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This is the Fusion Patrol podcast.
Each week, we look at a different science fiction TV episode or movie
and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life.
welcome to the discussion
hello and welcome to another episode of fusion patrol i'm eugene
and i'm simon and tonight we are looking at the 1981 bbc one-off production of john windham's
Day of the Triffids.
Serial production.
All right, serial.
I think it was one-off because it's not like Doctor Who.
You would call a mini-series on the side of the pond.
Yes, yes.
Six parts.
We would call it a series because that's kind of quite long for us.
Yeah, so it's based on a book.
Triffids are a plant bioengineered by the Soviet Union to be an efficient fuel additive.
They are unique in that they can move about and can sting animals to death,
or to a lesser intensity, blind them.
Bill Mason works on one of the triffid farms, and he accidentally was blinded by a triffid sting.
Now he recuperates in a hospital, waiting to see if his sight has been saved.
Sadly for the bandaged Bill, on the night before he gets his bandages off,
he misses the greatest light show the world will ever see.
An astral phenomena bays the Earth for 24 hours
in an amazing light show in the night sky.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Neither are there free light shows,
because the next day, everyone who saw the show is blind.
Bill, now one of the few sighted people left in the world,
meets up with Joe and begins their adventures
in a world turned on its head.
Oh, and the Triffids have escaped,
and they're hunting down blind humans like a feast.
Bill and Joe first meet up with a group
planning to go to the country
and set up a polygamous compound.
Blind women can produce sighted babies,
and so they must breed up a new generation of humans
to take back the world.
Bill and Joe decide to join in.
But then...
They are captured by Coker,
a sighted man who feels that everyone should stay in the city,
helping the blind get food until help arrives.
Since they refuse to do so on their own,
they are imprisoned and chained to work gangs.
Bill and Joe are separated.
A disease begins to kill off everyone,
and Bill manages to leave his work group after they all die.
He cannot find Joe,
but he finds the name of the place where the group had been intending to go,
Tyson,
and along with a repentant coker,
who also saw all his blind people die of disease,
they head out to find it.
They do in fact find Tysum,
but the group has already splintered into two factions.
Those that remained at Tysum felt that
good Christian values and morals must be maintained,
and the two groups agreed to split.
Coker tries to convince them that they cannot just rely on God's grace
and must start doing things to save themselves.
But they refuse,
and the pair leave looking for the other group.
Bill hopes that Joe is with them.
They cannot find the group, and Coker decides to return and try to make them see sense.
But Bill remembers a place on the South Downs where Joe mentioned her self-sufficiency-minded friends
had a farm with a well and wind power and a generator, and that it might make a good retreat.
He travels there, and along the way rescues a young girl, Susan, from the Triffids.
Bill finds Joe, and they are reunited.
Soon, Bill goes back to check on Coker and Tyson, but the group is dead of the disease.
There is no sign of Coker.
Bill and Joe spend six good years together with her two blind friends.
In that time, Susan becomes as a daughter to them and grows up, and they have a child, as do her friends.
Good years, that is, save for the fact that they are under constant siege by thousands of triffids.
Cougar arrives via helicopter.
He survived the disease at Tysum and found the other splinter group.
They've settled on the Isle of Wight and freed the island of Triffids.
Others are colonizing the Channel Islands.
He invites them to come live with him.
He especially needs Bill, a man with bioscience training on Triffids,
to help make the fight to retake the Earth.
They decide to go, but first they want to spend one more summer on their idyllic farm.
Alas, the next day a tank pulls up with representatives of the newly established and not elected government.
They are setting up the New World Order.
They are apportioning land to sighted people and requiring them to take ten blind people for each sighted person as effectively slave labor.
The sighted will be feudal barons under the authority of the government.
Just one problem. Only two sighted adults are allowed.
Susan will have to come back to the HQ with the soldiers and be assigned to suitable duties.
That night, they get the soldiers drunk, sabotage the tank, and escape, heading for the Isle of Wight.
Okay, well, Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham,
who some people consider to be a particularly notable British science fiction author,
And some people consider a bit of a hack.
Some people do think his books are pretty hackneyed.
So it's an unusual dichotomy there.
I will say this.
Although I looked for it and I could not find it, I absolutely positively have Day of the Triffids on my bookshelf somewhere.
And read it.
And read it, yes, many years ago.
and this is pretty darn faithful to it it's like there's not a lot that i remember is windham a
is windham a hack or is he i'm gonna ask you that question i have never read a john windham novel
so i'm not the person to ask i'm i'm pretty i'm pretty tolerant um i enjoyed the book
so is he is he one of the greats i'm not sure he's got some interesting stories out there i mean
day of the triffids is probably his most famous um the midwitch cuckoos is probably the second
most famous book of his which uh anyone who's seen the movies will know as village of the damned
um or the two movies known as village of the damned that that were based on his novel and
the rest of his work is not well known here anyway as far as i know he said i mean he certainly
produces works that get adapted and i mean the the phrase triffids has kind of entered
into the language is a useful kind of description for any particularly menacing type of or or
voracious kind of plant
because there's a lot of them
I've not only
managed to not
read The Day of the Triffids
I've also not managed
to watch the 1962
film or the
2009 TV series
or various
of many radio
adaptations that have been made
so people do seem to keep coming back to it
and
I've also
You will know, some listeners will know, I'm quite an avid fan of the output of the audio company Big Finish, who have produced an audio play, Night of the Triffids, a sequel to Day of the Triffids.
But again, which I can give that a second look.
I've listened to the audio play from Big Finish.
So it's it's all right.
You know, I haven't read the book. I think it's based on a book somebody put out, but it doesn't, it's not really a direct sequel. I think it's just kind of a few years later on. Doesn't involve Bill Mason or anything. It's, I think, mostly in America, as I recall.
But that way, because I remember it because of the American accents.
In fact, I think Nicola Bryant might be starring in it.
I'm not sure.
If not, it's somebody doing a Nicola Bryant as Perry imitation.
It's almost certainly Nicola Bryant.
So anyway, so what did you think of this as being only exposed to the term Triffid,
but never having seen or been exposed to the actual story?
Well, I'll tell you one thing. It felt like an adaptation watching it.
So I could almost feel the gaps, if you like, that someone watching this, familiar with the book and having more background knowledge to what's going on coming into it,
might have a very different view on this TV series,
which I'll grant you is quite atmospheric.
And that's hugely important in obviously creating this post-apocalyptic environment.
And, you know, part of that is the really quite striking music by Christopher Gunning.
And it's the kind of, there's a good sense of menace,
which I will put down more to the acting and the reacting
than I will necessarily to, and, you know,
I don't want to be too rude about anyone doing their best
in the constraints of 19, well, basically just coming out of the 70s.
