Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Five [TV] (1981)
Directed by Shaun O'Riordan

Film Review

Broadcast over six evenings in August 1981, Sapphire and Steel's fifth and penultimate assignment was the only one not to have been penned by the series' creator P.J. Hammond, and this could explain why it sticks out like a sore thumb.  For their solo entry in the series, writers Don Houghton and Anthony Read took the easy option of dressing up that good old standby of the country house murder mystery so that it bore a passing resemblance to what had gone before, but the end result is still more Miss Marple Meets Hercule Poirot than Sapphire & Steel.  The plot is such an obvious rip-off of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians that it hardly needs to be pointed out to us by one of the characters that there are ten people in the slaughter house.  A good plagiarist would not have made such an elementary blunder.

It may not have anything like the mystique and atmosphere of P.J. Hammond's episodes but this much-maligned fifth adventure for television's weirdest troubleshooters still has a lot going for it.  The spacious main sets, authentically decorated and dressed with a remarkable attention to period detail, exude a particular kind of subdued menace, which is achieved by some very subtle lighting and fluid camerawork.  The cast - the largest the series enjoyed - offers an ensemble of talented and charismatic performers who deserve to better known than they are.  After the leads, Patience Collier and Felicity McDee have the greatest impact and make the most of their well-written and totally believable character roles.  Davy Kaye's Lord Mullrine is likeably creepy, and there are equally strong contributions from Stephen MacDonald, Jeffry Wickham, Jeremy Child and Peter Laird.  There is enough time-distorting malarkey to keep the Sapphire & Steel purists happy but what makes the story so compelling is the interplay between the colourful assortment of characters.  For once, the story has a powerful human dimension, and the ending, whilst fairly predictable, is surprisingly poignant.  To give Houghton and Read their due, this was a reasonably successful attempt to push the boundaries and take the series into new territory, without departing too far from the brilliant concept that P.J. Hammond had devised.

Film Synopsis

Successful businessman Lord Mulrine has organised a party at his house to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of his company.  He has gone to extraordinary lengths to make the house interior appear exactly as it did in 1930, the only anachronism being the sonic key he uses to enter and leave his modern office.  First to appear are his wife Emma and an old friend, Felicity, the wife of Mulrine's deceased business partner, Dr George McDee.  When the guests arrive they include Sapphire and Steel, who introduce themselves as Virginia and James Cavendish.  Immediately, the time investigators sense that something is amiss, that time is once again threatened by an attempt to recreate the past.  A friendly game of sardines ends with one of the guests being knifed in the back.  When another guest is shot dead it becomes apparent that someone intends murdering the guests in order of increasing age.  The key to resolving the mystery is the unexplained death of George McDee.  Sapphire and Steel discover that if McDee had not died in 1930 he would have been responsible for a laboratory accident that would have wiped out all life on Earth.  The murders are a prelude to a far greater crime: an attempt to alter time by ensuring that McDee lives long enough to destroy the world...