Backlisted - The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

It's sixty-five years since John Wyndham published The Midwich Cuckoos, the fourth in his hugely successful series of science fiction novels that began in 1951 with The Day of the Triffids. Many people’s first introduction to The Midwich Cuckoos is through the classic film from 1960, which was renamed The Village of the Damned and starred George Sanders. We’re joined for this episode by the writer and director David Farr, who has just produced the most recent adaptation of the novel: a seven-episode series for Sky. As well as assessing the merits of the book – sometimes obscured by its popular success – we discuss the process of adapting a classic novel for a modern audience. This episode also features Andy sharing his holiday read – The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (author of The Constant Nymph which we featured last year). The novel is set in Cornwall, which was exactly where Andy found himself when he read it. John also introduces a new independent publisher, Hazel Press, whose exquisite small, environmentally friendly books include The Wren by Julia Blackburn, a haunting sequence of short journal entries and prose poems. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 11:00 - The Feast by Margaret Kennedy. 18:01 - The Wren by Julia Blackburn. 22:48 - The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Other conditions apply. I was in Cornwall last week. I had a lovely time. I went to Lanhydroc and I went to St Michael's Mount and Castle Drogo. Castle Drogo, yeah. Oh, Castle Drogo, man. Have you been there? Has anyone been there?

It's just got such a great name. Castle Drogo. One does not simply walk into Castle Drogo. You have to follow the path. So I'm going to say it was built in the 1920s and 30s, designed by Lutyens, responding to his American patrons' desire for a new castle. So it's this Art Deco castle with a sort of 1930s flat roof,

as a result of which the water it's uh the water has been leaking in for the last 90 years and it's just undergone a nine year restoration process but it's very peculiar it's like when you walk into the main hall it's these incredible lutch and spaces but it's but none of the flagstones or the or the the ramparts are worn down or old everything's basically as new it's a very odd experience and then within it you've got these kind of country house rooms these cozy little rooms within these these this castle environment yeah it was brilliant it was the sort of thing as we said on lot listed that uh yeah it was brilliant it was the sort of thing as we said on lot listed that uh andy miller would do and and he did do it i did do it it was really fun it was really really fun

david where where where are you you said you were in the country i mean i am i'm in a secret location that i can't divulge in the country are you you hiding out but it's my little bolt hole that we go to and so i do genuinely not tell anyone where it is really. Brilliant. I mean, it's in East Anglia. It's really nice. It's really lovely. It's broad enough for us.

Yeah. And it just kind of gives me a break from the mayhem of industrial television and the city. It makes you seem so kind of elusive as well. I'm not going to tell anyone where I am. I could be Spider-Man or I could be in my bolt hole. It is very good. It's particularly good if sort of the Wyndham feel that the world might possibly catastrophically collapse. And you wouldn't know. You just quietly look after your vegetables. David does look like he's

calling us from the room at the end of 2001, incidentally, everybody. That's something to do with the wide-angle lens on this. I mean, it's actually a very small room, but the wide-angle lens does make it look very cool. Like Leonard Rossiter might appear in 2001, might just come down the corridor in his suit. Now, there's the thing. Leonard Rossiter, the star of 2001, I think, as far as we're all concerned. He is so good in that.

I loved him asking those questions. Oh, dear. Oh, that's David set the tone already. We've managed to get a Leonard Rossiter mention and we haven't even started the podcast yet. Well done. Well done, everybody. Rising damp for Castle Drogo as well.

So there we are. Perfect. Shall we crack on? Let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us standing on the outskirts of a sleepy English village in the mid-1950s. It is the morning of 27th of September, and we're looking across a field of stubble

towards the spire of the village church, just visible through a stand of elm trees. Smoke from the village spirals upwards, but there are no birds in the sky. In the pasture to our left, a small herd of cows lie motionless, apparently sleeping. We open the gate to look more closely when suddenly our sight begins to blur. Dun, dun, dun.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by a guest making his backlisted debut, David Farr. Hello, David. Hi there, hi. From a mystery location.

David is a writer and director for Page, Stage and Screen. He began his career in the theatre. He was artistic director of London's Gate Theatre and the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith where he directed productions of Kafka and Harold Pinter. He is also director at the National Theatre and Young Vic and was associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has more recently moved into screen writing his first feature film Hannah. David later adapted the film into a three-season television series for Amazon Prime. One of the reasons we wanted David to come on here before we get to the actual book

is he has a history of adapting a wide range of source texts, which include the UN inspector, Gogol, metamorphosis, Kafka, as mentioned, crime and punishment in Dalston. Quite proud of that one. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And his adaptation of John le Carré's novel The Night Manager, which I'm sure lots of people listening to this will have seen,

starring Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, aired on BBC One in 2016. A total of 9.9 million people tuned in to watch the series finale and the show earned multiple awards and nominations. million people tuned in to watch the series finale and the show earned multiple awards and nominations he's also listeners a man who adapted philip k dick's story the impossible planet you've really covered um all the bases there pretty much i've i've i've colonized adaptation from slightly maverick texts i think that would be vaguely how I would describe it. Yeah.

Did you find with one of the things about Philip K. Dick as a prose stylist, if we can just digress immediately, is he's like, he's ever so good at ideas and very, very bad at dialogue. Is that something you were aware of going into that? Were you a fan of Philip K. Dick? And is that something you were aware of going into that? Were you a fan of Philip K. Dick? And is that something you had to work on? I wasn't a fan of Philip K. Dick, almost for that reason.

I don't think I love his writing, but he's a wonderful conceptualist and a brilliant mind and philosopher. And to be honest, I don't care at all if his dialogue's rubbish because I'm not going to write his dialogue, I'm going to write my dialogue. What you want as an adapter is you want a story that just works, that someone has just had a wonderful idea. In fact, I'd say, to be honest,

Impossible Planet and Midwich Cuckoos have deep similarities in that regard that you can probably tell the idea to a child in about 30 seconds and someone will get quite excited. And once that initial idea is there, I tend to kind of, the idea to a child in about 30 seconds and someone will get quite they'll get excited and once that initial idea is there i tend to kind of we you know we'll talk about this in detail in a minute but i tend to go off on my own a little bit at least a bit because i feel that's the job you know i feel like otherwise it's you might as well just read the book you know i love books i don't want to i want to do something that's that departs to some extent and then of course because hopefully because you love the book it also stays truthful well fortunately we can have both

or in in the case of this several versions which is uh we'll get on to the midwich cookies in in a minute david's first book for children the book of stolen dreams was published to acclaim last year and comes out in paperback this september and backlisted listeners may care to know we have a motto on this show. The best books are books about books. And as luck would have it, the Book of Stolen Dreams is about books, isn't it? It is so much about books. It's about a very strange and magical book.

