hodges331
Hello, i was only 8 years old when i watched the changes, it invokes powerful memories as images of series remind me of Berkeley power station where my father worked most of his life. More recently i have been playing computer game called half life 2, and only just realised some of the in game environments have a similar feel and atmosphere to images that i remember from the changes episodes.No wonder i like the game so much, desolate landscapes filled with electricity pylons making that buzzing noise. I hope the series will be released, it will be amazing to watch it again after all these years.I would be very grateful for any feedback related to the comments i have posted.
michael-stead
I remember seeing this as a child, and I believe it may even have been repeated soon afterwards. It was quite hard-hitting bleak stuff for the children's slot, and very welcome because of that. David Garfield as a hard-bitten leader in the post-industrial dystopia gave a memorable performance. In fact in the years since it was last shown (an before IMDb or other internet sites made it easy to dig up these old shows) the only thing I had to convince myself that the show really existed (in the face of blank stares from my contemporaries) was David's performance. The title of the show was certainly unmemorable.I imagine that at the time this was seen as a junior version of Terry Nation's 'Survivors', and was in the same mould as 'Ace of Wands', as a slightly unsettling half an hour of entertainment. This was in an age when every schoolchild grew up believing that at any minute the Russians and Americans would set off nuclear Armageddon, and so in some ways it was also rather like one of the Public Information Films of the time. I think that in these days of shouty Blue Peter presenters and the thunderingly moronic "Dic 'n Dom" it would be utterly out of place on CBBC.As we 'know' everyone was bewilderingly racist in the 1970s . . . except that millions of children were introduced to Sikhism through 'The Changes'. The only people unaffected by the destruction of society were the rather noble band of Sikhs.I suppose what was rather alarming about 'The Changes' would have been the juxtaposition with 'The Wombles'. In the latter a broken television set was the prompt for Tobermory to turn it into a new camera or automatic hot water bottle for Great Uncle Bulgaria. In the former it would be left discarded at the side of a wind-swept wasteland as the rest of society crumbled around it.The end of the series was rather haunting, as the children who were the heroes found their way to a cave deep under a mountain in wales, where a huge pulsing white rocky crystal was sending out the waves of hate which had perverted the world.So far BBC worldwide seem not to have considered this for release as a DVD. Perhaps the special effects would seem a bit dated today, but I am sure that as a piece of quality drama it would have lasted quite well.
Glenn Walsh
I remember this from my childhood and like the first reviewer I was totally captivated. It dealt with some terrific ideas, but I always remember the opening credits where the girl's father smashed the TV with one of those ashtrays-on-a-stand. To me, a 10-year-old telly addict, that was horrifying! I read the book it was based on, 'The Weathermonger' and it was much better, with a developed story and a more plausible ending. WEE SPOILER... In the book, the supernatural force was revealed to be Merlin the wizard, no less. A re-make of this with a bigger budget (maybe even a feature) could be very successful today as we are even more techno-dependent than we were in 1975. Any producers reading this...
andyfennessy
CONTAINS SPOILERS (not that you'll ever get to see it!)This was a children's TV series consisting of ten twenty-five minute episodes first broadcast in 1975 on BBC1, and repeated a year later. I have very vivid memories of it, because it scared me half-stupid (and considering I have grown up believing, for instance, The Exorcist to be a comedy, that's saying something!)Young Nicky Gore wakes up one morning to discover that everybody - her parents included - has gone mad. They are out on the streets smashing up cars, destroying televisions - any mechanical / electrical device you could care to mention, in fact. Deserted by her parents (who decide to flee to France) she is befriended by a group of Sikhs who, like her, appear to be immune from the cause of the madness - the "Noise", disturbing waves of sound which emanate from electricity pylons (or so I remember).Various adventures in rural England ensue before Nicky - accompanied by various companions along the way (and at one point tried as a witch) - finds the source of the noise in a recently excavated cave system... This is the last episode and things get SERIOUSLY weird! She finds a large glowing red monolith which is crying out in a strange faraway voice "Muni targit! Muni targit!" (Latin for "I stop the World" I believe).Apparently, it is a very confused supernatural force which has been reawakened by the excavation work, and sensed (I'm guessing here - it is twenty-seven years since I saw it and I was eight at the time!) that the natural order of the planet has been perverted (and indeed, polluted) by the inventions of man since the Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, and is attempting to revert the world to a time when people were more at one with their environment.The denouement is something of a cop-out. Nicky prostrates herself before the ancient force, pleading with it to reverse the harm it has caused. And, um, it does so.The world is free again to poison the land and seas, for superpowers to threaten each other with nuclear weapons, for s/he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins mentalities... Civilisation, it may be concluded, is amoral, but once innocence is lost, it can never be regained. Will wisdom grow in parallel with progress, or are we merely rushing headlong into self-destruction? Thoughts to chew on, certainly.Note: Much of the location work was shot in Bristol and the West Country.