Elements of Surprise
The TV series Sapphire and Steel began in 1979 and ran intermittently for a few years. It’s a mysterious show. One of the mysteries is why I didn’t watch it as a kid – there it was, one of the few fantasy series on TV, while I was addicted to Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. It could be because, for some reason, we didn’t watch much ITV – maybe there was some middle-class aspiration in the household that kept the dial defaulting back to BBC? And yet I watched Quatermass that year, on ITV, religiously. I once realized, after not seeing that show for ten years, that I could still recite the creepy nursery rhyme from memory, that’s how much of an impression it made on me.
“Huffity puffity ringstone round,
If you lose your cap it will never be found.
So pull up your britches right up to your chin,
And fasten your belt with a bright new pin,
And when you are ready then we can begin,
Huffity puffity puff.”
So it was a pleasure to finally catch up with S&S after all these years, and discover it really was the most bananas show on TV – kids at school always complained they couldn’t understand it (but they kept watching), and no wonder – the show deals with two emissaries from an unnamed authority whose task is to repair faults in time, and stop beings from beyond time from breaking into our history. But this is only really explained once, at the outset. Latecomers would be fucked.
But then, even having heard the one-off explanation, we have to cope with a series in which the protagonists, working for an abstract organization, battle abstract threats, using abstract methods. There’s the lively sense of a huge, unexplained cosmology underlying the show, and at the same time the distinct impression that creator.writer P.J. Hammond is making it up as he goes along. And it works, somehow.
Each assignment take place in a single setting – isolated house, deserted railways station, tower block – and runs between four and eight episodes, 25 minutes each. It was very cheap TV, which is why the broadcaster liked it, but it’s atmospheric as hell within its constraints. Producer Shaun O'Riordan, who also directed most of it, had clearly been looking at Night of the Demon (the hand on the banister!) and musters a creepy ambience in which the specific shot choices add to the eeriness. The show probably looked naff for a few years, but now there’s an atmospheric value to old video – and anyway, I bet it was always possible to appreciate skilled framing and cutting.
It’s helped enormously by the characterization of the leads – I had watched David McCallum as a kid being The Invisible Man, and sort-of knew Joanna Lumley from The New Avengers. This was quite nice cult TV casting, but they also play really nicely together – they always seem to be sharing secrets, and even when we’re allowed to eavesdrop on their reverberant telepathic conversations, we’re never really in on it. Also, Steel (McCallum) is cold and hard as his name, mean and surly, pushing the expendable characters around. While Sapphire is nicer and can sweet-talk the norms, she’s still in cahoots with this mop-topped Scottish bastard, so we don’t really warm to her either. And it’s so refreshing to have an SF series where the leads aren’t nice, or noble (very dignified, but not noble) or ingratiating or goofy.
The supporting players, who change with each assignment, get mercilessly abused and manipulated by these extra-dimensional authority figures, and since their circumstances are uncanny and terrifying, they find themselves submitting. It’s about our need to surrender to fascism – when life is frightening and mysterious, the strong force which claims to understand it and to be able to help, even if it hurts, wins our support.
Interesting to see, in the first assignment, an incident where a child’s bedroom suddenly distends into an elongated white corridor, an uncanny moment Terry Gilliam promptly snatched for Time Bandits. And that is about it for influence: British TV headed away from fantasy. Twin Peaks happened without any help from the UK. But even Twin Peaks is not as strange as Sapphire and Steel. Very little is.
by David Cairns