Sapphire and Steel

Sapphire and Steel, whispered about by thirty somethings as terrifying them as a child, remains my favourite programme ever, even usurping Doctor Who. It ran, in a haphazard fashion from 1978 - 1982, finishing when I was 10, and I finally got around to seeing them when they were released on VHS over 1992 - 1993. When I saw them again, it was one of those rare occasions in life when reality actually exceeds expectations.
I wasn't expecting that at all. When I was in the 6th form, there was a curious nostalgia amongst my friends and myself for Sapphire and Steel. Rumours in the common room, half-memories no-one really remembered 'a faceless man','a haunted railway station', 'a floating pillow', 'people trapped in a picture'. Great excitement was caused by a clip of Sapphire and Steel on Wogan. It showed Steel (played by David McCallum) in a darkened room talking to a ghost of a soldier... This was all we had, that, and a plot synopsis of the last ever story in a magazine called TV Zone; a petrol station where customers kept turning into shadows? Surely the reality would be disappointing...
No, quite the opposite... S&S remains as startlingly original and terrifying as it ever was, not to mention completely inexplicable...
Assignment One (as the stories became known, they had no titles at the time) introduced us to our anti-heroes, after an atmospheric title sequence involving a burning grid in space, a barely seen helmet type thing floating in a starfield and an ominous voiceover telling us that 'all irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension, transuranic elements may not be used where there is life, medium atomic weights are available... Sapphire and Steel have been assigned'.
And so began the most unlikely programme to be broadcast at 7:00pm on a weeknight...
So, in Assignment One, a boy is working on his homework in a dark and eerie farmhouse. The myriad of clocks in the house stopping working, and his sister tells him that their parents have vanished. Sapphire and Steel appear 'You called us, we came' said Steel, not at his most comforting.
Sapphire and Steel were cold and alien. Not at all the kind of heroes you wanted to come and rescue you if some strange phenomena had made your parents vanish. Steel was cold, dressed in a grey suit, and made no attempt at comfort, empathy or even explanations. Sapphire, outwardly warm and friendly, seems deceptive and not to be trusted. She also has the power to 'borrow time', to access images from the past... which she does in the room where the parents had vanished. A wall disappears, replaced by a white vortex in which a plague victim appears floating toward them...
There is little attempt at explanations in S&S, and what explanations there are contradict themselves in later episodes. In Assignment One, Sapphire explains how time is a corridor, and sometimes the fabric of the corridor becomes worn, and that time itelf can reach in through this corridor and take things and people. Steel adds to this by saying that there are forces from the very beginnings of time and the very ends of time that search for the weak places in that corridor, searching for a way in. The weak places in the farmhouse are nursery rhymes; 'ring-a-ring-roses' bringing up ghosts of plague victims, 'Goosey goosey gander' summoning civil war soldiers that try and behead Sapphire. By this point in the story she has become trapped in a painting on the wall, of the house as it was when it was built. Steel only manages to free her by bringing the temperature of the painting down to absolute zero. Complex and hypnotic, the story unfolds like a half remembered nightmare. Everything is shot inside a farmhouse set in a studio, giving a claustrophobic, theatrical feel. The nature of the enemy is never really explained. Is it one of the forces from the start and end of time? Is it time itself? Malevolent duplicates of the boy's parents lure him into the cellar. Sapphire and Steel -both telepathic- can communicate with him, but not see him. Eventually the little girl is used as bait; by repeating a nursery rhyme, she brings the force down into the cellar and into the foundation stone where it is destroyed by Lead, another medium atomic weight who has joined them.
And thats another thing. The nature of the protagonists is never revealed, only vague hints to their origins. Certainly not human, yet not quite extra-terrestrial. Steel warns that the 'Transuranics are never to be trusted' because they are 'unstable'.
A kind of equilibrium is restored at the end, the clocks start and the parents are returned, but I always wonder about the boy. The viewer never sees the parents except as their malevolent duplicates. One wonders if he will really ever trust them again...
And that was a kind of happy ending in the disquieting world of Sapphire and Steel.
