Lasting comfort is hard to find, though there is brief solace in the mother-child relationships that are formed. This is done with a single pitch of changing colour and tonal quality, an eerie echo rebounding as though off the walls of a quarry. Yet there is often a dark undercurrent to the writing and a sense of profound unease, especially when describing the hive mind the children have in place. Peel’s ability to portray pastoral scenes through her electronics is a massive bonus, for some of the scene setting is exquisite, matching the rich green shades of the production. Peel adds drones and tape manipulations to dislocate the perspective of the viewers, but also dips into more obviously English and pastoral references when writing about the setting and the ‘home’ personalities involved.ĭeeply unnerving but weirdly consoling at the same time – rather like the children who have mysteriously arrived in the town!
For her score to The Midwich Cuckoos she uses analogue synthesizers to replicate the ‘hive mind’, shared by the group of children whose initial purpose is to take over the suburbs, but whose greater aims become even more disturbing. The job of portraying these elements in sound has been given to Hannah Peel, who is building up an impressive arsenal of music for the screen, both in analogue and digital form. Reviews for the series, fronted by Keeley Hawes and Samuel West, have been lukewarm, but to this writer at least the story remains a compelling and disturbing one, the tension rarely letting up, with the idea that such dark things could be afoot in ‘normal’ English towns proving to be profoundly unnerving.
As the seven-part series takes shape, the tension between the two reaches breaking point, and a number of startling events lead to an extremely fraught battle of the minds. It tells (plot spoiler alert!) of a group of children arriving by stealth in a leafy English town, then growing quickly both physically and mentally as a unit until their power eclipses that of their parents.
John Wyndham’s classic 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos has inspired a number of big and small screen responses, the most recent being from Sky with their starry interpretation that has been all over digital TV of late.
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