The family of a black employee of the DFDS Seaways Lorry service drives home in Birmingham in their red Morris Marina, a series that stopped being produced in 1980 due to its recognized poor quality.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was broadcast by ITV the very night before BBC1 aired this film.
According to the writer David Rudkin, the golf-ball typewriter featured in the film belonged to him, and is now in the IBM museum at Chandlersford. With that hardware, it was easy to change the type setting in a text almost as easy as with present day's software editing systems.
Gideon wakes up in Gwen's car, having spent the night on the road to Oxford. The first thing he sees is the logo painted on the back of a red van, reading: «J.Ch. Simopoulos & Co. / Rolls - Stamps - Punches - Dies / Oxford». Gideon sums up for the viewer, "The life of a man!"
Gideon Harlax suddenly finds himself in an unidentified militarized city, where the citizens seem to be all sick, who seem to understand his questions but who do not speak English. A public address system streams out monocordic announcements in Estonian spoken backwards.