In this first of a semi-regular column on the TV that made us SFFH fans, Gary Couzens revisits The Changes to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Fifty years ago, on Monday 6 January 1975 at 5.20pm on BBC1, the first episode of The Changes was broadcast. We begin with Nicky Gore (Vicky Williams), a teenage girl living in a city (unspecified, but shot in Bristol) with her parents (Sonia Graham, Bernard Horsfall). She is doing homework. The television is on: in this serial made and broadcast in colour, the Gores have a black and white set, which at the time more than half of British households did.
Suddenly, there is a loud humming sound, and her father is moved to smash the television. Outside, people are in the streets, driven by “the noise” to destroy machinery. As they try to escape for the continent, Nicky gets separated from her parents. She moves across the country, at first with a family of Sikhs, in an effort to find safety and perhaps find the source of “the changes”.
Directed throughout by John Prowse, The Changes is a well-remembered serial broadcast in children’s viewing hours, between John Craven’s Newsround and the early-evening news. The credits on each episode say “by Peter Dickinson, adapted by Anna Home”, because the serial is written by the latter from three novels by the former. However, the novels and the serial are sufficiently different that they are best seen as separate entities.
Meet the writers
Dickinson (1927-2015) had a long and distinguished writing career. He wrote detective fiction for adults, but his children’s fiction is often science fiction or fantasy. The trilogy on which The Changes was based was first published in reverse order of internal chronology: The Weathermonger, Heartsease (both 1969) and The Devil’s Children (1970).
At the time the novels were published, the term “young adult” did not exist. There had always been children’s novels with an understanding that some of them were more appropriate for older than younger readers. One marker of whether a novel is young adult, or the American term “middle grade”, is the protagonist’s age.
These novels have entirely different casts of characters, and they become older as the trilogy progresses. Nicky appears only in The Devil’s Children and she is twelve. (The screen Nicky is older.) Margaret, the viewpoint character of Heartsease and with her brother Jonathan the protagonist, is fourteen. Geoffrey in The Weathermonger is sixteen.
Anna Home (born 1938) had worked with Dickinson on a previous BBC serial, Mandog (1972). An admirer of his work, she optioned the Changes Trilogy (as omnibus editions of the novels are called). The serial was originally intended to run for thirteen episodes but it was eventually made in ten.
How the novels were adapted for television
The Changes is a very free adaptation of the novels. Nicky became the central character of the whole story, the only one appearing in every episode. It’s notable that, at a time when a common discussion point is whether boys will read novels about girls (vice versa is assumed to happen automatically), that Dickinson had female leads for two of the novels. The Weathermonger may have a male lead, but Geoffrey’s younger sister Sally is as much a major character. This is borne out in the TV serial: a story not aimed at one sex with a female lead, which it achieves without any fuss.
Jonathan (Keith Ashton) and Margaret (Zuleika Robson) make their appearances in the fifth episode and he becomes a co-lead from then on. Very little of The Weathermonger remains in the serial.
The source of “the changes” in the novel is a reawakened Merlin, panicked by what has happened to the world and seeking to revert it (or at least England) to a previous form. Home provides a different resolution on television, which is hinted at in the final credits of each episode.
The Changes was an undeniably ambitious project – entirely shot on film other than a video effect in the final episode – and was nearly cancelled, only going ahead with the backing of the head of the BBC’s Children’s Department, Monica Sims. The serial of 25 minute episodes was common at the time and was indeed the form of Doctor Who, then broadcast on Saturday evenings. However, Who had not stretched for as long as ten episodes since 1969, and had not gone beyond seven after 1970, so The Changes was unusual in its length, even for drama broadcast during children’s viewing hours. (It was not entirely unprecedented though: 1972’s The Long Chase stretched to thirteen episodes.)
However, at a time when there was no way of recording television for the great majority of people, you had to be at home from school at the same time each week for ten weeks, or you missed episodes. That was the experience of this viewer, aged ten on first broadcast, eleven on the repeat showing on Wednesdays from 9 June 1976 in the school summer holidays. The Changes has not been shown by the BBC since then, though it was shown on UK Gold in 1993. I didn’t see the entire serial from beginning to end until its DVD release in 2014. Unfortunately that DVD is now out of print.
Suitable for children?
The first episode, “The Noise” (each episode has a name which was printed in Radio Times and other listings but does not appear on screen), was broadcast with advice that it was “for older children”. This was announced twice, before Newsround and before The Changes itself. This didn’t prevent people complaining, by phone or letter, that the programme was unsuitable for children. Home and Sims did not believe in pandering to children, nor sugarcoating the content of their programmes. They were certain that young viewers could cope with some tough subject matter, even if it is kept within PG levels. We’re in the tradition of what, in written SF, is called the cosy catastrophe. But here, the England that has been reverted back to pre-industrial times – filmed here in some very picturesque countryside – is no bucolic paradise, but communities infested with xenophobia, racism and intolerance. This reaches its peak halfway through when Nicky is accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death by stoning.
Nicky is a type of heroine we don’t see often any more. She’s written and played as very much an ordinary girl. She’s an only child, which you suspect has a lot to do with her self-reliance – though her parents are about to provide her with a sibling. You could read much of the story as Nicky’s attempt to be part of temporary families while she tries to find her real one, at first with the Sikhs (treated very respectfully, even to the point of having some dialogue in Punjabi), and later with Jonathan, who is a surrogate brother rather than a love interest.
Nicky wins out because of her innate common sense and decency: you can’t imagine someone like her turning up in Skins, say. Vicky Williams plays her with an unshowy conviction that does much to hold the story together, and which offsets some of the more melodramatic turns from the adult guest cast, many of whom will be very familiar from other 1970s television programmes. Aged around seventeen at the time of filming, Williams was something of a veteran as a child actress, having made her screen debut in 1969. She has gone on to an acting career as an adult, billed as Victoria Williams.
Fifty years on, The Changes stands up very well, even if the way it was made inevitably harks back to its time. Certainly many of its themes, such as the intolerance that “the changes” have brought about, are unfortunately as timely as they ever have been. The 1970s were a rich era for small-screen genre shows for children and teenagers, and The Changes is very much part of it.
Do you remember The Changes? Let us know what you thought in the comments below ⬇️
Leave a Reply