S01 E12 - The Boys Book of Homoeroticism

On this episode Dylan is joined by J.R Southall to look at the expanded universe of the Tripods. First up the tackle the comic strips from Boys Life Magazine and BBC Junior Television Magazine, then they look at the prequel novel 'When The Tripods Came' by John Christopher.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah, then you just take all the bug bits and lead the way, mate.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Welcome back to Two Hot for TV. We are the podcast that looks at all things expanded universe. Today, I'm joined by podcaster and writer J.R. Southhall. J.R., welcome to the Other Two Hot for TV.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Oh, this is my first time on the other two Hot for TV, I think. It is indeed. Oh, it's so good.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

It's so much so much benefit the Doctor Who version. Well, everybody talks about Doctor Who, don't they?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

They do. I try not to. Well, not all the time, anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

So, JR, why don't you tell everybody out there what you or we have chosen to talk about today?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Oh my god, this is a bit of a weird deep dive, isn't it? We are doing the tripods. Yes. But we are doing expanded media, not from the TV version of the tripods, but from the novels of the tripods.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Although some of it is from the TV version as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Well, there's a little bit that's from the TV version, but also, I guess technically, that's also from the novels as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

I suppose you could have that even if you didn't have the TV version. The timeline of this is quite interesting, actually. Yeah. We'll go into that in a minute. The timeline's funny.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Absolutely. So The Tripods is a series of young adult science fiction novels by John Christopher, published in 1967. The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity is enslaved by tripods, gigantic three-legged walking machines piloted by an alien race identified as the Masters. The first two books were the basis of a science fiction TV series produced in the United Kingdom by the BBC in the 1980s, which ran from 1984 to 1985. And it hasn't got much else. You know, it's books, it's a TV series, and ultimately it's a couple of comics we're going to talk about. But what's your relationship with the tripods?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

I think I read The White Mountains at school. But I was thinking about this today. So this would have been in the early 80s. I don't think it was on the curriculum. I think when we started in secondary school, in order to try and get you into reading the books that were on the curriculum, I think the teachers either gave you books to read that weren't that they thought might interest you. Or else there was a reading list. And the White Mountains was either on the reading list or it's one of the books we did in class. And I'd always assumed it was one of the books we did in class. But to be honest, I can't imagine doing the White Mountains in class. Not with like 15 boys and 15 girls. Because this is not really a book for girls. Let's be honest.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

And I suppose You know why that is though, don't you? John Christopher's publisher said to him, girls will read boys' books. Boys won't won't read girls' books, so don't write for girls.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

He's told this story so many times. He's just basically making an excuse for his own bloody sexism, I think. I don't know. But I read it at some point in the very early 80s anyway, and I absolutely loved it. And so then I went out and bought the two sequel books, City of Golden Lead and Pool of Fire, immediately. And so I read the whole trilogy over and over again throughout the 1980s. I think that the very first time I read The White Mountains, I was already aware of its lineage. Because I even as I was reading it, I'm pretty sure I was thinking to myself, oh, John Wyndham did this 20 years earlier in the day of the Triffids, and H.G. Wells did it 55 years before that in The War of the Worlds. And I think they all take the same idea. I think they all borrow the ideas from each other and bring something new to it. Because it's tripods, right? There's no way John Christopher wasn't aware of H. G. Wells. And in fact, one of the things we're talking about, I've got a second edition of it where there's a preface by John Christopher where he explains himself. And even in explaining himself, he can't help but bring up H. G. Wells, even though he doesn't admit to having been influenced by him. So I I I think I thought, well, this is basically your sort of third step down from the War of the World, but I still loved it anyway. I love all of those three things. And so for me, more of the same is like a good thing, not a bad thing.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

So then what about the TV series? Were you a fan of that? No. Even fans of that aren't fans of that though. My only relationship with it is the TV series, which I own on DVD. There's some good episodes, it's got a great theme tune, looks great in places, but it's not a cohesive series, and it's pretty dull in in a lot of places. And I've tried to watch it a number of times, and I've ended up just sort of going, I'll skip this episode. I'll skip this.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Do you know what? The TV so the casting is not great, and the directing does not bring anything out of those actors. So those actors I think are pretty much left to flounder. And it's Christopher Barry. I don't think Christopher Barry's a great director, I've got to be completely honest. I agree. Occasionally, yeah. Occasionally he'll turn something in, like the demons, but very rarely. And most of the time he'd turn in absolute dross. The weird thing about the tripods TV series is in the second series, which is it's is it 12 episodes or 13 again in the second series? Either way.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

Feels like 400.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

There's about six which are outside the city of Golden Lead, and there's about six which are inside the city of Golden Lead. And the six which are inside the city of Golden Lead are directed by somebody else. And all of a sudden, the story just absolutely lifts. So those six episodes inside the city of Golden Lead are the best six episodes in the entire 26 or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

I I couldn't tell you. I remember quite enjoying them.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Well you don't need to, because I just told you.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

So the first thing we're gonna look at today is a bunch of comic strips based on the tripods. One being from Boys Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, which I'm sure we were all big fans of, uh, which ran from May 81 to August 86 with Art by Frank Belay. And then the 1985 comic strip, which was in the BBC initiated Beb, the BBC Junior television magazine, which is based on the TV series and it's sort of extended universe stuff for that, whereas the first one's more of an adaptation.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

It's the BBC's attempt to do something like was it called Lookin'? The one that was basically based around ITV. It was the BBC attempting to do something like look-in. So you had like the Tomorrow People cartoon strip and stuff in Lookin', right? And so, similar deal here. And it just didn't take off.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Will Parker lives in a world where humanity is controlled by the tripods. Giant three-legged machines that place mind-controlling caps on people when they reach adulthood. Unwilling to submit, Will flees his village with his cousin Henry and later joins a boy named Beanpole. Together, they travel across Europe towards the White Mountains, a hidden refuge where humans resist the tripods. After a difficult journey, they reach the resistance and learn more about their enemy. Chosen by the Resistance, Will, Beanpole, and another boy named Fritz infiltrate the city of the tripods by entering a series of athletic games. After earning victory, they are taken to serve as attendants to the alien masters who control the tripods. While living among them, the boys discover important information about the master's plan, society, and vulnerabilities. They eventually escape and return to the resistance with knowledge that could help humanity fight back. Armed with the intelligence gathered from the city of Golden Lead, the Resistance launches a campaign against the Masters. Will and his companions take part in dangerous missions aimed at disrupting the aliens' control over Earth. As the conflict spreads, humanity rises against the tripods and their rulers. The struggle culminates in a final confrontation that determines the future of both Earth and the Masters Empire. Did you know these existed?

SPEAKER_01 9:00

No, I found out a few weeks ago. I mean, the one that's in the Scout magazine in America, I I mean, I've never lived in America, and I've never been a member of the Scouts. So that's two reasons why I would never have heard of that.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Yeah, it's it's an odd one, isn't it? Like, somebody actually mentioned doing tripods when I did a small run of non-Doctor Who stuff on the Doctor Who podcast, and I looked into it, and this was what I could find, and they were like, oh, well then let's not bother them.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

But you can find them online. Yeah. All of the boys' life ones are on the Wayback Machine, and all of the episodes of the all of the issues actually, whole issues of the Beeb magazine are on Flickr, I think it was. Right. Where we found them. And the weird thing is the crossover of the timeline, isn't it? The boys' life thing starts like four or five years before the TV version. So three and a half years. So that is clearly not inspired by the TV version. You've got to wonder how well those novels sold in North America.

