Talk to the Hand

The Children's BBC adaptation of The Demon Headmaster ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. It's an interesting adaptation in many ways; after the first series adapted the first two books, they ran out of usable material -- there was a third book but it was impossible to realise on a film budget, let alone for children's television. Author Gillian Cross thus came up with a detailed plot outline for a new story, she went away and turned it into a book, whilst adapter Helen Cresswell wrote a television series using the same story. Those latter two series are hence broadly the same stories as the books, which were released around the same time as the shows went out, but sometimes the two authors have a slightly different take on the same idea, dialogue frequently changes (there is a noticeable change in the show's diction once it's no longer adapting Cross' dialogue verbatim), and the Headmaster is generally more involved in the TV versions, whereas the books tend to keep him as an off-stage presence a lot of the time. A full comparison can wait for another day, however, because I want to look at a few shots from the third series, The Demon Headmaster Takes Over, specifically the fourth episode. Starting with this one:

This is not Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, who had been Prime Minister for less than a year when this series aired in January 1998. It is -- and I am tremendously grateful to John J. Hoare for looking this up for me -- a lookalike by the name of Michael Aidan-Ross. Mr. Aidan-Ross was pretty well-known as a Blair lookalike prior to the 1997 election, as this 1996 article on him from the Independent demonstrates, although very little else about him seems to remain on the Internet all these years later; this stock photo of him with John Major lookalike Peter Friel, taken during the 1997 election campaign, is all I could find.

It's perhaps not apparent from that screengrab, but he's a pretty good lookalike, the shot is framed very well, he's carrying an extremely convincing red box (which has the royal cypher plainly visible and everything, which feels like a slightly bold choice), and you might be forgiven for thinking -- as I initially did -- that it was real footage of Blair they'd digitally manipulated somehow to include the green hand badge (a sign of the Demon Headmaster Taking Over). Especially given what else appears in the same episode. Let's tackle the big one first:

This is an altered copy of, as chance would have it, the Independent -- probably the natural choice of newspaper to use to show that free thinking is being stamped out. Just above the mocked-up headline is, helpfully, a news piece about the 1997 Tour de France, which was held from 5 to 27 July 1997. The original date is also just about visible (but probably only with the power of the 2018 DVD release -- I don't think viewers of the original broadcast would have been able to make it out) as Thursday 17 July. Can I get a picture of the original front cover?

This is interesting. Bits of it match up -- the 'tuition fees' story is fully visible a few seconds after the screengrab when the remote control is lifted off it -- but the Tour de France piece on the prop newspaper is replaced with "JURASSIC PARK II: LOST WORLD OR LOST PLOT?" After some further poking around in the archives, I've come to the conclusion that the original cover as archived online is an early edition, and the Jurassic Park bit was replaced with the Tour de France update for a later one, which was used for the fake cover (rather than the production splicing two different covers together).

The episode's other manipulations are this scrambled Ceefax screen:

And, immediately before the Blair shot, this digitally manipulated shot of the front of the Houses of Parliament, which I think is what subconsciously makes you think the production might have used altered footage of Blair:

That shot is kept, I think deliberately, very brief in the programme -- it's only once you're looking at a screencap that it starts to look a bit dodgy. But TDH in general has some very admirable production values for a children's drama series budget even if, just occasionally, the ambition of the story slightly outstrips what is possible, and its depiction of a society where independent thought is being stamped out is surprisingly effective -- I haven't even covered the scenes of libraries being shut down and books being burnt in all of this.