So 1970s TV, but we'll put it this way.
It was directed to try and avoid showing the Triffids too much.
Right.
Too much of the Triffids, which was, you know, a good thing, I think.
Even in the kind of very stylized title sequence, it looks fine until you see a Triffid Sting.
The Triffid Sting is probably the worst piece of the effect because it doesn't look like a sting.
It looks like somebody beating you with a rubber hose.
You know, it doesn't have that it's been shot out, point first, hit the person in the face.
it has the more sort of whip effect of it being slapped against the person's face.
Which, you know, since we never really see it do a sting in that way,
I mean, we do see the kind of whip effect.
It's not...
I...
I think...
Boy, I'm not 100% sure.
I think I saw this before I managed to get hold of a copy of the novel.
But I'm not...
And so this was your first Griffith experience?
It's really hard for me to tell.
So basically, if this came out in 1981, so I would have been...
Well, that would have been just before I went to university.
When I got to university, so I moved to another city, and when I got to university, that is about the time that they started showing Doctor Who on television here in the Phoenix area.
that led very quickly to some bookstores getting,
driving up like purchasing Starburst magazine,
which was not a American magazine and bringing in all the target
novelizations and getting a lot more British science fiction,
uh,
press and stuff.
So start picking those things up,
start reading about them and start learning about day of the Triffids.
And this bookstore was just basically doing well.
were a few but the one that i went to frequent it you know they were doing the same thing they
would look through it and go oh dear the triffids quatermass oh bring you know see what we can get
and either bring in new copies or or used copies of these books so that they would have them
stocked in this relatively good section so i i don't remember whether somebody brought triffids
over or i found the book on the shelf first i just can't remember um it might be the book
it sucks not to be able to remember back that far i mean it's only
what 35 40 years yes yeah so but um but i do remember that whenever i got to the point where
i was able to compare the two that they were pretty darn close they were i think i don't close
i can believe that what we see on the screen is taken from the book i think the thing that
that is missing as as a viewer watching it and this being your your kind of first encounter with
it is that the pacing doesn't feel quite right somehow and it feels like there are
not that there are unanswered questions because actually the final um i wish to say this is in
six half-hour parts and in the final part it's made quite explicit that there are questions
that are unanswered and that's okay what bugs me a little bit is that they weren't being asked
right at the beginning I was asking them but the characters on the screen didn't seem to be
asking the same questions which leads you to wonder do they know the answers
and i imagine some of those questions are in the book to do with um like things like
um what is causing the disease for example um whether it is actually infectious or not because
we quite quickly jump to assumptions.
So some of the kinds of nuts and bolts questions.
I don't remember anything about the disease from the book.
I mean, I know it was happening.
I don't remember them, you know,
at the end where he asks the question about, you know,
was the disease man-made?
I don't remember that.
I remember that he, towards the end,
he postulated that the comet might have been some sort of weapon gone wrong.
Yeah, just in case we didn't get what all this was about.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think in the book,
the Triffids were made as a vegetable oil substitute,
not a fuel oil,
or some sort of amazing vegetable oil.
I guess for frying chips and stuff
but
that's kind of neither
here nor there in a sense
yeah but another
a man-made catastrophe still
definitely an engineered catastrophe
for our greed
and our
you know as opposed to
if the comet is indeed a weapon
then you know
that's our folly as
warlike apes but
but it just it does it does seem a bit suddenly everyone seems to have radiation sickness in
something that is clearly intended to be an allegory about nuclear fallout but there's no
obvious reason why they are suffering those symptoms okay and i don't mind that there's
an unanswered question i mind that there is an unasked question and it feels like you've missed
a bit it feels like at some point those questions were asked and i think that's partly to do with
when you make an adaptation you have to make choices about pacing and obviously
that's quite difficult when you've only got six half hours to do the whole novel and also
obviously the novel seems to cover several years but a lot i mean a huge amount happens
in those first few hours after the comet right and to me a lot of that's the kind of interesting
stuff and and i i want to know
i i want to know why why it is for example that the radio isn't working i want to know
why it is that everyone is so debilitated by losing their sight and that sounds a kind of
silly question but there are some things that obviously
you simply cannot do not being cited there are other things that simply take longer
and that's the far bigger category and the the effect of the effect of that
when such a large percentage of the population
loses their sight
are really going to be felt
but they're not going to be felt straight away
necessarily
and in the book
you've got more time to do that
but on the TV it's like
it's the small hours of the following morning
and everything has already gone to chaos
it just seems strange
okay
Let me talk about the disease for a second before I lose that train of thought.
I never saw that as an allegory for radiation sickness.
I saw it.
I don't think it's an allegory for radiation sickness.
It's the symptoms of radiation sickness, isn't it?
You know, as you say, yes, it certainly could be the symptoms of radiation sickness.
It doesn't look like cholera to me, but I'm not 100% sure what cholera looks like.
I certainly up until this view through, and I don't recall anything to the difference from the book, but again, I definitely haven't read the book since 1983 or four.
I thought that was meant to represent generic epidemic.
I mean, the people are, the water is going to stop working.
They're probably pooing in their flats and living in their filth and they're all going to die.
That's not going to happen the day after.
No, but I thought that took a little while to start.
Well, that's kind of hard to tell.
Yeah.
It doesn't actually seem to take a while.
