I’ve recently spent three weekends working in Pitlochry, a very nice town in Perthshire. One of its best features is an excellent secondhand bookshop in the railway station building, and I’d strongly recommend visiting if you’re in the area.

While browsing in there a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of “Chocky” by John Wyndham.

This immediately caught my eye because that cover design is based on the TV adaptation that was made by Thames Television for ITV, and aired early in 1984. I didn’t follow the series and I think I only saw one or two episodes, but I remember it being haunting and spooky, and it triggered enough of a memory to make me pick the book up and buy it.

Apparently John Wyndham’s last novel, published shortly before his death in the late sixties, it tells the story of a boy called Matthew, aged twelve. He lives with a well-off family in a town in Surrey, and the story is told from Matthew’s father’s perspective. His parents begin to notice Matthew talking to himself, and it seems like he has some sort of imaginary friend, known as Chocky, despite being a bit too old for that sort of thing. It soon turns out, though, that Matthew has in-depth arguments with Chocky about science, philosophy and the nature of existence, and it all seems very intense and real. His parents get particularly concerned when these arguments cause him distress, and it all seems to be quite a worry. Things take an even stranger turn when he – almost miraculously – acquires new mathematical and artistic abilities, and even saves his sister from drowning, despite never having learned to swim.

His parents try to get to the bottom of it by consulting medical professionals, one a friend of the family who is forced to conclude that whatever Chocky is, she appears to be real. He then gets referred to someone else, who unfortunately has nefarious motives, leading to some mysterious and harrowing events for Matthew and his family. Eventually, Chocky leaves.

The book feels like it’s quite old-fashioned in terms of language, culture and attitudes, reflecting the fact that it’s written from an upper-middle-class perspective sixty years ago, but in a lot of ways it feels like it’s highly relevant to today. Matthew is presented with more perspectives and information than his young brain can cope with – does that sound familiar? Chocky also doesn’t understand the demands on Matthew’s time, and becomes intrusive initially, causing him trouble. Chocky’s desire to understand life on Earth makes us think about our own limited perspectives and ideas, and there’s a lot to think about here on the nature of intelligence, and our place in a very big universe.

The whole thing is hugely atmospheric, spooky, ethereal and captivating, a slow-burn building up to a fascinating and moving conclusion.

Having read it, I was keen to see the TV series in full, to see how it compared to my memory, and also to see how they adapted it for the small screen. It’s all on YouTube – here’s the first episode, you can follow the rest from here.

Let’s just pause for a moment, before we dive in, to appreciate that absolutely wonderful and memorable Thames TV ident at the beginning. It was the sight and sound of my childhood, living as I did in their broadcast area, and I associate that ident with so many TV shows I absolutely loved, and still fondly remember many years later. To me it should instantly be followed by “up above the streets and houses, Rainbow climbing high…” – but that’s another story.

Right – so how did the TV adaptation stand up to the book? Pretty well, I think. It seems like a very complete and pretty faithful adaptation, including just about everything that happened in the book (although one or two events are moved about a bit, and there’s a couple of minor changes to which characters appear and do what at various stages). There’s only two real changes made – the perspective is shifted away from Matthew’s dad as the narrator to a more neutral point of view, and as the show goes on, we get to see and hear Chocky in ways we didn’t in the book. Her appearance and voice are famously spooky and are probably the standout memories most people have of this show. I think it works pretty well in showing how intense Matthew’s relationship with Chocky becomes as the story advances.

A couple of changes are made to shift the series into the world of the 1980s, when it was made, so it features things like a Rubik’s cube, which Chocky helps Matthew to solve, and a home computer, in possibly the only scene that looks a bit laughable now. The computer blows up after Chocky helps Matthew to play a perfect and long game of Space Invaders.

I don’t think any of the child actors did much else, although two sequel series were made, and I’ll give those a watch when I can. The adult cast included some well-known faces, though, and the quality of the production is pretty high throughout. It’s an even spookier and more atmospheric thing than the book is, aided by that fantastic piece of synth music at beginning and end. The final scene is, as it was in the book, a moving and emotional moment, and handled very well.

I feel a bit sad I never properly discovered this gem when I was a kid, actually – I think I’d have loved it. It didn’t help that I didn’t read much fiction back then, unless it really grabbed my attention. I rather preferred factual books, reminding me of this great C.S. Lewis quote from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: 

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators, or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

I’ve had plenty of time to catch up since, I suppose, but a story like this would have really captured my very intense childhood imagination. I think I would have quite fancied a Chocky of my own, if such a thing were possible. Well, better late than never. The book is sixty years old, the TV series is forty years old, and I’m fifty years old, but that’s nothing in a gigantic and mysterious universe that’s been here for billions of years. That’s a good thing to dwell upon, after throwing myself into the mysterious and haunting world of Chocky.