Place of Stuff

Did it, had a fantastic time and am now fully married.  Thanks to all of you who wished us well, it was a great ceremony and Helen looked beautiful.  Pictures are after the jump and all can be clicked for biggererness: Continue reading ‘Left For Wed’ »

Shutting down for the night.  Tomorrow is the big day…..

Well, it’s taken me around 10 months to write up these posts and we’re now at the end of the television series.  This series was a big part of my childhood and pretty much spoiled me for “normal” sci-fi or horror.  Not for me the joys of “pew pew lasers!” shows or simple non-psychological horror.  No, I want my shows to be a little unusual and thoughtful.

Hopefully, I have ignited a small spark within you to find these shows and watch them to see what I’m on about.  I am completely serious about wanting these to be returned to the small screen and updated.  With the new Dr Who shows, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, The X Files, Lost, Heroes and so on the audiences of today have also shown that they want shows that are not strictly mainstream and that do interesting things within the genres.

Sapphire and Steel may well have languished forever, being just a part of UK TV history until Big Finish Productions began reviving series by moving them to a purely audio medium.  Their most successful series are the Dr Who audio plays, but they also managed to gain the rights to create a completely new set of episodes for Sapphire and Steel.  These plays have introduced an entirely new audience to the series, many of whom haven’t seen the TV shows at all.  As we shall also see, they have takent he series ina whole new direction without losing anything of the original feel of the shows.  They have also created and introduced new characters.

One warning,  It’s taken me almost a year to write just 8 posts (2 like this and 6 on the episodes).  The Big Finish productions have 15 episodes, so this may take a little while to do!

I am indebted to CliveBanks.co.uk for the episode guides used for these posts – they prompted my memory meaning that I didn’t have to keep watching bits of the shows to write these.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

So here we are, after almost a year we are now at the final episode of Sapphire and Steel.  I really thought that this wouldn’t take me all that long to do.  For such an inventive television series, six series seems very short.  Many other shows ran on for much longer and stand the test of time (no pun intended) far less well.  We have seen them solve problems in an isolated farmhouse, a railway station, a stately home, an antiques shop and a futuristic invisible living space.  And now, for this final showing, we are at a lonely service station just off a British motorway.  This is fitting as all of these shows are set in innocuous locales where that sort of thing just doesn’t happen.

Silver (the ever smooth David Collings) the technician, is already there.  The three adjourn to the cafe attached to the service station to wait developments.  A couple drive up in their car.  However, despite the service station being located in the present day, the car and the couple are both from 1948 and they seem to have little interest in anything that is from their future.  Later, they see the station as it was in 1925 and a traveling musician from 1957 arrive.  S&S quickly realise that this is a trap set for them: technicians always arrive after operatives, the service station is stuck in a time loop lasting a few seconds and all the people who should be there have disappeared.

These new people are all Transient Beings, Beings who are so powerful that they have had to be trapped in their own areas of the time stream.  Interestingly, both Sapphire and Steel had been approached separately by the Transients with an offer to join them.  They are the enemies of the organisation that S&S work for and they are here to trap S&S as part of the bargain that gave them their freedom.  They have “time box” that they use to trap S&S in an inescapable trap – an area of ‘no time’.

This one stands out as an excellent finish to this series of shows.  Lumley and McCallum give it their all, and so they should as they no longer wanted to continue as the characters.  We see another new power – this time Sapphire is able to create an entire image of a car that will bear a close look (as long as you don’t touch it, of course).  The Transients are acted fantastically well, they all have a chilling sense of regret and determination – as if they have a job to do which they don’t enjoy.  But a job which they will see through to the end.

This episode also fills in a little more detail about the “universe” of S&S.  We now have the enemy, Time, the organisation that our technicians and operatives work for and now a third power: the Transient Beings.  In Assignment One, Steel scoffed at the idea of S&S being angels, so we know that there’s no shoehorning in of religion to the series, but their organisation remains a mystery.  It’s fun to think that if the series had continued we could have had a fuller background to the battle between the powers and maybe a few new sides and characters introduced.