the illness begins almost straight away and it's three days doesn't it doesn't with one possible
exception it doesn't seem to affect anyone who is sighted ah now this is where i was going
this is where i was going when i got to the end of this and i remember him mentioning the the
illness being possibly man-made i started thinking about it because that's what i do and then seeing
the podcast here and it occurred that thought occurred to me because it was bugging me it's
like how come coker didn't die how come bill didn't die how come joe didn't die they're they're all
exposed to these people who are dying right and left and if it's contagious they weren't asking
right they weren't asking is this only is this only people the old christian lady died of it
good point yes and she was cited that was the only person i can think of who was cited who died of it
though so maybe it was a different disease that got her i mean if you're hanging around a bunch
of dead bodies rotting because the disease is killing everybody else you know there's
there are a number of factors the ill people could have secondary infections that
are causing something so i mean it's still possible you're right it does seem to be
hitting the blinded people substantially more then the question is how come that didn't affect
the people who didn't see it is this a radiation that can only be entered into your body through
your eyes because i mean bill was there in a room and you had to be you had to be out in it
yeah there had to be a sight line for you to be affected by the radiation
it's it's a possibility it's a possibility it it is i don't i mean i don't know if i would
be asking those questions i myself trying to put myself in this situation um and then you can talk
about the blindness too and yeah sure you ask a lot of questions uh but i don't know i think i
would be if you have an epidemic the first question you ask is how is this thing transmitted how the
hell do i get out of this town is my first thought i just assumed it was contagious and i would be
thinking about countryside but then that was already in my head i mean the the the folks at
the university already put that in everybody's head there's going to be disease we need to get
out of town you know bill said that too he was talking about cholera and other diseases and who
knows what and they were but this was day one that was the thing that well i would be thinking about
that on day one i absolutely would be thinking about that on day one i mean i've seen enough
post-apocalyptic fiction to know that you immediately get out of town because it makes
you somewhat atypical and i don't even like post-apocalyptic fiction anyone who wasn't
watching all the post-apocalyptic tv series probably wouldn't realize that they were in a
post-apocalyptic scenario they might just think that they had a power cut well they did have a
bunch of people like coker who was like no no no we've got people you know we got to stay here and
help them until help arrives so clearly you know there are people on the spectrum of how deluded to
bad off the earth is but that but then they're not deluded they're acting on the best information
that is available to them they're ignorant but that's entirely understandable because
why would you assume this thing affects the whole planet why would you assume it affects other cities
well i mean bill has good reason to he heard the radio broadcast that said
that absolutely everywhere in the world got to see this show over the period of 24 hours
that was on the news the night before when he was in his room but that's that's drawing the
connection with the the comet comet which isn't you know the the immediate thing
all right let me ask this question would you go out and look at it
to comment yeah if if that were if that were a thing that happened tonight
yeah i know i find that to be one of the most compelling
terrors of this show to me is the idea that you know darn good and well that if you weren't
drugged to sleep or bandaged or something,
you would absolutely make the time to go out and look at this thing.
You'd have to.
I mean, what kind of a slug would you have to be to be sitting there going,
eh, I don't want to see a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event right outside my window.
I was like, you'd have to be quite the piece of work not to do that.
Now I can see people who have reasons not to, like little kids who've gone to sleep.
And think of all the babies that died on probably the first couple days.
Because they were in their cribs, in their rooms, never saw it, never got affected.
And their parents fell up and, you know, I mean, it...
Except they wouldn't die in the first couple of days.
This is the thing.
I don't know.
You know, when somebody is, I haven't been around somebody who is blind, and I certainly hope not to be one of those people or be around somebody who goes blind.
But, you know, if you take depictions of the psychological aspects of it, people who get disabilities frequently go into a bit of a funk, a helpless funk that, you know, I can't do anything and I'm helpless and I want to die.
And can you imagine if everyone you knew everywhere was blind?
But it wouldn't be something that would kill you within a day.
That's what I'm saying.
When you have a cataract operation and you're on it.
I mean, Bill, at the start of this, is blind himself,
and it's a temporary condition.
But there are...
But they're not dying of the blindness, though.
They're dying from living in places with stairs,
which is just a dangerous thing or it's not like and triffids like that it's not like you're living
in an unfamiliar place where you don't know the stairs are you know where the stairs are you know
where you know where the fridge is and where the water tap is but we saw what we saw the guy the
in the in his t-shirt and his wife that bill went into their apartment and he was you know he was
the first to give bill his you know rundown scenario of how bad it's going to be in a few days
and he's you know he and his wife were doing okay in their house but then the food's gonna run out
and sure sure i think i think i think the thing for me was that the speed with which it happened
didn't allow for the exploration because in a way this is my this is my favorite kind of science
fiction it's it's extrapolating through some kind of disaster or event like this from what we have
now how how our institutions and our society would stand up to these big i mean it's like
it's it's exactly the scenario we've got in in torchwood children of earth which i think is my
favorite sci-fi tv series so i'm interested in exploring that stuff but i think part of it would
be how or part of what determines how disastrous it would be would would be how successful or
unsuccessful would you be in those first few days at getting organized but it is days it's not hours
and that you know i think i think there is a chance there and i think you would be trying to
find the useful people that wouldn't just be sighted people that would actually be the registered
blind because they've got a load of people who are actually very capable at dealing with
one of my nodes which they cannot see i would go find a blind school exactly exactly they could be
teaching and if you've got time and you could start teaching people how to cope then
when the food started running out when the water i mean it's the water that's the scary thing i had
there was a burst pipe up the road the other day and i had a
what you know maybe 12 18 hours without water and my word you just suddenly realize how incredibly
dependent you are on it so in in some ways the speed with which these things can occur
you know is much much faster than we conceive until something like that happens um i think
The whole with the water thing is because I've had water.
I had a burst pipe in the house and without water.
And it's kind of where they were shut it down for a while.
It's like, sure, I can go to the refrigerator and I can get some bottled water or I can get some I can get some Dr. Pepper or something of that nature.
It's when you go to the toilet the first time and you go, oh, there's only the one.
There's only this one flush.
Then we're done.
And then we got a problem.
Then we had then we've got a problem.
And you think, oh, I know.
I know because I've had a problem with the cistern before.
I know how to flush it.
I'll just get a bucket of water and throw it.
And you think, where do I get the water from?
And the fact that, you know, I'm in the bathroom standing under the shower thinking,
hmm, there's something wrong here.
And I finally twig that there's no water in the house.
And when I'm thinking through the consequences, I'm thinking, oh, I can't wash my hands.
Never mind.
I'll go and get some water from the kitchen.
Well, a kitchen tap comes from the same place.
It takes you a while before.
And then you think, oh, maybe I can borrow it from a neighbor.
But hang on, the whole street's out.
And so then you get the shotgun and you start going after the stores,
raiding, because that's how civilization breaks down.
What is that for a few hours?
Or possibly you go to the river that is, you know, literally two minutes walk.
Well, isn't that nice?
Yeah, but, you know, we're talking about something that is set in the UK.
OK, I wouldn't think out of the Thames in the 80s.
That's fair enough.
London, probably a bad place.
But what you're obviously doing is marshalling the resources that you've got
and starting to prioritise things.
Whereas what we seem to be jumping to on screen was that,
well, actually, everything has already failed and we're into the disaster planning.
And this is where we're getting the kind of right wing fantasist nut job stuff.
And we're getting Croker, who you seem to dislike, but frankly, who is the hero that this show needs.
Because Bill and Joe are ready to sign up and let Joe pick Bill and other couple of wives.
I don't picture Croker as the villain of the piece by any stretch of the imagination.
I think this is an argument between he...
So, all right, maybe he doesn't realize how widespread the problem is.
And this is a failure of communication because Bill should know.
Bill heard it, right?
Bill...
And I think they all put the comment because his doctor told him it was the comment, right?
I'm not sure it is pure ignorance.
So Bill, okay, so in a way he's deluding himself.
He's either deluding himself or he's ignorant of the problem.
I don't understand it.
But you do have some people that are-
There may be a bit of delusion.
They do have some people, Bill in this case, who has a doctor of ophthalmology who is postulating that it was the comet.
