Bank Holiday Special: The War of the Worlds

 

Bank Holiday Monday, August 31 1970, was a minor televisual event – the first broadcast on British TV of Byron Haskin's 1953 epic adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic The War of the Worlds. ITV had been broadcasting in colour since the previous November, and had likely held back the seventeen-year-old blockbuster to take full advantage of the fact. Back in 1953, colour films were still quite a novelty, and the Technicolor treatment of Wells' story would have looked as stunning to moviegoers as it did to the television audience tuning in on a dull Bank Holiday evening almost two decades later.

I still remember that broadcast. ITV had taken a leaf out of Orson Welles' book – his notorious 1938 'radio verité' adaptation had apparently fooled some listeners into thinking it was all happening for real. There was no hoodwinking the televisually-aware viewers of 1970, but during the commercial breaks between the preceding programmes (Opportunity Knocks and Coronation Street), a teaser slide would flash up announcing 'The Martians are Coming!' accompanied by an image of the movie's iconic war machines. If only they'd got Reginald Bosanquet to make the announcement...

Despite its seventeen-year vintage, the film didn't look particularly dated to me. Seen today, it seems steeped in the fashions of the late 40s and early 50s, and the cars are a dead giveaway. None of that mattered when you saw the Martian machines with their manta ray bodies and swan necked heat-ray appendages. Viewers with colour sets would have fully appreciated the Academy Award-winning special effects, which were so far ahead of their time that, even in 1970, they didn't look dated at all. Wires? You couldn't see them.

At a mere 85 minutes in length, the film cuts along at a remarkable pace and, even with the romantic boy meets girl plot element (imposed by the studio to the dismay of screen writer Barré Lyndon), there's no time wasted as the action moves from one set piece to another. Many of Wells' original scenes are present: the famous 'unscrewing' of the Martian cylinder (in the film, it's a meteorite); the heat-ray; the close encounter with the Martians in a ruined house; and the manner in which the invaders meet their end. Wells' Martians were, famously, tripods, but the film makers decided – wisely – that walking tripod models would present too many problems and opted instead to have the machines supported on legs of 'magnetic flux', which are visible in the scenes of their initial appearance, but quietly forgotten thereafter.

This 1970 Bank Holiday broadcast was my second encounter with Wells' famous tale. I'd first discovered it earlier the same year as an abridgement in the 'improving' magazine Tell Me Why, which published it as a text serial over five issues during January and February. The illustrations of the fighting machines were highly convincing, rendered in a painterly style that left just enough to the imagination but achieved an impressionist realism. For me, these are still the definitive visualisation of the cowled tripods.

Tell Me Why magazine's depiction of a Martian tripod – artist unknown.

The television rights to the 1953 War of the Worlds remained with ITV for the next decade, and it was shown again in 1976, in an early evening slot; but by the time it next landed on television it had migrated to BBC2, where it formed part of the channel's 'SF Film Festival' which ran for several months early in 1983. In all, the movie clocked up seven broadcasts on the BBC between 1983 and 1997, six of them on BBC2; but regrettably, of recent years, it's been supplanted in the schedules by the Spielberg version, which is presumably deemed more palatable to 'modern' audiences.

Although I'd read the Tell Me Why abridgement of H.G. Wells' original novel several times, I didn't get to read the complete text until 1976. I'd picked up a battered old copy at a school booksale, without covers, and falling to pieces: it looked like it had been through an interplanetary war itself. But I'd been given a brand new Pan paperback for my birthday that year, and I finally got round to reading it on Tuesday 2 November, finishing it eight days later. Much as I liked the 1953 film adaptation (and still do), there was no surpassing the original novel, and I returned to it many times over the years. The cover of that Pan edition, however, left a lot to be desired. Had the artist even read the story?