SPEAKER_03 9:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I wonder if maybe because Scouts magazine, they're not going to have the biggest budget, presumably. I wonder if they got the rights for those fairly cheap, because maybe they hadn't done massively well in America.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Yeah, the books may not have sold well there. And, you know, they're quite European novels. They're very British novels, but they're quite European as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:19

And the t as you say, the TV series hasn't started. So it's probably a bit of IP, not that they would have called it that then, that just was going cheap in America because, you know, you might as well make a few shillings out of it if you can.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah, yeah. And and obviously the version in Beb, after Doctor Who looked like it was stuttering, they'd put some money into the tripods. And they used some. I mean, I read this on I saw I was like doing a bit on Wikipedia today before we started. They were using early versions of uh sort of CGI on the tripods. The first time the BBC had used computer animation on television, I think it said. And so the tripods, when it came, when it was on the tele, the first series, that was quite a there was quite a lot of promotion around that. There was obviously hopes for it. Yeah. And and clearly as well, there's like uh internal changes at the BBC. And the old guy who liked it goes out, the new guy who doesn't want it comes in and knocks it on the head. But not before, it's got so much promotion and so much interest that they've turned it into pretty much the lead strip in this magazine. It's on like page eight. I think it's the first I can't remember, but I think it's the first comic strip you come to, or the second one. So yeah, big thing.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Yeah, no, clearly, and I mean it only ran for 20 issues, but you wonder like, had it been in a slightly more popular magazine, it probably would have outlived the the TV show considerably because it's a you know it's a decent little strip. The first one, having not read the books and only being vaguely familiar with the TV series.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Have you still not read the books?

SPEAKER_02 11:57

No.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Oh wow, they're really good.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

I f I find I find it all a bit silly to be honest, JR.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

John Christopher, should we do a slight tangent and then come back to your point? Is that alright? John Christopher was basically kind of so the expression YA didn't exist back in the 60s and the 70s, right? That's like an invention, the expression of the 21st century. But John Christopher was doing that back then. The YA that I've experienced has always been authors using a fantasy or sci-fi analogy for something that teenagers go through in their ordinary lives. And so there's a science fiction thing and it represents a change that you go through during your adolescence. And John Christopher was basically doing that back in the 60s. The White Mountains is really uh it's got it's two things. One of it is sort of a post-war thing. But I think the question it's asking is not if what if Germany had won the war, but what if Russia had won the war? Because the perception of Russia in Britain in the sort of fifties and sixties was of a peasant nation with now heavy artillery. And so you look at the White Mountains, it's about peasants and heavy artillery. It's so I think really it's what if Russia won the war, and what if these teenage lads, as part of their adolescence, go on this big journey, the big journey being adolescence, right? Yeah. And the journey that sort of takes them away from. I mean, judging by a few of the things he said, I think John Christopher was a bit of a communist himself. So but clearly not one who was over enamoured. So I think communist with a small c and very much not over enamoured with what was going on in Russia. And so there's this weird thing going on there where you've got sort of communism, but not communism, and children becoming adults all at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

See, all I get from the TV series is homoeroticism, and all I get from the comic strip is boys' own adventure. So perhaps I do need to read the books. I'm probably not gonna, to be honest. I'm probably not gonna.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

I'm gonna show you something now, and this is so this is for the video, not for that's a box full of John Christopher books, all of which tell post-apocalypse stories about teenage boys finding themselves. And there's no homoeroticism in there, just John Christopher really loves to tell that story. And the White Mountains is the best version of it, but he's told it two dozen times, and a lot of those books are also really good.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Right. I mean, I I've just I'm just not familiar with him and his post-apocalyptic universe.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Yeah, I know, fair enough.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

So the boys life one, is it a different take from the books? Does it veer far from the source material? Obviously, you've got less to play with in terms of words, but you've got the visuals. So where does it land?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

My takeaway from this, from reading this, is I just don't know how much you'd get from it if you hadn't read the novel. Well. And and if you have read the novel, I don't know what you're getting from this either. Because I mean it's literally, it's literally the novel. There's it it doesn't deviate or differ in any way. The only thing it does is because it's telling it I mean, can you imagine this magazine that comes out once a month, you get one page of this strip. And then you've got to wait another month until you get the next page of this strip. How much are you getting out of that? I don't know. But it's it is literally the barest bones of, I suppose, each chapter of the novel transposed to a page of comic strip. And it was quite nice reading it, but you know what it was like? It was like reading the cliff notes. It was like reading a refresher. These are the things that happened in the book, but I'm not getting anything else out of it other than these are the things that happened in the book. And I remember enjoying reading the book.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Well, it worked for me because having not read the books and vaguely paid attention to the TV show, I feel like I know what the tripods is about now. So, you know, I mean what? It probably took me an hour to get through all three books, something like that. Like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because the artwork's there and it's it's there to illustrate a point. But I'm it's not the sort of artwork where I'm like, God, I must stare at that for hours. It's a straightforward retelling of of the three tripods books work for me. And I imagine if you're a seven-year-old Boy Scout, it's very, very exciting if you could be bothered to wait a month for the next the next issue. Well, this is it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 16:43

But they start the story in May of 1981, and they get to the end of the story in August of 1986, over five years later. I mean, if I can't imagine that anybody was in the scouts for five and a half years.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

No. If you're nine in 1981, you're well into your teams at that point, and you're not reading Boys Life magazine.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

And there's no eBay for people to go to and get back issues. So presumably you're turning up halfway through the city of Golden Lead, and you're not sticking around for the end of the pool of fire. So 99.9% are the people who are reading this, and the 0.1% is the author of the actual strips. They're not reading the whole thing. We're probably the first people No, we're not. I know we're not, because obviously they're on the Wayback Machine, and I'm the member of the tripods group on Facebook now as well. But I was gonna say, flippantly, we're probably the first people who've actually read this from start to finish.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

If there's anybody out there who read these at the time and was a Boy Scout and a subscriber to Boys Life, please do get in touch and let us know how much of it you actually consumed, because I I'd be interested to know. Or if this was your first exposure to the tripods, no one's gonna write in, but you know.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

I mean, but they'd have to be in America. And the thing about podcasts is I mean, by and large, we tend to uh do better in our own countries than we do abroad, don't we?

SPEAKER_02 18:10

Well, quite, but there's a few Americans that are.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

But there's a few, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

You know?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

So you never know.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Well exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

I mean, most of our listeners, your listeners and my listeners, would probably there'd be a certain cross-section who are of the right age.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

What you this is this is a hip young podcast, JR.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Okay, my podcast of the right age.

SPEAKER_02 18:31

So then the other one from Beeb Magazine, this takes the format of I mean, is it bits of the book or is it new bits?

SPEAKER_01 18:39

It's new bits inserted in. Okay. A bit like it's kind of it's the big finish of the comic strip world. Right, okay, that makes sense. It's sticking new bits in a gap. So there's a bit in the novel, I think it's fairly early in the novel as well. I think I read somewhere it was chapter four, but that seems a bit too early to me. But somewhere towards the middle of the book, they go through Paris.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

And these comic strips are basically inserted, either just before or just after they've done Paris, I think.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Does it do anything new and interesting with them besides or is it just more traipsing across Europe, the country, whatever?

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I think it does. But before I answer, because I have a certain take on it from having read the books. What did you think?

SPEAKER_02 19:26

I mean, because I hadn't read the books, and because I don't really like the TV series, I was bored shitless by these ones in a way that ha ha ha th the ones that were retelling the book, I was like, oh, this is the tripods, but these ones just didn't didn't work for me.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

Oh wow. I don't I don't think they're exceptionally good, but I do think they do something interesting. Because I suppose because if they're inserting it into the middle of the novel, then they've got to be very careful and bring everybody out, sort of mentally and physically the same as when they went in. So there's not much drama around whether the three protagonists will survive. So they add a fourth one, and tellingly, since we're in the 1980s now, the fourth one that they add in is a girl, right? Yeah. Much like there's a whole episode of the TV series, which is entirely brand new to the TV series, the one where the girls' convent thing?

