Opening his full episode guide, RICHARD PHILLIPS-JONES looks at the story that started it all for Sapphire & Steel, Assignment I: Escape Through A Crack In Time.
BROADCAST: in six parts 10-26 July 1979
STARRING: David McCallum (Steel), Joanna Lumley (Sapphire), Steven O’Shea (Rob), Tamasin Bridge (Helen), Felicity Harrison (Mother), John Golightly (Father)
WRITER: P.J. Hammond
DIRECTOR: Shaun O’Riordan
Sapphire & Steel – Assignment I: Escape Through A Crack In Time Review
Young Rob sits in the kitchen of the family home, doing his homework, while his younger sister Helen is upstairs with Mum and Dad, playfully reciting nursery rhymes. The home is full of vintage clocks, the camera panning to each as, one-by-one they come to a standstill, indicating that something is going very wrong…
A chilling noise prompts Rob to dash upstairs, where he finds Helen alone, their parents having apparently disappeared without a trace and his first instinct is to alert the local neighbourhood police officer but an arrival at the front door turns out, instead to be a pair of unexpected visitors…
It’s an opening sequence that sets out Sapphire & Steel’s stall simply and succinctly, that this is a show about time, and the dangers and consequences of its disruption. It also quickly establishes the tone that the show would carry throughout its run: minimalist sets, brooding unease, a dreamlike ambience and a slow-burn, deliberate approach to pacing, allowing the chills to creep gradually under the skin of the audience.
It sets off the first screen entrance by one of fantasy television’s most enigmatic duos and the dynamic between the two is quickly established: Sapphire shows empathy toward the frightened children, whilst the unfolding narrative reveals Steel to be coldly pragmatic and relentless in his pursuit of resolving the disturbance.
There are also hints at some potential triggers for the disturbances which Sapphire & Steel would encounter over their six television assignments, as Steel mentions: “Old names, an old house, lots of old things… lots of old, old echoes…”, and Sapphire tries to break things into layman’s terms for the children:
“There is a corridor, and the corridor is time. It surrounds all things, and it passes through all things… Oh, you can’t see it, only sometimes. Then it’s dangerous…”
The use of nursery rhymes as the spark that ignites the story still feels novel all these years later, as does Sapphire’s tactic of reciting those same rhymes backwards to repel dark forces. These mini song-poems, after all have their own connotations, with speculative theories at various times linking them to historical tragedies or upheavals.
Such connections are made explicit as a wretched looking (plague-ridden?) countryman appears, along with a ghostly troop of Roundheads, not to mention a pair of apparitions who may or may not be Rob and Helen’s parents.
“They do clutter their lives, don’t they?” opines Steel, emptying antique furniture and books from a room of the house in an attempt to free it from any historical interference, and is there a hint that the pair may have been involved in a certain famous maritime disaster?
Rob: When you said you did a job like this once, on a ship.
Steel: Yes?
Rob: What happened?
Steel: We had to sink the ship.
Before Steel adds, in voiceover: “For its own good, of course…”
Escape Through A Crack In Time belied the show’s origins as a pilot tale aimed at an audience of children, with what would prove to be an unusually tidy conclusion, but perhaps most clearly in a playful moment when Sapphire magically changes her costume (and even hair colour) in an instant to distract the children from the creeping menace around them.
Tellingly, this would be the only story with juvenile leads. Even if it was somewhat retooled for a slightly older demographic and a later timeslot, and those alterations gave the material a harder edge than its prototype form, this was still a tentative step into the dark corners waiting to be explored, full-pelt in Sapphire & Steel’s next assignment…
TRIVIA POINTS: We also got to meet to one of Sapphire & Steel’s “colleagues” for the first time here: Lead (portrayed by Val Pringle) arrives in episode four, providing Steel with some vital insulation.
As often encountered in my episode guides for Spooky Isles, here’s two more child performers who appear to have left the profession: This was the final screen credit for Tamasin Bridge, whilst Steven O’Shea had intermittent screen credits through to the end of the 90’s. As always, any info on what became of them is welcome.
Tell us your thoughts about Sapphire & Steel Assignment I: Escape Through A Crack In Time in the comments section!
Read our Sapphire & Steel Episode Guide: 1979-82