And these brother and sister suddenly end up with it because their father is rather brutally arrested and taken to a camp by this evil dictator who runs the country and they have to figure out why it's so important it's all it's about life and death and family the book has a very secret ability to make to to allow you to cross from one space to to another from the land of the living essentially to what's what in the book is called the hinterland, but it's kind of the land of the dead, if you like. This is great. It comes out of my great love of, in fact,

not really even children's literature, but kind of all those wonderful turn of the century. I've got a German Jewish family on my mother's side, and that's very important in the book. And it comes out of love of Hesse, and particularly Stefan Schweig, and all these guys, that kind of world where stefan schweig for kids exactly well actually wes anderson the filmmaker did sort of do that with grand budapest hotel and i and i took my kids and they just loved it so much because because it sort of was a simple world

it was kind of strangely nostalgic and yet at the the same time, it didn't feel old fashioned. It felt modern. And actually probably quite inspiring to me when I wrote the book, just thinking about the way in which he as a filmmaker manages to do that. Yeah, wonderful. He's, yeah, I love Stefan Schweig. The Book of Stolen Dreams is available from the backlisted.org, bookshop.org, bookshop.

And your latest play, A Dead Body in Taos, performs at Wilton's Music Hall in London and on tour this autumn. But, of course, the reason we are specifically delighted that you're here is that you have adapted John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. It's just premiered on Sky, starring Keely Hawes and our former guest, Sam West. And we've been watching it. What a treat this has been over the last week. Really has.

Wincing Wyndham on screen and in print. It's been absolutely brilliant, hasn't it, Johnny? We loved it. Absolutely loved it. I'm very pleased. As you say, what you need is a great story. And The Midwich Cuckoos is a great story. It was by John Wyndham.

It was first published by Michael Joseph in 1957, the fourth in a series of hugely successful science fiction novels, which began with Day of the Triffids in 1951 and made Wyndham a household name. They've never been out of print, these books. It's been adapted for film and television and radio numerous times, most famously probably in the Wolf Rilla 1960 classic film Village of the Damned. The book was disparaged later on in the 1960s by fellow sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss

as an example of cosy middle-class catastrophes. But in recent years, there's been something of a critical revaluation, with Margaret Atwood calling it Wyndham's chef d'oeuvre, and adaptations like Dan Rebelato's for radio. Hello, Dan. Yeah, thank you, Dan, in 2003. And of course, David's current seven-part serial on Sky, where there are layers of moral ambiguity and dramatic complexity that maybe previous generations of readers had missed. Anyway, before we roll up our sleeves

and start weighing up the ethical and biological implications of xenogenesis, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Is that what we're doing today? Okay. Oh, yes. It'll be fine. Yes. Impregnation by foreign species. Well, I was down in Cornwall, as I was saying a moment ago.

So on my way out of the house last week, I grabbed a book, knowing actually not very much about it, other than that it was set in Cornwall. That book was The Feast by Margaret Kennedy. Ah, Margaret Kennedy. Which was published last summer by Faber and Faber with a very Kath Kidston-y cover. Very summery.

And the words Cornwall Summer 1947 on the front. So I think they know who they're going after with that. But anyway, they got me. And this is the third of margaret kennedy's novels that i've read um after becky brown and nora perkins talks about troy chimneys on episode 109 and of course alexandra pringle brought the constant nymphs to us a few episodes later in episode 113 and one of the things about marg is no two of her novels that I've read are anything like one another. So this one is from 1950.

I think it's like her 12th novel, maybe. It's set in the Pendizac Manor Hotel in Cornwall at midsummer 1947. And according to Cathy Rensenbrink's excellent introduction, the idea of it stems from Margaret Kennedy's trying to create a set of characters, each of whom represented a different deadly sin. So you think you're reading, forgive me, John, a cosy middle class catastrophe. Thank you, Brian, all this. But actually, you're reading something quite strange. As it went on, I was thinking, this book's much weirder than I thought it was going to be.

I reckon those Cath Kidston buyers might be slightly taken aback by what's happening in this book. So I would describe it as a cross between the following. And there's no irony here. It's a cross between Agatha Christie, The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff, which is a great favourite of ours here, is a cross between Agatha Christie, The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff, which is a great favourite of ours

here, One Fine Day by Molly Pantadowns, terrific novel, and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Which is something not a combination that you often see together,

Molly Pantadowns and Ingmar Bergman, but there is, as it goes on, it becomes stranger and more symbolic and has a really haunting denouement where I couldn't even swear to you, I'm sure, what happened. And indeed, Cathy says in her introduction that... She says brilliantly the feast is so full of pleasure that you could be forgiven for not seeing how clever it is and actually it did remind me um reading windham this week there is a sort of post-war

thing going on there's a kind of what is the post-war settlement how do the various classes from strata of society how are they going to reach an accommodation what are the forces that are shaping uh the relationships between the classes that those things are all in in this book anyway i just want to read you one little bit which gives you a very good flavour of how this is a little bit more unexpected than I thought it might be. We're about to meet a lady novelist called Anna who has persuaded a girl called Hebe to come with her to her friend Polly's house a few miles drive from the hotel. Anna pushed open a green door in a very tall white wall. The garden went uphill in a steep succession of grass terraces and a flight of stone steps up the middle. At the top

stood the house and on the bottom terrace two people were lying on the grass sunbathing. They lay on their faces and they wore slacks. They had such curly hair that Hebe supposed they were girls until as she and Anna went past they sat up revealing masculine torsos. Oh Anna said one of them have you got any cigarettes we've run out. Only enough for myself said Anna. Is Polly up at the house? I expect so. Where's Bruce? Anna laughed and took Hebe up the steps of the house. At the top they had a fine view of the harbour and the roofs of lower houses and then they walked through a long window into a room full of people who looked all alike to Hebe until she had begun to sort them out. They were not young and they were not old. Most of them wore slacks so that it was different to

tell in several cases whether they were men or women. They did not seem to be particularly pleased to see Anna, but they stared at Hebe. Presently, Polly, who had red hair and was unmistakably female, asked who she was. This, said Anna, pulling her forward, is Hebe. She's staying at my hotel and I've brought her along because she's in the doghouse over a slight case of murder. This was received with some animation and an old gentleman, who was certainly not an old lady, came forward and shook Hebe by the hand. Hebe made the little curtsy she had learnt in America but could not get her hand away until Anna intervened and told him that Hebe was only there to be looked at. Oh my god,

said Polly crossly, I draw the line at infant murderesses. Who did she murder? asked several voices, and somebody gave Hebe a drink. She'll be no trouble, declared Anna. She can play with Nicolette. Nicolette's not here, darling. Her father has got her. Listen, Anna, I've had a letter from the landlord. The drink was like nothing Hebe had ever tasted. Her head spun after a couple of sips. Their voices became booming and indistinct so that she could not be quite sure of what she heard. But it seemed to her that Polly had used one of the words. There were three or four of the words and she had seen them written up on walls,

but had never been able to find out what they meant, only that nobody ever used them, and that the people who wrote them up were not agreed as to the spelling. Presently, Polly used it again, quite unmistakably, and then she used another. By the time that she had finished describing her landlord's letter, she had used them all, and several which Hebe had never seen written up. But nobody seemed to be surprised. And presently, someone asked again about the murder.

I love it. Isn't that brilliant? And that, let me tell you, everybody, comes out of relatively nowhere. You've been bowling along on this quite strange murder mystery stroke social contract, and then suddenly there's this efflorescence of debauchery in Cornwall. So, yes, that's The Feast by Margaret Kennedy. That's published by Faber and Faber, £9.99.

