There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV's (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai ("It's mine! I found it!"), which seems mysteriously to match another in the museum, found a hundred years ago beside a skeleton that had been dead for hundreds more; and Matt's painting ("He found it in an old junk shop") that seems to offer the key to the strange events taking place in Milbury. Co-written by former Dr Who script editor, Trevor Ray, the series is structured like an ouroboros, almost like one of Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops. The village is apparently trapped in a "psychic bubble" or "time circle" and the discovery of these objects seems to imply a kind of fault or slippage between different cycles, different levels of the moebius strip.
Several British films and TV programmes in the 60's and 70's transpose the classic dystopian theme of an individual or small group against the ominous and threatening community from its traditional future city to a more rural, or at least far from metropolitan, setting. Children of the Stones borrows liberally from all of them: the pagan themes, masks and morris dancing from The Wicker Man; its rituals and chanting and supernatural mystery from Nigel Kneale's film, The Witches, for Hammer; and the sinister newspeak greetings shared by the community insiders ("Happy day!") from The Prisoner ("Be seeing you!"). Children of the Stones, however, was made for children's television, anticipating the pre-tea time strangeness of The Tomorrow People.
Like The Tomorrow People, one of the most extraordinary things about Children of the Stones is its music, only in this case achieved without the aid of Delia Derbyshire's VCS-3 synthesizer. Producer, Peter Graham Scott recalls hearing a piece by Penderecki on the radio while driving to the show's location in Avebury and being so inspired to suggest to composer Sidney Sager that he try something similar. Sager agreed to the use of a choir, only insisting upon adding the solo soprano voice which completes the haunting opening theme. The theme was sung by The Ambrosian Singers, started by British early music specialist Denis Stevens and famed for their pop collaborations (including the intro to 'Inside' by Stiltskin) and light music collections. It is based around the acoustic (or Lydian dominant) scale, favoured by Bartok and Franz Liszt for its tonal uncertainty.
Based on the results, the piece by Penderecki may well have been his Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (1970-73). The music shares with Penderecki's great choral work more than just its unusual technical effects - whispering, groaning, murmuring, wailing - also its post-Second Viennese School melodic leaps and cross-wise motion. We hear shades of Berg and Berio, but also Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. It's sweeter than Penderecki, warmer and more repetitive. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the happy smiling faces of the supplicants and the eerie, strangely weightless dissonance of their chant makes up a large part of what is so uncanny about this most singular of programmes.
There was a silence onstage after the DJ finished his set and Foxx's short introductory video had ended. "Come on John," and "Come on Foxxy!" came the cries from the crowd. Having never seen him before I wondered if he always needed to be so cajoled into making his appearance. But appear he did. My word, I thought, he looks rather like Robert Kilroy Silk. But when he sang he did not have the voice of Kilroy. It was a voice to make Davros sound like Jonathan Creek (then again, maybe the voice of Davros is the 'truth' of Kilroy ... ). Actually, the comparison is rather apposite. A great deal of the sounds in tonight's show - and particularly from its first third - would have been quite familiar to a fan of Dr Who in the 60s and 70s, and yet completely alien to anyone watching the BBC today (especially anyone watching Dr Who today). The scream of oscillators, the peal of arpeggiators, the juddering apocalypse of square wave distortion.
On the backdrop, projected images of utopian modernism: skyscrapers and Camel cigarette ads. Remnants of a time before tall buildings were considered high risk terror targets and cigarettes a faux pas in polite society. Remnants of a time that still dared to look forward. For all his - enormous and undeniable - influence on the music of today, he comes across somehow as just as much of an anachronism as the smiles and the cars on the screen. One new song, co-authored with Mira from Ladytron and keyboard wizard Benge (who is part of tonight's ensemble), sounds possibly even more technoprimitive than the oldies in the set. But many of the images (shots of the tube, council blocks, spaghetti junction, and so forth) highlight a peculiarly English modernism that we are so often asked to forget about. To treat the modern as something that happened overseas, while England will be forever Basingstoke, Blackpool and Tunbridge Wells. Foxx embodies as much another England as another time, an England that did go to the moon (if only via the EMS Synthi A).
I remember distinctly seeing this episode as a repeat on BBC2 as an adolescent. I wonder what it was about this particular episode that stuck in my mind; was it the political conflict between environmentalists, coal miners, and a multi-national petro-chemical corporation, the combination of Dudley Simpson's eerie pitched percussion and Dick Mills's electronic screams, or was it the Cronenbergian body horror of the strange maggot creatures lurking down the mine that so piqued the interest of my pubescent mind?
This story, from what we might call the 'golden age' of Dr Who (roughly speaking, season six to season fifteen) is also notable for the use of the sonic screwdriver as a kind of sonic weapon to temporarily paralyse the maggots; a believable love story between Jo Grant and Professor Jones (not to mention more than a twinge of jealousy from the Doctor - albeit the resigned jealousy of an old rake who knows there will always be more fish in the sea); a computer that enjoys humming Beethoven and Wagner to itself and paraphrasing Oscar Wilde; and the Doctor's attempt to fox said computer with one of Douglas Hofstadter's 'Strange Loops':
"The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false."
In Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter uses these self-referential loops, common to both the drawings of M.C. Escher and the canons and fugues of J.S. Bach, to explain the emergence of self-consciousness in an apparently rigidly deterministic system such as the human brain, or that of a computer.
The other nice thing about this 'golden age' period is the gradual introduction of a whole host of semi-regular characters, beyond the Doctor's immediate assistant(s), who pop up from time to time: not just Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton, and Captain Mike Yates, but also The Master and the sinister High Council of the time lords.
Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)
Richard Wagner
Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)
Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)
Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)
