I’m not going to lie, I had a different post in mind for today, but when news broke on Friday that Anthony Stuart Head had died, I went to delay Friday’s post to do a repost of my post about Buffy the Vampire Slayer only to realise that I have never written a post about Buffy. And so I thought that now was (sadly) the time to change this.
In case you have been living under a rock for the last nearly thirty years, I’m going to quote Anthony Stuart Head’s character Rupert Giles to explain the premise:
In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer
Buffy Summers might look like an ordinary teenage girl but she is the Slayer. At the start of the first season she’s just moved to Sunnydale, California after getting expelled from her school in LA*. She wants to make a fresh start only to discover that Sunnydale is also the Hellmouth – a mystical portal between earth and other dimension and basically the place that all demons are drawn to. Thus begins seven seasons of vampire hunting, demon slaying and teenage angst for Buffy and her group of friends – known as The Scooby Gang.
I’m going to date myself here, but I was basically the perfect age when this arrived on screens in the UK. Buffy was ever so slightly older than me and I wanted her outfits, her boyfriend (Angel! Oh Angel!) and her wisecracks. I hated school a lot of the time so a high school could literally be hell was also appealing. Coincidentally, I had been watching the first series (again) earlier this week and put it on again while I was writing this and within minutes there was one (“bad hair on top of that outfit?”). I recorded every episode on video (in order) so that my sister and I could watch them again (and again). I used IMDB’s quotes feature (already in existence even back then), Microsoft word and coloured paper to create a wall of quotes on the side of my desk. The reason I got into spoilers is because I went on the internet as soon as series two finished to find out (spoiler) if Angel was really dead.
Obviously vcrs became obsolete a long time ago, and my budget never stretched to the DVD boxsets, so it was only when Sy Fy did a complete repeat from the start sometime after I moved to Northampton that I realised how much of my sister and my shared language is pulled from Buffy because it was a staple of our Saturday nights in together**. I have a strong preference for the first three series which I will happily rewatch over and over and there are probably some from the final series that I’ve still only watched once or twice max, but I can recite you whole chunks of other episodes and if I close my eyes and think hard enough I can still conjure up the scene in the Yoko Factor (season four) where Angel completely mentally outwits (stupid) Riley after beating him up physically.
It’s another one of those things where I have absolutely no perspetive on how it would work for someone who has never seen it – the pretty girl fighting the baddies (not getting killed by them) is not as subversive/revelatory as it was then, but I still think it’s funny and clever and great and the special effects aren’t even too awful because the late 1990s was a work of practical effects, make up and long distance shots of stunt doubles with occasional bits of cgi rather than the cheap computer effects for everything that came a decade later. Oh and the soundtrack was cracking – I owned both “songs from” albums, and the cast recordig for the musical episode*** and my ambition was to be able to play the Buffy-Angel love theme on the piano. I know. It was a simpler time.
To go back to where I started – Anthony Stuart Head’s Giles is at the heart of the show in those first three years. He’s the fish out of water British Librarian but he’s also the father figure that Buffy needs in the absence of her real dad. The show is poorer when he’s not in it, and the world is poorer without him in it. Seventy two is no age. And obviously I’m sad as a fan of his work (he’s also brilliant in the radio sitcom Cabin Pressure and as Adam Klaus in the first episode of Jonathan Creek) but my thoughts are really with his daughters – their mum and his partner died in December and so to lose their dad so soon must be unimaginably devastating.
Here are some of season one’s best bits, featuring loads of Buffy, plenty of Giles and some Nicholas Brendon who also sadly died a couple of months back. The Buffy cast has had a really bad 18 months, as Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, died in February last year.
Go watch some Buffy -(or if you’re an F1 fan enjoy the Monaco GP and *then* watch some Buffy).
*in events in the original movie (with a completely different cast) that came out in 1992.
**Along with Clueless, She’s All That, Never Been Kissed, Ever After, Pretty Woman and the Richard Curtis oevre
***And I bet I could still sing along to pretty much all of it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
I didn’t know he had died, I’m sorry to hear that. I love Buffy too, I have watched it over and over again. And because you said it’s not a book, I thought I’d mention that you can get Buffy books, the scripts were published by Pocket Books, and some episodes have been novelized, like Gingerbread. They’re great for if you want to read Buffy during a power cut.