We know Bill heard that the comet was seen by absolutely everyone in the world.
So at the very least, when he's there going, oh, you need to worry about the Triffids.
when somebody comes along and says, no, no, the emergency services company is like,
this happened everywhere. You know, we think, I think this happened everywhere.
So my questions are how long before, if nobody is there to work it. And I, and I really do feel
that if everyone went blind, they would not be getting into their jobs in the morning.
Those who are at their jobs would not care about their jobs at that point and would be freaking out
And trying to get help.
I don't know how automated the services are to say that would phones keep, I mean, today phones would keep working.
Electricity would work for a while.
Water would work for a while.
I don't know how much manual intervention is required every day.
I mean, did somebody come in and flip on the switch for London to get the power going in 1981?
I don't think so.
But, you know.
Well, no, I think the power would go out without people to.
And it would be the same. I mean, I'm assuming this is set in 1981 rather than 1951.
Yeah, I think. Yeah.
But even so, I think the degree of intervention required, because even elements that are automated, we're really talking about semi-automation.
As soon as there is any kind of fault, no one's going to be able to rectify it and things are going to go down.
So to my mind, some of those things are quite fragile.
But I'm not sure I entirely agree with what you're saying and what clearly if John Wyndham isn't saying,
then Douglas Livingston, who adapted it, is saying about people basically who are doing their jobs,
abandoning their jobs or, you know, what we see in the TV series is basically running for their lives,
every man for themselves.
And it's doctors, you know, this is the thing.
It's people whose whole vocation is about the welfare of others
who are suddenly throwing their arms up and saying,
actually, what we've got to do is abandon everyone who isn't sighted.
And to me, that just...
Yeah, some people in the public services, maybe,
but by and large, that's not the ethos of the health service,
the fire service, the police service.
I'd say educators, I may be biased here.
There's a whole bunch of people who I think
are a lot more compassionate and civic-minded
than we are being led to believe
in what I think is, for the most part,
a pretty darn bleak portrayal of human nature.
Well, I will say this.
I have never particularly liked post-apocalyptic fiction.
I don't like what humans are, by and large.
And this sort of scenario, whether it in real life would, and I think in real life it probably would because I'm cynical.
But certainly in writing, because that's what makes for drama, always turns out, I mean, it always brings out the worst in people.
And when I try to look at these situations, it's the only thing I can do when I'm watching this sort of disaster is to go, what would I do?
And I can't say that personally I wouldn't do exactly what I needed to do.
If I genuinely believed that this was a worldwide phenomenon, I would, and let's say my whole family had gone blind.
I would probably go down to the store and load up the van and I might I'd probably leave money behind
so as to not be thieving just yet and the ethos and I would be thinking about
where I could go to get away from the city
because the city will be the part,
the place where it goes down in a handbasket first
if that's what's going to happen.
So, you know, it's not a question of whether or not
I would want to help other people,
but I think I would have to set the scope at some point
and say, well, how many can I help
with my set of skills?
And I certainly would not be chaining people up
because I'm a good guy and I'm going to make sure that you help other people
so I'm going to beat you over the head
and I'm going to chain you to people so that you are good Samaritans
because that's not actually the actions of a hero.
Well, I think in the context of it,
but it's a right-wing criticism of the kind of collectivist philosophy
because what we have here is a conception which is based on human nature being basically
bad people being selfish the only way that you're going to
the only the only way that you're going to get away from that is by everyone being able to lift
look after themselves, lift themselves out from the sewer,
and it becomes purely competitive,
which is where anyone who has an advantage,
which is going to be the sighted people,
leave the others behind,
and they will help each other out, not out of collectivism,
but out of the desire to seek mutual advantage.
Well, OK.
And that's what the set-up is then that Coker is...
Because there's a fair amount of nationalisation that goes on here,
the seizing of private assets for the public good.
But Coker is the kind of extreme of that because he's forcing people.
Now, I'm not sure I'm ready to accept either of the premises here.
I'm not sure that I'm willing to accept that human nature is as base and selfish as the right wingers want us to believe.
It doesn't have to be everybody.
It only needs about 10% of the population need to be that way.
screw everybody else over well no i can i can see but that but that's particularly if they have guns
yes and that that that is why you need to have a state and again that's a left-wing argument
you're also i'm i'm not the the left-wing philosophy is going to be people are fundamentally
good and people may may behave in a selfish and immoral way a minority of people and you need to
react to that situation and obviously that means you make sure they're not the ones with the guns
so you have to be the ones with the guns hence having a police force and or army etc etc
they in very very simplistic terms there you have the foundation of the state
and so i'm not accepting that i'm also not accepting the premise that the only option
available here is the the the kind of
forcing people using the guns and chaining them up to do what they should be doing because it is
their moral duty. Okay. So, so two things. One, do you not think that there's a possibility here
that, again, if the world came to that situation and I made my internal decisions that I had better
get the family out and stable and do what they can. Do you not think that that is a prudent
first step to then what do we do to try to, because without the Triffids, which is the
problem, without the Triffids, you're right. There are, people are going to continue on.
And so you can build up a way to actually help them. But being in the, that first mode of
let's make sure we don't die of cholera um you kind of and and that is ultimately what coker does
is and and that's what the group that was originally going in the first place we're going to do
i think it's a little hard to tell but you know once you establish a colony you can start doing
good you can start expanding that you can start rebuilding it i don't know that they were
necessarily, you know, going to let the world burn.
I think they were marshalling their resources so that the world could continue long enough
to try to save people.
Because, again, they can, we can produce more babies.
We just need to be able to survive through the thing.
And the second part is when Bill is, when Bill is killed, not Bill killed, when Bill's
guards are killed he doesn't abandon them he stays with them until it's clear they're dead
and he also doesn't you know take on the services of the teenager who's throwing herself at him
to get him to stay um so i mean bill behaves in a we're setting a low bar for him but yes i'll
agree he clears it yeah i i yeah i'm not saying that's necessarily but i mean it's it's a very
distasteful offer, frankly, from her part. And it's very cynical from the people who go, hey,
maybe you should go, you know, give him some company. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.
But I mean, he does stay. He does do that, despite the fact that he could easily leave at any point
and that he wants to find Joe, but he doesn't. He feels human empathy for them. He
to help them so i mean again a little less awful than what coger does to them at that point in the
game but then he also becomes repentant for what he is probably was a little over eager to do i'm
not sure he is repentant and yes i i yeah the portrayal is he's over eager to do it but i i'm
still like at least at least you're helping and i i so i guess i guess partly my my question is
what do you think of the performance of john dutton in this i've never seen him in anything
else to my knowledge neither have i um it's a little bit flat how about that i i yeah i mean
i think so because what what we are what we're describing what we're coming to is that here's a
man who is actually supposed to be quite conflicted he's he's torn because
while whilst you say whilst you say all the way all the way through um
that all the way through that episode where he is looking after the people that coca is assigned
him and staying with them even after he has a chance to leave he's thinking about leaving
and so the key thing there is the conflict that he feels between his duty to those people
and the fact that he feels that it's completely hopeless and
that means he's not he's not the doctor right he's not someone who is going to stay with every
hopeless case but on the other hand he's not
he it he's not he's not someone who is just going to be
out for himself or
quite as egregious as um people like uh david swift's character uh beetle or
or whatever he was called.
