Chocky

Chocky was one of those TV-series that I missed first time round but then felt somehow as if I hadn’t - like Bagpuss and The Magic Roundabout and, to a certain extent, most of the original run of Doctor Who. In fact, it turns out, I only really remembered a couple of bits of it, and they weren't even from the original series.

One thing I did remember very vividly was the title sequence. It turns out that the actual version I remembered was the one from second series, Chocky's Children, which was not actually based on any specific work by John Wyndham but which was distinctly "Wyndham-esque", doing its best to continue the story of the first series in a similar vein. (The only other bit I genuinely remembered was one episode from the third series.) The reason why I remembered this particular title sequence though was probably because although it started each episode with the same scary sci-fi music and creepy revolving geometric shape as the first series had,* it also had an ultra-creepy voice saying the name of the show. (Why? Why not for the first and third series? We’ll probably never know.)

Why don't I remember more? Almost certainly because that was all I saw. Again, why not more? Possibly because it was too scary, possibly because it was too scary and/or boring for my brothers (although “This is rubbish/stupid.” was a good catch-all definition when growing up for things that one didn’t want to watch - much better than to admit to being spooked)! Possibly because there was always something better/more important scheduled on BBC1 at the time! And possibly because tea was always ready at exactly the wrong time!

Anyway, such are the wonders of the modern DVD market. I don’t know why I bought the series on DVD as an Xmas present for myself this year. (Would a Chocky box-set have been a box of Chockies?) It’s possible that it was because Auntie was re-showing the Triffids series recently and I got a hankering for more Wyndham. It’s just as possible though that I noticed that Devin Stanfield from The Box of Delights (Auntie's Not-a-Box of Chockies) was in it and I wanted to check out the one other thing he’d been in before he chucked it all in and got a life.

So what (and who) was Chocky? On one level it was standard childhood wish-fulfillment about an invisible alien friend giving a boy called Matthew magic powers - more serious than most of the CFF stuff from the '60s and '70s, and sci-fi rather than straight fantasy, but at the same time very much proto-Harry Potter (though when Harry starts hearing voices in Chamber of Secrets it's a Bad Thing). ‘[L]ike a Children's Film Foundation movie directed by David Lynch’ is probably a good description, except that unlike the master of modern surrealism's work it's very much played for real. The invisible friend who helps you become good at cricket is standard fare. Good at art and maths as well though? Perhaps less so! But how many children in children’s fantasy stories end up being sent to therapy by their parents?

So despite the escapist premise, which normally means the kid and his friends end up getting their own back at the nasty parent(s)/teacher(s)/authority figures generally, Matthew's father in Chocky by the end has been read into what’s going on – by the eponymous alien herself, in person, no less. It’s an extraordinarily mature attitude for any children’s sci-fi/fantasy work to take, and to my knowledge quite unique. A slightly more mature alternative to the "kids get their own back"-meme, as in Alan Garner’s and Susan Cooper’s books, not to mention the 21st century’s own dear Harry Potter, is that the adults are completely left behind, whether physically or spiritually, permanently befuddled by phenomena that their children take for granted. Even C S Lewis didn't quite manage to solve this rather basic problem. (Prof Kirke in Wardrobe is, we later learn, simply a “grown-up” Narnia child himself.) Only Tolkien really escapes the trap. (The hobbits, although not technically children, do play that function, but their involvements in the wide world beyond the Shire do eventually lead to a wholesale change for the better in their own society.)

Matthew's mother as it happens is treated in a way that is arguably quite misogynistic – not to say anachronistic. But that only really underlines the "unusualness" of the relationship of the son with his father, because the man and the boy are in fact very good together. And ultimately it’s the sense that Matthew benefits personally from his extra-terrestrial visitation in a real, positive way – he ends up much closer to his adoptive father who encourages his emerging artistic talent – that is probably the most surprisingly affecting thing about it.

Another subversion of the wish-fulfilment trope – although here at least the fairy-tale logic is fairly tried and tested – is that it explores the potential negative consequences both to Matthew personally and to humanity generally of things suddenly going really well. For Matthew himself it’s his painting, and the downside is that he's treated as a child prodigy. For humanity generally it’s free cosmic energy and the global political ramifications thereof.

I haven’t read the book and don't know much about Wyndham's politics, so I can’t say what Wyndham would have made of the conclusion, but here the leftism is fairly standard - dull and tedious: in the end it's the energy companies (the nasty right-wing capitalists) – in cahoots, somewhat improbably, with Harley Street child psychiatrists – who try to banjax the free energy programme. I suppose they might. We don’t really find out the identities of the baddies in Chocky’s Children, but apparently they’re the same hyper-powerful bunch of private healthcare professionals as in the first series, who for some reason not only believe in extraterrestrials but also want to cover up their existence in order to protect the fossil fuel energy industry – and yet who can’t just pull themselves together and squish the little moppets that the aliens are working with. Fundamentally then, it's still the evil capitalists, who are trying to stop us getting Chocky's free energy. And then finally in the third series, Chocky's Challenge, it's the evil British military who are trying to exploit it.

