{"id":110124,"date":"2021-04-29T07:11:50","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T06:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=110124"},"modified":"2021-04-29T07:14:44","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T06:14:44","slug":"sapphire-and-steel-flashback-revisit-itvs-weird-70s-sci-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/exclusive\/sapphire-and-steel-flashback-revisit-itvs-weird-70s-sci-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: Sapphire And Steel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the Seventies, ITV, our third channel, had a reputation for vulgar populism that was even worse than it has today. ITV was the go-to place for in-yer-face cop shows, boorish sitcoms, and sequinned variety knees-ups. It wasn\u2019t the channel you\u2019d have expected to find anything as conceptually ambitious and strange as Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> is remembered so vividly now is a testament to its blazing originality. Whether it’s the ghostly sight of a World War One soldier walking the platform of a disused railway station or the besuited landlord with no face or the sight of our heroes looking out into space from a floating cafe window,\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> was a series that seared itself into the memories of those who watched and loved it.<\/p>\n

Many fictions, fondly recalled from our childhoods, prove a crushing disappointment when revisited as grown-ups. But not\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>. It may have been produced on a threadbare budget, but little has dated from its 34 episodes and six broadcast stories.\u00a0What remains beguiling and fascinating about it is its proud, strutting opaqueness, its stubborn desire not to explain. Even before we discovered that the Doctor was a Time Lord, we knew he was an alien, we knew he was 450 years old (or thereabouts), and that he lived in this box called a TARDIS. But\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> never ever offered us those crumbs. We\u00a0were told nothing about our central characters except that they were \u2018elements\u2019, who dealt with disturbances in the fabric of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to give too much away,\u201d said creator PJ Hammond, \u201cbecause once you say where they\u2019ve come from, you\u2019re committed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Peter J Hammond could storm his way through those 34 episodes without ever caving in to pressure to illuminate his two enigmatic leads is kind of admirable. It\u2019s hard to imagine a series as gleefully obstinate and elliptical as\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>being given the green light now without some panicky execs butting in demanding a chunk of backstory and a sliver of sexual tension.<\/p>\n

Hammond\u2019s series never did tell all. Indeed, it never told anything at all<\/em>. Even if star Joanna Lumley believed that Sapphire and Steel were aliens, that was nothing to do with Hammond. \u201cI\u2019ve not known for 28 years,\u201d he said in 2007, \u201cand no-one else seems to know, and no-one else seems to have cared.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>took its small screen bow on 10 July 1979. It had been commissioned under the title\u00a0The Time Menders<\/strong><\/em>, and was originally mooted for a children’s slot on ITV. Thames had already turned it down when the channel’s midlands provider, ATV, took it on. Luckily ATV was a company that thought big. Its chairman was the flamboyant Lew Grade, who’d helped shepherd another singularly authored oddity,\u00a0The Prisoner<\/strong><\/em>,\u00a0to production ten years before. It was Grade that sought the commercially attractive David McCallum and Joanna Lumley for the lead roles.<\/p>\n

Both came with high price tags, which gobbled up much of\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>‘s slight budget, but it was never a series that needed much more money spent on it. As an almost totally studio-bound show (only one story took them into the open air, and even then it seemed strangely wrong),\u00a0Sapphire And Steel\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>made a virtue of its lowly production values. Claustrophobic and stylised, it probably looks more like televised theatre to modern eyes, and indeed it’s not hard to spot something of JB Priestley’s plays,\u00a0An Inspector Calls<\/strong><\/em> and\u00a0Time And The Conways<\/strong><\/em>, in\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>‘s makeup.<\/p>\n

The true radicalism of the series, apart from its bloody-minded reluctance to explain who its protagonists were, was in its shunning of traditional antagonists. There are no monsters or bad guys or indeed violence in\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>. Instead, time itself is the evildoer at the centre of the series’ six stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a corridor,\u201d Sapphire tells a child, whose parents have disappeared, in the first story, \u201cand the corridor is Time. It surrounds all things. You can\u2019t see it \u2013 only sometimes. Perhaps a glimpse. And then it\u2019s dangerous. You cannot enter into Time, but once in a while, Time can enter into the present… break in… burst through.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of the six\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> tales were ever given titles, more by accident than design.\u00a0Although some fans prefer their own self-spawned titles such as \u2018Escape Through A Crack In Time<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 or \u2018The Creature\u2019s Revenge<\/strong><\/em>\u2019, the stories have become known more recently by their DVD monikers \u2013 \u2018Assignment One<\/strong><\/em>\u2019, \u2018Assignment Two<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 et al.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they would have said at the time: \u2018Could you think of titles? I would have done that. But it just wasn\u2019t thought of at that moment,\u201d Hammond reflected in 2007.<\/p>\n

Eventually put into an early evening slot, only \u2018Assignment One<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 lets slip Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>\u2019s origins as a (admittedly sophisticated) family show but \u2018Assignment Two<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 was an altogether darker and more ominous tale. Set in a deserted railway station, the story has time feeding on the resentment of the dead, using as its focus Private Sam Pearce, a World War One soldier shot and killed 11 minutes after peace was declared in 1918. The eight-part serial threw up some striking, memory-searing images, such as Steel strung up on barbed wire and submariners choking to death on a submarine. And all of this in the time slot where\u00a0Emmerdale\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>now screens.<\/p>\n