Biedler, he was the bald guy that was running that group at the time?
Yes, yes.
I always think of him as Henry Davenport
because he was in Drop the Dead Donkey,
which was a fantastic topical, satirical TV series set in a newsroom.
That's a heck of a name.
Well, yes.
Anyway, the point about that group was that if you think Coker was over keen to throw his weight around,
they were really, really going off on their kind of crazy, paranoid, right wing cult polygamist.
You know, there was no reluctance in there.
Whereas clearly that wasn't at any point Bill's first thought.
No, but I mean, Bill and Joe's thought was to get out to the country and go right to where they ultimately ended up.
They wanted to they wanted to look after their own interests, but they didn't necessarily want to destroy anyone else's or even.
you know if they could if they could offer help without it being too much of a sacrifice for them
to to refuse that help they they were you know moderately willing but but there's definitely
a conflict going on there because i think there there's a real dilemma and
the problem with Bill as a hero in this story,
unlike someone like Coker,
who is much less about the conflict
and much more about just get on and do the thing
that you believe to be right.
The problem with it is I didn't get that
from John Dutton's performance.
He just seemed to amble around a lot.
I think it's buried underneath that beard, maybe.
Indeed.
You know, if he had less beard, maybe he could emote more.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
I was wondering about people who were managing to be clean shaven after six years.
Where are you getting the razors from, guys?
Oh, Coker.
I guess they could have been stone sharpening, you know, proper old fashioned cutthroat razors.
But still seems like possibly not the top priority.
That's true.
I definitely would say that's not a problem.
But not a problem for Bill because they had him bearded from the beginning.
Yeah.
He just got shaggier and shaggier.
And Joe grew her hair.
Joe got rid of her Joanna Lumley and moved on to something a little more post-apocalyptic there by the end.
All right.
Let's see.
Yeah, he's not great.
I don't want to pick on him.
But he is kind of...
He is the single protagonist in this.
He's basically in every shot.
He has to carry it.
Mm-hmm.
Do you think that the...
The comet idea as a...
Did that seem credible to you?
comet as a weapon
not especially but i didn't i didn't really worry about it i was kind of
you know here's a phenomena that happens and like i say everyone would go look at it
there's absolutely no doubt that just virtually everyone would go look at that if you possibly
could. And then you go all the way to the end of the story and suddenly you pop up the idea that
says, well, you know, maybe this was of our own making. Is that, I find that there is a
group of people, sometimes environmentalists,
that seem to adopt an attitude,
and that's not all environmentalists,
but there are people who adopt an attitude
that humans are awful.
The world would be so much better without them.
You know, we destroy everything we touch.
We're terrible.
We're awful.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I was perfectly fine
with that comet being a thing that happened.
It's just, it just happened.
Space is a dangerous place.
Stuff happens.
This thing did it.
The world went blind.
There have been mass extinctions for forever.
Who knows?
Right?
That's fine with it.
But by putting it at the end,
it just sort of feels like,
frankly, it feels like 80s zeitgeist
to, well, no, it had to be
us destroying ourselves.
It couldn't be random chance.
That would never happen. We definitely, we had to
have done it.
And I'm,
I don't know.
I don't think it fits. But isn't that the whole point?
I mean, I don't know how the
point is conveyed in the book.
Obviously, I haven't read it.
I believe it's conveyed exactly the same
way towards the very end. He goes,
you know, I'm thinking maybe that was man-made.
the point the point is it's not a catholic guilt thing or something it's like this is our fault
i'm sure this is our fault we we did this i i don't think we did it's it's it's nuclear weapons
i yeah i don't know i really don't know i don't get that i did actually go look for the book
um because i just barely managed to get through the serial by last night so that we could
we could discuss this today and i just thought well what the heck i i'm sure i have a couple
of hours i can just whip through the novel too before we watch it but uh fortunately i didn't
find it so therefore i didn't have to i didn't do that but i don't know i don't know i mean it's
written in 1951 so you've got a different you've got a different attitude towards nuclear weapons
in 1951 and you definitely have a different attitude about nuclear weapons in 1951 Europe
than you do in 1951 America. So, you know, I may be bringing my own preconceptions there.
I just did not feel like this was a nuclear weapons story. I felt like this was a disaster
story that somebody decided that they would try to blame on nuclear weapons.
you know as part of the adaptation but the but the the triffids i mean the triffids are definitely
our problem yeah the truth the triffids are are uh the the kind of archetypal um
not it's it's not that it's not the bad side but it's it's the it's the scientists
isn't it?
It's the scientists producing
something
that
they
once it has been created
once the genie is out of the bottle
they
can no longer control
the consequences.
We can no longer control the consequences.
Now wait a minute.
That's not 100% true.
And I don't remember whether this is part of the book
or not okay but they're very clear about this they just about wiped out the triffids they had
just about cleared the planet of triffids and then somebody figured out that they were a fuel oil
so greed brought them back
we identified a threat we cleared it out it's almost like it's almost like polio
as a fuel oil they did the soviet union engineered them as a fuel oil and then
per this narrative, the guy was trying to steal it.
His plane got blown up.
It scattered the seeds around the world.
Nobody outside the Soviet Union, presumably,
knew that these plants were the fuel oil or the plants.
Maybe the people in the Soviet Union were dead
that knew they were the fuel oil plants.
But they talk about the newsreel and Bill's narrative.
He says, you know, they were showing up all over the place
and we pretty much wiped them all out.
And then somebody figured out that this was that amazing plant that did the fuel oil thing.
And suddenly everybody was farming them.
So, I mean, this is man's greed brought this one back twice.
Created it, amoral scientists and greed.
So it's not just scientists have the blame on this one.
That was definitely corporate greed.
I mean, you know, also a popular theme in 1980s TV.
But that's, I mean, that's still the case in the sense of the invention of the atom bomb.
Without it, you wouldn't have it.
You wouldn't have the atom bomb.
but equally without the kind of paranoia fueled arms race,
it wouldn't be a problem because no one would build them,
even if you knew how to do it.
Right.
You'd have to be crazy, crazy to do that.
I'll go along with that anyway.
You'd have to be crazy to do that.
Yes.
But, yeah.
