The luxury that a television series has over a movie is the amount of time it can take with introducing characters and revealing back stories. Several radio productions of the story have also been broadcast throughout the years. A remake of the 1960 movie as made in 1995 by John Carpenter and featured Kirstie Alley and Christopher Reeve in his last movie role before he became paralyzed.

The first was a 1960 film called Village of the Damned and due to its success, a sequel, Children of the Damned was produced soon afterwards.

This isn’t the first time, or even the second that the novel has been adapted for live action media. Just as they are about to evacuate all the inhabitants outside of the zone, everyone begins to awake, and all the women of childbearing age who had been unconscious intuitively know that they are now pregnant. The military is called in and begins trying to figure out whether the people within the affected zone are alive or dead, but no one can get near enough to find out. In the small town of Midwich, one evening, all living things collapse in an unconscious state. This has direct correlation to what happens in the Novel and in the movies and television series. A cuckoo is a brood parasitic bird that lays their eggs in another bird’s nest, the egg hatches earlier than the hosts and the chick usually evicts the eggs or the young of the host bird. That's the journey that I think we take you on.The Midwich Cuckoos is a new British television series based on a novel written by John Wyndham in 1957. ‘It makes you question whether human beings are indeed species that should even really dominate the earth anymore. He wanted to tap into the modern feeling of how Midwich looks to be the perfect place to bring up children until something like this happens and the locals begin to question everything they’ve known up until that point. ‘So suddenly, he became Susannah Zellaby, Alice Troughton brilliantly directed the first episode and it's just gotten much more female focused.’ The Midwich Cuckoos Pic: UKĬonsidering the book was released in 1957, David added that the story had a bit of a Cold War-y feel to it and so along with making the lead character a woman, he also made it much more contemporary. John Wyndham’s lead character was a local resident called Gordon Zellaby, but Keeley Hawes’ plays a child psychiatrist called Susannah Zellaby.ĭavid elaborated on his reasoning for the change and shared: ‘In the book, it's a man, Mr Gordon Zellaby, and he was a real lecturer and one of the big things we've done is we've made it a much more female story, because it is a female story.

The midwich cuckoo book