Screen Time: Sky

(First published in Shindig! magazine #166, August 2025)

SKY’S THE LIMIT

Heading to Somerset for your summer holidays? Take inspiration from SKY, a 1975 children’s TV serial riddled with Shindig!-friendly folk horror oddness. As the show’s spooky soundtrack gets a first-ever commercial release, BOB FISCHER sits cross-legged on Glastonbury Tor and awaits “the chaos”

“The Juganet is a circle, the circle is a machine, the machine is a crossover point, the point is a paramagnetic intersection. That is where I must be!”

This cryptic quest is the stated mission of Sky (Marc Harrison), a time-travelling young alien marooned in rural Somerset. Discovered languishing in the undergrowth by three local teenagers on a pheasant shoot, he sports an immaculate David Cassidy-style coiffure and unnervingly blank eyes, choosing to communicate largely through a series of oblique telepathic conundrums. And he’s the central figure of one of the strangest children’s TV series of the 1970s, a field not lacking in some pretty stiff competition.

Produced by HTV – the undisputed champion of regional ITV weirdness – and broadcast throughout April and May 1975, Sky was written by Bristol-based duo Bob Baker and Dave Martin. Their contributions to Doctor Who had already given Jon Pertwee’s stranded Time Lord a dose of the lightly psychedelic: 1971 adventure The Claws Of Axos boasts a beguilingly hallucinogenic quality, and the following year’s anniversary story The Three Doctors even sees companion Jo Grant dropping in lyrics from ‘I Am The Walrus’.

Sky, however, is perhaps the apotheosis of Baker and Martin’s unlikely interest in the counter-culture. On the face of it, they were improbable hippies: both were hovering around their fortieth birthdays and had previously worked together on hard-boiled TV serials like Z-Cars. But the series is riddled with New Age ecological concerns, drawing much of its drama from the friction between old-school Somerset gentry and the alternative lifestyles already becoming wedded to the local landscape by the activities of Pilton dairy farmer Michael Eavis.

It’s a tension epitomised by Sky’s trio of teenage helpers. While the plummy-voiced Roy (Richard Speight) is the dithering son of a retired Major, brother-and-sister duo Arby (Stuart Lock) and Jane (Cherrald Butterfield) are practical, working class kids with resolutely local accents and a more sympathetic ear for Sky’s dire warnings of a forthcoming global apocalypse. Or, as he calls it, “the chaos”. Their sometimes tense dynamic echoes the youthful love triangle in Alan Garner’s folklore-infused 1967 novel The Owl Service, a comparison reinforced by a subtly-woven subplot: Roy secretly harbours a slow-burning crush on Jane.

Meanwhile, the villain of the piece is (literally) derived from the conflict between man-made futurism and the ancient spirits of Gaia. Although ironically, it is the presence of Sky himself that inadvertently generates this “animus of the organism”. The black-cloaked Ambrose Goodchild is played with sinister relish by Robert Eddison – later immortalised as the antediluvian knight at the climax of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989) – and has been “made manifest” by the Earth itself to expurgate Sky, who it identifies as something akin to a viral infection.

Shindig! readers might take particular delight from episode five, Evalake, a veritable riot of poncho-wearing post-hippy thrills. Transported to Glastonbury Tor in search of his mysterious “Juganet”, Sky finds himself drawn to the caravan of glassy-eyed New Age couple Susannah and Michael, the latter of whom becomes convinced that the youthful alien fulfils a quasi-Arthurian prophecy. “Evalake the unknown, come to build again the abode of light on the isle of glass. You shall find him, seeker, in the temple of the stars…” he whispers, before Goodchild destroys their vintage raffia furnishings by sending an invasive army of tree branches crashing through the caravan windows.

The show’s conflicts are emphasised by a soundtrack of evocative contrasts. Composed by HTV’s resident musical director Eric Wetherell, it mixes staccato harpsichords and elegantly baroque cellos with alarming Radiophonic-style swoops and clangs. Exactly fifty years after being captivated by the series as a square-eyed nine-year-old, avowed Sky fan Alan Gubby has tracked down Wetherell’s master tapes for a brand new deluxe 10” vinyl release on his label, Buried Treasure. Swathed in stunning artwork licensed from an April 1975 edition of junior TV listings magazine Look-In, the whole package makes for a sumptuous tribute to the lingering eeriness of the serial itself.

Bob Baker and Dave Martin continued to bring their own brand of delightful idiosyncrasy to the children’s TV schedules. Their 1977 HTV series King Of The Castle – a disturbing Kafka-esque fantasy set in a nightmarish tower block – was broadcast only weeks before their Doctor Who story The Invisible Enemy introduced fans to the Time Lord’s loveable new robot dog, K-9. By the early ’80s, their partnership had been amicably dissolved, but Baker enjoyed further success by co-writing the bulk of Wallace and Gromit’s award-winning adventures, cementing his reputation for gently subversive surreality.

Sky also takes its place amongst an impressive oeuvre of oddness helmed by producer/director Patrick Dromgoole. An unsung driving force behind a whole welter of earthy weirdness, Dromgoole at times seemed to be embarking on a one-man crusade to make HTV the unofficial home of small-screen folk horror. Alongside Sky and King of the Castle, his other credits include Arthur of the Britons (1972), The Clifton House Mystery (1978), Robin of Sherwood (1984) and perhaps his most enduringly disturbing commission: notoriously alarming 1977 series Children Of The Stones.

The co-writer of this latter serial, Trevor Ray, makes a charming cameo appearance in Sky, playing a slimy shape-shifter in a mischievous subplot that suggests both he and the glowering Goodchild have an unlikely side hustle as rural estate agents. But Sky and Children Of The Stones have an even more obvious element in common. Both series, as befits the regional remit of ITV drama, make use of two of South-west England’s most iconic landmarks. While Children Of The Stones is rooted firmly to the Wiltshire megaliths of Avebury Stone Circle, Sky pelts along the A303 for a revelation that becomes forehead-slappingly obvious with hindsight. The elusive “Juganet”, the circular “crossing point” that will transport the titular alien teenager back to his own time, is – of course – Stonehenge.

It’s the perfect post-hippy twist, and the springboard for a conclusion that takes Baker and Martin’s New Age interests into Wyndham-esque realms of post-apocalyptic science fiction. What ensues is probably a spoiler too far, but it provides a typically thoughtful climax to a series that still holds up as a richly intelligent and sympathetic exploration of alternative 1970s philosophies.

The soundtrack to Sky is available from Buried Treasure Records here:
https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/album/sky-2

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