This tape opens with the end of an episode of Blake’s 7.
Then there are some episodes of the BBC’s adaptation of Peter Dickinson’s The Changes. I think the first episode here is the second, so we’ve missed all the chaos as people started smashing up machinery, and this episode starts with young Nicky, waiting at home for her parents, who never come.
Vicky Williams has such a posh voice that it’s hard to remember that’s how people usually sounded. Now it seems odd, but then it was the norm. And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of regional accents among the adults here.
Vicky meets a group of Sikhs, travelling through the town, and warns them off going into the centre, because she’s been told there’s a lot of disease there, and she ends up travelling with them.
This show made something of an impression on me. The Sikhs are presented entirely sympathetically, and the show is happy to have the older members of the group speaking Punjabi. I’m not sure Sikhs had been portrayed like this on TV before – more often, someone in a turban would be the punchline of a joke. But in this show, by dint of them not being affected by the madness that has turned the rest of the country against machines, they seem like the most reasonable people. Even Nicky finds this out, when she steals from an abandoned house, and they come close to telling her she can’t stay with them, because they don’t think she’s setting the correct example to their children.
And the show is quite comfortable showing the overt racism that they face. Walking past a pub, one of the men there just decides to throw a stone at them, hitting a young girl. But that’s as far as the violence goes, because the racists aren’t up for a fight when the Sikh men, all carrying staffs, step up to face them.
Nicky finds an abandoned house, and takes some things from it, some as gifts for the older women in the group, and there’s a scene where the head of the group takes Vicky aside and tells her the perhaps she should leave them when they pass a community that’s friendly. Partly they are worried that she’ll be hurt if they are attacked, but also, they don’t like that she’s basically stolen from the abandoned house, and she’s a bad influence on their own children. I loved that it’s the ‘outsider’ group who are holding to the higher standards, and it’s the English girl who’s getting it all wrong.
The episode ends with an image that I still remember, as they leave the village, then Nicky starts sensing something, tells them to stop, there’s an ominous sound on the soundtrack, and the last shot of the episode is the electrical pylons, and the wires crossing the road they’re on.
I’m not the only one this made an impression on, either, as someone mentioned it on Twitter recently in response to the question ‘what’s the first thing that really scared you?’
The next episode sees the Sikhs settling at an abandoned farm, where they set up a forge. Nicky helps to barter with the local village, swapping repairs of hand tools for grain and food. The village is ruled by Mr Barnard, a blowhard whose sole claim to being in charge is that he’s got a big sword. The show is happy to make it clear what an idiot he is, when he’s arbitrating a dispute, and says outright that a woman will always be less than a man, so he’s ruling in favour of the man.
He’s shown a garden fork that was repaired by the Sikhs, as an example of the work they can do, and he tries so hard to break the mend that he ends up shattering the handle. So he can’t really fault the repair, but insists all dealings with the sikhs go through him.
There’s another slice of Blake’s 7 before the next episode.
In the next episode, things seem to be settling down, and the Sikhs are doing a good trade in repairs. But things get a lot worse when a gang of robbers arrive, and decide they are going to take over. You can tell they’re evil because they all dress in black, and to keep the villagers in line, they kidnap all their children and keep them locked up in a barn, threatening to set fire to it if there’s trouble.
The chief robber is played by Edward Brayshaw, who we saw a while back in Moonbase 3, and who (I had forgotten) played Mr Meaker in Rentaghost.
So it’s up to the Sikhs to sort out the robbers. Nicky and Ajeet are tasked with keeping the children in the barn safe while the fighting is going on, so Ajeet tells them a traditional Sikh story.
Outside, the Sikhs and the Robbers are fighting a pitched battle, and there’s some spirited swordplay, some of it on horseback.
The Sikhs are winning, although not without fatalities on both sides, so Nicky and Ajeet take the children out and back to the village, where they are reunited with their parents, themselves on their way to the house, having seen the barn burning.
There’s an amusing speech by one of the villagers. “They’re safe because this girl and her friends, them we call The Devil’s Children, rescued them.” I half expected him to continue “We’re going to help them fight, but before we go, we have to think of a less offensive nickname for them.”
The next episode starts with the last of the fighting. Things look like they’re going back to normal. Then the head Sikh Chacha (Rafiq Anwar) has a heart to heart with Nicky, and asks her if she’s happy. A small aside – I was delighted to learn, while looking up the cast, as I often do, that Rafiq Anwar is the father of film editor Tariq Anwar, a name I see quite regularly on programmes.
He tells her that perhaps now it;s time for her to try to find her aunt in the Cotswolds, so she leaves on a cart with another man. This seems like an abrupt change, but it’s because the books this series is based on don’t have a continuous cast, and mostly feature a different set of characters in each book, but here they’re using Nicky as a character who hangs the books together.
The cart throws a wheel, and Nicky falls off knocked unconscious. She wakes up while her driver has gone for help, and wanders into Shipton, the town they avoided (“mean savage lot, they are”). She falls asleep next to a tractor, then wakes up next morning, and accidentally releases the brake on the tractor, letting the local witchfinder know she’s in there. And because she was able to sleep next to ‘that wickedness’ he declares she must be a witch.
The witchfinder, Davy Gordon, is played by David Garfield, and makes an excellent villain.
The great Jack Watson plays a local farmer, a bit in thrall to Gordon but (so his family say) a good man underneath.
There’s a trial that’s barely a trial, and Nicky is voted to be a witch. These public votes never end well.
The next episode sees Nicky locked in the local school so preparations can be made for her stoning. Jack Watson’s children, Jonathan and Margaret, decide they need to rescue Nicky and help her escape.
Jonathan loved machinery, so the effects of the changes haven’t really lasted on him. He’s able to start a tractor in a nearby field, so the men guarding Nicky are distracted, and they can escape. Jonathan sets the school on fire so it will look like Nicky died.
The plan is to get to a boat, the Heartsease, and get away, but Gordon and his men discover that Nicky wasn’t in the school, and Watson is shocked when his son’s penknife is found at the scene.
That’s the last episode of the series on this tape. The rest of the series was on a tape I looked at in 2015.
After this, there’s an unmarked programme, an episode of Doomwatch. This episode is Invasion. John Ridge is helping the search for some boys who went missing while exploring caves. Their search leads them to Wensdale House, which is heavily guarded by the Army, and they can’t get close to it. The army is commanded by Geoffrey Palmer, looking scarily like Denholm Reynholm from The IT Crowd.
The tape ends after this episode.
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