The Day of the Triffids

The past couple of nights saw the broadcast by the BBC of The Day of the Triffids. Well, they said it was The Day of the Triffids. And they had a caption at the start of both installments saying it was "based on the book" by John Wyndham. That caption lacked the words "extremely loosely" before the "based on". But more on that later.

The first problem with this "adaptation" was the length. The two episodes were an hour and half each - therefore, both the length of a normal feature film. Which whilst it does require a substantial commitment from the viewer is not asking too much. As long as there is a good reason why the two episodes are so long. Unfortunately, this adaptation actually appeared to be six half-hour episodes crudely stitched into two 90 minute installments. Seriously, watch the episodes again if you don't believe me. At every half hour mark, there is a mini cliffhanger, and more often that not a fade to black where the credits would have been. This shouldn't be a major problem - except that each deleted cliffhanger takes up a substantial amount of time to set up, only for it to lose most of its dramatic impact since the story just rolled on. Therefore, this adaption was created with one format in mind, only to be shoe-horned into another format. As a result, it reminded me of one of those endless Sunday morning compilations of Hollyoaks, where the episodes are all blurred into one and you end up wondering when the tedious farrago of photogenic Chester teens parading themselves and their limited acting abilities will ever stop.

Of course, that might not be the fault of the producers. It could be that they were told by the BBC that they would get six half-hour slots, only for that to change after the programme had been completed. However, it is equally possible that the BBC felt they had to broadcast the programme in the way they did - in two large chunks on consecutive evenings. Because had this been broadcast over six weeks, I doubt I would have made it to the end of the series - and I love the source material. And that is the fault of the producers.

See, this version of the novel was an attempt to do a spectacular end of the world story, complete with the sort of special effects normally associated with a Roland Emmerich picture (who obviously has the budget to do it far more effectively) and with a determination to tick off every disaster movie cliche. There was the evil sub-Bond villain in the terribly realised Eddie Izzard character, the troubled father-son relationship (completely missing from the original book) that ends in friendship just before tragedy strikes and so on. It all screamed "humans can be as bad as the Triffids, you know", but did so in a far more jarring and consequently far less effective way than the book.

Which is the biggest problem I had with this adaptation. It took the book and turned it into a checklist of settings to tell a very different story to the one told by Wyndham's novel. And as a result, it came across as far less credible than the already fantastical original work. Take the ending. In the book, the family escape by putting sugar in the engines of the military vehicles, and then driving away. In the recent TV version, we have a hysterical hostage situation, followed by a Triffid attack, followed by a nonsensical escape plan that seems to involve dripping blinding Triffid juice into people's eyes to make the Triffids like them, before the protagonists row away to end the story. The beginning of the novel deals with Bill waking up and realising that a Wednesday sounds like a Sunday, and slowly finding out from there that the world as he knows it has ended. In doing so, he takes the reader with him as he explores a mysterious and frightening new world. However, Monday night's episode had a bit of pointless scene-setting before showing the spectacle of the world ending. Which was not as dramatic as it could be, and certainly not as dramatic as the mystery at the start of the novel. The beginning of 28 Days Later is far closer in spirit to John Wyndham than anything from this adaptation of his classic work.

What Wyndham realised - and the producers of this adaptation totally failed to get - is that the basic scenario itself is dramatic. It is about the end of the world. You can get the drama you need to propel the story forward just from people trying to survive. In the book, for example, disease is one of the major problems faced by the characters and one of the things that makes the characters flee London. You don't need plane crashes, or trigger happy policeman, or ludicrous would-be dictators played by comedians not best known for their dramatic acting. Actually, you don't really need the Triffids - they are just a commercial gimmick. The apocalypse is dramatic enough without the relentless over-egging of the pudding that the BBC managed with this flawed attempt to reproduce the classic novel on the small screen.

Ultimately, what the BBC broadcast over the past couple of nights was Bill Masen and Joely Richardson in a mildly diverting adventure with some Triffids. It was not an adaptation of The Day of the Triffids. The closest we have had to a proper version of the novel is the 1981 version; however, if you really want to understand why Wyndham's story became so famous and has endured for so long, then I suggest you go read the book.