Assignment Two sees them at an abandoned railway station. There is a ghost hunter there investigating the phantom of a soldier, but there is something else, a 'kind of darkness'... Assignment Two stretched over eight weeks (interrupted when first broadcast by some 1970s strike or another) and was rambling and in no hurry to get where it was going. The railway platform seems to be haunted by summer, even though it is October. Fresh flowers appear on this platform, the ghost of an old world war 1soldier appears. Communication with him reveals a hatred for the flower girls that sent them off to their deaths... but then there are ghosts from World War 2 also; men trapped in an experimental submarine. Sapphire and Steel are drawn into their horrific depths trapped underwater with the air failing, and also into the death of a pilot on his last flight... They wonder if the railway station might be a 'recruiting ground for the dead'.It transpires that something is using these ghosts. A seance is held, and it is revealed that something referred to as the 'Darkness' is feeding on the resentment of those who died prematurely at war. The Darkness promises eventual release for these ghosts, though that is a lie, and they will be trapped there in eternity, the darkness feeding always on their hatred. When the soldier realises this, he delivers one of the most chilling lines on television, 'not this... not forever'.
Sapphire becomes possessed by the darkness. Black eyes, no pupils, no white, just utter darkness. At one point she takes her hands away from her face revealing nothing but a mass of mangled meat. My god, this was on at 7:00 in the evening.
The ending is horrible. Sapphire and Steel sacrifice the ghost hunter to the darkness. His death, fixed some point in the future, is premature. The Darkness takes their sacrifice, their 'unique resentment'. This unique resentment is not the resentment of the dead ghost hunter, but the resentment of time itself, the ghost hunter's death being a kind of atrocity against time...
Assignment Three I always find the most disturbing. Time travellers from the future are living in an invisible penthouse on top of a present-day office block. They have lost contact with control and the other time travelling projects. Coats fall off hooks, cushions and pillows move. When one of the time travellers takes a joint of meat out of the fridge, she is assailed by images of screaming animals and abbatoirs, a slaughterhouse hell. Sapphire and Steel are joined in this story by Silver, another medium atomic weight. The three eventually gain access to the penthouse. The time travellers baby is accelerated into adulthood, with the power to send people and things back into their own chemical past. Steel is attacked by a floating pillow cum swan ghost. Sapphire becomes trapped in another project (the rural project I thin) where she discovers that all the participants have killed themselves to prevent what was there getting back into the future. Silver, a 'technician' conducts experiments. There seems to be blood in the walls, the blood of an animal, in fact all animals. These scientists of the future, after the extinction of all animal life, bred a kind of animal in their laboratories, 'nothing more than pieces of meat'. These 'pieces of meat' were used as time travelling devices, only the creature that bought them back has begun experimenting on them and wants revenge. The creature escapes the wall, but is lured back in by the time-agents throwing joints of meat back into the wall, 'feed it, feed it!'.
Sapphire instructs Steel and Silver to send the travellers back into their future with the creature, this revengeful piece of meat. 'Let them deal with it, not our problem' seems to be her rationale. Despite the laboured moral ('experimenting on animals is wrong') the truly chilling sting in this tale is how inhuman our 'heroes' seem.
Assignment Four takes place in an old junk shop where the 'shape', a faceless man, can take on any form he desires, and is in every photograph in existence, whether hidden in the shadows, or in the street beyond, or behind a wall, or in a house. 'Every photograph is a photograph of infinity' Steel reveals. The Shape who can travel between photographs spends his time bringing other photographs to life, namely photographs of Victorian children, sepia-sadists who threaten to gouge out Sapphire's eyes with an umbrella. They also crumble to dust when hugged. The Shape also traps people in photographs too. In a rather effective and sickening ending, the Shape sets one of these photographs on fire. The woman trapped in the photograph, still conscious and completely immobile, screams out in agony at the end of episode three as she is burned alive. The scream lingers on into the end music. Watching this recently, I was stunned at how this was ever broadcast at the time it was. After thirty years the story is still as disturbing as ever. Eventually, the Shape is trapped in a kaleidoscope, mirrors reflecting mirrors, another kind of infinity. While Sapphire and Steel search for the kaleidoscope to trap the Shape in, it whispers to the tenant of the shop above the flat, that it will wait for her, that it will find her, wherever she is... Sapphire and Steel arrange for the Kaleidoscope to be present on a ship that is destined to be buried in ice, and undiscovered for a number of decades. As they leave they tell the woman to destroy all photographs ever taken of her, and to never have another one taken... An impossible task, and it is never really explained why the Shape could eventually use photographs and for what ends.
We'll ignore the fifth story, written not by P J Hammond who wrote the rest of the series, but by some other people whose names I can't recall now. This, briefly, involved a dinner party and a virus that time wanted to use to destroy the human race.