The thrilling part of it is that they have to play their parts until all three are together and the loneliness and isolation of the service station makes the trap all that more chilling.  There are some wonderful performances by all of the actors.  As this was the final episode of the series, I have no idea how the writers would have freed S&S from their eternal prison, though it’s fun to guess.

Assignment Five has it’s detractors.  It’s one which, oddly, doesn’t entirely fit in with the rest of the series.  As we have seen with the other Assignments, they are all set “today” with an outside force opening a door to a previous era to allow someone or something to come through.  In this one, the force opens the door to send things back.  Normally, in a longer running series, we would be able to see this as an escalation in tactics and would have time to get used to the idea.  Because of the nature of S&S, rather than a steady escalation this is thrust upon us.

Lord Arthur Mulltrine is throwing a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his business partnership.  His partner, Dr George McDee, had died some years previous.  As a part of the celebrations, Lord Arthur recreates the era by insisting that all the guests dress in period costume, by removing all “modern day” appliances and replacing them with antiques from the time.  Can anyone say “trigger”?  Sapphire and Steel arrive just before the whole house is sent 50 years back in time.

During the party, the guests notice that they have begun to speak of events that happened then as if they were happening now; before long they are fully subsumed into the time period.  Our operatives soon have to act as detectives as people who were not born in the earlier period start to be killed.  Soon, the events of the night being celebrated start to recreate themselves as Dr McDee arrives at the party.  On that night, he had created a lethal virus but was shot by a jealous lover before it could be released.  Time has taken over the lover’s body in order that the virus can, this time, be released.

As ever, and with the benefit of hindsight, we can look at this as a piece of televisual nonsense.  But the fine acting from our players mean that it is easy to believe in the events.  This Assignment suffers from the same malady a lot of older television does: it does look very much like a stage play.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that visual effects aside, this could be transported to the stage with very little change to the script.

There are some lovely touches, one of the guests realises that S&S are not who they say they are and, further, realises that they can speak telepathically.  They enlist his help, even going so far as to give him his own name: Brass, and to enable him to communicate with them.  There is also some wonderful flirting by the ever lovely Joanna Lumley to the wonderfully stiff David McCallum.

The finish of this Assignment is very well done, the horror that is touched on in other episodes is well realised in this one.  The finale is touching and chilling at the same time.  Again, as with other Assignments, S&S will move on leving the victims to pull back the pieces of their lives.  And yet, with all the great parts of this Assignment, it just doesn’t work as well as others.  I think it’s because there are just too many people in the show.  S&S is a very intimate, secret thing and it’s easy to imagine the one or two victims carrying on and being believed to be a little odd.  In this one, all of the guests are respectable and, presumably, well known people and if they started to discuss the events they would be believed by many people.  As well, the dead people would have to be explained away to the modern day police force.  Even though there are potentially many many plot holes and loose ends in all S&S episodes, this one has far too many.

Although it fits within the S&S mythology, it doesn’t fit as well as earlier episodes and stands out as a script that was calling out for a different show to be part of.

Soon, this blog shall be moving home.  Mine host has decided to go for a better deal.  And no matter what you all say, I trust him on this implicitly.  There will be some preparatory changes, most of which you won’t notice.  The one that you will notice is that I shall be disabling comments during the move.  This is so that none of your wonderful comments are lost during the move.  If the move happens close enough to my extended holiday/honeymoon they will be re-enabled sometime in week 3 of June (or maybe week 4).  Otherwise, I’ll just tease you by re-enabling them and then disabling them.  Depending on how the mood takes me.

If this all goes as well as I think it will, you won’t really notice the move.  Otherwise, well, stock up on tinned food and ammo and batten down the hatches, it’s gonna be a cold cold winter.