Flying Near the Sun
- Article 3 of 13
- Off the Telly, March 2006
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages
Chocky deals with 12-year-old Matthew Gore (Andrew Ellams), who starts to hear a voice that enables him to become a genius in school subjects for which he never showed any aptitude. Matthew, however, is not the central character of the story. Instead, the shows focuses on the boy's father, David (James Hazeldine), who is concerned that his child isn't just conversing with a make-believe playmate but is actually schizophrenic.
Chocky, while more adult than most shows, still falls short of Icarus for two reasons. Firstly, Matthew's knowledge comes not from his innate talents but because he's been "possessed" by a friendly alien - the eponymous Chocky. Secondly, Matthew is never placed in any real danger. At one point in the story, Matthew is referred to a psychiatrist, who realises that Chocky might actually be real. He informs his oil company clients, who kidnap, drug and hypnotise Matthew, hoping to extract the knowledge of "cosmic energy" that Chocky has given him. But, when they discover Chocky has left, they simply release him, rather than kill him. Icarus, which aired not long after Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech and only a few years after the invention of the neutron bomb, spoke to far more adult concerns than this successor.
Chocky went on to spawn two sequels of increasing childishness that fell completely into the traps it had almost managed to avoid. Chocky's Children (1985) saw Chocky move on to another child, Albertine Meyer (Annabel Worrell), a genuine scientific genius, in an attempt to pass on her "cosmic energy" knowledge more covertly. While David Gore and Albertine's father, Arnold (Prentis Hancock), are still major characters, it's ultimately the children who thwart the pesky villains, using telepathy. By now the focus has perceptively shifted towards the junior leads and further away from realism. The final serial, Chocky's Challenge (1986), takes Chocky firmly into children's SF, with Albertine and a group of scientifically gifted Chocky acolytes ganging together to create cosmic energy collectors under Chocky's overt tutelage, while the moustache-twirling military looks on in delight, ready to swoop in and steal the results.
Even Icarus' writer Richard Cooper was unable to make much headway. He deployed some of the same tactics he'd used to make Knights of God (1987) as mature as possible - but with diminishing returns thanks to its futuristic setting. Knights of God sees England in the year 2020 turned into a dictatorship by right-wing Christians. Cooper, who had been asked by TVS' controller of programmes Anna Holme to create a tough story for children but with a mostly adult cast, drew on his own fears of religious groups to create the show and deliberately steered clear of any science-fiction trappings to make it as realistic as possible. He succeeded enough for the programme, which was originally made in 1985, to be shelved by ITV's controllers for over a year: they regarded it as too grim and depressing for family audiences.
Nevertheless, Knights of God was largely unsuccessful in exploring adult themes. There was no real adult lead, unlike Icarus, leaving the uncharismatic, unlikeable Gervase Edwards (George Winter) and his drippy girlfriend as the show's protagonists. Despite this, the grim setting and Cooper's themes of brainwashing and children being at the mercy of outside forces shone through, particularly compared with the similar shows of the time.
The last hurrah for adult-themed children's programming on ITV was newspaper drama Press Gang (1989). Although populated by teenage leads, these were very clearly young adults rather than grown-up kids. Occasionally undermined by overly comic situations, Press Gang managed to deal with issues such as drug abuse and political corruption in an adult manner. Yet its bright-eyed optimism, where nothing bad happened to any of the main characters, no matter what they did, placed the show firmly in the children's programming genre, rather than adult's.
After Press Gang, only a brief revival of The Tomorrow People (1992) and another Cooper-authored show, Eye of the Storm (1993), showed even a hint of adult sensibilities. Post-1993, ITV and BBC alike gave up the ghost and stopped produced anything that could remotely have been called "adult" for a juvenile audience.
25 years on, Codename: Icarus still remains more or less the only example of how best to create an uncompromising children's drama.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages