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ARTICLE 1: SAPPHIRE & STEEL: PETER J HAMMOND Assigned!
by Jamie Woolley
Creator and writer P J Hammond recalls the origins of `Sapphire and Steel'
From `TV Zone' issue 37 (December 1992)

It's ten years since "Sapphire  and  Steel", ATV's twice-weekly Time thriller,
was last on the air, and the  final  time we saw the unfortunate investigators
they were trapped  in  Nowhere,  which  strangely  resembled  a roadside cafe.
However, along with other classics  of  bygone  years, ITC have been releasing
the entire series  on  video,  and  the  sales  of  the  tapes  have been very
impressive.

As the creator of  the  radiant  Sapphire  and  the  cold-hearted Steel, Peter
Hammond have a vested interest in  their  renewed popularity. He always wanted
to write, even when he  was  at  school,  but  didn't  get into the profession
straightaway.

Past History

"I initially found myself a career in art,  which wasn't where I wanted to be.
So I left that and took up various other jobs, such as driving vans or being a
postman, which enabled me to  write  in  my  spare  time.  But it's a Catch 22
situation - broadcasting companies will  not  take  you  on unless you have an
agent, yet agents won't take you on until you've had something broadcast."

Peter found a way around this by  selling  a half-hour play to a radio station
in Canada, which gave him something to  show prospective agents. He then did a
few radio plays, but found that wasn't  enough  to earn a living, and so moved
onto writing plays for school's television.

"Those plays were for a series called `Going to Work', but after that I didn't
get any work for a couple of years. But I persevered at trying to get `in' and
eventually I sent an idea in for `Z  Cars'.  I met the producer who took me to
lunch, and told me that he didn't  like  what  I had written, but would I like
the job of script editor. He said that he thought I had potential and that the
position would give me a chance to learn the trade.

"I couldn't write for two years whilst  I  was  script editing, but even so it
was ideal, because I had  to  deal  with  other  writers which was an enormous
help. After that, I decided to try my  hand at freelancing again, which I have
been ever since, writing for  shows  like  `The Gentle Touch', `Hunter's Walk'
and `The Bill'. I did mostly police  dramas,  but  there were also a couple of
plays I did for TV, and  about  twelve  episodes  of `Ace of Wands', which was
fun.

The `Ace of Wands' stuff  led  onto  some  Fantasy plays for children's series
like `Shadows' and `Dramarama', and  then  I  decided  that  I  wanted to do a
Fantasy show of my own. So I tried `Sapphire and Steel' as a one-off half-hour
show for children."

Peter approached Thames Television with the idea, but they decided it wouldn't
be  a success.  Southern,  the ITV  company  that used  to  hold the franchise
currently  held  by TVS,  were interested,  but it was ATV,  the  company that
preceded Central, that bought the show. However, they made some changes to the
programme and it became an adult show which, instead of just being  one  half-
hour episode, ran for 34 episodes over four years.

The Concept

"The basis of `Sapphire and Steel'  came  from  my desire to write a detective
story, into which I wanted to incorporate Time. I've always been interested in
Time, particularly the ideas of J B  Priestly  and  H G Wells, but I wanted to
take a different  approach  to  the  subject.  So  instead  of  having them go
backwards and forwards in Time, it was  about Time breaking in, and having set
the precedent I realized the potential  that  it offered with two people whose
job it was to stop the break-ins. It  started off with just Sapphire and Steel
who did that sort of thing, but  then  the  producer  came up with the idea of
them being just two of a whole  range  of  detectives, and that's how Lead and
Silver came to appear now and again."

One distinctive characteristic of the programme is that the central figures of
Sapphire and Steel are always shrouded in  mystery. It is never revealed where
they come from, where their orders come from,  or even who they are. Did Peter
himself know?

"I didn't want to give too much away because once you say where they came from
then you are committed. We were thinking  of doing a story where we introduced
the god-like character behind them, but decided against it. In the final story
we did suggest that there were  other  powers  out  there, but again we didn't
give too much away because that would have spoiled it."

Confusing the Viewers

Not only were background details thin on  the  ground, but the plots were also
quite complex and needed a lot of  careful  concentration to be able to follow
them through. Surely this  combination  of  lack  of information and confusion
would only alienate the viewers.

"No, strangely enough they didn't  seem  to  mind.  However, I was writing the
script to a very  tight  deadline,  close  to  the  actual  production, and in
retrospect I would have liked more time  to  think them out. But then again, I
think it can be a danger when you know  what the ending is. When I was writing
the second story which was about the  old  railway station, I had no idea what
the ending was, and in a way it came  over on the screen and that made it more
exciting. But I do think that at  eight  episodes  long it was a bit too long,
and if I could go back and do it again, I would edit out an episode's length."

The Darkness

That particular story concerned haunted  railway  station and an all-devouring
Darkness which fed on the despair of people who had died before their time. In
one scene, Sapphire is possessed by  the  Darkness,  and  as a result her eyes
turned black. However, this was not  achieved  by  using Chromakey - the video
effect used to make her  eyes  glow  blue  whenever  she displayed her special
powers. "That was a very difficult  effect  to  do, and Joanna volunteered for
it. They were going to use Chromakey,  but  instead she wore huge black things
covering her eyes, but she could  only  wear  them  for  about a minute at the
most, so everything had to be cut  together  very carefully. But in the end it
was very effective.

"The script  required  the  Darkness  to  creep  across  the  set,  swallowing
everything up, and the way they did it was to film a table, for instance, stop
the cameras and then replace the  table  with  an identical one, but which was
completely black. So what you  see  happening  in  half  a minute took several
hours to film, which is why the series became very costly."

Novelizations

Not only are the videos of the  programme being released, but the novelization
of the first story which Peter  wrote  when  the show was first transmitted is
being  re-issued   by  Virgin  Books  in  December  with  a  new  introduction
"They've  asked  me to  explain a  bit  more  about  Sapphire and  Steel,  but
again without giving too much away. Depending on the success of that, they may
want to do books of the other adventures,  and if they are popular, then there
may be original `Sapphire and Steel' novels, as they're doing with the `Doctor
Who' books. But it's early days yet.

Despite the fact that Peter sees the show as his brainchild, and that he wrote
all but one of the televised stories  (Don Houghton and Anthony Read wrote the
fifth adventure because Peter needed a  break),  he would be perfectly willing
to see other authors writing stories  featuring his beloved creations. Yet the
novelization was his first and, so far,  only book and writing it he describes
as a `good experience'.

"With television, you  have  to  write  subtexts  so  that  you  allow for the
camera's contribution, which means you can leave lots of gaps. In effect, it's
not what you say, it's  what  you  don't  say,  and  you  leave  a lot for the
audience to interpret themselves. But when  writing  a  book, you find you are
committed - for instance, you cannot cut away to another scene, and you cannot
give an instruction to pick  out  someone's  face  which the camera would then
show to the audience. You have to write  it all and, instead of showing facial
expressions, you have to describe what is  going  on in someone's mind. I find
it a very relaxing way to write,  but  I  couldn't  get used to writing in the
past tense, because television is always written in the present".

Trapped in Nowhere

The conclusion of the final adventure is  memorable  for the fact that for one
the good guys didn't  win.  The  two  detectives  were  instead trapped in the
roadside cafe, suspended in Space, with  no  apparent  way of escape. But what
was the reason for effectively killing the characters off?

"It was the cost  involved,  basically.  Even  though  it  was almost entirely
studio based with only one piece of  location filming in the whole series, the
time involved in setting up the effects  and  so on just made it too expensive
to produce. Today, the effects  would  be  a  lot  easier and cheaper to make,
which would cut down on the  cost  enormously.  So  it was decided to rest the
series, but I disagree that  it  isn't  open-ended.  The  trap could easily be
unlocked and they could escape.

"Also I felt that I had written enough;  too many episodes in a short space of
time, and the final story was a sort  of  full  stop. At the same time, it was
also a comma, because  they  could  always  be  brought  back. If a production
company came to me and said they wanted to make some more episodes, I would go
for it, but I would  make  a  list  of  mistakes  that  we made the first time
around.

"And I see no reason why Joanna Lumley and David McCallum shouldn't be brought
back into their roles, a the characters could  have been stuck in the cafe for
ten Earth years, which would explain why  they  look older. But if they didn't
want to do it, I don't know  how  well  the series would work with Diamond and
Jet, for instance. I think people do identify with David and Joanna."

So it would appear that  the  `Sapphire  and  Steel' revival is well underway.
Peter thinks of it as opening a chest  after ten years, although he says  it's
not so much of a case of it coming back as it having never been away. "I don't
see any reason why the programme could never be made again. After all, they've
done it with `Star Trek'..."

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ARTICLE 2: SAPPHIRE AND STEEL
by Andrew Martin
In their element and fighting Time... We study the trail of these enigmatic
temporal detectives.
From `TV Zone' special issue 6 (August 1992)

`Sapphire and Steel' was one of  the most bewilderingly strange and perplexing
Fantasy series ever produced for television,  and  as  such  is one of the few
that really counts as a cult series.  Although it was quite popular when first
shown, perhaps  chiefly  because  of  its  stars  (David  McCallum  and Joanna
Lumley), the series paradoxically seems to resist appeal to a mass audience.

The characters of Sapphire and Steel  themselves  are wreathed in mystery, and
we never get more than vague clues about their origins or identity. The series
itself is hard to pin  down.  On  the  presentation  level,  although it has a
supposedly explanatory voice-over after the teaser to each episode, it doesn't
really tell you much,  and  there  are  never  any  helpful touches like story
titles or even episode numbers - but then, this all adds to the mystery... The
series is obviously  Fantasy,  but  with  a  Science  Fiction flavour, perhaps
because of its harshness. Time in that sense is much more credibly dealt with,
and although it  is  manipulated,  it  isn't  seen  as  something  that can be
disregarded, or treated as a number nine  bus. It is the great enemy, although
it is never defeated, our heroes are forever battling to contain it.

Elements of Reason

Time in `Sapphire and Steel' is treated as  a kind of magic, where old objects
are held to be dangerous in some  way,  allowing malignant forces from Time to
invade. There is  as  little  sense  in  this  as  there  is  in `Doctor Who's
depiction of flitting about through the  aeons  - in `Sapphire and Steel' Time
travel is always related to the present day  - attributing age to objects in a
human perception (if you go along with the Big Bang theory) was created at the
same time, and so at the most basic level is all the same age. Rationales that
some property is imbued into materials  when  they are turned into objects are
not offered. But then magic was never a great one for reasonable explanations.
Similarly, the naming of Sapphire and  Steel  is done for euphonic reasons, as
neither is actually a single element in itself. Sapphire is aluminium oxide in
crystalline form,  while Steel is manufactured from iron  and  carbon. Most of
the other "medium atomic weights" mentioned in the title sequence, Gold, Lead,
Copper, Radium and Silver  are  elements,  while  Diamond  is  another form of
carbon, and Jet is polished lignite  (a  rock formed from partially decomposed
vegetation, and so ultimately another  type  of  carbon with traces of oxygen,
hydrogen and magnesium). Curiously, Lead  is  for some strange reason replaced
by Mercury in the title narration of  the last story [and the third episode of
the fourth story]...

Television and film Science Fiction have always been marked by their inability
to find their own forms. `Sapphire  and  Steel'  uses a detective story idiom,
albeit owing more  to  Agatha  Christie  for  all  its  would-be Chandleresque
overtones, and yet  its  Science-as-magic  approach  is  reminiscent of Wells'
spacious yet obviously partly-sincere rambling  at  the beginning of `The Time
Machine' about the nature of Time. Sapphire and Steel are Time detectives, and
yet the `crimes' they investigate are more like accidents.

Each story is essentially the  same:  something  goes  wrong with Time, people
disappear into it or reappear from it,  meddle  with it - or mysterious forces
try to use it to destroy Humanity. But  basically the idea is to set things to
rights, to restore the status  quo  one  way  or another. Sapphire and Steel's
sense of values is very human, for all their alien dispassion. They profess to
lack emotion yet they understand it in a  way  and express it in others. It is
almost as if they have forgotten  how  to  express it rather than never having
been capable of it.

Love in a Cold Climate

There is a definite, if understated,  sexual frisson between the protagonists,
which is unusual as Science Fiction on British  tv tends to be very chaste and
innocent. On only one occasion does Steel say `love', and even then he's being
as oblique as  he  can.  He  is  jealous  of  Sapphire's  response to Silver's
flirtations, although at  other  times  Steel's  attitude  to  her is somewhat
peevish. They seem at one and the same time to be a team AND independent.

In the final story, it emerges that both have been approached by the Transient
Beings' superiors - they hadn't discussed the fact, yet neither feels betrayed
or deceived... If one  can  speculate  that  Sapphire  does  feel a human-like
attraction to Steel, it must be  the  child  in  him  that she likes. Steel is
petulant, forever grumpy, grudging  in  the  extreme  in his affections. Given
that there is  a  perceptible  relationship  there  -  although  it is perhaps
excusable as part of the bonding that makes  them  such a good team - it never
seems to interfere with their work,  other  than  to make sure that neither of
them abandons the other: but they are a  team,  and they need each other to do
their job effectively.

`Sapphire and Steel' is arguably as  minimalist  a series as television can be
without losing sight of  realism.  Although  the  settings, costumes, etc, are
naturalistic, they are done very  sparsely.  All  the houses and buildings are
very barely or shabbily furnished,  their  colours  muted  if not in shades of
grey. There is no  story  where  bright  colour  is  an  important part of the
production design, other than the colours denoting the central characters, but
they are hardly  gaudy.  The  other  elements  who  appear  are  in paler grey
(Silver) or black (Lead), and one yearns at times for an appearance by a fiery
Radium, or a radiant Diamond. The number  of  sets  in each story is also very
limited, as each set  is  a  single  building,  and  only  one  of the stories
features location filming.

The Powers That Be

The individual characters  of  Steel  and  Sapphire  are  what  the  series is
basically sold on, and although we are given certain facts about them and what
they do, we are never told straight  out  who they are. Their names are chosen
to  reflect  their  different  yet   complementary  characters,  and  yet  are
deceptive. Steel, hard and unyielding on the surface, has weaknesses, emotions
which occasionally surface and cause at  worst problems, at best amusement for
Sapphire. She on the  other  hand  comes  across  at  first  as  a warm, human
character, at least in comparison with Steel.  Her icy blueness is her colour,
however, and she outwardly takes  the  role  of  the diplomat, the negotiator,
while Steel handles the `rough  stuff'.  In  fact,  Steel's physical feats are
infrequent, one example being his super-human  reduction in temperature in the
first story. Often, when confronted by physical  danger, he seems to avoid the
worst of it.

Sapphire's superpowers are more  obvious.  Her  telepathy  is used to discover
2information about their surroundings, and she  can discern the age of objects
and the fate of people. Steel has to  ask her these things as his only psychic
ability is telepathic communication with her  -  but  as is shown in the fifth
story, even a mere mortal can use  that  power. Sapphire's main party trick is
`taking time back', accompanied by throbbing sound effects and her bright blue
eyes.

