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December 4, 2008
Why the love affair with man-eating plants?
A new BBC adaptation is being made of The Day of the Triffids, but why are we still prepared to believe in a post-apocalyptic world roamed by flesh-eating semi-sentient plants? And do we have a love affair with fictionalised destruction?
Including quotes from Dr Barry Langford, senior lecturer in film and television at Royal Holloway, University of London and Andy Sawyer, librarian at the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool.
There's room for comments at the bottom of that article if you feel like joining in!
The recent BBC adaptation of the truly brilliant The Day of the Triffids, sums up everything that is wrong with the Beeb these days. I'm shocked at just how low this production was. They really were going out of their way to take a thought-provoking and many-layered story, and transform it into a patronising, senseless, B-movie. Even an all-star cast couldn't save this. Every nuance of the original was sullied, every concept driven down to its lowest common denominator. If the BBC wanted to make a mind-numbing, race-against-time 'Horror' then they could simply have scribbled out a cliche-ridden plot on the back of a fag packet, instead of laying waste to one of the 20th Century's greatest novels. Poor beyond words.
Been a while since I saw it now, but thinking about it, it wasn't that great. The original TV series was more like the book I think, weirdly gloomy and spooky. On the plus side at least there was interest to remake Day Of The Triffids and maybe some people will seek out the novel after seeing it.