John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I recently was in your neck of the woods, Andy, at the Wealdon Festival, which is very lovely, up in a very nice country house. Lots of nature writing going on there and lots of other good stuff. But my eye was drawn to a series of titles um by a publisher i'd previously not heard of called hazel press i was drawn to them because they were really really beautiful small volumes of mostly poetry but some essays uh it was also drawn to them because one of the books was by julia

blackburn who's one of my favorite writers it's also drawn because this if you will probably recognize andy this is by uh by the designer, book designer from the 1990s, Geoff Wilson, who did all of Captain Corelli, all of Louis de Bernier and many other books as well. So Hazel Press formed and started in lockdown. One woman, a van that she drives around literary festivals. The books are beautifully produced, beautifully designed. They don't have any blurbs

they're all 10 pounds each they're amazing names as well as julia blackburn martin shaw you know the the storyteller who i love helen mort the poet katrina know me ella duffy caroline's daughter edmund duval you know hair with amber eyes she's she's gathered together an extraordinary list very very quickly of beautiful i think wonderful books the one i was going to just just read very briefly from was the julia blackburn book it is 40 fragments i think probably taken from her notebooks julia blackburn should just say i think one of the still one of the most underrated and brilliant english writers uh started in the 90s with daisy bates the desert. She's done non-fiction. She wrote an amazing book about John Krask,

the painter who used needlework to construct his artworks in East Anglia. She wrote the book about Doggerland, Time Songs. She did an amazing memoir called The Three of Us about her bohemian upbringing. This is kind of fragments shored against whatever old age. Here we go. I'll read three of them for her bohemian upbringing. This is kind of fragments shored against whatever old age. Here we go. I'll read three of them for you, four of them. I'm 73. My father died at 61 on the night of my 29th birthday. My mother died at 82, holding on for just a bit longer, she said, to get past April Fool's Day. My husband died in the first moments of turning 76,

and even that death is almost eight years ago now. Gentle departures that between them carry much of the story of my life. Two. The days are filled with the thoughts of the end of days. Apocalyptic horses on the gallop, eyes wide. Sparks from their hooves set the forests alight. Steam from their nostrils melts the ice fields. Sweat runs down their flanks to join the salty oceans. I lean close

and hear the hum of them like a heartbeat. Quick and slow, then quick again. Three. If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, do you suppose, someone said, that we would get it clear? I doubt it, said the rest of us, our faces filled with fear. Four. But then there's the child who hides under the bed and I pretend I cannot see her protruding feet until she emerges triumphant and laughing.

And all is well. But then the robin walks into the room, proprietorial and tiny and unafraid. And all is well. But then the robin walks into the room, proprietorial and tiny and unafraid, and all is well. But then I'm kissed by the man who's become my lover in this late chapter of the life, and the kiss pulls a thread through me from my mouth to the soles of my feet, and all is well. But then the moon is glimmering peach pink and unconcerned behind a semaphore of trees, and all is well and the last

one this is 17 3 30 a.m. and the sharp cry of a tawny owl reverberating through the dark garden the owl speaks of the night and of solitude and of the vast time of its being in the world, way before we came along. Anyway, you've got 40 of those lovely, beautiful bits. They're wonderful. It's really nice. I love discovering new independent publishers, and I completely love a woman in her 70s who's just decided

she's going to do it, and she's driving, and she's selling them into independent bookshops. So tell us quickly where can we get it? Hazel Press. You can buy them online independent bookshops. So tell us quickly, quickly, where can we get it? Hazel Press, you can buy them online at hazelpress.com. You can get them from the London Review of Books bookshop. You can get them from most good independents. She's not at the moment being distributed through the bigger chain. That's The Wren by Julia Blackburn.

The Wren by Julia Blackburn, £10. And it's environmentalism, feminism and great, great poetry. We'll be back in just a sec. Consider for a moment the end of the world. Throughout the centuries, many suggestions have been made as to how it will come about and when, but few more sinister than this. These things, whatever they may be,

have not only succeeded in throwing us out of their element with ease, but already they have advanced to do battle with us in ours. For the moment we have pushed them back, but they will return. For the same urge drives them as drives us. The necessity to exterminate or be exterminated. And when they come again, if we let them, they will come better equipped. Or maybe this might be the beginning of the end. Oh, great. Who would want to miss out on the opportunity

of Alan Wicker reading from The Crackham Wakes? No one. No one. We're going to hear a bit more from that later on. That's a 1960 uh very rare interview a feature of john wyndham on uh um tonight i believe on bbc yeah on bbc one in 1960 david before we we discuss any plot elements of the Midwich Cuckoos, Village of the Damned, anyone's version, including your version. When did you first read a book by John Wyndham?

Yeah, it's very important, this, because I was 12 and The Day of Atrophies was on television. You're one with John Dutton. Absolutely. Starring. As I recall, I've dared not see it since, in case I'm wrong. It was great. Oh, it's brilliant.

Oh, good. It's still really disturbing. Maybe I'll watch it again. It's one of those ones. Yeah, you don't want to watch them. Sometimes you watch them again and you go, oh, no, what a terrible taste I had when I was 12. But on the whole, actually, that was a good time for television.

You know, it would be Le Carre or Alec Guinness or, you know, Dennis Potter and Edge of Darkness. But this one, I really loved it. So then I went off and found other books, basically, by him. Not all of them, but I read Chrysalids, which I liked. But the one that just completely scared me so deeply was The Midwich Cuckoos. And I think it's because it's in that sort of little hermetically sealed town. And without going into the story yet, as you say, I was living in a hermetically sealed little town.

It was relatable. And in fact, weirdly, when I then read Choccy, I discovered that Warnersh, which is literally three miles from my house, is in Choccy. And of course, then I discovered that John Wyndham lived in Petersfield. So of course, he's all over. Basically, it was weird. I was in Godalming and Warnersh is around the corner

and Petersfield is where he lived. So it was really, I was sort of like, okay, I am in John Wyndham's world and in fact, the aliens are here. And then I started thinking in my slightly 12-year-old way, maybe I am an alien or maybe the kid across the road is an alien. Because he does that to you, Wyndham, doesn't he? He starts making you think, well, what if I'm an alien but I just don't know?

I haven't been activated yet by the consciousness. So altogether, this book, I couldn't sleep for ages and it really was even, and it it really um it was even and it's it's quietness you know you talked about that cozy catastrophe the cozy catastrophe thing that we do in gebride and all this is criticism and of course he's totally right but for me that's the that's the quality that's that's the unique that's what surely that's the appeal yeah that's the skill yeah how normal normality spirals out of control so quickly. And it actually makes me very defensive of Wyndham in that regard

because I feel like when America does cosy catastrophe, it's cool. Like it's Steven Spielberg and it's Stephen King and it's those picket fences and it's people rollerboarding or skateboarding, whatever the word is, along the street in the sunshine. And it's basically Stranger Things. Stranger Things is cosy catastrophe. It's it's really cozy so actually he starts all that he starts the idea that you can just live in this normal town it's really nice everyone's middle class no one's got any social problem political you know and of course you can criticize that and say it's a particular world

but in that lies terror and for me, therefore, it's a hugely influential, massively influential book. Brian Aldiss is being very grumpy there as well, isn't he, in 1973. I mean, come on. A tad disingenuous as well. It's a whole strand of British sci-fi that runs through Wyndham, Nigel Neill, exactly, certainly into late 60s, early 70s Doctor Who. One of the things they realised was particularly terrifying to children

was if you made things happen in streets they recognised, in shops and their own homes, rather than in, you know, some fantastic alien environment. Exactly. And now it's called things like speculative fiction or, you know, there's all sorts of new words for this to try and not call it science fiction because people find that scary in some way. So he invented this in a way, you could argue. I suppose H.G. Wells has got a certain element of that to some extent.

