The UK Sci-Fi TV Book Guide: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

An edition of The Day of the Triffids released to tie in with the 1981 BBC television adaptation.

Script Writer
Douglas Livingstone

Television Details
The Day of the Triffids
6 × 30 Minutes / BBC1 / Colour

10/09/81 Part One
17/09/81 Part Two
24/09/81 Part Three
01/10/81 Part Four
08/10/81 Part Five
15/10/81 Part Six

Archive Details / DVD Releases
The Day of the Triffids has been released on Region 2 DVD in the UK (Amazon.co.uk / HMV.com), and on Region 1 DVD in the United States (Amazon.com).

The Day of the Triffids

Fantastic, frightening, but entirely plausible, John Wyndham's famous story of a world dominated by monstrous, stinging plants catches the imagination like the best of H.G. Wells.

'One of Great Britain's most serious and literate pioneers of intelligent science fiction... Wyndham always wrote well and imaginatively' — Financial Times

Publisher Penguin Books Format Paperback Publication Date 1981 ISBN 0-1400-0993-0 Original Price £1.25 Country UK

Edition Notes

The front cover shows Josella and Bill, as played by Emma Relph and John Duttine. Another image from the same photographic session was used on the cover of the Radio Times (5 — 11 September 1981) to publicise the start of the television adaptation.

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General Notes

The Day of the Triffids is one of the most famous science fiction stories of all time, although to people who are only familiar with the 1963 movie version starring Howard Keel, the plot may not be entirely as you remember it.

In brief, Bill Masen, a worker on a triffid farm, is temporarily blinded when he is stung by a triffid, and finds himself in hospital with his eyes bandaged up. The night before the bandages are due to be removed, a spectacular "meteorite" shower is observed, and by the morning the majority of the Earth's population is now blind. Unsurprisingly, Bill is now one of the few sighted people left, and with the inevitable death of the blind, the fight for the survival of humanity begins, with one of the major dangers being the carniverous triffids who have by now broken free from the farms and which are capable of killing with a single poisonous blow.

Note the absense of lighthouses and seawater which were introduced into the movie for the conclusion...
Other television dramas which deal with various "end of civilisation as we know it" scenarios include Survivors (see image right), Terry Nation's 1970s drama in which the world falls prey to a deadly flu-like virus from the far east; the 1994 TV mini-series based on Stephen King's The Stand in which over 99% of the world's population is wiped out by a superflu accidentally released from a US biological facility; and in a nuclear sense the two BBC dramas The War Game and Threads.