SPEAKER_02 20:22

Yeah, I do remember that one.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah, there's no girl there's no girls' convent in the novel.

unknown 20:26

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

There's no girls in the novel, there's no women in the novel at all, pretty much. But I I think it does something slightly interesting. It kind of Because the the thing is it's inserted into the first novel, but obviously those novels were written 20 years before nearly. So the people who are writing this will know what happens in the second and third novels. So they're able to introduce allusions to things that the reader might or might not know about. Because the re at this point the reader might only have seen the TV version. But I think they expand the lore slightly beyond the TV. And they also introduce a sort of Walking Dead type element. You know, in The Walking Dead, I say this not having seen The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead. I mean, I watched the first episode and there's a bit at the end with the horse, and my partner said, I am not watching any more of that given what they've done to this horse, and I've not had a chance to go back since. But in The Walking Dead, right, you've got lots of different groups, and essentially the story is how will these groups interact with each other to a degree. And you get the same thing in a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff, right? Fallout does the same thing, and obviously Survivors did the same thing. And there's so there's a thing here that the books don't do, because the books aren't really about the disparate groups, because everybody in the books has been uh uh taken over by the tripods. So the books is about these three boys walking through a landscape where everybody is under the control of the tripods. So you don't get lots of different groups. What the book does is it takes the idea of the tramp who is uncapped at the start, and it says, right, what if we meet more people who are in groups who are uncapped? And how do these people interact with each other? Because in the city of Golden Lead and the Pool of Fire, especially in the Pool of Fire, there are all these other groups that they get together with to bring down the tripods. And so the comic strip in Beb introduces the idea of all these different groups that not in a benevolent way, these groups are not working together. These are more like the hungry and the wretched and the desperate. And they're sort of preying on each other more, a bit like in something like The Walking Dead or Survivors.

SPEAKER_03 22:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

But the book is putting those on the page, the comic strip and Bieb is putting those on the page in a way that the books don't, and that the TV series wouldn't. And so I just thought it was a really interesting alternative angle on the sort of tripod story.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

I guess if you're not invested in the the TV series, it's it's a harder sell. What do you think of the realization of the tripods in both these strips?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

I think they're pretty good actually. I like the tripods in them. Yeah. The ones that are in Boys' life, obviously, that's way before the um TV series comes about. And even when the TV series has started and they're still going through the third book, they've obviously made their choices about how everything looks. But I the the tripods, the ones that they've come up with, they look like a sort of medieval helmet with legs, don't they?

SPEAKER_03 23:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

And I think that's really effective.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

And the masters inside kind of look like Vogans from um Hitchhiker's the TV series. But they do. They're well realised. I don't I get the threat of the tripods within that first comic strip, but the masters seem fairly ineffective, full stop. Yeah. And I think this is one of my problems with the tripods in general, is it's it's it's just a bit of a silly idea. You know, like why why turn this planet that's full of people into things? Why not go to a planet that's suitable? Why does everybody forget in like a generation about all technology and things like that? It's just a little bit silly.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Yeah, there is a point in one of the comic strips, I can't remember if it's one of the boys' life ones or whether it's in the Bib one, where they date it to 2086.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

And so it's supposed to be a hundred years in the future. And I'm wondering if that's a date that they've come up with. I always, I don't know why necessarily, but I always assumed that the tr the White Mountains was about 200 years or so after the fall of civilization. Because it's gonna take a certain amount of time to forget everything, right? So I figured it's about a couple of hundred years in the future, if not more. Have you ever read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham?

SPEAKER_02 25:00

I've never even heard of it.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Okay, so that's that's the most famous John Wyndham that's never been adapted for the screen. Right. And basically, the White Mountains is the chrysalids with the trifids in it, basically.

SPEAKER_02 25:15

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

So the chrysalids is 200 years after a nuclear bomb, after a nuclear war has killed out most of mankind, and there are a few areas left on the planet that haven't been sort of like aren't filled with radiation, and so there are small pockets of humanity living, and they've devolved back to sort of basically late medieval or you know pre-Victorian and so very much the White Mountains is very much the same as the chrysalids. But in the chrysalids, instead of having tripods, some of them develop telepathy. So again, it's the same story, they're on the run. They think by by developing telepathy, they're going to be they're going to be um executed or whatever, so they have to run and find a safe place. So it's just like the White Mountains, they're looking for the White Mountains and they're escaping from the people who would cap them.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

All these apocalypses sound very, very silly, JR. What about the characters? So let's take the boys' life one. Are are these the familiar characters from the book, or is it uh are they just boiled down to their their bare minimum?

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Nope, they are, to be fair. I think they do a relatively good job of bringing those characters to life. I don't I mean, it's very thin, especially the first one, the White Mountains they do in 15 pages, and then they expand that to 19 for the city of Golden Lead, because they clearly realize that they've stripped it back too far. Plus, they probably want to keep it going, right? They've spent their money, so they want to keep it going. And then I think the pool of fire is 30 pages, so it's twice as long as the White Mountains, despite covering probably less ground than the book. So the White Mountains is very thin. But I think even in that thinness, I think the boys in the book are well drawn enough that it doesn't take a lot to bring them to the page in the comic strip. Especially, I suppose, if you know the books. Or the TV version, to be fair. The TV version, I have watched it like twice. Maybe three times even. Yeah, three times. And they're they do a decent job in the TV version of bringing the characters off the page, and I think they do the same in the comic strip. Because they are the the the boys are quite well drawn in the book. This is what John Christopher's really good at is bringing characters out. And because Will is not especially likable, but you understand him and you completely sympathise with his rashness and his the way he sort of easily gets angered by stuff.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

And what about in the uh Beeb strip? Does that feel like the kids from the TV show? Yeah, it does. I mean, what did you think?

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Did you not? I think it does.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

I mean, yeah, like they irritated the fuck out of me like they do in the TV show.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, fair.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

I I don't have particularly high opinions of them.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

But again, I think, again, it comes from the idea that he just wrote three very distinct characters in the book. So Will and Henry and Beanpo in the book are so distinct. And I think this is why these books have lived on, you know. These books have got a huge sort of cult following. And it's because of the characters as much as the idea, I think.

SPEAKER_02 28:22

And does the Beebe strip capture the feel of the TV show?

SPEAKER_01 28:27

No, it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

No.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Not at all. But that's its strength, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 28:32

I think it probably is. I think so. It's more of an apocalypse in those comic strips than it ever feels like on the TV show, I think.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Yeah, yeah. But then I don't think the TV version is supposed to. The book is not an apocalypse. The the landscape, I mean, like I say, I think it's 200 years in the future. I think the apocalypse is so far in the rearview mirror, I don't think there would be any evidence of it. And so actually, the thing about the comic strip is, because it does make it feel a bit more post-apocalyptic, I think it gets that part wrong. But at the same time, I also quite enjoy it.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

Yeah, fair, fair.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Do you know Disney owned the rights to all of these now, apparently?

SPEAKER_02 29:12

I don't know about that. It's but they've had them for a while, haven't they?

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I'm not sure whether they bought the rights to these books or just to the John Christopher Back catalogue.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

Oh, I could not tell you, but it feels like the sort of thing that every few years somebody must go, oh, and we've got this. Should we do something with it? And they stew around with it and then go. Nah.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

I think there's sort of like two reasons why not, though. I mean, if you're gonna do tripods, right, you go to War of the Worlds.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Or Day of the Triffids, potentially.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

And War of the Worlds is public property now, so why would you play with an IP?