But I think it's a bit more close to home with Wyndham. His stories are not quite so outlandish that they tend to exist through human beings, don't they? Often literally like Chucky or this one. They tend to exist through human beings, don't they? Often literally like Chucky or this one. I reread a few for this and I must say, I thought Chucky was absolutely brilliant. I thought that stands up incredibly well.

I mean, there's lots to enjoy in the others. We'll talk about some of them later in the show. But Chucky, I thought, wow, this is... And Chucky's almost his last book when he's alive. Yeah, it's his last published one. Yeah, it's his last one. He was maybe writing stories, but it's got to be the greatest imaginary friend book ever written. Yeah.

Hey, I've got a question for you, Nicky. You said that you... Do you remember the early 80s Day of the Triffids? Yeah, I remember watching Day of the Triffids and then reading Day of the Triffids and not being able to have a plant in my house for about 25 years. Genuinely, I couldn't sleep in a room with plants. All his books are about a kind of uneasy relationship in the natural world, aren't they?

It's a sort of, almost like sort of darwinian nightmares you know he's so interested in in other forms of of consciousness um which we'll come on to with this book as well but you know whether it's whether it's animals or insects in particular it's a brilliant story of his called consider her ways about a woman who wakes up and finds that she's inhabiting this kind of body of a large, gravid female, and she's horrified by what's happened. It's a world where men have gone extinct, and it's kind of a strange early feminist story. There's so much going on.

I think a lot of teenagers, late 60s, early 70s, everybody read Wyndham. I agree he was still very present when we were kids yeah and I remember Triffids and I remember Craig and Wakes and I remember Chris Lids and I remember but I hadn't actually ever read until we were doing this podcast I'd never read the book of the Midwich Cuckoos and it's my god, my God, it's several million degrees better than I was expecting it to be as a novel. What's it about, John? Nicky, John doesn't need to tell

us. No. Because we've got audio to help us. So what we've got here, we're going to first of all, we're going to hear an excerpt from the trailer of Village of the Damned, the famous film adaptation of The Witch Cookies, and then going to pick up the story

in an excerpt from the trailer of David's adaptation of The Midwich Cookies. Science fiction has never imagined so strange or terrifying a story as that of the village of Midwich, England, cut off from life as we know it by some mysterious force. And later, at one and the same time, a child was born to every woman in the village. Children that grew to look like this. Beautiful youngsters behind

whose fiery hypnotic eyes lurk the demon forces of another world. They're not human. They ought to be destroyed. Forces put to such sinister use that it became a national emergency. We are gathered here as advisors, as scientists, as government experts. Have we established anything about the origins of these children? There is a possibility of the transmission of energy. Let me get this straight. You imply that these children may be the result of impulses directed towards us from somewhere in the universe. Well, I assume, listeners, you're gripped by the acting talents

of George Sanders and Richard Vernon. You know that half the budget for the movie went on Sanders. Sanders' fee. Quite right. £20,500. Worth every penny. Every shilling. Trailers in those days were not understated, were they?

They didn't do that. They were not. Now let's fast forward 60 years, 62 years, and let the new adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos pick up the story. Oh, Hannah. Don't. Hannah, please.

Mummy. What have you done? I can't sleep. And why can't you sleep? Because bad things will happen. Since 9.47, we've had a complete blackout. No communication in or out. We've got no idea what it is.

I don't trust them. Sweet dreams, everyone. David, it's absolutely terrific. So my first question is, let me ask you, I'm going to ask you two questions quite quickly. How long have you wanted to adapt it? This the midwitch cuckoos how long have you wanted to adapt it and my second question you've made a significant number of changes one of which is midwitch is a village in the book and you've chosen to move the location somewhere else so could we i'd like to ask you about both those things first of all so how long have you wanted to to do this i wanted to do it in a sort of theoretical sense since i read it in the sense that i it's one of those strange stories that i saw very clearly and

obviously i've got one of those brains when i read things i tend to i see them sometimes if the story grabs me uh then more specifically what happened was uh i have a friend called Rob Cheek, who is a producer. And I knew that he had a connection to the Wyndham estate and that a colleague and him were working on various of the Wyndhams. Because Wyndham had slightly fallen out of popularity a little bit. And they felt, I think rightly, that the stories had still had so much to say, even though he'd been emulated by Hollywood in other versions. And I said to him, look, if you ever get this one, Midwich Cookies, it's mine. It was about eight years ago. I said it in a very proprietorial way.

I think it was before Night Manager. Then Night Manager happened and me saying that was luckily a bit more useful because actually it meant that rather than some enthusiastic Surrey boy, it was actually someone who had a bit of history in making stuff. So lo and behold, it wasn't that long ago, three or four years ago, he comes back to me and he says, you know, we've got it. And it was difficult to get it, just quickly,

because Hollywood, the not-so-good John Carpenter movie, and I love John Carpenter. That's mid-'90s, isn't it? Yeah, it's badly cast in Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Eich. And they stuck with the stupid title. Yeah, they did Village of the Damned again, but of course the first film was much better. Anyway, the rights got completely entangled in the studio system,

as happens, and it took a long time, heroic work by a man called Mark Samuelson to bring them out, and Rob is his colleague. So suddenly there it was, and available. But to answer your second question seamlessly uh it the thing about it when you when you when you update something like this is I'm really aware that people have copied this sort of story so when you think about this story you've got to think well what why now why is it interesting now and the idea of a remote

village that nobody has contact with and he's very careful about that in the book he talks about the fact that it's it's not really anywhere it has no particular use it's a strange anomaly he talks about midwifery in this quite funny way yeah but one of the reasons he's doing that technically is is it's easy to not notice it's there and so when this thing happens this terrible you know drama with all these women becoming pregnant it's not impossible to imagine that you could keep it secret and you could keep the blackout secret. And I realised very quickly that the blackout, something like that happens in modern day Britain, regardless of where you are.

