Richard Phillips-Jones opens his full delivery guide and looks at the story that it all started for Sapphire & Steel, assignment I: escaped by a crack in time.
BROADCAST: In six parts 10-26 July 1979
Leading role: David McCallum (Steel), Joanna Lumley (Sapphire), Steven O’Shea (Rob), Tamasin Bridge (Helen), Felicity Harrison (mother), John Golightly (father)
WRITER: PJ Hammond
Director: Shaun O’Riordan
Sapphire & Steel – Allocation I: escape from a crack in time review
Young Rob is in the kitchen of the parental home and does his homework, while his younger sister Helen is upstairs with mum and dad, who plays playful for kindergarten rhymes. The house is full of vintage clocks, the camera takes to each, because they come to a halt one by one, which indicates that something is very wrong …
A horrifying sound asks Rob to fall upstairs, where he finds healing alone, their parents apparently have disappeared without a track and his first instinct is to warn the local police officer of the neighborhood, but turns out to be an arrival at the front door, instead to be a few unexpected visitors …
It is an opening series that explains the stall of Sapphire & Steel simple and concisely, that this is a show about time, and the dangers and consequences of its disruption. It also quickly determines the tone that the show would wear during his run: minimalist sets, sultry unease, a dreamy atmosphere and a slow -burning, deliberate approach to pacing, so that the cold shivers can gradually crawl under the skin of the audience.
It turns off the entrance to the first screen by one of the most enigmatic duos of Fantasy Television and the dynamics between the two is quickly determined: Sapphire shows empathy towards the frightened children, while the unfolding story reveals that steel is cool pragmatic and compassionate in its aim to resolve the disruption.
There are also hints on some potential triggers for the disruptions that Sapphire & Steel would encounter about their six television assignments, as steel mentions: “old names, an old house, many old things … lots of old, old echoes …”, and Sapphire tries to break things in the terms of laymen for the children:
“There is a corridor, and the corridor is time. It surrounds all things and it goes through all the things … Oh, you can’t see it, only sometimes. Then it’s dangerous …”
The use of children’s songs such as the spark that ignites the story still feels new all those years later, just like Sapphire’s tactics to recite the same rhymes backwards to ward off darkness forces. After all, these mini songs have their own connotations, with speculative theories at different times that they link to historical tragedies or revolutions.
Such connections are made explicitly as a miserable looking (bullying?) Countryman appears, together with a spooky junk round heads, not to mention a few appearances that may or may not be the parents of Rob and Helen.
“They rumble their lives, right?” Does steel, which empty antique furniture and books from a room of the house in an attempt to free the historical interference, and is there a hint that the couple may have been involved in a certain famous maritime disaster?
Rob: When you said you did work once, on a ship.
Steel: Yes?
Rob: What happened?
Steel: We had to sink the ship.
Before Steel adds, in Voice -over: “For his own good, of course …”
Escape due to a crack in the time that the origin of the show had as a pilot story aimed at an audience of children, with what would turn out to be an unusual neat conclusion, but perhaps the clearest at a playful moment at which Sapphire distracts her costume (and even hair color) in an end to distract the children from the crawling mence.
Reporting this would be the only story with juvenile leads. Even if it was withdrawn somewhat for a slightly older demographic and a later time slot, and those changes gave the material a harder edge than its prototype shape, this was still a provisional step in the dark corners waiting to be explored, full in the next assignment of Sapphire & Steel …
Trivia -Points: We also came across one of the “colleagues” of Sapphire & Steel for the first time: Lead (depicted by Val Pringle) arrives in episode four and offers Staal with some vital insulation.
As often found in my delivery guides for spooky islands, there are two more child artists who seem to have left the profession: this was the last screen credit for Tamasin Bridge, while Steven O’Shea had intermittent screen credits until the end of the 90s. As always, all information about what has become of them is welcome.
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Read our Sapphire & Steel Episode Guide: 1979-82
