The Boy from Space (1980) - Episode 7: The Hunt for the Car
Story Part 1
The shadow coming up the stairs towards the terrified children is Tom. They explain to each other what has happened.
The thin man holds Bunting and Peep-peep in the woods and operates a controller device.
Bunting: Where are you taking us?
Peep-Peep: The direction of the lake.
Zooyixi: Silence!
Tom agrees to accompany the children to look for their lost friends on Rabbit Hill.
Meanwhile Mr Bunting and Peep-peep are taken onto the space-ship by the thin man, and shut in a room behind an invisible window.
There is another space-man already locked in the room whom Bunting realises must be Peep-peep's father.
Peep-Peep: Father!
Father: [Peep-peep!]?
Bunting: Is he your father?
V/O: The thin man turned a switch, then there was a humming sound and a window appeared suddenly. It shut them in!
Peep-Peep: He couldn't find me, father. I hid from Zooyixi in a sand-pit. [?]
Father: [?]
Bunting: Meteorites.
Father: [Meteorites.]?
V/O: Mr Bunting could see that Peep-peep's father thought they were like gold.
Teaching Middle
Wordy and Cosmo talk about what has happened in the story. Cosmo points out that the word 'window,' behind which the thin man locked Bunting and Peep-peep, ends with the same letters as the 'shadow' that Dan and Helen saw coming up the stairs.
They talk about the questions that Tom asked the children to understand what had happened, and Cosmo points out that questions always end with a question mark.
What? Why? How? Where?
- Ask a question and put a mark there.
Why? Who? Where? What?
You don't mean to say that you forgot?
Featuring the Two Stars
Cosmo is 'more frightened' than Wordy of a curly question mark floating around the Wordlab, and they notice different kinds of comparative words.
You're puzzled. - Well you're more puzzled.
You're frightened. - Well you're more frightened.
Oh dearie me, what can it be?
Featuring the Space Moles
The last verse of the song is played again with missing words for viewers to fill in themselves.
Cosmo retrieves the pamphlet from the hemisphere and reads some of the story. Then the Spacelab is hit by a meteoroid shower and Cosmo has to go outside in his space-suit to repair a broken gyro. He and Wordy plan the operation using lexical fields including 'go'/'going'/'gone.'
They watch a film about meteorites and meteoroids, and then return to the story.
Story Part 2
Tom, Helen and Dan find the car tracks on top of the hill. Tom recognises his own tyres, but they are puzzled that the tracks just stop.
Inside the space-ship the thin man is trying to work the controls. Peep-peep's father tries to explain things to Mr Bunting by writing out words with a special writing ring, but Bunting cannot understand them.
Father: He wants [?] the meteorites for himself. He's gone mad. This is MY ship.
Bunting: I think I understand. That man wants all the meteorites, is that it? That's yes. I understand.
Father: Is he still busy?
Peep-Peep: Yes. But he cannot repair it.
Father: Keep watching him.
V/O: Peep-peep's father put a strange ring on his finger. When he had made sure that the other space-man could not see them he began writing with it. It was quicker than the way we write.
Bunting: Fantastic, fantastic, ha ha ha ha.
Father: Read. It is the language of your world.
Bunting: I can't read it. Why do you think I can?
Father: You must be able to read it. (to Peep-peep) Tell me about him.
Peep-Peep: [I can tell you...]?
Helen finds Mr Bunting's book by the side of the road and inside is a message in Peep-peep's writing which they read using a mirror: "captured."
Production notes
The Two Stars song characters are presented as dapper and elegant old time music stars. In the early stages of development the stars were envisaged to be running their own "extra-terrestrial Bubble Theatre", touring outer space giving performances in their own auditorium encased in a see-through bubble. They were planned to behave and look like rock stars, although this gave the production team pause that it might "patronise the kids who are rock freaks," and so the concept was gradually moved backwards in time to make it easier to parody, first as late-sixties pop stars, and ultimately to the old time performers we get in the final programmes.
The space moles song 'Of Even Closer Encounters' is the last in a sequence of three featuring the characters and showing the arrival of an alien creature on their small planet. This song repeats the first 2 verses from their song 'Of Closer Encounters' heard in episode 5 and then ends their story with some banter in which they call each other 'mouldy old mole' and so forth. The two space moles were named A and B in the lyrics sheets, and in the next episode Cosmo distinguishes them from each other by describing "the space mole with the spiky nose". Early script drafts (of the first episode) would have seen Wordy explain that the singing space moles "live on the next door planet to us, the one that looks like green cheese."
Read about how the film for this episode was rearranged on the page about the 1970s episode.
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