered stones on a village green to the sound of sinister humming and wailing. I fondly hoped for junior versions of the Rolling Stones to appear in a Scooby Doo Mystery Gang stylee, to point and cry, "Woaaaaher! Let's git oughta here!" But no.

Instead a pa called Adam Brake and his lad Matthew drive along in a car along the countryside. They're off to live in a village in a nice cottage for a few weeks, as the pa has science-work-stuff there to do regarding standing stones. The kid sounds intelligent and yet is chomping on a snack bar, which is a good thing as it shows he is of the skilled-child calibre of say a particularily talented Knightmare contestent, but yet down to earth enough to be like the rest of us in enjoying an unwholesome 70's choc bar. In other words, not a Wesley Crusher and not a cast member from Skins. They yak engagingly about stone circles and stuff as they drive past. And I note that everything about this is grainy and grim as far as filmstock goes. What's the date on the DVD... 1977? Threads era? Uh-oh, this is going to be Brit-bleak-fest isn't i

HOLY SHIT

CREEPY STONE IN THE ROAD CREEPY WOMAN IN THE ROAD TITLES SMASH!

Ooooh. Wow.

Gosh, is Nigel Kneale involved in this? This is going to be a Nigel Kneale deal isn't it? As I like to say, as I sit back with my foaming pint of nut-brown ale before a TV set showing classic short-series intelligent Brit sci-fantasy; "This is apt to be the Kneale-Deal". Shortly before I punch myself in the face.

They arrive at the cottage with the creepy woman as landlady. More engaging yakking with the lad, who is oddly only very mildly freaked out by the old woman's 'Welcome to the Village' routine, which consists of standing in the middle of a road with arms upraised replete with terrifing expression whilst channelling some sort of malevolent stone-spirit. She offers him tea and cake.

'Yes old woman I would like cake yes. MY TEETH THIS CAKE IS MADE OF STON!'

No, he doesn't actually get chance for cake.

Instead more strange eerie noise and suddenly incredibly static-for-a-moment pretty girl in blue is at window. It's a classic PHWOAR-BRRR for our shag-haired 70's lad, but before he can register she slips away. And so they get back on to yacking about recording the magnetic fields of stone circles in front of the eerie old woman, Mrs Crabtree, who was later found to be considerably less eerie in Calvin & Hobbes, unless you were reading one of the Spacemen Spiff installments.

The dad, Blake from Blake's 7 (for it is he) suggests that his son show her the painting that inspired them to go into this sort of thing. He unveils it to her and she drops her pot and cups and entire tray-shebang in shock. And man, what a painting! It shows a circle of people in a hollow and a death-star beam pulsing down in the middle of them and two figures fleeing in the foreground AND a giant snake and it's all sort of Pentangle Prog-Rock album cover awesome. I reckon Crabtree must be a prog fan herself, and is merely overcome by the possibility that this is some sort of poster proposing an exciting new prog-fest for the village.

Ah. Nope, she's out for the count. Must be something else, then. Which leads us to new character... Mr Hendrick! Who also enters entirely silently and suddenly in shock-edit out of nowhere. Batman's got nothing on these village yokels. Hendrick's smooth, polished yet donnish sort of way. The sort of guy the boffins at Joddrel Bank would wheel out to take press calls. In Pertwee Who he'd be head of a plastics company with hilarious consequences. A very nicely veiled interogation follows from Hendrick, who adroitly probes Matthews intelligence by leading him on. And then, bored of Wesley Crusher-esque precocity, they tell him to go explore with a kid on a bike outside who's seemingly cycled in stage-left from a public information film.


Off they cycle, spied upon by tramp with telescope lurking behind stone. They cycle gaily about the village while Adam Blake - sorry, Brake - tells Hendrick about how Matthew displayed great detail of memory regarding their times with his dead mother, passed away two years ago, memories seemingly brought on when handling items that were significant to her. Sure that won't come up again.
Meanwhile, lads cycle and cycle hard. Vrooom! Eat dust, MaliA! And then suddenly Matthew sees a truck bearing down. Look out Public Information Film Kid! Surely in his status as the Kenny of British TV making he must die, but as the horn blares and breaks screech terribly and the camera cuts in to a close-up of Matthew's face as he shuts his eyes and tenses for the scream...

