Sapphire and Steel, Assignments One to Four

Sapphire and Steel is one of the oddest but most interesting of British science fiction series of its era. It was produced by ATV and was broadcast, rather sporadically, from 1979 to 1982.

The series was created by P. J. Hammond who has had an interesting career as a television writer, his credits including episodes of police procedural series such as Z Cars and The Sweeney and science fiction series like Ace of Wands. More recently he has written for Midsomer Murders and Torchwood. Hammond’s original idea was for a children’s series, which probably explains the format - each story was broadcast as a series of from four to six half-hour episodes, in the manner of Doctor Who. At some stage the decision was made to do Sapphire and Steel as a fully fledged science fiction series for an adult audience with a distinctly darker tone.

The two leads were both major television stars, David McCallum having achieved fame with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in the 60s and Joanna Lumley having starred in The New Avengers in the mid-70s.

The two central characters, Sapphire (Lumley) and Steel (McCallum), are space-time trouble-shooters, their job being to locate and neutralise time anomalies. Time is conceived of as being somewhat unstable, and the instabilities are highly dangerous. Sapphire and Steel look human but are in fact aliens. They can be thought of as being vaguely similar to the Doctor Who concept of Time Lords but with some important differences. Their primary job is to safeguard time and to prevent the past from breaking through into the present. Saving any humans who are threatened by time anomalies is a secondary consideration. They do try to save humans in such cases but it’s clear that neutralising problems in time is a far more important consideration, such problems having the potential to do so much harm that the survival of a few humans is of rather lesser importance.

That’s one of the most interesting elements of the series - Sapphire and Steel are not the caring sharing Doctor Who type of aliens. They regard humans with a certain detachment, and at times even as something of a hindrance. This is particularly true of Steel who is a long way from the traditional science fiction hero. He is, for the most part, cold and emotionless. Sapphire has more empathy for humans but for her as well the job comes first. They are distinctly ambiguous and not always entirely sympathetic heroes. 

P. J. Hammond wrote five of the six stories in the series. These are stories involving time that are far more complex and disturbing than those to be found in series like The Time Tunnel. The dangerous time anomalies often result from situations in which people have inadvertently created temporal confusion. In Assignment One the problems arise in a house that is filled with too many elements from the past, and elements from too many time periods. The house was built 250 years ago on the foundations of buildings of an earlier era and the couple who inhabit the house with their two children have filled it with old objects such as furniture and (most dangerously) clocks. Even worse the wife has a great enthusiasm for old nursery rhymes many of which have associations with historical events. Time is a kind of corridor inhabited by creatures (which appear to people as ghosts) that are trying to break out of the corridor into the present. These creatures can use old paintings, old books or old nursery rhymes as triggers to break out of the time corridor.

A recurrent theme is that it is extremely hazardous to mix different time periods. For example a house built in the 17th century containing pictures painted in the 18th century, furniture built in the 19th century and various everyday objects from various decades of the 20th century would be a kind of (quite literal) time bomb. It would contain a multitude of triggers any one of which could cause potentially catastrophic space-time disruptions.

The idea of ghosts as reflections of time is intriguing. Hammond’s initial inspiration came from spending a night in a supposedly haunted house and he has managed to take the traditional English ghost story and give it a clever science fictional twist whilst still retaining the essential atmosphere of the ghost story. 

Assignment Two further amplifies Hammond’s conception of the nature of ghosts and ghostly hauntings. It also emphasises the alienness of the agenda of Sapphire and Steel - they are guardians of time, not of the human race. Compassion cannot be allowed to prejudice the success of their task.

Assignment Two makes wonderfully effective use of its setting, an abandoned railway station. With just a handful of sets it achieves an extraordinary sense of claustrophobia, melancholy and at times stark terror. It is an exceptionally clever and unconventional ghost story, of ghosts who have been cheated.

After the brilliance of the first two stories Assignment Three comes as a major disappointment. Since it deals with the present and the future rather than the past it lacks the spooky uncanny feel of the past haunting the present. It also lacks the essential elements of tragedy and melancholy that made the first two stories so effective, and it resorts to some rather silly, sentimental emotionally manipulative ideas. While the low budgets were no problem in the first two stories this story unfortunately looks cheap and crude.