SPEAKER_01 29:47

But also, this is there's no female characters. Disney is the home of the Disney princess. And whatever you might say about Disney, they have always, always had very strong female characters with tons of agency. So you stick in a story with like three men and no women at all, you'd have to make some pretty radical changes. You'd I think you'd have to make Will, the lead character, a girl, because neither Henry or Beanpole, I think you could do as a girl, so it would have to be Will. And Will's not the most pleasant of characters, frankly. But also the other thing is, I don't I like I said earlier, I think the book is about the Cold War, about foreseeing a time if Russia won the Cold War and Will became Russian. I mean, you can't tell that story in 2026. So what would be the point? So I just think so, as much as I love the books, I don't think they're culturally rele relevant these days. I think you'd have to find something else to make them be about.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Yeah, and the moment you start to do that, you drift further and further away from the tripods, and again you're left in this thing of, well, we could just do something new. Because it's got a cult following, but it's not a big enough property to go, the name alone will make people show up.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think there's a definitely a generation of people like me who were off the age where this was in and around schools in the early 80s, but I don't necessarily think that probably carried on much after.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

No.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

And the problem with the TV series is because they never finished it, instead of relaunching it for a new generation, I think there's probably a generation like you who that kicked the idea on the head for.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

Yeah. Absolutely. And the the generation it most appealed to were probably just waiting for Doctor Who to come back, to be perfectly honest. Yeah. It was in the slot. It was like, well, this will do until they bring Doctor Who back. So it it just, you know, it wasn't to me. That's certainly what it felt like watching it, I've got to be honest. I mean, that is, and admittedly, a lot of the people and podcasts I listen to are Doctor Who adjacent at least. And Doctor Who fans, that's what everybody says. But, you know, maybe there is, I mean, there is tripods cast that uh John Isles does, which is a brilliant examination of the TV series, the books, and everything associated with it.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

I'm in the middle of listening to it now. I deliberately stopped before we got anywhere near any of these things. Right. So that I didn't so I wasn't repeating somebody else's take on it.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

I listened to it when it came out, which was a few years ago now, and that is my biggest exposure to the tripods, is just listening to that. Right. So what about the artwork? Let's look at Boy's Life, first of all.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

There's nothing really to say, is there? I don't want to disparage the work of the people making it. And I and so this is not a criticism, but it's very plain really.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

Yeah, it's functional. It does the job.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

There's some nice bits, there's some nice touches. I quite like the when you very first see the City of Golden Lead, for example, in the City of Golden Lead adaptation, that's a nice image. And that carries something that nobody reading this well, no, there it's in America, isn't it? Nobody reading this has read the books and the TVC. But if this had been published in Britain, that would have been a completely new image for everybody reading this. And I think it does a pretty good job of imagining the masters and stuff. So the people drawing it, I think have got a fairly clear idea in their heads of what everything needs to look like, but at the same time, it's very functional. It doesn't I it's at a time anyway, isn't it? When I don't think mainstream comic strips were too stylistic. No. It's before the dark night turns things around, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 33:38

Yeah, and ultimately this is a comic for it's very much for children. Yeah, you know, you could imagine the same magazine has probably got not the Billy Bunter comic strip, because I don't know whether that ever made it to America, but a film a similar ilk, a famous five comic strip, something like that, drawn exactly the same, but it works for what it is. I'm more enamoured with the artwork in the Beeb magazine one because it feels like someone's having a great time drawing that.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Oh yeah, that is. I mean, and that's only a few years later.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

I mean, well, I mean, that it crosses over, doesn't it? The Beeb comic strip. I mean, let's see, I've got the date in front of me. The Beeb one is 1985, and the Boys' Life one doesn't finish till 1986. So the Beeb one happens entirely while the other one's happening. And yeah, that very much is. Do you know what that reminded me of? Is um some of the strips. So I was never a big fan of comics when I was a kid, but I did try various different ones, and usually after a few issues, I'd get bored and move to something else. But I bought the first few issues of 2000 AD.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

And this made me think of that. I don't know what the timeline is. I think 2000 AD was probably around about the same time, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Quite possibly. I'm not a big 2000 AD person, but uh John M. Burns did end up doing some illustrations for 2000 AD. He's someone that he did things like TV 21 and the Lady Penelope, some extra TV action. So he he he's got lots of other credits, but it feels like throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, he's doing lots of tie-in stuff. He does Doctor Who TV, Comic Annual, Space 1999, Kung Fu, The Tomorrow People in the Look In Annual.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

So he probably starts as fairly functional. Yeah. And by the time you get to this stage of his career, he's probably spreading his wings a bit.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

Yeah, absolutely. And his last credit was for The Spirit, and the one before that was 2000 AD, uh, which he worked on continuously from 2014 to 2023. Wow. Wow. So he he's had quite the career. That was the big takeaway for me from these strips was the art of the second one. I just thought this is someone someone loves drawing an apocalypse and as is making this show look a bit meatier than it is on television.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Yeah, yeah, far.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Do you have much more to say on these comics? Because they're quite light on content. You know, one's retelling the TV show, the other one's filling in some gaps. Is there any like standout moments, any exciting things that you want to point out?

SPEAKER_01 36:20

So if you were a fan of the TV series, and of course it gets knocked on the head before they get a chance to do the third book, I think it would be a nice thing to do to go out and find the comic strips of the third one. Because the comic strips of the third one, purely by chance, there's twice as much of that as there is of the White Mountains. So they've obviously I mean, probably because they were trying to eek it out, but they've they've done a much better job of the pool of fire than they did of White Mountains. And so I think if you enjoyed the first two TV series, it's well worth seeking out the comics of the third one to try and have a sort of visual version of that third story that you don't get because it's not on telling.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

With someone who's not planning to read the books, it was nice to sort of finally especially piece together that that final series or that final book that never materialized.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Yeah, fair. The only other thing I was going to say was I think whoever the author is of these, and I think there's some suggestion that John Christopher wrote them himself, but I don't know if that's true. It wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility. Because I don't think he had a massive amount of success with a lot of his books. So I think they were pretty successful, but I don't think he was a millionaire off the back of him or anything. So, I mean, it it would have been a paid job, so I wouldn't put it beyond him to have done it. But whoever does that, I think they come up with a really great idea of how to get through the stuff fairly quickly, fairly early on in the process, that they use to great effect throughout. And that is so in a novel, if you've got a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, then you pick up from the same place and carry on, because you're reading straight from one into the other, right? If you're reading a novel, you're not reading a chapter and then putting it down for a week, although we might come to that in a minute. But most people would just carry on reading, right? So you want the next chapter to carry on at the same place. Whoever's writing this understands what Stephen Moffat got when he's writing, you know, Doctor Who in parts. And he's saying if there's a week between one episode and the next, then the audience will have moved on mentally. So you're allowed to move on as well in the telling of the story. So I noticed fairly early in the White Mountains adaptation that you would get to the end of a page and there'd be a cliffhanger. And then when you got to the next page, the next instalment, instead of picking up where it left off, there's a couple of lines of dialogue to explain how they got out of the cliffhanger. Most of the cliffhangers aren't really cliffhangers in the way we think of them in Doctor Who. They're like a question, what should we do next?