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But although Hammond’s scripts were wordy and somewhat opaque, there was, according to McCallum, still a desire to keep the series penetrable to the ordinary ITV viewer.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother used to have a cleaner, Mrs Puttock,\u201d he remembered, \u201cand she saw the first episode and said to me: \u2018I loved it, but I didn\u2019t understand it\u2019, so we always tried to make the stories Puttock-proof.\u201d<\/p>\n

The six-part ‘Assignment Three<\/strong><\/em>‘ (screened over two weeks in the January of 1981) is arguably\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>‘s shakiest effort. A heavy-handed passion piece about the morality of\u00a0meat-eating (two humans from an animal-free future travel back to our time), it suffers from some wonky effects (Steel being attacked by a feather pillow is the series\u2019 rock bottom moment) and some starched acting from the visiting guest cast: \u201cBeing a bit of a greenie, I suppose I was allowing my own politics to interfere with the telling of the story,\u201d Hammond said some years later.<\/p>\n

\u2018Assignment Four<\/strong><\/em>,\u2019 screened immediately after, is a more sure-footed, eerier story. This fat-free four-episoder boasted a memory-branding villain in The Shape, a faceless being that is present, somewhere, in every photograph ever taken. Again, it\u2019s stocked with moments that linger long, from the cliffhanger where a woman, trapped inside a photograph, is burned alive to the sepa-coloured Victorian children dancing anachronistically in the modern day.<\/p>\n

Series Three of\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>, which would consist of a single six-part story, was scheduled for the autumn of 1981, but Hammond, worn down through overwork, declared himself unavailable. Instead, two other names came in on scriptwriting duty. Anthony Read was very well versed in science fiction storytelling, having script-edited\u00a0Doctor Who\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>for two seasons, while Don Houghton had penned two\u00a0Doctor Who\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>episodes\u00a0\u2013 ‘Inferno<\/strong><\/em>‘ and ‘The Mind Of Evil<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 \u2013 during Jon Pertwee\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Lighter in tone than the other stories, ‘Assignment Five<\/strong><\/em>‘ owes more to the drawing room mysteries of Agatha Christie than the MR James-meet-JB Priestley influences of Hammond\u2019s work. Set at a Thirties-themed party in the modern day, our two time agents soon discover that one of the guests plans to manipulate time to prevent the death of her husband, 50 years before.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the direction I would have gone in,\u201d reflected Hammond about the story some refer to as \u2018Doctor McDee Must Die<\/strong><\/em>\u2019, \u201cbut it\u2019s nice to have a variation. People enjoy that episode.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although recorded as part of series three, \u2018Assignment Six<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 wouldn\u2019t see the light of transmission until August 1982, a year after the third season aired. During 1981, ATV lost its licence as part of the regular review of the ITV regional structure, and on 31 December, it handed over broadcasting duties to the newly-formed Central Television. The series was one of a number of unaired shows Central inherited from ATV, and they weren’t in any hurry to put out another company’s leftover programming, so\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>‘s sayonara story had to wait.<\/p>\n

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Set at a deserted (there’s that word again) motorway service station, ‘Assignment Six<\/strong><\/em>‘ was aways intended to be\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>‘s last hurrah. The story climaxed with the duo suspended, helplessly, in space and time, the victims of a trap by agents of a mysterious “higher authority”.<\/p>\n

\u201cA further series was actually thought of, but only in a vague sense,\u201d Hammond said later. \u201cDuring the writing of Story Six, I felt that we had gone as far as we could for the time being. I believed that their fate was to spend a number of Earth years in the trap. This means that they could emerge again whenever the need arises, perhaps being even older.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t to be. Despite various attempts through the years, Sapphire and Steel remain trapped in that motorway cafe in space. In 2005, however, the brand was briefly revived in a series of audio plays, produced by Big Finish. McCallum and Lumley passed on returning, and so David Warner and Susannah Harker stepped into the roles, with David Collings returning to his TV role as Silver and Mark Gatiss on board as Gold.<\/p>\n

Like McCallum and Lumley, Hammond couldn\u2019t be tempted back for more Sapphire And Steels<\/strong><\/em>, but he did make a return to SF writing when Russell T Davies commissioned him to pen two Torchwood<\/strong><\/em> episodes (\u2018Small Worlds<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 and \u2018From Out Of The Rain<\/strong><\/em>\u2019). Sadly for genre fans, though, Hammond has spent much of the past three decades on such landfill TV as\u00a0The Bill<\/strong><\/em>,\u00a0Dangerfield<\/strong><\/em> and\u00a0Midsomer Murders<\/strong><\/em>, which just seems a gargantuan waste of a dazzling talent.<\/p>\n

Sapphire And Steel\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>did return to the headlines, fleetingly, in July 2016, when\u00a0Luther\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>creator Neil Cross divulged that he was prepping a reboot of the series. “I’m planning to\u00a0\u2013 it looks like I\u2019m going to \u2013 relaunch\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em>,” Cross told the Nerdist Writers’ panel podcast. “There’s a broadcaster in the UK that’s very, very keen to do it.<\/p>\n

Worryingly \u2013 or not, maybe \u2013 all has gone quiet since then, but it\u2019s difficult to imagine the\u00a0Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> that was making it onto TV screens nowadays. Could a writer of even Neil Cross’s eminence withstand the inevitable pressure to widen its scope or provide needless backstory?<\/p>\n

Sapphire And Steel<\/strong><\/em> is not only the best SF show ITV produced, it\u2019s one of the best television programmes British television has ever produced, SF or otherwise. Any education in British science fiction is criminally incomplete without it.<\/p>\n

Sapphire And Steel is now available to buy on Network DVD<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n