Sky (1975) and Some Reflections on Categorising 1970s TV (Seventies TV Season)
The introduction to this series of posts about 1970s TV series can be found here:
Ever since I first started blogging about TV a decade ago I have been more interested in the effect that blogging would have on me than on an audience, and aimed to make blogging watch TV more thoughtfully. It is very pleasing that nonetheless a number of people kindly read my witterings here, but I am really the ultimate amateur and while I try to keep an eye on what everyone else on the blogosphere is saying and say something different, my blog posts are like thoughts which go out into the net without an intended reaction or audience. Once again the act of blogging has proved its main effect to be on the blogger, because writing these posts about 1970s TV shows has made me think something for the first time.
I often divide 1960s TV into the real and the unreal, and in the past I notice that I have tended to divide 1970s TV into the gritty and the non-gritty. But actually looking through 1970s TV shows to choose ones to blog about has given me a bit more of an overview and I have noticed that it is possible to divide 1970s TV into five categories.
1. Shows which draw on the spirit of the age and so come up with a show which is about adventure (The Protectors), sophistication (Jason King), sex (Man About the House), ordinary life (The Fenn Street Gang, Love Thy Neighbour), and so on. These shows also somehow manage often to be very sexy, very racist, or occasionally very distressing because they depict the 1970s as they really were.
2. Shows which draw on the spirit of the age and instead come up with a show which is about Paganism (Children of the Stones), magic (Ace of Wands), ghosts (The Stone Tape), New Age, environmentalism (Sky), science fiction (Sapphire and Steel), folk horror, or the otherwise strange (The Owl Service) and so on. If I'm forced to place it in one category obviously Survivors would have to go here.
You may say, and you would be right, that the line I am drawing is once again between the real and the unreal, but I think I'm seeing a shift in the reality here. I think in the 1970s *both* of these two categories were real: there was a boom in all things occult, new age, spiritual, etc, and the environmental movement was getting into its stride. I can't overstress the point I am making, that I don't think in the 1970s people would necessarily have seen the second category of show as unreal in any way: the Age of Aquarius had started and all things were possible.
Sky (1975) is one of the more classic examples of shows which walked into this world and essentially exploded.
I am going to have to admit here that doing this series of posts is what has made me watch Sky again and actually pay attention to it. I have had a pirated copy on my hard drive for at least eight years and watched through it when I first got it, but not since. It is about a strange boy who appears on earth with a message for us but who has managed to arrive at the wrong time and the earth's 'immune system' tries to reject him. Of course even if you've never seen it you already know without me telling you that the writers wrote for Doctor Who. I'm not going to focus on a single episode because I don't think I can get a whole blog post out of one.
The show manages to include pretty well everything in my second category above, and I can only say it would be a bit mind-blowing if you weren't expecting it. The boy communicates telepathically, there are mystical and environmental issues, it is filmed in the settings of some of Britain's ancient sites: it's like a experiencing what your neighbour who smoked too much weed in the seventies and wrecked his brain, saw. In fact watching it is a very strange experience indeed. It moves at the pace of a very elderly snail, some seriously weird things happen (I'm not even going to try to describe some of the effects). It looks about as old-fashioned as you can get and yet you just know the events couldn't have happened yet. It's virtually impossible to know what on earth is going on.
This show is genuinely like smoking the seventies. In fact I'm delighted to see on a couple or reviews that I'm not the only one who thinks the drugs probably contributed quite a lot to this show, and in fact it is really quite trippy.
They had the genius idea of including 'kids' rather than characters identified as adults, as a foil to sky. They are exactly like the 'kids' in Scooby Doo, old enough to drive, yet young enough to have the youth and resilience to carry on with the mind-expanding events.
I do have a question about whether something else is referenced, which I haven't seen anyone else ask. Sky is looking for the Juganet, which is what will help him get back into the right time. In 1969 ARPANET, the military/government predecessor of our current intervet, became active and I wonder whether Juganet was intended to sound like it. I have no idea whether ARPANET was actually secret at the time or whether the writers could have been confident enough of geeky enough viewers recognising the reference. Even if it isn't deliberately referencing, the name and idea of the Juganet are strikingly close to the sort of net we are now familiar with.
I think if this kind of weird stuff interests you you should watch this show. If I have any criticism it is that I find it utterly confusing and I do wonder what this show would have been like made as a film by people who weren't stoned.
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