Film Review
Sapphire & Steel, the most
unfathomable fantasy series ever created for British television, began
its run of six stories across four years with this creepy six-episode tale which provided
the template for the other stories in the series. The show's
creator and main writer, P. J. Hammond, seems to have conceived it for a predominantly
child audience, evidenced by the child-friendly dialogue and jokier
elements of Assignment One (none of the stories was given an individual
title) such as the jovial giant Lead (played by an actor who obviously
thinks he is doing a children's TV show). From Assignment Two
onwards, the series would show a marked shift towards an adult
audience, with more complex concepts and adult themes coming to
the fore.
Of the six
Sapphire & Steel
assignments, the first is the easiest to make sense of, but that
doesn't mean that it's child's play. Hammond tacitly shies away
from offering a clear exposition and instead piles mystery upon
mystery, so it is left to the spectator to assemble the pieces and
somehow construct a coherent narrative from what he is given.
This is British television of the late 1970s at its most daring and
experimental, and it almost beggars belief that the BBC's main rival,
ITV, put the show out on weekdays at a prime time slot. What now
looks like the result of an insane collaboration between Andrei
Tarkovsky and Harold Pinter was once a highly popular television
series, one that has endured and become a cult classic.
Instrumental to the series' success was the casting of two phenomenally
talented and charismatic actors for the lead roles. Already
famous for two TV hits,
The Man From
U.N.C.L.E. (1964-8) and
The
Invisible Man (1975-6), David McCallum was the perfect shoe-in
for the part of the brusque and coldly efficient Steel. Joanna
Lumley had become a household name as the glamorous high-kicking Purdey
in
The New Avengers (1976-7)
and could be relied upon to draw a substantial grown-up male
audience. As the gentler, more sympathetic Sapphire, Lumley is
the ideal complement to McCallum's charmless Steel, and both actors
bring the requisite mystique to their portrayals. Every line they
utter - no matter how bizarre and nonsensical it may seem - is uttered
with total conviction. We never really got to find out who
Sapphire and Steel were, or even where they came from, other than that
they were operatives from another dimension (two out of a total
contingent of 127) tasked with fixing irregularities in time (whatever
that means). As well as communicating telepathically, they have advanced
special powers - Steel can freeze his
body down to absolute zero (always useful on a date that goes badly wrong), Sapphire
can take time backwards (ditto) - but
they are not superheroes and seldom do they score an outright
victory. In some episodes, they appear hopelessly inept and
vulnerable, but we never doubt that what they are doing is of the
gravest importance to the whole of creation. In essence, they are
your jobbing dimension-hopping temporal troubleshooters, equipped with impeccable dress
sense and a nice line in sarcasm.
With most of the show's miniscule budget going on the salaries of its
two star actors, there was evidently not much left in the kitty for
luxuries, such as sets, special effects or even a decent credits
sequence. The lack of money available to the show's producer and
director Shaun O'Riordan proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it
allowed more scope for creativity. The series derived its
famously creepy atmosphere from its sparse sets which were mostly
under-lit and inhabited by the smallest of casts. It's amazing
that such an atmospheric and polished programme could have been created
on a shoestring budget using the old system of multi-camera recording
with (effectively) live editing (via a vision mixer). Some
episodes of
Sapphire & Steel
are so nightmarishly eerie that they could easily hold their own
alongside today's multi-million dollar, effects-laden horror
movies. Assignment Two (by far the best in the series) is a
particularly good example of how lighting, camerawork and minimalist
set design can be used to great effect to achieve an oppressive mood of
claustrophobia and sustained fear across three and half hours of screen
time. Abandoning the child-conscious restraints imposed on
Assignment One, P.J. Hammond would take the show into far darker places
for subsequent stories, and in doing so he would provide British
television audiences with an excursion into the unknown the like of
which they had never seen before, and would never see again
afterwards. Sapphire and Steel's tinkering-with-time exploits
would become compelling viewing for 28 more mind-bending episodes on a
unique flight of fancy into the unutterably weird vortex of the imagination.
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
In an old house that dates back to the 1700s, schoolboy Rob Jardine is
doing his homework whilst his parents read nursery rhymes to his
younger sister Helen. When the clocks around him suddenly stop
ticking, Rob goes into his sister's bedroom at the top of the house and
finds that his parents have disappeared. Within seconds of him
calling the police two strangers appear from nowhere - a man in a suit
and an attractive young woman who introduce themselves as Steel and
Sapphire. With the children's help, the strangers are able to
recreate the circumstances that led to their parents'
disappearance. It is revealed that time is damaged in the
locality of the old house, allowing some malignant external force to
draw people out of their own time. This force manifests itself as
patches of light which can be neutralised only by extreme cold.
To evade capture, this force hides itself in a painting of a country
house of the 17th century. Sapphire is unwittingly lured into the
painting and is certain to be executed by Roundhead soldiers of the
English Civil War unless Steel can find a way to release her...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.