C.F. Dr. Strangelove.
oh yes you've seen that recently haven't you indeed you did a review yes that's a that's
definitely um uh the single most um salient film about the conservation of bodily fluids i've ever
i've ever watched anyhow uh you know one of the funny things i find about this book
and well this serial and the book for that matter is the sort of
non-event that the Triffids are.
They're not in it much.
They show up as a sort of,
well, the world is a little more dangerous
than just people falling downstairs in their flats.
And, but, you know,
they're not much of a threat.
It's the disease that does for people.
And you'd think the Triffids were,
maybe I'm attributing mental processes to the Triffids,
which I think we're supposed to.
You'd think with all the dead bodies all over the place,
if a Triffid's job is to stand in front of a dead body
and let it decompose, you'd think they'd be busy.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, another, a whole other set of questions.
I appreciate they're asking questions about whether it can hear,
whether it can think in any sense of that.
But I would also have liked...
We kept coming back to the fact that Bill was a former Triffid researcher.
What happens when their food supply runs out?
The triffids seem to be multiplying, which was unsurprising given the number of bodies that had been around.
But presumably at this point, six years later, and they've got this compound keeping the triffids out,
the triffids aren't getting any nutrition, but that doesn't seem to be affecting them in any way.
the effects involved in a wilting
would have been too much
would have taxed the effects department too much
but
that would be
one way to wipe them out
you starve them out
do they really need decomposing
humans in fact
cows, sheep
well exactly
and so yeah
why
why are they going after humans
because they're evil which are difficult prey they're evil when there are far far easier prey
for them to be feeding on closer at hand maybe it's biomass i mean yes cows are still better
what about a cow what about a deer those are those are big not as popular in cities
where the triffids were at the zoo so i mean humans are kind of the logical
start there.
Well, maybe,
except what about
the other zoo animals,
or the cats,
and dogs, and foxes,
Is one human enough for one
Triffid? Because the other thing
is that they seem to be striking people
not for themselves.
You know, so they go out and they kill
Joe's father and they kill
the maid, well,
Why aren't there two triffids sitting there over the maid?
God, there's such a lot of fascinating questions about the...
Would you waste your time killing another one?
Biology, because you've now got a plant that can move.
But when would it move?
Because obviously moving is going to have an energy cost for the plant.
And if it's just killed a human, and it therefore...
I'll use the word no, but whatever it is, it's evolved in such a way as to be able to kill a human because it needs the nutrients from the human.
Once it's killed the human, the human needs to decompose for it to be able to make use of the nutrients.
That takes a while.
So wouldn't it stay with the human?
Yes, but it seems to go off and keep killing.
And if you kill somebody over, if you kill one here in front of you and then you kill another one, you can't make use of the other one because it's going to decompose while the first one is going.
So, yeah, I mean, that's just bad.
What about competitive behaviour in Triffid communities?
Because if you're a Triffid and you want a decomposing human,
one option for you is to go and sting a human and then wait for it to decompose,
which is going to take a while.
Another good option is going to find a Triffid that's already stung a human a couple of days ago
and
feeding off its human
and therefore you start to get questions like
can triffids sting other triffids?
Is there some way that triffids
can compete amongst themselves?
Yeah, I'm sure that there are lots of
really...
I would think that you could
really sit down
and think about the triffids for a while
and come up with a fascinating fake biology.
Well, yeah, because there are all sorts of potentially evolutionary strategies now for Triffids.
So, but yeah, swarming around, you know, swarming around the compound in their thousands
seems more like that they are truly intent on wiping out humans.
that seems to be a you know humans are maybe humans are considered a threat to them
maybe humans are the only thing that they consider them to be a threat
but that was that see yes that that is a question are they are they going to behave
defensively and you know you i want to know the mechanism by which that works because
a nettle sting is a pretty it's a pretty kind of simple mechanism really isn't it for how you're
going to how you're going to protect yourself because ultimately i'm getting all excited about
this so i'm thinking let's get dawkins on the case it's all about it's all about the gene isn't it
It's the selfish gene.
The Triffid's intent is actually pretty unimportant in terms of the way the Triffid must have evolved.
It's being able to pass on its gene.
But it didn't evolve.
It was engineered.
Yes, but you can't just engineer something from nothing.
Right, right, right, right.
How do they get the pieces?
It has a kind of family tree for want of a...
We do know they blow seeds.
yes and and the nettle thing is not totally i mean the reaction um where
bill goes for the triffid with the fork in that second episode is and he's just smashing it and
smashing it and smashing it long after it's dead i mean if you've ever seen me with a nettle that's
just stung me then you'll realize that's pretty realistic i've never actually seen a nettle so
in real life.
You don't get nettles in Arizona?
No.
Wow.
We have poison ivy,
but we don't have nettles.
I've heard of people
complaining about nettles
who've come from other places,
but no, I think it's too hot here.
I've been making,
I should say,
for the benefit of listeners
who live in places
where there aren't nettles,
they're sort of stingy plants.
If you touch them,
They irritate your skin.
It's quite painful, brings up little bumps,
and they grow all over the place in the UK climate.
But you have to touch them to be affected.
You have to actually touch them at particular times of year
because the nettle sting fades once they've gone to seed
because, as we're saying, they've fulfilled their role
in passing their genes on to the next generation of nettles.
Hmm.
Yeah, well, yeah, we don't have those,
but definitely have heard of them.
We usually hear them called stinging nettles.
Well, that's because not all nettles sting.
It is a particular type of nettle.
Oh, okay.
Did not know that.
Anyhow, yeah, the Triffids are fascinating.
And they serve just enough of a low-level threat that if we did not have the Triffids in this story,
I kind of feel like civilization would be back up and running within two years.
Really?
That's kind of my feel.
Even though everyone's getting wiped out by this disease?
well i think once they're dead by the disease we're okay
well at some point you know you burn a couple years well you've got all the
sighted people who didn't get the disease except for that one woman
um i know so all of those compounds just kind of need to withstand the burnout
of all the decomposing bodies and and but but they've they've still all the
infrastructure has has gone you've got you haven't got the oh i don't think we'd be back to normal
but i think we would be back to having to what the to what the militia guys were saying you know
the six or seven years of hard work because because basically all of your advance all of
your kind of advantages are gone you're not going to be able to plow your fields with a tractor
or or what have you you're not going to be able to to um use electronic milking machines you're
not going to be able to heat barns for your livestock or any any of that stuff or or for
germinating seeds you're right back to basically working solidly hard every single daylight hour
there is and if the crops fail you're going to die but we still have books and if you still had
and if people bound together in groups instead of isolating them and you know smaller groups but
communities then you're going to be able to do those things more efficiently i mean that's what
civilization has progressively shown what humans do and how we succeed and so yeah yeah i think
and and i suppose one other one other thing and again i felt this was kind of not
it wasn't necessarily obvious that they had asked themselves the questions about it but the actual
resource left over so if this is civilization at an end and a new civilization must be born
yada yada yada well the resource left over from the previous civilization is actually going to
be quite considerable so when you are thinking about things like fuel and um machinery and so
forth that you know just the oil that is left lying around in unused vehicles and such like
that might be used to power a generator if you could keep it going would actually
potentially keep you going for decades just because of the sheer numbers of
abandoned vehicles and and so forth i don't know how fast it evaporates but
you know at some point yeah well or or that's you know or that's stored in heating oil tank you
Tanks of kerosene or what have you on farms that have been abandoned.