It's not just the plots that are variable. The acting from the young prodigies themselves is decidedly hit-and-miss. In the first series, Andrew Ellams is utterly enchanting, throwing himself into the role with the mad passion that only a twelve-year-old boy can muster. His performance only really hits the skids in the second series when he’s placed opposite the girl who plays Albertine, his sidekick/prepubescent love interest. And by the third series, which he’s hardly in, he’s honed/confined his performance to little more than two facial expressions and a couple of costume changes. The sweetness, bumptiousness, cheekiness, pathos, alien weirdness and – perhaps most importantly – sheer energy of his performance in the first series all seem to have just vanished away, leaving a young actor who isn’t even embarrassed so much as bored. (He's now a secondary school economics teacher. Go figure!)

Why don’t we have shows like this anymore? I’m afraid the answer quite simply is because you just can’t get the boys nowadays. Or rather you can, but Auntie for political reasons is loathe to employ them. Good child actors are clever children and clever children tend to be rich and posh (and white - duh!). And that’s ironic, because in the days of Chocky and The Box of Delights children were cast because their parents were friends of the floor manager or the producer or whatever. The days of Jamie Bell and Asa Butterfield were still a long way in the future. And in any case, although she started out on telly, Pippa Hall’s magic has now moved on to the movies, and TV is left with ethnic children and the occasional pretty boy who can live in the hope of being the next Jude Law.

Devin Stanfield is the greatest loss in the second series. The new girl is simply rubbish. Most disappointingly of all, Matthew himself, who absolutely made the first series and single-handedly just about saved the second series, has by the third series been all but phased out. And having been the sort of boy in the first series who enthused about smashing teas and rides in police cars, by the thrid series he's become an utterly dull artsy type who wears a baseball cap (because he's been to America, and that's what Americans do). His multicultural replacements, moreover, are utterly abysmal even by multiculturalist standards - stereotypes imported into the story partly to comply with strict conventions of sci-fi that go back at least to the 1950s but mostly because of early-onset political correctness. The gook and the coon aren’t just embarrassing proto-PC cyphers – they’re embarrassingly poorly stereotyped proto-PC cyphers at that. (I suppose the most obvious lesson – that you try to be PC and end up being a bit racist, so what’s the point? - is a good one, but it's one that TV and film producers are never likely to learn.)

By the time the story of the third series has struggled to its abrupt conclusion, creepiness, subtlety and realism have all seemingly been ditched and the whole thing has degenerated into little more than a slightly posher (Oxbridge, doncha know!) version of The Tomorrow People (which was always a danger, to be fair, given Christopher Hodson’s work on both) – only set in the 1980s (with a female baddy who’s a cross between Mrs Thatcher and Princess Diana) and without the simmering latent homoeroticism. (Which, if you think about it, is all a bit of a shame!) Either that, that is to say, or an early version of The Sarah Jane Adventures!

Which is a pity, because generally the science-fiction element is sparse, and that makes it realistic, and that makes it scary. (With the honest exception of Predator, invisible aliens are the scariest sort for that very reason.) Even the technobabble in the second and third series is of a reasonably high standard. At the end of the day, after all, it’s Anthony Read, who's been much overlooked for his work on Doctor Who – seen today, somewhat sadly, as the filler between the “classic” Hinchcliffe era and that of ultra-groovy, post-modern, “famous” Douglas Adams.

The Cambridge thing is sort of interesting though. A little bit of Shada! A little big of East Anglian Puritanism! (Given the clean-cut, emotionally slightly dysfunctional atmosphere of the Fenlands, with its black-and-white morality and its commitment to excellence but to no particular purpose, one wonders what Doctor Who might have been like in the late '70s if more of its production team had been educated in the Thames Valley.) So too is the idea of replacing the original capitalist baddies with the British military. Sadly though, none of it is particularly well realised. (The military baddy himself is a two-dimensional buffoon who makes Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart seem like a tortured soul by comparison.) Nothing gets a chance to work itself out properly, and finally there's a lack of closure, just as there is in The Omen "trilogy". (The deus ex machina-solution at the end, albeit not quite as literal as in the final Omen film, is something else the two trilogies have in common.)

And yet despite all this the underlying problem is that Wyndham by this point has been left far behind, and any real chance of getting back to any his original ideas  has been all but exhausted. All-in-all, there's a sense of a show having parted company from its roots and ended up in a mess.

That's not to say that the "trilogy" over all isn't enjoyable. But it's the first series that is really very very good and promising, and that promise doesn't in-and-of itself demand sequels. All great children's stories end with a similar desire to know more - what happened to the kids later on, what would they have been like as adults? - and it's a problem that's not easy to get round. One solution obviously is actually to have the children grow up, and from Dickens to Narnia (and arguably Middle-earth) that can work. But what all great children's stories (and arguably all great stories) are really about is about "growing up", and part of growing up is learning to think for yourself.

Answering the question 'What happens next?' is what life is all about.

*Not to mention the weird Jor-El crystal head effect from Superman: The Movie - which then seemed to turn into a weird Easter-egg image – which was perhaps unfortunate, given that the show’s name!