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The Day of the Triffids is perhaps John Wyndham’s best known work and has been adapted for TV and film several times. The first adaptation was a 1960s B-movie which took several liberties with the original novel, including adding a happy Triffid defeating ending. The BBC has adapted the novel twice, once in 1981 and again in 2009. The 2009 version is awful. Do not watch the 2009 series, it is very, very silly. It’s an adaptation that out B-movies a B-movie. The 1981 series though is a true One Season Wonder.

For those of you who don’t know the plot, The Day of the Triffids focuses on one man and his struggle to survive in an apocalyptic England. The Triffids are a new strain of plant life that can be refined to create a wonder fuel so energy companies create farms to cultivate and process them into oil. Bill Masen works on a Triffid farm where he cultivates the strange and deadly walking plants. Masen is (un)lucky enough to be stung and temporarily blinded by a Triffid while working on one such farm. As Bill recovers in hospital the world gathers to watch a beautiful display of meteorites streaking across the night sky. Bill awakens the next day to find that his sight has returned after his injury but the rest of the world is blind. With the vast majority of the population of London blinded Bill Masen must find a way to escape the chaos and survive the attacks from the Triffids who are now able to easily hunt the blinded population.

This BBC series is a faithful adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel and contains few modifications to the original plot. The opening scene of Bill Masen wandering a semi-deserted hospital is still chilling and was such an effective device that 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead shamelessly stole it for their introductory scenes. The BBC show’s hospital scene is creepily effective due to the wailing of distressed patients, nurses and doctors, coupled with Masen’s increasing panic and bewilderment. The hospital itself is clearly an NHS one with drab colour schemes, fixtures and fittings, although it’s a 30-year-old image of a hospital it’s recognisable and familiar, and all the more terrifying for it. Wyndham tapped into the primal fear of going into hospital and coming out changed for the worse, although Bill regains his sight he loses everything familiar and comforting in his life and the adaptation conveys this perfectly.

The show is only six episodes long and moves at a slow deliberate pace but this is a show that takes care to maintain the spirit of the source material. There are many dialogue scenes that manage to convey the horror and helplessness of the situation. Several characters have ideas on how to rebuild society and none of them are portrayed as being absolutely right or wrong. It’s an intelligent examination of how a society without an infrastructure, community, and a deadly new predator would cope and attempt to rebuild. There are several solutions put forward and all are examined for their benefits and flaws via lengthy debates.

Being 30 years old (and adapted from a book written in the 1950s), the show is dated in several areas. The main threat during the initial days of the apocalypse is not the Triffids but roaming bands of football hooligans. They stumble around the streets chanting and raping and pillaging and it’s clearly a fear pulled from the pages of the 70s and 80s news pages. The hooligan problem unchecked, running wild in your town, attacking your friends and looting and pillaging with no riot police to stop them. Still, the hooligans are a simple way of creating a post apocalyptic gang, it’s obvious that in the early days of the apocalypse that the already formed and strong social groups would band together to take advantage and survive. As for the heroes of the piece, well they’re all clearly well-educated and middle class, the working class are generally relegated to being stumbling, blind, Triffid fodder or rampaging hooligans.

The music and sound are generally excellent, the music is almost always jangling and on edge, filled with panicked percussion and piano notes. The sounds of Triffids communicating via their odd, thumping appendages is always unnerving and is a distinctive monster sound to rival that of the Doctor’s best enemies. The DVD menu uses this sound to add a disturbing ambient air to the simple process of selecting what episode you’d like to watch.

The Triffids themselves are a great monster design, they look like plants that could exist and are not so exaggerated that they look ridiculous. No sharp teeth or strange plant faces gurning at their victims, these Triffids are tall and ominous, almost beautiful, but disturbing and wrong at the same time. Much like Romero’s zombies, the Triffids slowly stumble along making their odd noises while gradually devouring the population and taking over the planet. Due to the limitations of the monster design, there are few action scenes involving them but those scenes are effective. You’ll notice that in the publicity photos that Bill Masen carries a sort of space age Triffid gun designed for killing the plants. The Triffid gun looks to have been shoehorned in to add a bit of flair to the publicity shots as the series only makes one use of the weapon and it’s a poor special effect. The gun is then wisely kept out of the action.

The Day of the Triffids is an intelligent, thoughtful adaptation that manages to maintain the spirit and intelligence of the original source material while being an effective drama in its own right. You can pick it up for a very reasonable price from Amazon. The opening titles are below (courtesy of retro TV specialist Rob Buckley) it’s very spooky but you have to forgive the rubber stinger attack at the end.