The question is all going to come down to the numbers and there are all going to be logistical questions about it.
But there are ways in which the benefits of the previous civilization are possibly going to be able to give a kickstart to the new one.
that's going to see them through actually quite a few years
before they're completely on their own or having to do their own thing.
Have to figure out how to refine oil on their own, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you know, yeah, absolutely.
And I think the people who are going to be successful
are those that have somebody in the group that thinks that way.
Yes.
Who thinks in terms of, you know.
Which to me, which to me, bigger groups than 10 people.
But then on the other hand, and I'm going to say I slightly resent this because I'm born and brought up in Brighton.
The crazy nut jobs in Brighton who fired at Croker and who are insisting on everyone being in units of 10, et cetera, et cetera.
I think they probably got that wrong.
You don't think Brighton would be the first to return to that?
Yeah, I mean, I...
Brighton, everyone would be too stoned to get that organized.
But anyway.
I might, you know, I think the first thing that crossed...
And again, it's really hard not to...
It's really hard to put in the mindset.
But my first thought, and I live in a desert, so keep that in mind.
My worst thought is, if this is the problem, find an island.
Yes, I like the fact they went to the Isle of Wight because I was thinking that.
And I was thinking that, and I was thinking that because these triffids, I was thinking, why not build a saltwater moat?
I was thinking, hang on, no, you don't need to do that, you just have an island.
Because I hadn't thought about the seeds drifting across, and I was glad they addressed that.
But it sounds like triffids take a while to grow.
Sure.
And I forgot what he said it was, but he said as long as you dock them,
so like the ones in the zoo, as long as you dock them every two or three years,
they're harmless.
And again, it's all about time.
It's all about time.
But it is absolutely true.
I mean, the reason that Skoma Island has such a thriving colony of puffins
is an island in southwest Wales.
And it's because they're burrow-dwelling birds.
And it's because there are no rats on the island.
If anyone were to introduce a rat to the island,
it would wind up the puffit population.
So, yeah, you would expect humans would be off to the islands,
and we've got a few good-sized islands around the British Isles
where they would be able to keep down the population of Triffids
and basically live...
Because the Isle of Wight is a big island.
You know, there are several towns on it.
Admit, I have no idea how big the Isle of Wight is.
Visually in mind, I'd have to look up on a map to see it.
I couldn't tell you exactly, but I'm thinking it's maybe 15 or 20 miles across.
Okay, yeah, that's a good-sized island.
You could support quite a lot of people there.
I assume you can probably grow crops there.
But it's not a windswept rock.
Well, we're talking about the southeast of England.
But even, you know, take the Isle of Man, say, where it's definitely a little bit more rugged.
But it's, again, quite big.
Fishing.
Probably, coincidentally, the size of Brighton and Hove.
You've got, yeah, you've got fish, you've got sheep.
And you can certainly grow crops.
And if you had triffids, you'd have cooking oil.
Oh, wait, no, that's wrong.
That's the book.
You could deep fry sheep strips.
And vegetables.
Well, you could certainly produce oil from other crops.
I would suggest maybe Triffid would be the best choice.
Yeah, maybe not.
Maybe not.
Anyway.
Yeah, so it's fascinating.
I don't know where this falls on the timeline of post-apocalyptic stories.
You know, at some point, if you go back in time, there's going to be the first one.
Right?
I mean, in any genre, there's always the first one that somebody comes up with.
I don't think this is it.
I don't know if I would consider War of the Worlds to be that.
But maybe.
But it certainly is much older than a lot of the crop that has just seemed to burgeon over the years.
There is something wrong in the human mind that makes them crave these stories.
I really don't know what it is.
I really don't understand it.
Is it that they want to see the ugliness of humans?
come out? Do they feel like we deserve some sort of punishment and this is a way of
vicariously watching it? I don't know. I'm not a fan. I enjoy this story. I love the premise of
the Triffids and I wish, as we've discussed, they were better fleshed out, so to speak, on
their biology and how it worked and maybe a little more logical.
and I appreciate that it's kind of
at least a hopeful ending
that it looks like
it is a matter of waiting out the Triffids
it's a matter of
growing up a new batch of kids
and starting to
get the knowledge
back and go this is not a
living dead film
where it's done
you know anyone who ever dies
becomes a zombie therefore there's an infinite supply of of of enemies coming at you you know
i i could envision the earth being triffid free in 50 to 75 years or at least whole
whole livable areas just completely devoid of triffids and and rebuilding so but that's a
dramatic problem for the story i think because where do you end it is kind of a peter out end
there isn't it a lot of people complain especially as especially as they're not going to answer the
questions about the either the meteor shower or the disease or anything about all these kind of
biological questions we've had about the behavior of triffids or the capabilities like can they
all those questions like i say i don't mind unanswered questions but from a dramatic point
of view it could have ended in a number of different places and i i'm not even sure if
it wouldn't be a better story if it had done a hundred years from now
500 years from now we think i mean it certainly i mean it certainly could have carried on
let's pretend like
by the time people are
asking the questions properly
that
we will never
find out if that comet was
an atomic weapon
that the MOD or whichever
organization put that
thing up there, collapses, burns
down, the records are lost
they're retrievable
that no one ever finds out what caused that comet.
A hundred years from now,
how many religions and how many schools of thought
will have evolved up over that divine judgment
handed down on humans?
I think that's really interesting.
I think the dramatic structure of the story is challenging
because, as you say, it's not the kind of all-out wipeout.
