Sapphire & Steel - Assignment One [TV] (1979)
Directed by Shaun O'Riordan

Film Review

Sapphire & Steel, the most unfathomable fantasy series ever created for British television, began its run of six stories across four years with this creepy six-episode tale which provided the template for the other stories in the series.  The show's creator and main writer, P. J. Hammond, seems to have conceived it for a predominantly child audience, evidenced by the child-friendly dialogue and jokier elements of Assignment One (none of the stories was given an individual title) such as the jovial giant Lead (played by an actor who obviously thinks he is doing a children's TV show).  From Assignment Two onwards, the series would show a marked shift towards an adult audience, with more complex concepts and adult themes coming to the fore.

Of the six Sapphire & Steel assignments, the first is the easiest to make sense of, but that doesn't mean that it's child's play.  Hammond tacitly shies away from offering a clear exposition and instead piles mystery upon mystery, so it is left to the spectator to assemble the pieces and somehow construct a coherent narrative from what he is given.  This is British television of the late 1970s at its most daring and experimental, and it almost beggars belief that the BBC's main rival, ITV, put the show out on weekdays at a prime time slot.  What now looks like the result of an insane collaboration between Andrei Tarkovsky and Harold Pinter was once a highly popular television series, one that has endured and become a cult classic.

Instrumental to the series' success was the casting of two phenomenally talented and charismatic actors for the lead roles.  Already famous for two TV hits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-8) and The Invisible Man (1975-6), David McCallum was the perfect shoe-in for the part of the brusque and coldly efficient Steel.  Joanna Lumley had become a household name as the glamorous high-kicking Purdey in The New Avengers (1976-7) and could be relied upon to draw a substantial grown-up male audience.  As the gentler, more sympathetic Sapphire, Lumley is the ideal complement to McCallum's charmless Steel, and both actors bring the requisite mystique to their portrayals.  Every line they utter - no matter how bizarre and nonsensical it may seem - is uttered with total conviction.  We never really got to find out who Sapphire and Steel were, or even where they came from, other than that they were operatives from another dimension (two out of a total contingent of 127) tasked with fixing irregularities in time (whatever that means).  As well as communicating telepathically, they have advanced special powers - Steel can freeze his body down to absolute zero (always useful on a date that goes badly wrong), Sapphire can take time backwards (ditto) - but they are not superheroes and seldom do they score an outright victory.  In some episodes, they appear hopelessly inept and vulnerable, but we never doubt that what they are doing is of the gravest importance to the whole of creation.  In essence, they are your jobbing dimension-hopping temporal troubleshooters, equipped with impeccable dress sense and a nice line in sarcasm.

With most of the show's miniscule budget going on the salaries of its two star actors, there was evidently not much left in the kitty for luxuries, such as sets, special effects or even a decent credits sequence.  The lack of money available to the show's producer and director Shaun O'Riordan proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it allowed more scope for creativity.  The series derived its famously creepy atmosphere from its sparse sets which were mostly under-lit and inhabited by the smallest of casts.  It's amazing that such an atmospheric and polished programme could have been created on a shoestring budget using the old system of multi-camera recording with (effectively) live editing (via a vision mixer).   Some episodes of Sapphire & Steel are so nightmarishly eerie that they could easily hold their own alongside today's multi-million dollar, effects-laden horror movies.  Assignment Two (by far the best in the series) is a particularly good example of how lighting, camerawork and minimalist set design can be used to great effect to achieve an oppressive mood of claustrophobia and sustained fear across three and half hours of screen time.  Abandoning the child-conscious restraints imposed on Assignment One, P.J. Hammond would take the show into far darker places for subsequent stories, and in doing so he would provide British television audiences with an excursion into the unknown the like of which they had never seen before, and would never see again afterwards.  Sapphire and Steel's tinkering-with-time exploits would become compelling viewing for 28 more mind-bending episodes on a unique flight of fancy into the unutterably weird vortex of the imagination.

Film Synopsis

In an old house that dates back to the 1700s, schoolboy Rob Jardine is doing his homework whilst his parents read nursery rhymes to his younger sister Helen.  When the clocks around him suddenly stop ticking, Rob goes into his sister's bedroom at the top of the house and finds that his parents have disappeared.  Within seconds of him calling the police two strangers appear from nowhere - a man in a suit and an attractive young woman who introduce themselves as Steel and Sapphire.  With the children's help, the strangers are able to recreate the circumstances that led to their parents' disappearance.  It is revealed that time is damaged in the locality of the old house, allowing some malignant external force to draw people out of their own time.  This force manifests itself as patches of light which can be neutralised only by extreme cold.  To evade capture, this force hides itself in a painting of a country house of the 17th century.  Sapphire is unwittingly lured into the painting and is certain to be executed by Roundhead soldiers of the English Civil War unless Steel can find a way to release her...