SPEAKER_03 38:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

And then you come in on the next page a month later, in terms of the magazine, and instead of one of them saying, Why didn't we do X? They're actually doing X. And so they've answered the question and they've moved the story on, and they've got through about four or five pages of the book that they now know don't need to adapt for the comic strip so they can get to the next important bit. And I thought the way they did that worked really well. And so I think you can sit down and read it, because we put a PDF together to make it easier to read than flipping through, you know, file after file after file on the Wayback Machine or whatever. Because I mean these things are not easy to get. Disney owned the IP now, so you can't buy them. So I just thought it made it a much smoother read than it would otherwise have been, frankly.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Yeah. No, absolutely. It's a shame really that Disney do own the IP, because it's the sort of thing that a company would lovingly reprint, spruce up, and would make a lovely little collector's edition for a limited audience. But you know, like they've they reprinted the Tomorrow People's strips from Looking or whatever it was. Yeah, you know, not my sort of thing, but people responded really well to that, so it's a shame. I bet. Yeah. I don't have much more to say on these. I'm glad that I read them, mainly the the first three, to full to fully get the tripod story. Although it basically goes in all the places I would expect the story to go. I liked the ending, you know, like I'd never could like it's that sort of final strip, isn't it, where it's years later and all humanity's arguing and like oh is it all worth it, you know. I thought that was quite a nice little morality tale at the end. It was fine to visit them.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

The thing about the the ones in the Beebe magazine as well is it feels like it's trying to take it to a slightly more substantial place, yeah, but it never quite does. So what they're kind of doing is they have three pages, and every third issue they move on to a new story, but they bring it in in the mid at the midpoint of something that's already going on. So this kind of overlap between these stories, it felt to me like it was trying to build towards something slightly bigger, or it was going to bring all the characters back together or something. Because there was a lot of overlap of characters. But of course, because it never got there, it left it feeling really insubstantial. Like it was all these tiny little vignettes of stories that never actually any of them turned into a story. They get caught by some villagers, they escape from the villagers. Okay, but that's not a story. You know, what's the point of that? And it feels like you never got to find out what the point was.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

Yeah, no, I get ya, I get ya. It's uh cut off in its prime. So are they clangers, bangers, or average meanders? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

I've gotta say I think they're slightly above average meanders. They're not bangers. There's no world in which these are bangers. But I get at the same time, there's no world in which these are clangers, even less so. So I think they're I think they do a really good job of what they do. Yeah. But they have fairly low ambition, really.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

Yeah, I'd say that's fair. And if there was ambition to the Bead magazine one, it never reached it because it got cut down and it's prime.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Yeah, absolutely. But they were enjoyable, they were fun. You know, I didn't I I I wasn't sitting there thinking, oh god, I wish they'd done a better job of this. I just thought they've done a perfectly reasonable job of this, but it's not a spectacular job.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

The format of this podcast, JR, is that we take a thing and we we look at the expanded universe away from its original format. So what's the what's the next thing you've chosen, JR?

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Um, the next book in the series. So, but it's slightly more than that, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

What so, and this is like this is the most metatextual this podcast is ever gonna get, really, isn't it? Quite possibly. What happens is a series of books, a trilogy of books gets adapted for television, ostensibly as a trilogy of TV series. Third one never transpires, but and then because of the TV series, the author of the books adds a fourth book. So and the fourth book is a prequel rather than a sequel, so it's going back to before so you what you effectively got is a spin-off of the TV series, which is a spin-off of the novels. Yeah. And it comes full circle, becoming a fourth novel.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

Yeah, without the TV series, it's unlikely that this would have existed. So I let it I let it pass. So it's uh 1988, When the Tripods Came by John Christopher. Laurie is a teenage boy who witnesses the arrival of the mysterious giant tripods on Earth. At first, humanity appears capable of resisting them, but the real threat soon emerges through a popular television program that gradually Influences people's minds and turns them into loyal followers of the tripods. As more and more people fall under the tripod's control, society begins to collapse. Lorry and his family flee across Europe, searching for places that remain free from the growing domination of the invaders. Everywhere they go, they find tripods tightening their grip through mind control and the use of special caps that remove human freedom. Eventually, Laurie and a small group of survivors retreat to the mountains where they begin to build a resistance movement and preserve human independence to oppose the tripods. So, first off, have you read this before?

SPEAKER_01 44:40

I did not even know this existed until recently. So I was a fan of the tripods trilogy, the White Mountains. We never knew it as the Tripods trilogy. I I've always known it as the White Mountains trilogy. Until I guess the computer age, where everybody's calling it the Tripods trilogy, right? Maybe the TV series changed it by being called the Tripods. Anyway, I was a huge fan of that. So this is back in the 80s, right? And when I was still at school. And so you only pick up books that you can find, right? And depending where you live, that doesn't necessarily mean you've got a great pool of bookshops to go to. So I was a huge fan of the Tripods trilogy. And I would look for other John Christopher books, and I think I only ever bought about six. And now I've got about twenty, about half of which have never been read, and which I intend to take into my retirement and read then, hopefully. But the other John Christopher books that I did manage to get hold of, and sometimes I'd get the middle one in the trilogy right, but they were all great. I really enjoyed them all. And so you would think, but they were books for sort of 14-year-old boys, basically. So by the time you get out of the 1980s, and I'm in my twenties, and I've only got about eight or ten books by John Christopher, and I've moved on to other things, JD Salinger and Graham Green and stuff like that. I guess I kind of forgot John Christopher to a degree. And it was only relatively recently, and I can't remember why. Do you remember why? I I it certainly wasn't my idea. No, I just somehow I ended up looking up John Christopher on IMDB or no Wikipedia for one reason or another. And in the listing, so I saw the names of a lot of these books that were familiar, either because I'd read them or because I'd read the middle part of the trilogy, and so there were the other two parts of the trilogy or whatever. And then at the bottom of the list, or near the bottom of the list, it says when the tripods came. And I was like, wait, what? There's a fourth tripods book, and it's the prequel which tells the story of how the White Mountains comes about, right? I was like, oh, we've got to do that. And because I am one of those people now who is of an age and of a sort of time in their life where I don't get much time to read books. So if I'm going to read a book, I need to force myself to do it. And by forcing myself to do it, what that really means is there needs to be a podcast happening that gives me a timeline and a deadline. So I think I said to you, right, I've found this tripods book. I need to read it. You need to force me to do a podcast about it. Let's do it for this. And that was perfect timing because you were just about to start the other weather. Too hot for TV, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Yeah, exactly. So here we are. Unsurprisingly, I've not read it before. I mean, technically I've still not read it. There is a fan audio book on YouTube, somebody else reading it. And I just knew that I would wouldn't get through the book in time. So I picked it up and it's like four and a half hours, something like that, and I did the it in our chunks, which made it a little bit more palatable when you know I could do it on the go, basically.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, fair enough. Why not? It's 2026.

SPEAKER_02 48:04

That's how people do things. Well, quite. So, sort of a two-part question here. Can you remember in the original books if there's much said of when the tripods came? And secondly, is this what you would expect from a tripods prequel?

SPEAKER_01 48:17

Right. A, no, I can't. But B, the weird thing is, reading through the comic strips, there's more in there than you think there is. Right. And actually, because those comic strips predate the TV version, the stuff that's in those comic strips must have come from the book. And B, John Christopher, the idiot, the copy of the book that I initially picked up is a reprinted version from I'm gonna try and find the date now. So it was published in 1988, and this edition is from 2014. So 16 years down the line, he's put a preface in in which he makes a real twat of himself essentially and describes the reason why he wrote the book, which is the pettiest reason you could possibly have for writing a book. Which is I'll come to it in a second. Because to answer your question, as part of the preface, he goes into the the sort of the the story of how what he's going to make of, the reason why the tripods came about, how the story went. And he makes out in this preface that this is all stuff he's thought of since he saw the TV version. But it's also all the stuff that's mentioned in those comic strips before the TV version even existed, which must therefore have been in the original novels anyway. So either he's being extremely forgetful and just by chance, very luckily, has managed to tell the story that the other book said he was going to tell, or he's being disingenuous and he's telling a few porcupies about where he got the idea from, because it's right there in the City of Golden Lead in 1967.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

Either that or the Boy Scouts magazine was ahead of its time in adding mythos to the tripods mythology.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

That just happened to be exactly what he was going to put into this book five years later.