The sound cuts out entirely. The truck vanishes. The kid wheels around and cycles back, unharmed. Matthew opens his eyes again.

The sound fades back in. "C'mon," says the kid.

It's one of the best pieces of sound editing I've ever heard in my life.

Off to the newsagent. She greets them with the words, "Happy Day!" which is instantly terrifying. I know not why Rough Guides do not invoke this simple advice but it should read, "Trust not the village that collectively employs the unconventional greeting."
And then the lad runs into the girl at the window. Excellent enigmatic dialogue reveals that she was looking through the window because she heard new people were in the village. She's not like the others and her mum works in the museum. AND THE VILLAGE NEEDS NEW PEOPLE. And then she whispers the words, "We must stick together!" And then she leaves, to watch someone be run over by a Mini-Moke or be harrassed by Leo McKern, probably.

"She's strange," says Matthew.

"That's because she's not a happy one."

"What's a happy one?"

"Somebody who's happy of course!" beams the kid.

Get out of there! GET OUT!

To be fair on Matthew and this show thus far, he looks increasingly creeped out as shit, even holding a free ice-cream. Points over modern stuff where they'd spend an age doggedly ignoring pointed signs.

And now for Part Two - The ENWEIRDENING.

Let us speed up. Adam and Matthew must be introduced to the two classic tropes of spooky villages, The Spooky Classroom and The Sexpot. Wisely, the show sticks with the genre and it is Familia Patternis Adam who meets the Sexpot and Familia Juvenilia ("Please check Latin," - prod. ed.) who sits in Spooky Classroom. The other way round would just be weird.

So Hendricks takes Adam out for a drink in an incredibly quiet country pub. Incredibly dark too. Ahh, the days before stupid irritating widescreen tellys in pubs. Hendricks introduces Adam to good-looking red-headed musem (ah-ha!) owner Veronica Strong. Hendricks handily explains that she's a widow too, struggling with raising her girl. To his credit though he doesn't then immediately whip out a violin and start playing slow romance around the dimly lit table where they sit, awkwardly, over miserly measures of spirits.
This is immediately a fascinatingly odd turn of events, as if Sandra isn't one of THEM - and the uncomfortableness of Veronica around Hendricks clearly demonstrates that she isn't one of THEM, then what purpose serves Hendrick to introduce them? Because the scriptwriters are intelligent. They know that Hendrick, being intelligent, would know that in a village they would immediately seek each other out. Veronica to air her fears, Adam in innocenct enquiry as to museum history. Here, Hendrick controls the encounter.

Y U NO THIS CLEVER NU-WHO?

Alas, Matthew isn't being handed out free drams at the school, though his glassy-eyed cheery fellow pupils could clearly have been imbibing a few. Ho ho! THAT IS OF ANCIENT SINISTER-JUICE. Ahem. So, Matthew gets into class and is immediately set upon by the Nelson of the school. But Matthew fights back, earning a respect that is evinced by him thus not clearly belonging to terrifyingly vast majority of placid, peaceful, "HAPPY DAY'S" kids.

Wait... Happy Days kids...?

"Heyyyyy Richie! 'ow come you no hang out at the diner anymore?" (Adjusts collar, flicks sleeve cuffs.)

"I'm sorry, Arthur Fonzarelli. But that place no longer holds any significance to me."

"Ay, you get this? He's gone all I Like Ike on me. Whut's with him, Mr C.?"

"Don't you understand, Arthur Fonzarelli? This is the new order. We obey a higher power now. The Diner as you call it is a place of false joy. Truly, now that the ancients have returned to rule once our den, Happy Days are here once again."

"Whut, y'mean FDR runnin' again?"

*Laugh track*

"Simple greaseball mind. You do not understand. LET ME SHOW YOU."