Assignment Four is a vast improvement. A ghost in this series can be a kind of echo from the past, or it can be a person (alive or dead) from another time. It can even be a figure from a photograph that is brought, not exactly to life, but to a kind of shadowy existence. This idea is explored in depth in Assignment Four. Photographs can act as a species of portal, and one of the most interesting ideas is that every photograph is a photograph of infinity. It contains not just those people and objects visible in the photograph, but everything within the frame of the picture - the people  who were behind a wall, or inside a house, or in the street behind a house in the image. There really is more to a photograph than meets the eye.

In this story an amateur photographer playing around with photographs, mixing images from different photographs into one photograph, has unknowingly opened a portal and something has entered. His big mistake was to mix images from photographs taken at different times, thus creating an extremely powerful potential time anomaly. Now figures from century-old photographs are inhabiting the present day. They are ghosts, but ghosts of living people rather than dead people.

McCallum and Lumley resist the temptation to play their characters in a traditional heroic manner. Both give nicely ambiguous performances with Lumley in particular adding some wry humour.

One of the series’ great strengths is that it doesn’t try to give tidy explanations. It’s content to leave the viewer slightly mystified, with the sense that some answers have been given but further questions have been raised that remain unanswered.

This series was made on a very small budget, a circumstance that becomes an asset rather than a liability. Being shot entirely in the studio on a very small number of sets contributes to the sense of all-pervasive unease. The lack of money for elaborate special effects necessitates attention being given to atmosphere rather than spectacle. And it achieves the right atmosphere extremely well.

Anyone who enjoys ghost stories with a science fictional twist should certainly check out this fascinating series. It’s available on DVD in Britain, Australia and the United States.

Supernatural (1977)

Supernatural was a 1977 BBC TV series devised by Robert Muller, who wrote the bulk of the scripts. It lasted for only one season, of eight episodes, and then vanished into obscurity. After having watched a few episodes I can readily understand why it vanished into obscurity.

The idea was quite a good one. An exclusive society, the Club of the Damned, demands an unusual qualification for membership. Prospective members must tell a tale of the supernatural. If the story succeeds in chilling the nerves of the existing membership then the would-be member is admitted. If the story fails to satisfy even one member then not only is membership refused - the prospective member forfeits his life.

Muller’s stated intention was to revive the classic gothic tale, relying on atmosphere and ideas rather than blood and gore. He also chose to use period settings rather than to employ the dubious and difficult technique of trying to tell gothic stories in a contemporary setting. Laudable intentions indeed. There are however a few problems.

By 1977 British television series were starting to break out of the studio-bound shackles of the early years of British television. Supernatural is however very studio-bound indeed. The stories often take place in exotic locales. The usual method of dealing with this in 1960s British television was to use some stock footage to set the location and then film everything else in the studio. Supernatural uses a different technique. It uses paintings and camera tricks to evoke its exotic settings. It’s an interesting technique that at times works surprisingly well. The fact remains that the series does remain very studio-bound and by the standards of 1977 looks a little old-fashioned. Visually the series could have been filmed a decade earlier.

The limitations of studio shooting could be turned into an asset by an imaginative director and a gothic series might well have benefited from the kind of claustrophobic feel that a good director could achieve in a studio. Supernatural unfortunately often looks merely cheap.

The series certainly had some fine acting talent at its disposal, but even this could at times be a problem, as we shall see.

The first episode, Ghost of Venice, deals with ageing Shakespearian actor Adrian Gall (played by Robert Hardy). He is obsessed with the idea that during a very successful season in Venice some years earlier something was stolen from him. Something very valuable indeed. Oddly enough his wife can remember nothing of any robbery having taken place at the time. Nor can the Prefect of Police in Venice, a kindly man and an old friend of Gall’s.

In fact something really was stolen from Gall, but it was not material goods. The difficulty with this script is that the nature of the stolen goods is revealed rather too early, which has the effect of making subsequent events less ambiguous and more predictable than they should be. The other key plot point is also revealed too early. As a result this episode doesn’t quite manage to deliver the punch it needed. Robert Hardy was a fine character actor but his performance is allowed to become rather too hammy.

Having said that, Ghost of Venice is still an interesting and original idea even if the execution is not all it might have been.

The Mr Nightingale episode has far bigger problems. Again it’s potentially a good idea. Jeremy Brett plays the title character, a rather shy and obviously virginal Englishman lodging with a German family in Hamburg. It’s a doppelganger tale, a staple of gothic fiction. Like Ghost of Venice this episode also attempts to bring the gothic tale up to date by adding sex to the mix. Unfortunately this episode’s desperate attempt to create an atmosphere of sexual repression is somewhat overdone.