SPEAKER_02 50:17

Okay, well, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Shall I tell you, before we move on, shall I tell you the reason he writes the book? And so I don't know how honest he's been. He basically says that there was a review on the television of the middle series of the tripods trilogy, in which a fairly well-known, but he doesn't name, science fiction author was saying the science fiction in this is rubbish. And basically his entire reason for writing the fourth book is I'll show you.

SPEAKER_02 50:48

Fucking hell.

SPEAKER_01 50:50

Which is a bit sad and made me think an awful lot less of him than I did before. And what I've done now is I've gone out and bought a first edition of this because it fits size-wise with the other books, and I'm a bit anal about stuff like that. But also so that I can get rid of this book with its stupid preface that has made me like John Christopher less.

SPEAKER_02 51:08

Did it show them JR? Did it?

SPEAKER_01 51:11

I don't think you did. And I don't think I've shown him either by buying two copies of the book.

SPEAKER_02 51:16

No, you've fallen right into his trap. How do we feel about the way the tripods invade Earth? And in many ways, did the human race fucking deserve it?

SPEAKER_01 51:28

Yes, I think actually, the weird thing is because I just read the preface, for the first chapter, two chapters, I was thinking, oh God mate, you should not have gone back to this because you're just being small-minded about it. And then it just picks up. And actually, I think in the second half of the book, it is the perfect, absolutely perfect prelude to the White Mountains trilogy. And where that goes, I think it sets it up absolutely brilliantly. I think I because I read the first couple of chapters, I was thinking to myself, oh my god, has he even read his own books in 30 years? Does he remember what he's writing the prequel to? And by the end, it's like every detail that he needed is all included.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

There's a sense of peril and impending doom in the second half that I really enjoyed. In the first half, it feels like a not very good version of the John Mills Quatomass. You know, it's the trippies, it's this television show they're using to get inside people's minds, and it's like he's seen that and gone, I'll put a bit of that into the tripods because that's what the kids like.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

It does predict reform though. Does it? Yeah, it's very reform and magga. It's very uh uh so actually, I don't disagree with what you said, but at the same time, as soon as you spot that basically it's predicting MAGA and reform, actually it takes on a whole new meaning. And actually, from about halfway through the second chapter, maybe the third chapter, I was like, oh right, actually, I think this is doing something much better than I thought it was gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 53:12

And what you mean by that is that the tripods manipulate information to a point where people welcome these new overlords, these new revolutionary overlords, because they claim to offer something different. So it's a it's a almost like a there's a bit of an invasion at the front, and you're like, oh, it's just gonna be War of the Worlds, and then that finishes, and then we get basically it's like a secret invasion, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 53:37

Where they take over a sidious invasion, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:40

And that's a really nice idea.

SPEAKER_01 53:42

Yeah, I think I think actually that so that reminded me then of why I loved John Christopher so much when I was in my teens. Because because actually, that so I I really would recommend you read The White Mountains. The second half of this, what what you got from that, you get in spades in the White Mountains.

SPEAKER_02 54:01

Because this ends it in a desperate, like they're going from country to country, just trying to find somewhere where the tripods aren't. And there comes a point where someone just goes, Oh no, maybe this is it now, and we've just got to find somewhere to be the White Mountains, because there's just there's just nothing out there. This is the whole world. And this feels like the best sort of apocalypse films or prequel apocalypse films that I love when you see the damfall of society, and it's never planes falling out of the sky and nuclear bombs going off, it's everything falling to shit around normal people. So, much like you going in, uh the first few chapters I was like, oh no. But yeah, two-thirds in, I was sold. Because it's there's a good momentum, there's a good pace, there's a good sense of peril, and I'm like, I didn't get this from the comic strips, I didn't get it from what I've seen of the TV series, and here I'm like, oh, suddenly I'm interested in the world of the tripods, which I've never really been before.

SPEAKER_01 54:58

Uh you'll get this in all of John Christopher's books, all the ones I've read. But there was another thing about the first couple of chapters that was very weirdly off-putting for me, and I think I mentioned this to you, didn't I? For some reason he set it in Exeter where I live. I don't I have so you've got this there's this one bit where at the start where these spaceships have come from, you know, God knows where. Three creatures have come, three tripods have come, and the news reporter says, and they've stationed themselves outside three of the most important cities in the country London, Manchester, and Exeter. And then I don't know whether he's ever lived in Exeter. I don't know, maybe he did, because he gets some of the villages. So this is at a time before Wikipedia or Google Maps or whatever, but he gets the names of some of the villages right outside, but he doesn't get the name, he doesn't get the distance right. He mentions one village and says it's just outside Exeter. It's actually about twenty miles outside Exeter. And then he actually names like another village that doesn't even exist. So I don't know whether he picked up a name of something else, and so he does this weird thing where he decides to set it in Exeter and gets about half of it really right and about half of it really wrong in a sort of weird way.

SPEAKER_02 56:26

Well, there we go. But maybe again, we're in a time pre-internet where you can't look that up, so he's probably operating a bit off memory more than anything else.

SPEAKER_01 56:34

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

You know, shame on the editor.

SPEAKER_01 56:36

Yeah. For somebody who actually lives there, though, that was a slightly weird experience.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

So what about the characters within this? Are that we have we got familiar characters, new characters? Where does it where does it take us?

SPEAKER_01 56:49

The main character, I suppose, is a bit like Will from The White Mountains. I think I think John Christopher is so his writing is because it's for a certain age of children, I think really he his books are kind of broadly aimed at 12-year-olds, largely, 12 to 13-year-olds. So some of his writing is because there's a lot of ideas and there's a lot to get through. I think sometimes the characters are drawn in relatively broad brush strokes. And I and I also think in this book because it does move so far, about the same distance as the White Mountains, but I think it's a fairly shorter book, actually. I don't think he has quite as much time to put the characters in, and maybe also because this is quite late in his career. So I don't think the characters here are as strong as the characters in other books of his that I've read. Yeah. But at the same time, I also felt fairly reasonably that I knew who everybody was and how they all related to each other. And I did this weird thing because uh just because I started it way before we were due to record, and then we pushed the recording back. And I didn't want to have read the whole thing months before we recorded. So I did this thing where I was reading a chapter a week.

SPEAKER_02 58:09

I think the characters are quite two-dimensional, but I find them more compelling. I know it's not the same characters, but it might as well be. I find them more compelling, I think, in prose than I did in the TV series or or or the comics. Like, they're drawn just enough for me to not go, oh god, this is uh this is a bit dull, or these characters aren't working. Like, you get who they all are, what their personalities are.

SPEAKER_01 58:34

You don't get any of them with like an annoying tick that drives you mad through the book or anything.

SPEAKER_02 58:39

But actually it's about how they react under pressure and again, as I said, their realization that everything's screwed ultimately.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

Yeah, yeah. And actually, I think where the story ends up as well, because it does go to the White Mountains, I don't know how plausible any of that actually is. But it made it feel really plausible, didn't he?

SPEAKER_02 58:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:59

So, and and because of the people who are involved, that just made it feel more plausible, I think.

