In his semi-regular column on the TV that made us SFFH fans, Gary Couzens revisits The Owl Service, a formative book and series for many of today’s folk horror writers.
Divorcee Clive (Edwin Richfield) and widow Margaret have just married and, with his son Roger (Francis Wallis) and her daughter Alison (Gillian Hills), are on holiday in North Wales as Alison recovers from an illness. Keeping house for them are Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) and her son Gwyn (Michael Holden) while Huw (Raymond Llewellyn) tends to the garden. One day, while investigating strange noises in the attic, Gwyn and Alison find an old set of dinner plates with a distinctive owl design. Alison traces these patterns and finds that once she has done so, they have vanished from the plates…
The Owl Service sets a disconcerting tone from the outset, with the opening credits backed by tranquil harp music rudely interrupted by revving motorcycles, flapping bird wings and a chainsaw presumably about to cut down a tree. For what was made as, and broadcast as, a serial for children (no doubt older children – the DVD and Blu-ray releases carry a 12 certificate), The Owl Service distinctly talks up to its intended audience, with camerawork and sound design not dissimilar to some of the more avant-garde films some of their parents were watching in cinemas at the time.
The book and its writer
Alan Garner (pictured, born 1934) has for the most part been published as a children’s writer though, as with the best of them, he has always had a following amongst adults. Much of his work is challenging and more “difficult” than more supposedly adult fiction, not least due to the increased compression of his writing style. At the time, the term “young-adult” did not exist: there were only children’s books, with the understanding that some of them were for older rather than younger readers.
While Garner’s earlier three novels – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963) and Elidor (1965) – were and are for younger children, you could say that The Owl Service, published in 1967, was his first young-adult novel. Its three leads – a male/female ensemble like the previous novels, with a view to the book being read by both sexes – are teenagers and the issues are ones of people just coming of age.
This continued with his next novel, Red Shift (1973). Other than having teenage leads, it’s in very few ways a children’s book, even though it was marketed as such. The Owl Service’s Gwyn is something of a precursor of Tom in the later novel, educated beyond his class background (class tensions feature notably in both novel and serial), sometimes using his jackdaw-acquired knowledge as a conversational shield for his insecurities. (Red Shift was also adapted for television, as an hour-and-a-half Play for Todayin 1978, but as that was in adult viewing time, it’s out of scope for this series.)
The story
Garner’s novels rework old, archetypal templates derived from myth and legend, modern-day reworkings of stories of love and loss and courage.
The Owl Service won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the first of just six novels so far to have won both. Its storyline is based on a legend from The Mabinogion: Blodeuwedd is a woman made from flowers as a gift to Lleu Llaw. She falls in love with Gronw. Gronw is killed by a spear which penetrates stone (leaving a hole) and Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl as a punishment.
In The Owl Service, this old legend took place in the Welsh valley where the family are staying. It’s less a story than psychic energy which becomes pent up and has to be discharged. It’s hinted that Nancy participated in a previous iteration of the story which ended tragically, and this is why she is so angry when Gwyn and Alison find the plates, the “owl service” of the title.
In an epilogue not in the novel, Garner hints that the story will work itself out again, as three young children, two boys and a girl, play around the Stone of Gronw. Alison, Gwyn and Roger, all three in their teens, find themselves embroiled in a fully adult drama of love and jealousy and threatened violence. The adults look on, helpless to intervene. And what is Huw’s role in all this?
The TV series
The success of the novel led to several companies bidding to adapt it for the screen, and Granada Television (the ITV franchise for the Midlands) were the winners. As a young television researcher, producer/director (credited only as the former) Peter Plummer had met Garner when he interviewed him for local television shortly after Weirdstone was published.
Garner adapted his own novel into what was originally intended as seven episodes, but which was extended in editing to eight, all around twenty-four minutes, so a half-hour slot each week with a commercial break in the middle.
The serial was filmed, all on 16mm colour film and all on location except for a few studio days, in May and June 1969, mostly in and around the town of Dinas Mawddwy, Gwynedd.
The Owl Service was only the second Granada drama series to be made in colour, at a time when of the UK’s three channels only BBC2 was broadcasting that way. (The first was The Flower of Gloster (1967), which was broadcast only in black and white, though it has more recently had a DVD release.) One of the ways the serial experiments with colour is in the coding of the three leads’ costume designs. Alison is dressed in red, Gwyn in black and Roger in green, the then-colours of the wires in British electric plugs.
For the most part there are only six characters on screen. In an oddity shared with the novel, Margaret is present throughout the action and even has some influence on the plot but is never seen or heard onscreen.
Of the three leads, only Michael Holden was an actual teenager, nineteen at the time of shooting. Francis Wallis was twenty-two and Gillian Hills twenty-five. She had been acting since the late 1950s and by this time had something of a sexy reputation due to roles in films that most of the audience of The Owl Service was too young to see — such as her lead in Beat Girl (1960) and a taboo-breaking scene with David Hemmings and Jane Birkin in Blowup (1966).
The only other credited cast are four villagers and those three children, all in the final episode. Alan Garner makes a brief appearance by a phonebox and the photograph of Nancy’s late lover Bertram is actually of Peter Plummer.
There are tales of strange coincidences during the making of the serial, such as an owl turning up, and blinking on cue, just when Plummer had been unable to find stock footage of such and was considering making an excursion to a zoo to film one. However, The Owl Service was completed on schedule and on budget. Granada’s reaction was that the action was not always clear, particularly if viewers would have had to follow the story at the pace of an episode a week, so episodes two to eight had sepia-toned recaps added to their starts, which often spell things out more than the episodes themselves do.
Its reception
The serial was broadcast on Sunday afternoons, beginning on 21 December 1969. Due to industrial action at ITV over the new colour technology, The Owl Service was shown in black and white, despite newspaper and TV Times listings indicating otherwise, even in the six out of the then-fourteen ITV regions which had started broadcasting in colour at the time. It wasn’t until a repeat showing in 1978 that the serial could be seen as intended, in colour. That showing was prompted by the untimely death at age forty-four of one of the two cameramen, David Wood. Michael Holden was also dead by then, aged thirty-one, a victim of homicide. The serial had another repeat on Channel 4 in 1987, was released on DVD in 2008 and on Blu-ray in 2023.
The serial of twenty-five to thirty-minute episodes was a common format for children’s drama. At a time when almost no-one had the means to record broadcasts, this relied on viewers sitting down in front of their sets at the same time every week, or else missing it unless there was a repeat. That was how we watched the classic era of Doctor Who, to give just one example, and that show is an example of how things have changed over the years. Nowadays, you’d expect shorter, faster-paced stories, in the case of Who often over with and done in a breathless forty-five minutes.
There’s no denying that The Owl Service is very slow-burning by present-day standards. That’s certainly no bad thing as it does need a little patience, but it soon casts its eerie spell. It stands in a tradition of semi-mystical, sometimes very strange television SF and fantasy for children that carried on well into the following decade and beyond, some of which I’m aiming to highlight in this series.
Do you remember The Owl Service? Let us know what you thought in the comments below ⬇️
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