Curiously, I was never drawn to Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds, feeling that 1970s pop music and a Victorian 'scientific romance' didn't quite belong together. But as the decades went by, I began to wonder why no one had ever attempted to film the novel in its original setting of Victorian London. Stephen Spielberg's 2005 version is arguably an update of the Byron Haskin movie rather than the novel, and the whole device of having the invaders emerge from beneath the Earth rather than from the sky didn't stand up to any kind of logical scrutiny (surely they'd have been uncovered by accident or during earthquakes?). Worse still, Tom Cruise's unsympathetic lead makes the film, for me, borderline unwatchable. Once again, the invasion was placed in a modern day context. Was anyone ever going to give the novel the movie treatment it deserved?

In 2015 it was announced that a new BBC adaptation was on the way, but production wasn't confirmed until May 2017. Early reports indicated that this would, at long last, be set in the Victorian era. It was a long time coming, and when it finally arrived on screen, in November 2019, it was soon apparent that it hadn't been worth waiting for. New character arcs obscured the novel's narrative thrust, aspects of the story had been altered for no obvious reason and to no benefit, and the narrative was confusingly interrupted by pointless 'flash forwards' (possibly the worst film making technique ever conceived). This was, apparently, an attempt to 'upend audience expectations' in which it entirely succeeded: my own expectations having been of a coherent narrative that was as faithful as possible to Wells' original. This was anything but. It's almost inconceivable that anyone could take such excellent source material and make such a dull, slow-paced tedious mess of it, but somehow the BBC managed it. They must have known it was a dud, as the broadcast date was constantly kicked into the long grass, and it's been quietly forgotten ever since.

As Julie Walters' character in Educating Rita famously suggested in answer to an essay question, wouldn't it have been easier to 'do it on the radio'? Orson Welles had proved how effective a radio adaptation could be, and there would be many more of them over the years. The BBC's first radio attempt at The War of the Worlds was in 1950, with a script by John Manchip White that was reused for another production in 1967 starring Paul Daneman. This has survived complete and was repeated on Radio 4 Extra in 2023. Less successful was a 2-part adaptation from 2017, which was simply too wordy and boring and utterly failed to convey the nightmarish atmosphere of the original. 

I've had to admit defeat in expecting anyone to produce a movie of The War of the Worlds that in any way matches up to the 'movie' I see in my imagination while reading the novel. The 1953 film is, for me, superior to Spielberg's effort in every conceivable way. It's fast paced, atmospheric, scary, well acted (Gene Barry is probably at his career best) and has the best ever Martian machines, even if they're not tripods.

* * *

Today's viewers and readers are so familiar with the idea of aliens invading the Earth as a subject for films, comics, books and television, that it seems pointless to keep revisiting the same old trope; but when H.G. Wells hit on it as an idea for a novel, it was staggeringly original, and his depictions of England under attack, and the population of London fleeing under the Martian onslaught look, in retrospect, like glimpses into the future of warfare between mankind rather than between ourselves and extra-terrestrials. 

By the time I got to see and read The War of the Worlds, it was barely credible that intelligent life could exist on the planet Mars. The Ladybird Book of The Night Sky (published in 1965) conceded that primitive life might exist on the surface but that it would consist of simple things like mosses and lichens. We now know this to be a disapppinting over estimation. Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967) located its alien intelligence on the red planet, but by this time, the idea of Mars as home to a malevolent alien race was mostly played out in science fiction. Wells had based his story on 19th century contemporary ideas about Mars, deriving from the misapprehensions of Percival Lowell, who had, like others, observed 'canals' on the Martian surface and deduced them to be evidence of intelligent life. They were eventually found to be an optical illusion. I'd read about them in a bound volume of 1930s magazines, and for a while, believed in them myself.

A measure of the greatness and lasting power of H.G. Wells' story is that, even in the 21st century, when science has proven Mars to be a dead world, the reader is still more than willing to suspend disbelief and go along with his interplanetary war scenario: surely the great great grandfather of all alien invasion literature.