It's impossible to imagine that nobody would notice that it wouldn't be online in seconds and so on and so forth. And it felt to me that rather than trying to fight that i should almost allow that to be a good thing and then from there i thought well actually most people these days the rural life feels somewhat nostalgic in a way that perhaps it maybe it didn't in 1950 my dad was brought up in a rural village in worcestershire i i wasn't i was brought up in a small town i think most people that's that's normality so it felt to me like well if we're going to accept the fact that we're not in this remote hidden little tiny space where these strange things can happen unnoticed if we're going to do something a little bit different why not embrace that why not go to

a commuter town that's an hour outside london that is classic modern britain you know if people talk about the the classic modern voter it's always someone in a small town who drives a modern day man so so that felt to me like and it is of course personal i i was brought someone in a small town who drives a what's the monday oh man so so that felt to me like and it is of course personal i i was brought up in a town like that and i wanted to emulate it to some extent by moving it from the country into the commuter belt you you heighten don't you the sense of something gone very wrong the fact that that as happens early in the book the total blackout zone in and around midwich as you say you'd expect it almost now wouldn't you in a village if you in a tv series it reminds me i mean we're not talking about movie but the movies of m night and shia lan

are what i didn't want to do they're always in a very deliberately isolated space they're not they're not real and in a film it's okay uh it can last a certain hour and a half in a television show you it's like a novel you have chapters and you need to get involved in characters you really care about and that have some recognition factor with with yourself i think you know his films for example i'm sure there are not there are sci-fi writers you could think of who do this it's not the characters are not what you really care about. It's the concept. But I knew that the character was absolutely essential. And so it felt right that we should embrace the modernity of it

and not try and cheat in any way. I mean, it's that thing, isn't it, of once you've got, as you say, you've got such a great plot in this book and a lot of the certainly in the first two or three episodes some of the pleasure of it is seeing how you

adapt that to modern to the age of the internet but you also make a big change with Gordon Zellaby the George Sanders uh in the first in the in the in the film but also big character in the book is you flip that into susanna zeleby who's a who's a a woman psychiatrist with a complex history of her own but uh that's an interesting i'm just curious as to what led to that.

Other than the fact that it's a chance to have Keeley Hawes, which is a great reason for... Yes, but it came before that. It was actually the first thing I changed after having decided to shift it into a sort of more conventional town. And it wasn't because I love, actually, the Zellaby relationship. I love their marriage in the book. It's actually strangely moving. And love the fact that angela delivers the

speech at the at the meeting um but uh it just felt like if there's a flaw to the book and it's and i don't flaws the wrong word if there's a particularity to the book it's that zelebi does pontificate aloud a lot a lot and and and he is and he's right and he and and he's right almost endlessly what's moving about it is that he's unsure what to do about his rightness and so that's very touching um but but i knew that on television obviously that's not going to work and it does feel a little of its time so i sort of went okay let's go i suddenly had an instinct around wanting the opposite of that a female um listener rather than a male speaker uh and so she's a listener she's a therapist and she listens to children her job

is to listen to children in the way that most adults can't and actually the little bit in the trailer where the child says you know bad things will happen isn't it we see that very on early on she is good at her job she's good at listening the irony is she could she can't hear her own daughter and she can't relate to that so and actually that's much more common in therapists than one might think is that in the personal relationship they really struggle to do the very thing they're brilliant at doing in their professional life for me i hope she still has the sort of priestess quality that that i think zelebi does have a priest quality to some you know i see well you know that he has zelebi in the book it's certainly clear by the end that

he has from a mixture of um curiosity and uh let's say compassion has forged a relationship with those children but the relationship that you might forge in the 50s in a kind of paternalistic, somewhat didactic way, you've got to find a substitute for now, haven't you? And therefore, as you say, it's simply by dint of listening rather than listening to, rather than talking at. For example, he could have been a teacher, a male teacher in a school,

a really clever teacher in a school. But what that will never have now, that the one has in the past, is this strongly intellectual quality that Zellaby has. Zellaby is writing a book, as I recall, called While We Last, when this happens. And he's failing to deliver it to his publisher. I'm looking forward to doing it on the podcast. I mean, he is basically Wyndham, isn't he?

He is Wyndham. Yeah, yeah. And so if he's not going to be... One for Andy, sure. Yeah, you should do it. He's not going to be... If he's not going to be Wyndham, then I think you have to make a bigger shift

than just, oh, he's going to be a male teacher, because he won't have that almost mystical quality. And then you also start to get into the slightly strange thing, well, should a teacher have that relationship with children? No, probably not. Whereas a female therapist whose job is literally, I mean, you know, to sort of see into, and it reminds me slightly of that wonderful Ursula Le Guin story

about the guy who's talking to his therapist about what he sees into the future and then what he sees happens. Do you remember? I can't remember what it's called. It's called something like, it's not The Laser Time, it's the other one. And I found that book wonderful

and it's the way in which she does, she sort of turns the therapeutic process, which is so kind of modern and rational in some sense, it's supposed to be anyway, scientific. She turns that into a mystical thing. And so this weird connection between psychotherapeutic processes and what we loosely call in the old days, you know, mysticism or telekinesis, those two things,

perhaps they're not as different as we think. That interested me. Can I ask, john mentioned how much and you mentioned how much talking there is in the midwich cookies certainly in the second half of the the the book that that people stand around offering i mean i've i i found it totally um entertaining and uh gripping i have to add but they do kind of stand around offering you points of view on certain philosophical issues. When you're adapting, do you have to think,

well, we can't have that much dialogue. What will I substitute for it? Will I have to extract plot from what's there or do I have to impose new plot? I'm unusual in the ways of screenwriting because I actively dislike too much dialogue. And actually, weirdly, with this book, that's quite strange because I do feel that if another writer now had done this book,

there would have been more people talking about the philosophical ideas than there are in my version. I'm a bit averse on screen, not in books, on screen to too much articulation now that may be a flaw in my maybe and that maybe i i could have explored more you know i i feel the piece is absolutely actively exploring the philosophical ideas around everything and i i really love very much the scene at the very end towards the very end end, where Zellaby, Susanna Zellaby, finally talks properly to one of the children, which is my version of when Bernard

in the book talks to the children. And it's really shocking. And you suddenly realise how much more naive Zellaby is than the child. It's the child who's got the wisdom and totally understands. It's so true. It's so good. But also the children in every version, the book, Village of the Damned, your adaptation,

we can't wait to hear from the children, right? That's one of the things that's being held back by the storyteller, that we want those guys to have that conversation, but we wait and wait to have it. Don't you think,y the the genius of the children both in the book and in the various adaptations is they're every bright kid that's ever felt that they're oh yeah that they've ever felt out of place i mean i re-watched the film again last night in the movie they really try and amp up the sinister horror thing because they're

trying to sell the movie in the states which is why it's called village of the damned because they were worried that americans didn't know what cookies were or me or midwitch or mid yeah yeah witches is not good also i think what you the timing is not accidental so this is late 50s and the village of the dam the film is early 60s And what you're seeing is a kind of precog beat boom. You're seeing like you're about to enter the age of groups where gangs of rebels become the thing, right? It's slightly ahead of that sociological explosion. To me, the most obvious lineage is when those kids grow up,

they're going to be in the Clockwork Orange. Ah, yes. Because Malcolm McDowell, 10 years before, was probably in the village of the dam wasn't he definitely yes yes of course because that that that actor martin stevens more or who plays the david the kid in the book in the book is is is more or less he traded on that for you know he's still trading on this thing he's still alive because of the extraordinary kind of the wigs and the eyes obviously but also just that sense of

menace that the kids definitely have yeah but I so agree with you about the fact that every kid who's bright or a bit odd felt odd thought they might be one that's literally what I felt and I'm called David yeah you are and you have golden eyes which no one can see.