"Ay! Get offa me! Richie, help!"

"THESE ARE YOURS AND MY HAPPY DAYS..."


*double blink*

Sorry, I got distracted there.

ANYWAY.

It turns out that under tutelage of 1970's Imelda Staunton-alike, schoolkids are like hyper-intelligent solving scary looking complex equations. This is where Brit and US sci-fi differs, by the way. US sci-fi complex equations represent, "Wesley Crusher has bested this problem through science, go humanity!" Whilst Brit sci-fi says, "He can solve a complex equation! Shit! And he's twelve! Kill him, e's unnatural!"

Eerily, the teacher implies that Sandra, Nelson, random thickee kid from the farm (sucks to be him) and Matthew will soon be like the others. And if sci-fi has anything to say, being exactly like others is a BAD THING. The teacher is especially consoling to Matthew, after humiliating the other class non-algebra solving retards, by reassuring him that he was very nearly right - and will make an excellent candidate, or something.

Again, US Sci-Fi, Promising Candidate = Good. Brit Sci-Fi. Promising Candidate = Bad.

The kids are presented with further incredibly taxing algebraic formulations, and happily go back to solving at break-neck speed. Sorry, did I say Kneale earlier? Because this is showing the trappings of John Christopher and John Wyndham too, now.
Other precepts of skool are that violence solves nothing. As Nelson finds out after lamping grinning bike-riding kid for being provokingly smug over footie-match losing sore-point. Extra-eerily, bike-riding kid simply pops back up again and cheerily says, "See, didn't solve anything, did it?" and walks off. Brrr.

Cut from shuddering chills to smouldering thrills as Blake, er, Brake pops round to the museum. They chat about ley-lines and stones and a poor medieval guy who was crushed by a stone putting it up and ho-ho-thought-they-meant-good-luck-but-no-seriously-now. And yes, Veronica begins to hint that all is not well. Though Adam Brake does not believe in lay lines, she says that there is something wrong in the village. She feels alone here, and in a different way. That everyone is the same. Everyone is 'happy'. And then after this little dose of baffling the fuck out of him she asks him if he'll do her a favour when they step out to inspect the stones. She asks him if he'll touch one.

"What?"

"I just want to see if you are the kind of man I think you are."

Cut to early evening outside. Matthew rides on bike downhill weaving through stones towards cemetary, laughing like a lad. Suddenly, creepy telescope guy looms out at him, appearing for split-second as a hulking stone. Matthew swerves, bike spills and he hits his head on a gravestone. Creepy man looms over him. OOOOH!

And meanwhile, somewhere else, Adam walks with Veronica. And they encounter a stone. And so he touches it, and immediately cries out in pain as he is momentarily surrounded by a mad giddy whirlwind hallucination of spinning faces recoiling and screaming. He is thrown off his feet and falls unconcious. Veronica looks on pittingly.

TO BE CONTINUED!

So, verdict so far? Bloody brilliant. Belts along. Where more badly scripted and paced affairs would have you howling at the obvious creepy villainies this makes the smart move of having the two leads young and old quickly and privately twigging that there's something a little bat-shit insane at work but hey, no time to talk about it now, here's some more crazy shit coming. Here's hoping the second episode will give some decompress time for some general WTF'ing as they shout, "Aw man!" and shake each other terrified-style by the elbows.

I can't wait to watch the next. Stay tuned, Beex!

[Edit] Ammended start to somewhat fix stream-of-conciousness unreadability.

That sounds really good, thanks Pete! Sounds creepy in a Wickerman sort of way. Look forward to the next bit!

Excellent stuff Pete.

Indeed, this is a classic slice of Brit telly from the olden days.

If you like Quatermass and such, you'll be laughing (not actually laughing).

Pete, may I also draw your attention to The Omega Factor, if you don't know of it, for similar chills:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Omega-Facto ... B0009UCET6

Also The Stone Tape, which from memory has been discussed here before:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stone-Tape-DVD- ... stone+tape

Awes. Um. Stewart Lee, though Do Moondial next.