The two epitomize the typical  detective  technique  -  hot and cold. Whatever
their technique, neither really  objects  to  the  other's tactics, although a
number of times Steel urges Sapphire to  try harder when her powers don't seem
to be working. In contrast to Steel's supposed physicality, it is Sapphire who
most often bears the brunt  of  physical  attack, several times being spirited
away by evil influences. In the second  story  she is invaded by the blackness
and, later has her face replace by  a  hideous, distorted fleshy mass. The two
arrive in each  adventure  at  about  the  same  time,  but  not  always quite
together, and there is a feeling that their mission briefings are not joint.

It always seems a shame that we  don't see any other elemental characters than
Lead and Silver. Although Lead  is  rather  `over  the  top' with his constant
guffawing  and  singing,  Silver  is   a  delightful  character,  puckish  yet
irritatingly deferential. He  is  a  specialist,  a  technician,  and  he gets
himself into trouble by being too  obsessed  with his professional skills. The
only reference to the  other  elements  comes  in  the  first story, when Lead
remarks that Jet sends her love  to  Steel,  and reports that Copper is having
problems with the as yet unseen Silver.  [References to  other  elements  also
occur in story IV].

The Surreal Thing

All of the series' supporting characters  contribute  much of the substance of
the story, rather than being objects to which the story, as a separate entity,
happens to. In the first adventure the children Rob and Helen are surprisingly
convincing, given the usual unsatisfactory  stage-school products found when a
script requires children to be involved.

The second story is many people's  favourite,  and usually the first mentioned
when reminiscing about the series. There is a practical reason why this is so,
because it was the longest of all the  stories, not least because the 1979 ITV
strike happened after the second [third] episode, and rather than resume where
they had left off, the serial was  started  again. The serial is anyway one of
the most atmospheric and  well-realized,  the  characters  of the ghosts being
pathetic  as  well  as  scary,  the  various  visual  and  electronic  effects
masterful, but by far the best  feature  is  Gerald James's performance as the
doomed  ghost-hunter,  George  Tully,  creating   a  very  human,  bewildered,
blinkered yet noble characterization.

The third story's Time travellers  Eldred  and  Rothwyn are intentionally weak
characters, but the story's colour is provided  by the presence of Silver, and
the grisly nature of the threat Sapphire  and Steel face overpowers the viewer
in the end. Another favourite story  is the fourth, with its Magritte-inspired
faceless villain and animated umbrellas, and  the depressing atmosphere of the
grey-walled flats above a junk shop.  Alyson  Spiro's nightclub hostess Liz is
one of those lost souls frequently found inhabiting '70s drama.

The fifth story is about a murder rerun  in  a time warp, when a `present day'
businessman holds a '30s style party which seems  to end up in the real 1930s.
It is too busy really, and although the  plot  is weird, it is, let's face it,
too obvious. There are some nice moments  of gruesomeness, but things turn out
rather too well - a fault that can, in fairness, also be levelled at the first
story.

The final adventure is also a contender  for the best ever, with elements from
all the previous P J Hammond  `Sapphire  and  Steel's - clocks, ghosts, force-
fields, people out of Time, traps...

For once, the storyline is actually  concentrated  on  our two heroes, as they
gradually discover they are doomed from  the  start.  As with all the stories,
there is no flash gadgetry, and the means  of  their nemesis turns out to be a
pocket chess set, outwardly anyway.  Silver  makes  a welcome return, although
strangely his fate is not revealed. But  the final image of Sapphire and Steel
at a window,  floating,  lost  in  Space,  is  another hauntingly surrealistic
touch.

Admittedly, `Sapphire and Steel' cannot be said to be a cheerful show, and was
at its best when  downbeat,  dwelling  on  death, failure, depression, spoiled
innocence, betrayed trust... However, it  produced some classic Fantasy/Horror
moments, some deftly black but  subtle  humour,  and featured two consistently
strong lead performers in David McCallum  and Joanna Lumley, who despite their
detractors - Lumley especially - excelled here. It is sadly missed.