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The television version of The Tripods was jointly produced by the BBC in the United Kingdom and the Seven Network in Australia. The music soundtrack was written by Ken Freeman. Season one of The Tripods, broadcast in 1984, which had 13 half-hour episodes written by the well-known author of many radio plays Alick Rowe, covers the first book, The White Mountains; the 12-episode second season (1985) covers The City of Gold and Lead. Although a television script had been written for the third season, due to a campaign against TV Sci-Fi by Michael Grade, the Controller of BBC1 at the time, it never went into production.
The first season was released on both VHS and DVD. The BBC released Tripods - The Complete Series 1 & 2 on DVD in March 2009. It can be noted that the series introduced several minor changes from the book, notably the shape of the Masters and Tripods, which have tentacles (although the Tripods do have a mechanical claw-arm that they sometimes use); in the book, gravity inside the Golden City was increased artificially, which is not mentioned in the TV series; the introduction of "cognoscs", spiritual life-forms vastly superior to the Masters themselves; and more interesting main characters, including love interests for both Will and Beanpole. The original texts have almost no female characters at all. Youd was recently asked about this for an interview on Word candy,replying that at the time of writing the series, it was generally accepted that girls would read books with boy main characters, but not vice versa. He also stated that he felt the addition of an entire family of girls to the TV series was somewhat "over the top". The series is also notable for featuring non-humanoid aliens, which was uncommon at the time. There is also one major change in the series. In the series people are capped at 16, however in the books they are capped at 12-13. This was a change made by the BBC Producers, since hiring child actors would have been more expensive since additional crew would have to be hired (such as teachers, additional medical staff, specialized stunt persons, and chaperons) and the production time would have to be extended due to the actors having to attend on set classes, and child actors by law had to have the hours they worked on set reduced, thus increasing the production costs greatly. One very sad event that overshadowed the series was the tragic death in a car crash of Charlotte Long, who played Will's love interest Eloise, shortly before the start of transmission of the first season. For the second season, the role was briefly recast, with Cindy Shelley appearing as Eloise during a dream sequence.
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