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“Heavy transuranic elements may not be used where there is human life…” thus blared the God-like voice in the opening of Sapphire & Steel as squiggly lines and shimmering blobs depicted time, space and er, ‘elements’. Fashionably knocked by stare-sidelong-at-camera pundits nowadays, a fourteen year old me thought this intro was awesome. The idea of demi-gods, possibly indeed born of metals and jewels, keeping the human race safe from the invasion of a conscious and possibly malignant force of ‘time’ was too cool in all its Michael Moorcockian splendour for me to resist. You can’t go subtle on a set-up like that, it needs all the gotterdammerung of a heavy brass section, a sinister glowering floating helmet and the bellowing words “SAPPHIRE & STEEL HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED,” followed by the twice-wound sound of a hunting horn.
Ironic then, that what followed lacked all bombast. My first exposure to Sapphire & Steel came through my mum, who held cherished memories of the duo from the years when I mewled like a small needy thing from a pram in the soot-caked suburbs of Huddersfield. She’d found to her joy that they’d been released on VHS, and she bought the opening adventure. Age ten, I sat down cross-legged next to the fire (as children are wont to do) and lost myself for a few hours.
Upstairs in a house filled with old antiques and clocks an old nursery rhyme is being sung by mother and father to their little girl who rocks back and forth upon her hobby-horse. Downstairs her older brother scratches away at his homework. Suddenly, silence. The voices have ceased. The myriad clocks have stopped. The boy runs upstairs and finds his family gone. In the bedroom rocks a horse without a rider. Two impassive figures appear, a man and a woman smartly dressed, each with blonde hair and cold eyes. Sapphire and Steel. They explain to the boy that his family has been take by time. Existence, they tell him, is like a corridor and this corridor has weak spots through which time can break through and take things, people. Places with a dangerous amount of history, stuffed with old antiques are especially vulnerable and apt to rupture when triggered by old stories, songs or games. Naturally the boy freaks and tries to escape, but in jumping through the kitchen window the mysterious agents send him into a time loop where he’s forced to repeat the action again and again. Sapphire quickly releases him and having convinced the boy that the two magic-powered anthropormorphasised inanimate objects are on the level, they set to work at sealing the rift and getting the family back.
Obviously it gave me nightmares, but hey, at least that was a welcome break from the ongoing bad-dream saga that was The Tripods.
There were many elements that made the show gripping telly, but the key one was the remarkable casting of the two leads. Originally conceived of as simply a kid’s show, creator P. J. Hammond decided to cast the best names he could fish for and thus ensure that everyone in the production took the show seriously. Joanna Lumley, fresh off a debilitating but rather popular run of the The New Avengers, was cast as Sapphire and David McCallum, a respected actor who had made his name with his portrayal of Ilya Kuriakin in The Man from Uncle, played Steel. Both actors were intrigued by the thoughtful script sent them and against expectations agreed to sign up. It was an added boon that as far as their personalities they both naturally slipped into the roles. Sapphire was the empathic member of the team, a diplomat, there to reassure and guide the human element. She also was not above manipulation, bending humans to her will for the mission to succeed. Steel was a cold, scientific, agent totally committed to success at all costs. Very rarely showing emotion other than frustration at the slow wittedness of humanity, or occassional fear of the brute force and low cunning of time, he was clearly the mentor and the organiser of the team. This casting fitted the pair well. Lumley was a cheerful sort with a natural sense of understated comedic timing and a motherly tone. McCallum had a freezing glare, stern features and led a pretty serious regimented life himself, though he was a warm and cheerful individual. Both looked incredibly ayran, as if the Nazi’s had won and made the X-Files.
Each show had a pretty strong feeling of the M R James vein of gothic horror and it was this that was in my opinion its main strength. Without fuss the adventures would quietly open with the eerie wrenching of a physical location out of time. The Earth outside of the confines of a house, or a railway station or a motorway café would cease to exist. Looped sounds of birds chirping of cars roaring would be heard, oft-times from an external void of night or through the bright obscuring glare of strong sunlight. The show was very studio bound and this served to only heighten the claustrophobia. Into this temporal oasis people caught out of time would appear, like ghosts. Some would be traumatised and demand return. Some would relive moments of their lives in a looped fashion. Others would be stolid and indifferent, or suspicious. It was up to Sapphire and Steel to find out what time wanted, what it had taken and how it could be defeated. The subtle horrors presented were sublime and budget friendly. Deadly roving points of light. A faceless man. A swarm of umbrellas. The emotional rage of the Glorious Dead who’d been lied to. Given time the show could have slipped its child-friendly mandate and headed into the realm of Jamie Delano Hellblazer.
It did get silly, true. The adventure in the tower block is pretty terrible and very heavy handed with its animal-rights polemic. And it did get terribly slow and confusing – the tale in the manor house where a party slips further and further back in time and guests are picked off one by one has a fun concept, but muddles hopelessly. Still, three out of the six adventures were gold. One saw Sapphire and Steel essentially manipulating a foolish, guileless man into committing a terrible suicide of body and soul in order to defeat time, and Steel has not the decency at the end to show anything other than cold triumph. Another had a force that could travel from photograph to photograph kidnapping people and trapping them inside, and could only be defeated by the burning of said images – with inevitable collateral damage. My favourite, arguably the slowest paced of all, has unforgetable images – some of them quite Lynchian. Sapphire and Steel investigate a marooned in the void 1970’s motorway service station. There they are joined by the feckless and charismatic fellow agent Silver, a dapper dandy who cannot entirely be trusted. There are two people trapped there from the forties, who seem remarkably calm and disinterested. Also present is a sinister gypsy figure with a deadly small chess box. It’s a trap… but the nature of which is not immediately apparent.
Sapphire and Steel ended on a gloriously downbeat note, leaving the ‘heroes’ to a fate which it seemed impossible to escape. As if John LeCarre had found himself head of the children’s TV department, the two agents were callously sacrificed themselves, abandoned by their organisation as part of a ‘tactical retreat’. The program ends with them stranded in the void, staring with dull but mounting horror from the window of a motorway café out at eternity. The perfect marriage of new-wave Ballardian sci-fi and gothic horror.
And there the show ended. Another series was never commissioned, which came as a relief for P. J. Hammond who admitted that he’d sort of run out of ideas. What Sapphire and Steel proved, and what I believe still holds true, is that evoked feelings and mystery in a show can in cases be more frightening and exciting for children than monsters. The unknown space under a bed at night is the real horror, not the monsters imagination places there. If children are told something as simple as a wandering point of light is deadly, and the actors and direction sell the idea well enough, a simple spotlight effect can be far more frightening than a noisy CGI monster. The show thrived on a slow-burn atmosphere and always kept its mystery, holding its cards pretty close to its chest. P J Hammond disliked the notion of lore and felt that the more that was explained, the more bogged down a fantasy could become. We never even really found out what Sapphire and Steel actually were, though Lumley theorised (incorrectly I reckon) that they were ghosts. Whatever they were, it proved that child-friendly actors and characters weren’t necessarily needed if you could make the environment mysterious enough, and it was this that hooked the parents in as well and made it true tea-time telly, a show frequently spooky enough to send the nippers to bed with nightmares of invisible, broodingly incorporeal and malevolent scientific principles out to get you.
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