That is weird, man. And strange nails. I don't know why you were drawn to it, David. I have no idea. Why don't we... We've got some more of that really rare interview of John Wyndham. But do you know what? I think I ought to read the dust jacket first before we listen to that.

So I've got here the dust jacket of the we listen to that so i've got here the uh dust jacket of the midwich cuckoos we should say that um john winderman already published the day of the triffids the kraken wakes and the chrysalids so he's a known author those have been best sellers here's the jacket copy for the first edition of the midwich cuckoos in 1957 the important question what should i do in case of interplanetary invasion raises no less important subsidiary questions such as how can i be sure of recognizing an interplanetary invasion if i encounter one and is this an interplanetary invasion at all or is it something else although this story does not go as far as to solve such quandaries classic classic let me ask the question not answer it it does relate to an

occasion when these questions as well as a number of others arose to confront the inhabitants of the secluded somnolent and considerably astonished village of midwich. Mr Gordon Zellerby of Kyle Manor, Midwich, had few doubts on the nature of the events there, but even fewer practical remedies to suggest. He complained, quote, I cannot recall a single account of any interplanetary invasion that is of the least help in our present dilemma. Take HG's Martians, for instance. As the original exponents of the death ray,

they were formidable, but their behaviour was utterly conventional. They simply conducted a straightforward campaign with a weapon that outclassed anything we could bring against them. But at least we could try to fight them. Whereas in this case, the midwich cuckoos were no less formidable, but in a different way, a way that precluded straightforward reprisals. Ah, that's good. Of all our English SF writers, to quote a recent review in The Observer, John Wyndham, quote,

seems the only one to whom the medium is the natural mode of expression. We are confident that the midwich cuckoos will delight his many readers. That is such a strange blurb. Do you think? Do you think? I think it's playing the John Wyndham card. It's saying, you like this guy. He's on form.

It's a little bit like an instruction. It says it like as if the book might be an instruction manual on how to deal with interplanetary, which is quite strange. John, what do you think? You're a publisher of much expertise and standing. I suppose it's tricky, isn't it? Because having just read it, I think they do nail the fact that there is a moral ambiguity in your relationship to... What are they basically saying?

The bad guys in HG Wells are pretty obviously bad. They've got death rays and they're destroying us. Whereas this is much more, the fact that we've all just confessed to having deep sympathies with the children. And I don't think any of the, I mean, I think the things that you bring out, David, in your adaptation of the of the

the zealot b kind of confusion as to what to do and whether or not in either case without giving the ending away to people who don't haven't read the book or seen the tv show in either case it doesn't lessen the moral ambiguity and there's a there's also a brilliant thing that you pick up which i i obviously didn't it's not in the film is when you the ice cream the fact is how how although it's a high essentially it's a hive mind these in the book the 61 kids all operate in a way that they can read one another's minds and they if one learns something the others all learn it simultaneously so that's an interesting and that's that's definitely Wyndham Harris or whatever he is the name you want to use for him that's his interest in science and

in Darwinianism and particularly insect communities and different species and uh you know who's gonna who's gonna win this sort of post-war paranoia that all his books are full of but the bit where the the in the in the book it's a bullseye i think that one of the kids is enjoying and zelebi's noticing that they're enjoying the enjoying the individual quality of either eating ice cream in the TV show or eating the bullseye in the book. So they're not just, that's the thing is, they're not just a hive mind. They're not just the Martians coming to destroy the planet. That's, in fact, the brilliant thing I think about the book is you don't really have any sense of it being an alien life form. It might just be a more evolved form of human. You know, there aren't any spaceships.

There aren't any even spores like there are in the Triffids. It's really subtle. I think you've absolutely put your finger on the key centre of the piece, though, for the book. Our book and any adaptation should be that notion around the collective hive which is meant to be one and that and in that lies its strength so whereas we will squabble and have different opinions about how to deal with the life this this external force they won't and that's terrifying

and it it smacks of perhaps it's smacked of totalitarianism a little bit in the 50s probably for us i think it smacks of this new wave of populism or something. But it definitely scares me still now, living in today. But then that wonderful thing that, of course, they are different in taste. And if they're different in taste, couldn't that taste develop from just ice cream or a sweet into a human being? And then suddenly the notion of, oh, hold on a second, they're living with a family. into a human being. And suddenly the notion of, oh, hold on a second, they're living with a family.

And if the one thing the book perhaps doesn't explore as much as I thought it might when I read it again is the effect of living in family situations on those cuckoos. It's almost like, and I think Wyndham does this quite a lot, he sets everything up astonishingly. It's not that he loses interest, but he loses interest in certain bits of it. Yes, but he writes about what he wants to write about that that's what i think is so fascinating all his books he sets up you're so right david he sets up we're we're probably still reading him because of the setups of his plots not necessarily what he does where he gets to yeah the the the honest answer on that one is that

the ending of his book is a nightmare for adapting because there's this brilliant bit the kid is talking to bernard the kid is saying we're going to we are the life force we are going to destroy yeah but he says maybe we could delay it for a bit and then actually all they want to do is take a helicopter to somewhere like the silly isles or the isle of man and it's really rubbish and you're like really why do you want to go there you're absolutely right in terms of the plotting there is no without giving away the ending there is no convincing alternative it's like nobody seems to know what to do with these kids yeah yeah and obviously that's something that you did work on well for the adaptation i would like to add that i one of the things i found really interesting revisiting wyndham's

books this week is the midwich cuckoos is the book that he wrote after the chrysalids yeah and in a sense the midwich cuckoos is a response to the chrysalids so in the chrysalids you see a group of young kids or young people connected with a hive mind but individuals who we root for and in the midwitch cuckoos it's almost like you said okay i'm going to revisit that idea but i am going to posit the idea of that group of young people as a collective but individuals from not that we don't root for, but who have forces opposed against them in a way that is different from the Chrisleys. I found that really, really fascinating.

Very rich, actually, to read those two books together. Yeah, and there's no question that in Midwich, they are the antagonist. I mean, you might be fascinated by them, but they are absolutely, definitely the antagonist. Yeah, they're not the good guys. This is from this rare interview with john windham here he is talking about uh what's appropriate to put before readers well mr windham your books all deal with evil and fantastic happenings very often usually in, set in fairly ordinary situations.

Now, do you consciously set limits on these fantastic happenings? Do you limit your fantasy, or is it a case of anything goes? Well, I wouldn't say they're all evil, but, of course, there do have to be limits. What one starts with is the theme, and then you work it out to the logical conclusion as far as possible. But there is an upward and a lower limit, and sometimes it works out so that the lower limit, well, is unacceptable. It's unpleasant. Can you illustrate it?