Jeremy Brett’s performance can only be described as grotesque. Grotesque, but not in a good way. Brett was always inclined to resort to sceney-chewing and was always at his best when this tendency was kept under a certain amount of control. In this case however he goes completely over the top, and unfortunately he also goes completely off the rails. Lesley-Anne Down also overacts and the combination is not a happy one. The script is all over the place and Brett’s wayward performance makes the episode seem more ridiculous than chilling.

Despite my disappointment with the first two episodes I determined to give this series another chance, and Night of the Marionettes certainly marks a distinct improvement. It’s a genuinely good idea and this time Muller makes the most it. It is 1882. Howard Lawrence is a scholar who has devoted his career to a study of the lives of Shelley and Byron. He is particularly obsessed by the summer the two poets spent at the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva. It was there that Byron, Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Dr John Polidori competed in telling ghost stories, as a result of which the 19-year-old Mary Shelley began a novel, the novel being of course Frankenstein.

Howard Lawrence and his wife and his daughter (significantly named Mary) have lodged at a small inn in Switzerland. Lawrence convinces himself that Shelley and his wife stayed at this same inn before travelling on to the Villa Diodati. There are rarely if ever any guests at this inn but the innkeeper makes a living by running a marionette theatre. A very extraordinary marionette theatre. Lawrence and his daughter will witness some very strange events in connection with this theatre, events that will give Lawrence the answer to the literary puzzles that have long obsessed him, but he will pay a high price for the knowledge he gains.

The performances in the marionette theatre, with its sets remarkably reminiscent of German Expressionist films of the 1920s, are effectively creepy and this episode goes on to deliver some genuine chills. Vladek Sheydal is superb as the sinister innkeeper while Pauline Moran is excellent as Mary. 

Viktoria (the only episode not written by Muller) has some reasonably good ideas but self-destructs due to its obsession with trying to view Victorian sexuality through the prism of late 1970s feminist wishful thinking. Lady Sybil suffers also from Muller's determination to impose Freudian silliness on the past. On the other hand Dorabella is an effective and atmospheric vampire tale.

Supernatural was an intriguing idea but so far I have to say that it's extremely uneven. It’s a series that’s not entirely without interest but viewers are advised not to set their expectations too high. The BFI's recent UK DVD release offers decent transfers.

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968)

In the late 60s and early 70s the BBC produced a series of adaptations of classic ghost stories, including the classic tale by M. R. James, Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad. It was produced in 1968 for the Omnibus program, with the title shortened to Whistle and I'll Come to You.

It was adapted by Jonathan MiIler who also directed.

Michael Hordern stars as the delightfully eccentric Professor Parkin. He is taking a holiday by the seaside. The main relaxation for this very solitary man is taking long country rambles alone.

This is almost a one-man show. Apart from some breakfast-time conversations with another guest (on the subject of ghosts of course) and a few brief exchanges with the staff of the hotel all of Hordern’s dialogue consists of his character talking to himself. Which he does incessantly. This is one of his many idiosyncrasies. This poses a difficult task for any actor but Sir Michael Hordern is more than equal to the challenge. Hordern also succeeds in making Parkin very eccentric indeed without ever making him irritating. Parkin is a kindly soul, the sort of eccentric who makes life pleasant and interesting rather than disturbing.

The story is a very simple one and ideally suited for television - there’s not really enough plot to sustain a feature film. Professor Parkin is sceptical about the existence of ghosts, but without being dogmatic. Exploring a local graveyard he finds a rather strange object. When he cleans it up it appears to be a species of whistle. There is a cryptic engraving on this curious object. Being the sort of man he is, he tries out the whistle. He then thinks no more about it, but this seemingly trivial incident will have profound consequences for the charmingly dotty professor.

Audiences of today, accustomed to the crude and obvious style of modern horror, will be disappointed by this teleplay. Those who prefer their horror to be subtle, to be based on suggestion rather than beating the audience about the head, will on the other hand be entranced by this program. In fact it takes subtlety about as far as it can possibly be taken. It is reminiscent in some ways of classic British horror movies of the past such as The Innocents and Dead of Night which rely on ambiguity and mood, and on the mental state of the characters.

If nothing else it’s worth watching for Sir Michael Hordern’s superb performance, but if you’re a fan of classic ghost stories you should certainly enjoy this production.

It’s been released several times on DVD and is easy to find. The copy I rented also includes a 2010 BBC adaptation of the same story which I didn’t bother with since I have no interest in anything produced by the modern BBC.