Last of all there is Assignment Six, to my mind, the greatest pieces of supernatural / science fiction programminbg ever. Called to a petrol station, Sapphire and Steel discover Silver already there, though he doesn't know why. There is no time at the petrol station, the same six seconds repeating themselves again and again. There is no way out of the petrol station, an invisible and impassable barrier traps them. There is a couple there from 1948, who realise they are in the wrong time zone. Occasionally they vanish, leaving only shadows behind. There is also the ghost of an old man, who sees the time-agents as ghosts themselves. In a chaos of echoes and noise, time shifts forward by twenty minutes to 'whatever is going to happen... here'.
But nothing happens. This is a story that has no beginning and middle, only an end. Another character arrives, this time a kind of circus performer, called Johnny Jack, from 1956. He has the same habit of leaving shadows behind too. Sapphire postulates the theory that there is 'nothing to wait for' and that 'what if it is waiting for us?'
Silver conducts experiments on Johnny Jacks' tambourine. He discovers it has never been used as a musical instrument, despite his claims that he is the 'only real musician' amongst his fellow performers. Sapphire turns back time, and is greeted by an image of the old man, the man in the cafe and Johnny Jack is grey suits, much like Steel wears... and an image of herself and Steel and shadows. 'Our death... our destruction' she explains to Steel.
And then there is the end of episode three, which still sends chills down my spine no matter how many times I see it. Sapphire realises who, or what, they are. 'They're like us Steel, but they're like us!'. Steel muses on this, 'the same as us?' 'Well not quite... I think they answer to a higher authority'.
The three men stand up in their respective positions around the petrol station simultaneously. Whatever they are wearing is replaced by Steel's sober suits, and their eyes crackle blue, the same as Sapphire's when she uses her powers to turn back time.
The episode ends and turns everything we thought we knew about Sapphire and Steel upside down. There we were thinking that Sapphire and Steel, despite their ambiguities, were working for whatever forces were controlling each dimension, and now, we discover a whole hierarchy of authorities.
In the last ever episode, it transpires that three are 'transient beings' who can take on any form but they should be 'locked in the past'. It seems that the mysterious 'higher authority' have trained them to move into the future to assassinate Sapphire and Steel. Silver discusses they are using a 'time box' to move forward through time, and this time box takes the form of a chess box. Silver manages to duplicate the box, which also works as a weapon too, to send people back into the triassic period. Johnny Jack and the old man are duly dispatched. Sapphire asks to look into the box 'like a fortune tellers crystal'. Silver says 'its best not to know'. Silver opens the box, and inside the box is nothing but space, an infinity of stars. 'Days will become years, and years will become hundred of years, there is nothing but space' Sapphire says in dreamy reverie. Silver looks at her with a dark look. What of the woman with the man? She begs Sapphire and Steel to take her with them, but they discover she has some kind of implant in her chest. They take out the implant and she collapses.
They try to make it through the barrier, but the man catches them. He opens his time box, and a chaos of stars rushes out.
The last scene. The interior of the cafe at the petrol station. Sapphire and Steel enter, finding the man and the woman at one of the tables. The man tells them they are in the wrong time. Steel threatens them with the time box. The man opens his own time box. Nothing but chess pieces. The man and woman stand up. The woman says 'this place you see, this place was the trap. This place is nowhere and its forever'. They vanish. Steel opens his own time box. Nothing but chess pieces. He opens the curtains of the window. Nothing but stars. Goes to the door, nothing but stars. Sapphire, resigned, sits at the table 'I saw the future' she says 'and it was our future'. The last ever shot of the series is of Sapphire and Steel peering out of a window floating in space. For a series about time it was the perfect ending, the two time agents trapped forever in space.
There you have it, Sapphire and Steel. Well worth seeking out, and looking past the dated special effects and 70s fashion. Was it a science fiction series? A supernatural series? There really was nothing else like it. It explained nothing, didn't talk down to the viewers. The performances are superb (particularly the ghost hunter in Assignment Two) and David McCallum and Joanna Lumley as the eponymous heroes play it absolutely straight. The almost total lack of humour in the series combined with the negligible, often unseen nature of their enemies, makes the threats seem truly malevolent and believable. The atmosphere of the show is truly nightmarish, even more so given the ambiguous victories of the main protagonists, and, of course, their eventual defeat. Imagine an insane Rene Magritte writing for Doctor Who and you still wouldn't be anywhere near as truly strange this programme is.
Ah well, there ends my probably not very interesting ramble. I have bed to go to, and a 'group session' at the job centre tomorrow to go to... Should be fun. I bet it will feel like being trapped in a motorway service station for eternity...