Well, it's unacceptable. It's unpleasant. Can you illustrate it? Well, as far as the upper limit is concerned, you carry your invention to a point where it is acceptable to your reader. For instance, your English reader does not care for the idea of spaceships. I don't quite know why he does. Your American reader loves spaceships. I don't quite know why he does. The American reader loves spaceships. But in England, you don't. Now, in the downward limits,

some of the logical outcomes are not acceptable. For instance, in the... Which was it? The chrysalids. You see, you have a world that has been devastated by atomic bombs. A lot of mutations resulting. Now, most mutations would naturally be pretty unpleasant, but one doesn't want to follow that along. I mean, it would swamp the whole story.

So that one minimizes, one leaves out the most unpleasant ones, or even tasteless ones. For instance, there was, in the original, a point where a man had his hat was knocked off and he was seen to have a third eye on the top of his head. Well, there's no reason why he shouldn't have a third eye but it just has an unpleasant taste.

So this was the limit of your lower depth. On the whole, the story seemed pleasanter without... David, you weren't tempted to put in a scene where someone knocks off a hat to reveal a third eye, were you? No, but we did have good chats about, I like, I've never heard that. I love the sort of consciousness around extremity. I think that's, I think that's, we did have long chats about explicit, explicitness versus implicitness.

Go on. Well, no, tell us a bit more about that. Go on. Well, no, tell us a bit more about that, because presumably you're the audience of 2022 wants more jumps and scares and a bit more gore than than Wyndham would have been happy to deliver. But you want to hold something back, right? You want to suggest things rather than show them. And actually, strangely, my greatest fear about my show, to be honest, was I decided to take my time at the beginning and not to rush straight into the blackout like the films do. And I was very scared about that. But I felt like I needed time to introduce the world and the characters. And if there's a problem, even with the Wolf Ritter film, it's that in the second half, you don't have time to get to know the characters enough. And in a television programme, that's a problem. It doesn't matter in the film.'s so it's so impeccably directed it's so beautiful it doesn't matter at all but for a television show it does um so i felt like i i need to take my time and go go quietly was the was the kind of phrase of the motto go quietly and interestingly i think that has been more successful than actually

some of the more you know dramatic it's like people enjoy this uneasy dread that this feeling that they know something's wrong and no one's telling them what it is no one is saying what it is and i wonder if in our very explicit explosive everything's out there everything's being stated and articulated age i wonder if there's a really interesting space now for quiet dread quiet intimate strange feelings that are unspoken, because it's been more successful than I thought it would be in that regard. So, David, have you got a bit you could read us that you feel captures something of what Wyndham does in the book? Yeah, so I've strangely gone for a zelebi section even though i then changed him so radically he is a strange one around we're going to go on to gender he but some people accuse

him of some windham yeah some people accuse him of being misogynist other people think he's strangely feminist as as we were talking about you know with the short story and it's it's a strange one i think here he just i i i like this bit because this is about him, a married couple getting to grips with a very serious problem. And it reminds me of talking to the mother of my children, or it reminds me of other parents talking about their own children and the way in which you think about things. But they're talking about something so much more extreme at the same time. And I quite like it. So here we go. Zelebi reached out and took her hand. After some minutes, he observed,

I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catacresis than Mother Nature was ever perpetrated. It is because nature is ruthless, hideous and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begin to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea. As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by mother nature. Each species must strive to survive and that it will do by every means in its power, however foul, unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct. Angela seized the pause to put in, with a touch of impatience,

I've no doubt you're gradually working round to something, Gordon. Yes, Zelebi owned, I am working round again to cuckoos. Cuckoos are very determined survivors, so determined there is really only one thing to be done with them once one's nest is infested. I am as you know a humane man, I think I may even say a kindly man, by disposition. You may, Gordon. As a further disadvantage, I am a civilized man. For these reasons I shall not be able to bring myself to approve of what ought to be done, nor even when we perceive its advisability will the rest of us. So like the poor hen thrush we shall feed and nurture the monster and betray our own species. Odd don't you think he continued.

We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us but these creatures we shall carefully rear. Angela sat motionless for some moments. Then she turned her head and looked at him long and steadily. You mean that about what ought to be done, don't you, Gordon? I do, my dear.

That's like, John, that's like listening to Herzog talking about nature. I was just thinking that. The jungle. The jungle. Yes. Timothy Treadwell looked into the eyes of the bear and saw love.

I saw only hunger. I've never forgotten that. That's what it is. Nothing more terrifying than the eyes of a chicken. You must never listen to this. That's wonderful, though. I think, David, what a tribute to your skills as an adapter of the text,

that you left that out completely. It's so great. But it sums up the problem, doesn't it? Any woman now listening to that goes, all she says is yes, dear, no, dear. And then, of course, being a wonderful, highly intelligent woman, she works out what he means at the end and sort of gets the punchline. But that's not good enough for our day and age.

It just doesn't work. He is still lecturing. He is still ahead of the game. I mean, good, though, the Zelebi kind of monologues are, that there's a lot of men pontificating in this book, kind of Bernard and Zellaby. One of the other books that I read was Trouble with Lycan, which is his last.

So that's the last of his kind of imperial run in 1960. That's a very peculiar book. I think our friend Una McCormack has recommended it to me. It's sort of a glorious failure, Trouble with Lycan, because it's... You know, Wyndham prided himself, he's called it, what, logical fiction or logical speculative fiction?

And Trouble with Lycan is about if you developed a life-prolonging treatment, what would it mean for feminism? But because he's not one of life's natural feminists, it's it's a brave effort by by Wyndham. But it doesn't quite, you know, it doesn't quite come off. But I was trying to think what other male writer would be trying to do that in 1960? I can't think of one. No, I think he is strange in that way. And I think it comes down to this strange fact

that he had this incredible, bizarre, frustrated love affair all his life with this one woman who he couldn't marry for a long time because if she married, she wasn't allowed to be a teacher. She would be fired. That literally was the law i mean that is so outrageous but and he obviously so he knew that and i think there is something in him that he's not obviously brought up with the with the emotional language of feminism but he instinctively

feels it and interestingly even in midwich he gives the key uh speech of the cuckoos who are talking to bernard later in the book to a girl uh now of course it's a hive so it could be any of them but it is a girl who gives most but there is a boy and a girl but a girl picks up the conversation she says the killer lines towards the end so i think there's something in him that is always pushing at that door um we're gonna i want to come back to this topic we're just gonna hear one last clip now in 1960 um uh, if you worked for the BBC, you couldn't just say, as so many of us do to a writer, where do you get your ideas from? You had to present it in a different way. So here's another clip of John Wyndham answering the question as it was expressed back then.