There is a scenario envisaged, and then that has consequences,
and the novel, or the series, presumably the novel,
takes some time to explore a period afterwards but it's almost arbitrary
where it stops and i think you know if if i were if i were asked to do an adaptation of this story
i think i would be very tempted to plunder the structure from there was a tv series
over here about 10 years ago which was it was the title of it was literally five days
and it's nothing to science fiction okay it was a drama about the abduction of some
children and the the police investigation into the abduction and the five days were because each
of the five episodes of the series dealt with a day in that missing persons case but they weren't
consecutive days it was like the first the first day you actually see the circumstances around the
abduction and you see the the police attending and interviewing everyone and so on but the rest
of it is is kind of insights into what's going on at various points they like day three day 28 day
33 day 79 and obviously part of the the the job for the narrative is to fill in the gaps a little
bit for the viewer but you're you're you're kind of picking on days in the story when there is
actually something to talk about and and and it helps it gives you a picture of everything that's
come in between and i would nick that i think in the sense of i'd want to do the day of the meteor
shower right and maybe day three you know after the meteor shower but then maybe jump forward to
a year after afterwards and five years after and like you say it would be quite interesting to go
i don't know about 100 years but an entire generation afterwards to look at and to look
at and explore what has happened what people had found out what myths they had built up what
what reactions and and how how people have progressed because i think
unless you do that it just it it becomes a kind of endless narrative that really
has has no structure to it this is the beginning of a whole new story of mankind in a way so yes
it's the beginning not the end yes maybe that's the difference this is a beginning not an end so
yes and and all the questions we're asking you kind of want you want to see how they play out
so you need glimpses at least of what the consequences are in 10 years time 20 years
time and the rest of it yeah um i have a couple of things um one and i went back to check this
because it's, I remember this from the book.
And so it wasn't obvious to me in the TV show,
but it does appear to be true.
And since it wasn't obvious to me and I knew about it,
I will pass this on.
The military guy at the end,
I think it's Torrance is his name, right?
With the mustache and who's giving his little speech.
Did you recognize him from elsewhere in the story?
no he was the guy who opened on shot on bill and his chain gang and walked up and shot the guy in
the head yeah it's the same actor but because they had his hair dyed red or whatever it was
it wasn't obvious that that's the same sadistic guy but because of it in the book bill has even
more reasons to distrust this guy yeah see i he recognizes him as as that as that guy
which i don't know if that would realistically happen i don't recognize people i met yesterday
oh i suppose if i saw him gun somebody down in cold blood maybe i'd have a little better
uh mind of them in the uh and the other thing that i remember from the book that didn't
if it did happen it's because i don't understand geography of britain
uh well enough but in the book the religious lady when bill and coker left she says well
the other group went this away pointing to the right when in fact she knew they went that away
pointing to the left she intentionally sent them on a wild goose chase
okay and i don't think that i don't think that is in any way conveyed
in this story but she intentionally did that to try to
you know maybe make them change their mind and come back to god
um in in i'm not sure what that has to do with the geography well i mean i suppose that if uh
if she said, well, they went to Wiggum
and then we later find out that they went to Salisbury.
I don't know if those are in different directions or not.
I don't know if you, as somebody who knew the geography,
okay, let's say she said, yeah, I think they headed over to Wales.
And then we later find out, no, we told her we were heading to Scotland.
I could kind of go, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Okay, she lied.
But I don't think she...
I see what you mean. Right, yes.
Right, but in the book, I think it's more clear that she deliberately misled them.
And that...
Because, you know, they needed...
Because that's how God works.
You lie to people about stuff for their own good.
Yeah. Okay.
i think she i think she told them they'd gone to dorset and actually they'd gone to the isle of
white yeah i don't know and maybe they went to dorset first and did you know i i honestly don't
it's just it's a non-thing in this in this episode it makes her a little it makes her a little nastier
um in in a way well my opinion nastier but i suppose you know trying to save their souls there
anyway I don't know that I have anything else
this is a long one but that's okay because it was a long serial
or series
anything else Simon?
no I have nothing else but I'm going to mention
since we were talking about post-apocalyptic science fiction
that the earliest
in the genre may be
The Last Man, which I haven't read,
by Mary Shelley, published
in 1826.
But she did another book?
Didn't she do
enough damage with Frankenstein?
Oh, no.
Please tell me no.
No, no. If that's... If she did
this genre too,
first off, their scientists are evil and they
tamper with things they're not supposed to
and everything they touch will
destroy the world that's frankenstein and and i'm sure you've heard me rank on about that one
because that is so pervasive in the in the in the zeitgeist of the world that's her fault 100
thousand percent if she came up with the last what's it called the last man the last man the
last man if she came up with a genre of post-apocalyptic nonsense i am she is way down my
list on popular people that's all i gotta say i'm gonna look that up i'm gonna i'm gonna see
if i can i want to read it now i have to say i kind of do too i and i have but she found the
time to write both of these and travel with the doctor so pretty impressive so are you gonna you
gonna get the big finished night of the triffids now no i've i've i feel i've had enough i'm not
I'm not going to track down
the film
I
I might watch the more recent
adaptation if it popped up on my screen I guess
but
I'm not in a hurry for any more triffids
the
the 1950s
one the movie
the 62 film
what I remember about that
is
that the guy who stars in it
what i remember is that i kept thinking he was sean connery
now admittedly when i was younger i had trouble differentiating sean connery from a lot of people
so he was always the sort of generic bond guy
but that's a that's another story who aren't sean connery yeah there are quite a few people
who are not John Connery,
but there's some,
I think it's his voice.
I think it's this.
Colin Keele.
I think his voice may have been
very reminiscent of it.
I'm not,
I'm not sure why
because I haven't seen that film.
In,
you know something?
That's no doubt
the first place I've ever seen Triffids.
The 62 film?
There's no doubt I saw that first.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was going to ask you
when you were,
when you were talking about bookshops,
I had it in my mind to ask you
And then the thought slipped away.
So you say, right, your first.
I'm sure I must have.
Triffid experience was that.
So I've just discovered, courtesy of Wikipedia,
another nice little trivial Doctor Who connection,
which is that also appearing in the 1962 film was Carol Ann Ford.
She could have been playing Susan.
She could have been.
She was playing a character called Bettina, who I don't remember in this one.
No, I don't remember one in this either.
But we're talking about, a year before, Doctor Who.
Could be where she got the job from.
Well, I'm sure they would have been aware of it.
There is a Doctor Who connection with this serial, in fact, as well.
Because if you notice the name of the producer.
David Maloney
Maloney yeah
Blake 7
oh I didn't know he'd done Blake 7
but he did direct a fair
old number of Doctor Who
serials from
I think it was
Mind Robber was his first
one
War Games, Talents of Weng Chang
so quite a few
pretty top notch
serials
Genesis of the Dalek
yeah yeah yeah he i i see his name quite a lot um on on things i don't know that i could have
pinned them down to specific stories but you obviously look them up so that's cheating
research is cheating i've looked him up because i recognized his name but i will admit
i didn't in my head have the names of all the serials that he had directed
yeah I'm not
Toby Haydoki you know
yes
alright well Simon thank you for joining me
my pleasure as always
and listeners I hope you have enjoyed this
traipse through the garden of
triffins and I hope
you'll join us all again next
time on Fusion Patrol
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