fifty years ago today (a spasm of technophobic and psychotic violence)

During the (in)famous first few moments of this series, we meet Nicky, aged fourteen, doing her homework at the kitchen table. Mum and Dad are also present, she knitting, perhaps something for the baby (we soon find out that she’s expecting), he smoking a pipe and reading the paper. When Nicky complains that she’s finding it hard to concentrate, Dad reassures her that: “You always do well in English.”

So far, so ordinary – though we might momentarily wonder about the ram’s skull on one shelf and an ornamental set of scales on another. What disasters are being foreshadowed, and what exactly is about to be weighed in the balance?

As the scene develops, all three family members fret about the strangely close and oppressive weather – it’s this that’s been hampering Nicky’s concentration and it’s not doing much for the grown-ups either. The television, which has been on, has been playing silent black and white images of small children playing. (This may make us think of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and other uncanny depictions of children in genre fiction). Nicky asks for the volume to be turned up. Briefly, before static kills both the picture and sound, we hear fragments of a news bulletin: abnormal weather conditions, the Welsh borders, thunderstorms, and see images of flash flooding.

An unearthly noise then makes itself felt (“Twelve different layers of thrashing, awful sounds,” Paddy Kingsland of the BBC RadiophonicWorkshop later recalled) and Dad, face contorted, starts smashing the television with a candlestick. Sheila and Nicky look momentarily aghast before they too are possessed with an urge to destroy all technological gadgets. We then see street scenes of ordinary middle-class householders smashing bicycles and cars, intercut with stock footage of burning tube trains and exploding bridges. This footage is perhaps crudely put together by modern standards but this brief montage, showing us that this spasm of technophobic and psychotic violence is now nationwide, remains unsettling to watch.   

It's 6th January 1975, and we’re now exactly three minutes into The Changes. Britain’s youngsters – because it’s tea-time, and this is children’s programming – have just watched the world end. Soon, the BBC’s telephone switchboard will be jammed with parents calling in to complain..

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To read more, you'll need to get hold of an article I wrote about this landmark television series in the British Science Fiction Association's writers' magazine, Focus (#78, Summer 2024), in a trilogy of articles on 1970s British genre TV that also looks at Nigel Kneale's Beasts in #77, and Terry Nation's Survivors in the current issue, #79. 

(Trilogy? Arguably, it's a four-parter if we include an earlier piece which reads James Herbert’s landmark 1974 horror novel The Rats in the light of punk rock and other alternative cultures).

To sample both the 'initial montage' mentioned in the excerpt above and also Paddy Kingsland's/ the BBC Radiophonic Workshop music, watch the British Film Institute's DVD trailer (that'd be one way to watch, the other is to purchase on Amazon Prime, scroll down for links to both). 

It was watching this trailer on repeat (once something gets under the skin..) which told me that I had to get hold of the series - and, of the three series I've written about, it's 'The Changes' that'd be the one I'd take to the proverbial desert island and also the article which I feel is the strongest. 

I'm grateful to Dev Agarwal, Focus editor, that I was able to 'run a little long' with this one, compared to the initial wordcount guideline - this allowed me to note that the series re-unites a number of actors with significant prior reputations in Indian and Pakistani cinema who had also worked together on Insaaf [1971], an intriguing Urdu-language film, half-drama, half-extended infomercial, made by the UK Government’s Central Office for Information in order to promote employment rights under the 1968 Race Relations Act and given a limited cinematic release in British towns with significant South Asian populations. It also allowed me to reference two mid-1970s polemics by, respectively, E.P. Thompson and Michael Moorcock which deserve to be better known and more widely read..

One line of exposition I'd have developed given even another few hundred words on 'The Changes' would've been about how this series would be an important reference point for anyone wishing to talk about the life, career and almost wholly positive societal influence - in respect of creating children's television which respects, educates and entertains young minds and (as an integral part of that necessarily transformative project) in respect of the politics of representation, broadly conceived - of producer and executive Anna Home. Here's to you, Anna..!

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Other site content

Buy 'The Changes' (digital, £9.49)

Buy 'The Changes' (DVD, £15.10)

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