May I ask you, Mr Wyndham, where it is that you rely upon, how did you rely upon and what it is you rely upon for your stimulus? I mean, after all, you're dealing with subjects of fantasy which are outside our own experience. Do you simply brood and think of more and more evil? Well, I wouldn't say they're all evil. You know, the midwitch cuckoo's children look very evil in the film, but they aren't so evil in the original story. No, sometimes one gets an idea thrown at one. The original Triffids one, I think, came one night when I was walking along a dark lane in the

country and the hedges were only just distinguishable against the sky and the higher things sticking up from the hedges became rather menacing and felt that they might come over and strike down or if they had stings sting at one so that uh the whole thing eventually grew out of that the moving vegetable would be a real menace are you ever appalled by the fruits of your imagination um oh i didn't think i'm appalled once when I was younger before the war when I was trying to write ghost stories I used to

frighten myself pallid but do whatever that now these aren't frightening I don't think no thank you very much indeed I used to frighten myself pallid it's lovely isn't it

so I would like to ask you David your used to frighten myself pallid. That's lovely, isn't it? Beautiful. So I would like to ask you, David, your adaptation of Midwich Cookies has just gone up. We can watch it now. Margaret Atwood has talked about the influence, as John said, of Wyndham on her work. For instance, The Handmaid's

Tale, the relationship between The Handmaid's Tale and The Chrysalids. I wonder how you felt given that one of the major changes you've made to the midwitch cookers is the extent to which you feminized it because that's hardly touched on at all in wyndham's original how it felt about this distressingly relevant piece of tv being broadcast at the same era as the Roe versus Wade judgment. Yes, and it's very strange because I think one of the most interesting challenges was to think about abortion. He does it in the book. He's very interesting in the book.

I mean, there's a horrific section, isn't there, where a young woman attempts to terminate her own child in a very unpleasant way. Or did she try and kill herself? I can't remember exactly. She attempts suicide. It's a horrific, horrific section. And in our version, we wanted to really, well, essentially,

we decided that the Hive should, in this case, be that populist voice yeah that just absolutely refuses the woman's choice and we didn't really we just did it we just told that and it's a good example of how i do things there's barely a line of dialogue in that scene in and i really like it it's probably one of my favorites that strange little scene in the clinic um where these women who go in there with you thinking that they have free will and thinking they have the right to make that decision and suddenly some strange force says no you don't and of course when we were shooting it this hadn't happened yet and then suddenly it starts to become gets in the news and suddenly there's this this

phenomenal force of political power in this scene and in and that's i think where good great science fiction writing that's that's the think where good great science fiction writing that's that's the proof of it isn't it that john winham has suddenly landed right in the heart of contemporary america and that that scene will resonate in contemporary america in a way that we would never have done five years ago i totally fascinated by the extent to which these books are seem engaged with what feels like a very topical debate which we've talked about on batlisted several times the individual versus the mass or the state or whatever you want to talk about it's written 60 years ago in and it's picking up russo and whatever but but you know

as i mean it's it's coming around again and again and again, right? And actually, I felt that was one of the ways in which Wyndham came up shinier than I was expecting. It's true because you remember when we were talking about it before the episode that Wyndham was sort of talked about in the same way that Golding was talked about back in the 50s and 60s, not just as a scientist, but as a novelist of ideas, a serious novelist of ideas.

And I think that's definitely something that's sort of not... Because he was such a best-selling writer, I think he was read by kids, by adolescents in particular. But my hunch is that he hasn't been as read by people. He's not seen as one of the great literary storytellers of the second half of the 20th century in the way that Golding now is. Well, we should mention this book that was published in 1956 called Sometime Never,

which is a collection of three stories by, now, a trio of authors we've covered on Batlisted. Envoy Extraordinary by William Golding. Boy in Darkness by Mervyn Peake. Consider Her Ways by John

Wyndham. Published together for the first time. None of those stories would appear anywhere else. What a fascinating example of how literary status settles or is misappropriated over time. That in 1956, those new authors, William Golding, Mervyn Peake, John Wyndham, could appear together and be seen as a group. Now, they all have different attributes and strengths. But, David, I wonder whether you think, to bring this round, what is it about Wyndham that people could read now and really, really find relevant? Well, the strange thing about Wyndham, which is unique and completely different to Mervyn Peake,

for example, is I think he's so simple. And I think his simplicity, linguistically, in terms of the storytelling, how slimline. They're all tiny. You can read them in an afternoon if you really want to. You can't do that with most of Mervyn Peake. And I think that's... Amen. Amen, brother.

We just made that episode. Yes. Thank you. So I think it's cost him because... And I think it's cost him in the way that the rise of literary fiction in perhaps the sense that literary fiction should be about something that is around the style of language, linguistic. And he's utterly pared back, almost made-for-movies feel to him. I think movies haven't helped him, strangely,

because I think it feels like he's just writing prototypes for screenplays, almost. And it's unfair on him, because actually the ideas are really remarkable. Today, their control reaches out into space tomorrow will it girdle the globe there's nothing you can do to stop us leave us alone I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Leave us alone!

It's time for us to say farewell to Midwich, its weird children, and to offer huge thanks to David for helping us to re-evaluate a book which I think we all feel deserves its place as a modern British classic, to Nicky for connecting all our voices in an invisible but non-creepy way, and to Unbound. Good luck with that. To Unbound for lending us the canary. Oh, you can download all 166 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading

by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. All patrons get to hear Backlisted episodes early. And for less than the price of a round in the Stone and Scythe, lock listeners get two extra lock listed a month.

Our very own weekend cottage where we three take bracing woodland walks, gossip in the pub with disgruntled locals, and talk about the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. I so hoped you were going to say where for the price of whatever, I so hoped you were going to say where, for the price of whatever, you get to join our hive mind as we repel all borders. A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's Parish Pump Notice Board contains the following names. Jennifer Milo Shook, Jacob Wunsch, Andrew Hetherington, Sean Berry. And we're also delighted to welcome Susie Koo-Wilson

to our Guild of Master Storytellers, the highest tier in the backlisted film. Thank you for your generosity to all our patrons. Huge thanks for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy. We'd like to thank David for coming on in our blind date. Not blind date in a triffids way that would be weird and strange david thank you so much this has been brilliant i i found this completely revelatory going back to these books and thinking about them in a contemporary context

so thank you for giving us the excuse to i've absolutely loved it and should you choose to keep it in i i found out that it wasn't the Isle of Man, but it was a place where they will be unmolested. Unmolested. They are taken away by air to a place that they... And I must have strangely and Freudianly taken the Isle of Man from the Triffids, as you were saying. Yeah, well, Isle of Wight, maybe. I don't know.

One of the Isles. I imagined it as the Isle of Man. It's funny, isn't it? Is there anything else you would like to say about John Wyndham before we wrap up? It's just the end of a long journey because I wasn't sure. It was a long time thinking

this would be amazing on screen. I ought to have said, you know, I didn't see the film for years. The film was not a big thing around when I was a teenager, you see. So for me to have made the journey from the book to eventually the screen and then to come and talk about the book again, it's just been a huge pleasure. I do think he's a very idiosyncratic

British classic talent. Yes, I think it's very helpful to think of him in the bracket of Golding and Peake while being nothing like either of those writers. But we should pay him the same respect. We should because I think they were right. In the movies, Alfred Hitchcock is considered the greatest filmmaker, sort of, of all time, and he's exactly the same. Lean, mean, malicious at times, but the rigour is unparalleled. Some of the thinking is magnificent,

and Wyndham, for me, has that very English, cut-glass leanness. Beautiful. All right, well, listen, everybody. Thanks, David. Thanks, John and Nikki we'll see you in a fortnight if for some reason

you don't know what happens at the end of the midwich cuckoos don't listen to this bit coming up okay but otherwise

we'll see you next time bye bye uh E aí If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call lock listed which is andy me and nikki talking about the books music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight