The Night People

DVD, The Champions (The Night People)

The series had done a voodoo episode, the 'invisible' man, suicide drugs, and even a ghost (plane), so this time they go to witchery for their backdrop of terror. Actually, in production order, 'The Night People' was filmed in the middle and 'Shadow of The Panther,' the voodoo episode, came towards the end, so this was their first dalliance with the supernatural, if you ignore 'The Beginning' and its secret society that gives them their powers in the first place, and you could say that that was couched in a scientific approach, as this lost civilisation upgraded their faculties by operating on them, not by waving a magic wand. So while the series has suggested things that are beyond the natural, it always turns out to be villainous enemies using superstition as a weapon, and is very much the case here. There is a character, Mrs. Trennick, who genuinely believes in the nasty stuff, calling herself a 'white witch,' as if messing with the occult is okay as long as you're doing it for benevolent or defensive reasons, but she's also shown to be the biggest victim, both of her deceiving husband and of her own wayward beliefs, causing herself untold terror when Sharron steps on her little self-image voodoo doll, and constantly being in a state of worry and concern over this puppet so that it seems to consume her constant attention. She's a sad figure, made only sadder by husband Douglas' devious plot to push up the price of uranium so he can make a bit of money on the international market, not caring that his stunt could increase the likelihood of nuclear war in the world!

Trennick is shown as a rather unpleasant and manipulative toff. If we'd got a sense he needed the money for the upkeep of Trennick House, or his long held estate was crumbling, we might have had some sympathy, but there's the suggestion he's a philanderer, since his secretary, Jane, who doubled Sharron as the false Miss Macready, is in the know, while his wife is kept in the dark and led to believe the activity and preparations around the house are all for a celebration of the witchy rites and ceremonies that are coming up (midsummer? We know the exact date Sharron arrived at The Kings Head by her entry in the guest book: 1 July 1967), expecting hundreds of adherents to the craft to turn up for a big shindig in the woods. I wonder if Douglas was actually into such nasty things before, as how did he meet his wife, and he talks of such things as 'our' rites as if he's taken part in them in the past. It could be that they're newly married and he only got Mrs. Trennick on board to use as a cover, but then presumably he's always been the owner of Trennick House, unless, like Sir Henry Baskerville in 'The House of The Baskervilles' he had recently inherited the place… There are plenty of questions surrounding him and his family, and whether witchery had been going on there, but then again, although the villagers have stories of the place, you still get poacher Dan Edgely doing his 'rounds' in the grounds, so again, the stories might have been circulated in order to keep people away from the real happenings.

The episode tries really hard to present a dark and creepy atmosphere right from the start, with a dark and stormy night, owls hooting, and a grim butler peering out of a Gothic castle-like window, but appearances can be deceiving. So can sounds, as they do make one successful stab at horror by using the cries of babies wailing or screaming in the sound mix, especially whenever an effigy is revealed, which was about the only effective creepiness that was achieved. The other appearance I found deceiving was that Sharron really was on leave in Cornwall (not in itself anything to wonder at: as one who spent many happy holidays in the county I can verify that it is a lovely place to stay), and she really was indulging a heretofore unmentioned hobby of exploring the architecture of old buildings. I automatically assumed it was all a front, and she'd been sent by Nemesis to investigate something suspicious, but I was wrong. Not that she shouldn't have such interests, although I imagine there aren't that many young women in their twenties who would spend the hols round old buildings, but Sharron has many skills and interests, so why not, and it's nice to see a little more insight into the character. The boys, on the other hand, go for a more traditional Caribbean holiday, staying in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados at carnival time. Sharron's brief message encourages them to drop everything and head on over to Cornwall, which says more about the close bond between the three. I'd still like to know about the japes they got up to that led to Craig burning his suit ("Charcoal grey," as Richard puts it!).

White cassocked, hooded monks seem to be a staple of horror for some bizarre reason ('Starsky & Hutch' did the same thing), I suppose because men that have set themselves apart from society live a curious lifestyle, but also there's something about the good and right being twisted into something sinister that makes it more frightening - seeing monks stalking through the woods or burning crosses is all part of the effort to make Trennick House a no-go area, but if you took this episode as evidence, then Cornwall is all witches and poachers! It's very much classic 'Dr. Who' with a poacher witnessing what he shouldn't and being hunted down by malevolent forces. Only these are of the flesh and blood kind, and again, we see the detrimental power fear can have as he dies of a heart attack on seeing the evil sights. If there was a theme, that would be it, but it's not a very strongly implemented one, and none of the champions are ever in fear, even if Craig does get a bit uptight worrying what's happened to Sharron. It's the usual thing, you know the drill: one of them investigates something, leaving some clue or message that something's amiss, so the others turn up and try and track their colleague down only to find they've been held captive, so they break them out, have a fight and foil the bad guys once again. Yes, the series is rather formulaic at times, but at least they continue their attempts to present a global outlook - that's probably why Richard and Craig are in Barbados, so that we don't think everything happens in England all the time.

Craig certainly gets around as he's afforded the exclusive honour of starring in the post-credits sequence which is clearly in London if the big red bus is anything to go by, then he's in Bridgetown, and then Cornwall. Okay, so the post-credits are generally meant to be another time and place, not directly connected to the main story. That's even more the case here because we see the return of a familiar place and at least one face because The Kings Head and the chubby darts player show up as the post-credits scene way back in 'The Survivors' when Sharron scores a bullseye. I didn't realise it had been so long ago, although in production terms that sequence would have been filmed at the time of this episode and held over for that other episode which was one of the last few to be filmed. I suppose they decided Sharron had a good chunk of the episode and Craig could do with a bit more exposure, but it would have made more sense for the darts scene to slot into this story, except for the fact she hadn't arrived at the inn yet so they'd have had to take away the climax of Dan reeling back in fear for a scene where Sharron calmly pops in to the pub. No, it wouldn't have worked. They must have been always on the lookout for opportunities to make good post-credits scenes, and week to week how many people were going to remember that this or that place looked the same as somewhere they'd been before?

The best moment must be when Craig and Richard show up at The Kings Head only for Porth, the proprietor, to show confusion at the name of Macready, then when they visit her room, a stranger is wearing her clothes, has the same hairstyle and the same name. That was a good scene, but it would have been even better if we'd seen Jane (or 'Miss Susan Macready' as she calls herself), from behind, and then she turns round ("I'm not Tommy…" - a 'Rugrats' reference of something that always stayed with me from that cartoon!). Their powers seemed a bit weak in general this time, and there wasn't anything that really made me perk up or be impressed. There's a long time before we even get to a superhuman ability even being used (aside from Craig foiling the would-be bank robber's plan outside a branch of Lloyds Bank by snatching his gun - when the voiceover talks of gifts bestowed on them I don't think it was referring to pickpocketing!), with Sharron's super-hearing warning her of the approach of a 'monk' creeping through the grass during her night-time visit of Trennick. Yet somehow, though she heard one, she didn't hear the three surround her and is totally taken unawares by these agents of evil, captured. I'm sure she could have fought the three of them, but maybe she realised it would be quicker to get to the root of the plot by going along as a captive?

As in a few episodes, Craig or Richard tell her to stay out of trouble when it comes to the final confrontation, but at least this time she follows her own instincts and discovers the printing press in the basement where Trennick's gang have put together a counterfeit government white paper to fool other countries like Russia of its intent to escalate nuclear weapon testing, and also leads to Mrs. Trennick learning the hard truth, both about her effigy doll's lack of power, and her husband's real intent. You almost feel sorry for her that she's not going to get her 'greatest night of witchcraft in a hundred years,' but not quite! Time to find a new profession, madam. The only concession to magic or witchery is that she senses Sharron has powers. Even Craig and Richard don't get to use these powers very much, relying more on the latter's knowledge of old buildings and the 'tie beam' that they use to transfer stresses, or some such technical detail Sharron had told him, his encyclopaedic recall proving useful when they couldn't contact her in Trennick House. Early on, Craig has a bad feeling about what Sharron said on the phone, which is why they go to Cornwall in the first place, then Richard's drawn to a guidebook on the shelf of Sharron's room and is later able to trace the indentations in it where she wrote out a postcard. Craig senses something beyond a door of the inn that makes him think Sharron had been there, and they find the dead Dan in a coffin.

After that Richard tries to call out to Sharron outside Trennick with their special communication, but can't get through or hear any response, apparently. He cracks some nuts with his hands, to Craig's chagrin that he can be so calm, but as he later says to Sharron, he never doubted she'd be alright. Craig hears the high voltage generator parked in the woods, though that might not have been special hearing, and when he trips up butler Hoad, Richard catches the tea tray he was carrying, a feat, if small-time and humorous, and then it's as simple as Craig leaping from the roof of Porth's van in order to take out two of the 'monks,' a short fight, and not a very exciting one. So the powers were lacklustre and not always internally consistent - we've seen them unable or unwilling to communicate before, and Craig suggests they can't hear through four foot thick stone walls, which suggests the communication they achieve is actually sound, though so quiet or on a different frequency to normal human hearing. Even so, if this was the case, how come they can't contact Sharron once they're inside? Too convoluted a solution to find the tie beam and send out morse code (assuming that's what it was), than to simply search the house for Sharron! A clever idea, and I suppose she could have been hidden in some secret compartment somewhere rather than one of the guest rooms. They also wonder why they aren't getting any alerts to Sharron being in 'a situation' and Richard suggests in the past it was only activated by immediate danger, so that at least seemed more consistent with what we'd seen.

Still, the consistency or otherwise of the use of powers was only one issue among a few questionable moments it's fun to spot: a big one is that there are no Cornish accents. Perhaps the poachers were supposed to be along those lines, but weren't, nor anyone else, not even Trennick or his wife, which fits my suggestion they weren't from around there, and Trennick inherited the place fairly recently. But in all their investigations they never once find a comedy Cornish accent of the kind heard in the great 'Doc Martin,' so that didn't help sell the location when they're usually so careful to include accents, not just appropriate decor and stock footage of locations. The backdrops used to represent external views when filming in the usual interior sets (the inn, the opulent house, complete with the staircase - didn't even try to disguise it this time! - the basement which Richard escaped from in 'The Fanatics'), were too painterly: the Barbados hotel window was too close to the camera, and when Richard's let out of Trennick, the door (which looks tiny, yet in exterior view he exits out of the main entrance), you can see a line down the painted backdrop outside and even where the screen meets the gravel drive's ground! The House's wooden sign looks like it's been put up at a moment's notice and wouldn't have stood up to any of that wind and storm, and the biggest mistake is Porth pretending not to know a Macready was staying at his inn, when he must have known Jane was waiting upstairs for the visit as a false Macready, making his efforts redundant and him much more suspicious! Dead Dan's eye seems to flutter in closeup (which might be why they pause the picture during the zoom into his face), and was the records office in the same town or was Craig zipping around Cornwall?

If you look closely at the guestbook, a few names above Sharron's is an 'Alphose' (misspelled) Capone, which must have been a deliberate joke that they probably thought viewers wouldn't notice, not realising that in fifty years we'd still be watching the episodes and pausing DVDs to read such things! Good use was made of exterior filming, always something to add reality to the familiar interiors, and there's a bit of the usual banter, mainly between Craig and Richard: "Uranium? To the Roman Empire?" Craig deliberately misconstrues from Richard's Cornish economic history lesson. It's also good to see David Lodge (Porth), and Terence Alexander (Trennick), both character actors that were in a lot of old films ('The Cockleshell Heroes' for the former, and 'The League of Gentlemen' for the latter, both films I like a lot). There aren't many exclusions from the cast list this time, although the telephone operator had a few lines and no credit, as did the chubby darts player at the inn, who had a conversation with Richard - he's effectively appeared in two episodes as he was in that post-credits sequence of 'The Survivors' I mentioned, though non-speaking. Dan, and fellow poacher George Whetlor (who looks like Gollum when Richard finds him crouched over a rabbit!), along with Hoad, get credited, and even the eccentric Clerk at the Cornwall Public Records Office gets his due (comically replacing his glasses off straight with one arm sticking out!). I wonder if Anne Sharp, who played Jane, the fake Macready, was also Alexandra Bastedo's stunt double or stand-in because she certainly had the same look.

On the whole this is another episode that didn't really make it. It tries to create a sinister atmosphere, but the various day for night sequences where you can see the sun shining down through the trees, just don't sell it (Sharron's makeup almost appeared to glow like something radioactive because of the filming technique), and the uneasy use of witchcraft to try and create a brooding, gloomy mood, didn't work, and certainly failed compared to 'Shadow of The Panther' and its creepy zombified assassins with cruelly curved swords stalking victims down hotel corridors. The investigative nature of the story means that for much of the time it's just one or more of the main cast visiting places and talking to people, trying to find a clue to what's going on: Trennick House, The Kings Head (no apostrophe on the sign, which is why I write it that way), the County Witchcraft Museum, the Cornwall Public Records Office… Craig's scene with the clerk was entertaining, but the humour also dissipated any slight tension that might have built up, and there was never any real sense of uneasiness, even when hooded varmints are hunting people down in the woods. It's eighteen minutes into the episode before much happens, Sharron first hearing an enemy's approach, but the momentum never gets going. Even Tremayne only shares the end scene of a semi-serious chat about expenses, then when they've gone he finds his souvenir effigy with a pin through its head - I'm not sure what they were saying! 'Nemesis agents stumble on a small-time operator' is the headline, and though it's good they foiled another plot, there wasn't any definite threat, Trennick's plan hardly foolproof, relying on the white paper being taken seriously by foreign powers.

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