SPEAKER_02 59:05

Yeah. And it's it's the globe trottingness that they managed to sell here that in a way that the TV series never really does. And the comics do a little bit, but even the comics, it's like, oh, there's this we're in this country where it's people wearing, you know, like turbans, but they're quite clearly white people, and you're like, well, what what country is this supposed to be? Um, whereas here you get a real sort of European scale to it as they make their way through Europe and how different countries and different, as you were saying earlier, different groups or different societies react to the tripods.

SPEAKER_01 59:40

And do you know what? The funny thing is, he talks about the Swiss people and he does um he talks about how the Swiss people react to people from the outside and stuff. And I was thinking as the time I was reading that, is he being a bit unfair to these people? Or does he have some personal experience? And then purely by coincidence, I was reading something else earlier this week that was about the Swiss, and the person who was writing that, and this was like now, was saying exactly the same thing about the Swiss. And so I was thinking, oh, actually, you've got that spot on. So it must be personal experience, it must be.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

Speaking of writing, does he update his pro style at all between the sixties and the eighties?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

Not really. I think his pro style is pretty much set in stone right from the start to the end. And he does do there are he does do a few adult books. Right. Which are really good actually.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Sci-fi post-apocalyptic or just adult adult?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:39

Secret sci-fi.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:41

Secret sci-fi. Oh, okay. They sneak it in.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

So, like, uh it's about a story of an accident on a boat. That's caused by aliens.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:50

It's a murder mystery set in a country hotel.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:54

By an alien.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

So it doesn't so it doesn't necessarily say on the cover that it's gonna turn out to be sci-fi, and that'll be a twist halfway through.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:05

Can you see the TV show's influence on this book?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:08

No. I d I don't think so, funnily enough. I d he says in the preface, actually, again, another thing he says in the preface that just makes him seem really small-minded. He says, um, oh, they changed so much in the TV version that by the second half of the first book or whatever, I couldn't even recognise it as my own work anymore, or whatever. And I'm thinking, but then but then actually, to be fair, he goes on and says, but then you must do that when you're doing it for TV because it's a different medium, so it has a different audience. Yeah. But the bit where he says, I don't recognise my own work, I'm thinking, Jesus, mate, they've added an episode set in a particular place. But apart from that, the rest of it is pretty close. They didn't change that much. And they make like some cosmetic changes in the second book. Like they add a character, the Black Guard, to make it a bit easier for the reader to follow what's happening. Whereas in the novel, you can talk in the you know, you can say what Will's thinking. And so you can explain a lot through Will's thoughts that you can't do on the screen, so you had an extra character. And he obviously took exception to the fact that they added an extra character, and he was really upset when they added girls to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

Well, of course, of course, because girls have no place in science fiction.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:28

No. But because of that, then you've got to think to yourself that in when he wrote this book, you wasn't referring back to the TV series. He was referring back to his three books, wasn't he? And he was trying to expunge the memory of the TV series, really, from the thoughts of the people reading it, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:45

Yeah. Because going in, I thought, oh, look, looked at the date and was like, oh, this is gonna be a bit of a cynical cash grab. But it's almost done in spite of the TV series, but perhaps there's a re renewed interest, and he's gone, well, I'm gonna show them how it should be done.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59

Yes, exactly so.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:02

And you know, I enjoyed it more than the TV series, so maybe he was right.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:07

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Yeah, it's definitely way better than anything that turned up on the screen. Thanks, Christopher Barry. I can't you can't blame him entirely. The first series of the TV programme was written by somebody who apparently pretty much exclusively writing for radio before that.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:26

It's weird how they used to do TV back in the day. I mean, there are certainly more opportunities in some cases, but you you quite often you're just like, oh, so they've made this script editor slash showrunner of X TV show, this person, and they've written one thing before, but they've been they've been on staff for five years, so we've got to do something with them. It's bizarre.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

It's like Eric Saywood. I mean, uh not to get on his case or anything, you can cut this bit out if you want, but who looked at Eric Saywood, who'd written like six radio dramas and said, right, that's the guy who needs to be in charge of a TV programme.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:59

Yeah, it's exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. They might as well have asked Andrew Beach. What does this add to the world of the tripods?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

In the books, they do explain who the masters are, where they've come from. They explain a lot about, especially in the middle one, of course, where he's finding out, he's trying to find stuff out. They do explain a lot about where they come from and why it's happened. But I just but this book I think really did fill that world out. And like I say, by the time we get to the end of it, it does feel like the absolute perfect setup that includes all the elements that you needed to show how the world is going to be, where it is in the White Mountains, you know, 50, 100, 200 years, whatever it is, down the line. I just think it felt like it did a really thoroughgoing job of fleshing out all the stuff that needed to be well, that didn't need to be fleshed out, but if you were going to do a book, this was the book that it had to be. I don't think he could have done it better than this, frankly.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:06

And having read all the books, where does this rank in the pantheon of the four tripod novels?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

And is the lesser of the four. Probably. I mean Probably, because the other three were written together. So actually, the other three the other three really is one book divided into three. So I mean, uh in terms of quality, the other three are pretty much all banged together. So and this is not this is not uh this is that was him at the absolute height of his abilities. And this is not him at the absolute height of his abilities. But given that it is 20 years later, 20 odd years later, and you know, he is nearing towards the end of his career, I suppose, or getting further in that direction at this point. I think it's as good as you could expect it to be, really.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

And what about the setting? Because this is a very different world to the tripods, obviously. It's a prequel, but it's a more familiar world to us. You know, at one point our characters get interviewed on TV. You've already mentioned the sort of political allegories for politics that hasn't happened yet. Does it feel comfortable in in this world?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:18

Sort of. This was one of the other things that was slightly weak about the first ones, wasn't it? That the the early chapters is it feels a bit like a middle-aged man railing against children's telly, right? Teenage tell. So it feels like he's writing a book about something that he experiences but doesn't quite understand at those points. So again, the first two or three chapters aren't the most convincing, are they?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:43

No. It's this sort of mass hypnosis by this television show, and you've got these trippies and things like that. But it was for me, out of the all the tripods I've experienced, this is the one that I can most sort of, even though there are ideas I've seen used elsewhere before and after this, it's the one I could most clearly see being mined or adapted easier than the others in sort of like by modern standards.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:14

I mean, this is not a million miles away from something like, say, Chalky, right? Right. So, I mean, Chalky's about a little alien that gets into a sort of gets into a child's head. But there's something there going on about the child and the hypnosis, right? You can imagine a version of this that sort of pulled on that for the first few episodes.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:33

And the apocalyptic strains in it and the use of media and things like that is not a million miles away from even things like the the Will Smith I Am Legend, not the I Am Legend bit, but the when it sort of flashes back to the end of the world and the more modern retellings of War of the Worlds and things like that, where it's like he's written something that's contemporary and relevant for that point. And because we're nearer that world than the medieval times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does it doesn't feel so like if you said we're gonna make four tripods films and they started with this, I think this one would go down quite well. It'd be really interesting to see what a new audience made of the White Mountains all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:13

I think he's got all the right ideas. I don't think he's quite got the right angle on some of those ideas.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:19

But I think all the right ideas are there, totally. And the thing that he does in the second half also, I think, is a slight stroke of genius. I so, and there were a lot of complaints, right, when The Force Awakens came out that it was just Star Wars again. But I think what The Force Awakens does is quite clever. I quite like Force Awakens, I think it's quite clever, is that it basically tells the same story but changes the emphases and disguises the elements so that you can enjoy it as a different story. And I think when the tripods came, it basically tells the same story as the White Mountains, doesn't it? It's a bunch of kids, basically, a bunch of people leave England and try and find the White Mountains. And so it's a journey across France, across Europe. So basically it's exactly the same story, but he changes the element out, elements out, changes the emphases, makes it feel like something new. So it's the perfect prequel because it is the same story, but also it's a different story that leads to the same, that leads back to the original story. So it's the perfect because it's familiar, but at the same time it's new.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:31

