The Tripods (TV series)

The Tripods
The Tripods Titles
Genre	Science fiction
Written by	John Christopher (novel) Alick Rowe (series 1) Christopher Penfold (series 2)
Directed by	Graham Theakston (7 eps) Christopher Barry (11 eps) Bob Blagden (7 eps)
Starring	John Shackley Ceri Seel Jim Baker
Composer(s)	Ken Freeman
Country of origin	United Kingdom Australia
Original language(s)	English, French, Italian, German
No. of series	2
No. of episodes	25
Production
Producer(s)	Richard Bates
Running time	30 minutes per episode
Release
Picture format	PAL (576i)
Audio format	Monaural
First shown in	United Kingdom BBC Australia Seven Network
Original release	15 September 1984 – 23 November 1985
External links
Website

The Tripods is a television adaptation of John Christopher's The Tripods series of novels. It was jointly produced by the BBC in the United Kingdom and the Seven Network in Australia. The music soundtrack was written by Ken Freeman.

Series one of The Tripods, broadcast in 1984, which had 13 half-hour episodes written by the author of many radio plays Alick Rowe, covers the first book, The White Mountains; the 12-episode second series (1985) covers The City of Gold and Lead. Although a television script had been written for the third series, it never went into production.

The first series was released on both VHS and DVD. The BBC released Tripods — The Complete Series 1 & 2 on DVD in March 2009.

The series introduced several minor changes from the book, notably the shape of the Masters and Tripods, which have tentacles (although the Tripods do have a mechanical claw-arm that they sometimes use) in the book; the Black Guard was introduced to serve as a tangible human antagonist as overuse of the Tripods themselves would be expensive to film and undermine their dramatic presence; gravity inside the Golden City was increased artificially, which is not mentioned in the TV series; the introduction of "cognoscs", spiritual life-forms vastly superior to the Masters themselves; and more other main characters, including love interests for both Will and Beanpole. The original texts have few female characters. John Christopher was asked about this for an interview on Wordcandy, replying that at the time of writing the series, it was generally accepted that girls would read books with boy main characters, but not vice versa. He also stated that he felt the addition of an entire family of girls to the TV series was somewhat "over the top". The series is also notable for featuring non-humanoid aliens, which was uncommon at the time.

Charlotte Long, who played Will's love interest Eloise, died in a car crash shortly after the start of transmission of the first series. For the second series, the role was briefly recast, with Cindy Shelley appearing as Eloise during a dream sequence.