This book has renewed my vague interest in the tripods, and I am gonna try and watch the TV show as a result of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:38

Whether I'll get through it is another thing, but maybe we should uh make a pact to do that for uh strangers.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:45

Indeed. I'll let you know how I get on with the first three episodes. If I'm still there, then we'll carry on. Do we have much more to say on when the tripods came?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:54

Yeah, there was one more thing I was gonna bring up. There was something he said in the preface about not being able to predict technology. So there's a bit in the preface where he talks about this criticism he'd had for the science in the White Mountains trilogy. And he talks about the fact that as science fiction writers, you don't very often get to predict what the future is going to be very accurately. And then he makes this example, which is, for instance, nobody knew when I was writing the White Mountains that infrared was going to become a thing, like for remote controls and stuff like that. And I'm thinking, well, you idiot, you've picked an example of something that if you'd bothered to look into it, you probably could have been able to predict, but you didn't bother to look into it. And so, well, I mean, this is the impression he gives in the preface, again, is of somebody who's a bit small-minded and who took the criticism on the nose rather than taking the time to do the research. And it feels slightly like the book that came out of it is a book where he did take the time to do the research, or at least to think things through. But at the same time, you're right. There's this thing where the real world has overtaken it, isn't there? Yeah. Because he is telling a story about a television programme that hypnotises people into wanting to be capped. Whereas actually in the real world, MAGA and reform, they're not hypnotising people, they're just making being capped look really appealing. And I think I think that's the one thing in his story that could have been better. If he'd have just told a story about how being capped looks more appealing than not being capped, that would have made it even better.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:40

Yeah, agreed. Um, it it doesn't need that setup. It's like propaganda is a much more interesting form of hypnotism than the sci-fi hypnotism.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:51

I was not expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did, but I I had a bloody good time. So I'm actually really glad to find a bit of the tripods that that fully works for me. And I will re-watch the series. Um not right now, but maybe at some point I'll give the books a go, either in audio form or in written form. Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:11

Well, I think you should because I I genuinely do think they're very good books.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:15

So we must rate it. Is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:20

Do you know what? When we came into this conversation, I was going to say this is a slightly more above average meander than the uh comic strips were, but I think you've kind of persuaded me that it's a bit of a banger. So I think it's a sort of low-level banger. This is not a classic book. It's not as good as a lot of the other John Christopher I've read. But having said that, I've always enjoyed the John Christopher's that I have read. And there are several, not just the White Mountains ones, but several of the other ones that I've got that I read and reread and reread. And if I'd have picked this up when I was 15, I think this might have gone onto that pile of ones that I came back to. Especially when you know where it goes, because those first two or three chapters might not be great, but if you know that it gets a lot better, they're much easier to get through, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:13

Yeah. It's a it's a low-level banger for me, too. Like, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it at all. But I had a great time. I th I think it's got a great pace, does some great world building. I couldn't really tell you anything about the characters, but they're not important. Like, what's important is how society falls, and it doesn't do it in the way that I necessarily expected to. And when it does, the desperation levels hit fairly highly for all the characters involved. So yeah, a low end of the bangers for me. Great. You can tell that I like to score things out of ten rather than a three, can't you? It's true. It's an imperfect scoring system, JR, but I'm not changing it.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:53

And I wouldn't want you to change it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:55

There we go. We talked a bit about the possibility of whether there'd be a tripods film or new series earlier. Do we think there's any life left in the tripods in expanded media?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:09

How that's an interesting question. Because this is the kind of thing, this is the kind of thing where if Disney didn't own it, you could imagine that somebody like Big Finish would come in.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:18

Yeah, I'm sure they've tried. Yeah, I'd bet. I'm almost certain they have.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:23

Oh yeah, you would think so. You could easily turn all four books into audio adaptations, and then you could expand from there, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:32

But I d there are places to slot things in. You know, in between the end of When the Tripods came and the White Mountains, there's 50, 100, 100, 200 years, whatever it is, plenty of space to slot something new in. You could tell a whole new series of stories, always open-ended, knowing that actually the story gets picked up in the White Mountains trilogy.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:55

But you could you could do your own thing in there. And also there are gaps in the story itself where it moves on by a year and stuff like that. So you could even expand the story itself and tell the adventures of you know what Will and Henry and Beanpole are doing during the years in between, you know, the City of Golden and then the Pool of Fire.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:15

And there's also characters like like the uncapped tramp they meet early on, who, while you wouldn't make a series about them, you might do a one-off story and go, this is their, you know, an hour long, this is their story.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:28

Or actually, no, you could do a series of Ozzie Mandy, as they call him. Yeah. You could do a series where in every episode he goes to a different village and meets a different bunch of kids, and it's the story of how he gets one of those kids to go off to the White Mountains. And, you know, there's I mean, the setup would be he goes to a village, there's six uncapped kids, there's one in particular that he thinks that's the one. And of course, the twist at the end is that one is happy to be capped, and one of the others ends up going to the White Mountain. There are stories you could tell, and across six or eight episodes, you could actually tell six or eight episodes about Ozzie Van Diaz just going around to various places.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:06

Well, look, the Disney money's there. Somebody out there is gonna launch the tripods verse, and we'll all be reveling in tripod series and spin-offs and movies for years to come, but unfortunately, it's just not in this reality. Where can people find you on the internet should they wish to find you, JR?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:28

Uh well, I've been on several other episodes of Too Hot for TV. What have we talked about? We've talked about some May Gan stuff, haven't we?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:36

We've done some Maygan stuff. We've done the Autumn trilogy.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:41

We did the Autumn trilogy. That was great fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:44

Stephen Moffitt short trips.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:46

That was even better. We did. We've had the best episodes of Too Hot for TV. Have always been the ones with you and me on, haven't they?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:55

Well, quite. Uh and you've got a podcast you want to push?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:01

I like to think of our podcast, which I'm now not going to name, as the um the sort of what's the the speakeasy of podcasts? If you know what it is and you know where to find it, then you can only have your life made better by enjoying it. But if you don't know where it is and you don't know where to find it, then you probably don't deserve to.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:24

But you couldn't just look up Strangers in Space on your podcatcher. Next time, I'll be joined by Cam and we'll be looking at the expanded universe of WWE. But until then, I've been Dylan.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:36

And I've been JR.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:37

And this has been Too Hot for TV.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:28

One last thing before we go. We've been saying John Christopher all night. Let's give him his due. His real name is Sam Yowd.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:36

That's his real name. Why did he change it? What why did he want to?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:40

I guess Sam Yowd sounds a bit foreign. Maybe I'm not sure if he's Jewish, but I think it sounds as if it may be something like that. Jewish or Middle Eastern. I don't know. Um but I would guess that just taking a name like John Christopher just means that you if if you're on a high street bookshelf selling to children, they're gonna want a name that they remember rather than one that they don't know how to pronounce.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:07

There. There we go. Well, that's his real name. What's your real name, JR?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:12

Jonathan Richard.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:14

Exclusive! I mean, I knew that anyway, but uh where can people find you? You've got to count that bit. I never give mine.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:22

Usually it's down to Mark Concrumb.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:27

Next time, d don't know what I'm doing, I'll I'll throw that in later.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

But No, I think you should leave it with next time I don't know what I'm doing, I'll throw that in later. That's what I would do.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:39

I know you would.