(Information provided by Jonathan Day)
"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Trans-uranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available - Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned."
Sapphire and Steel was a late '70s, early '80s British Sci-Fi series, starring David McCallum (Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Joanna Lumley (The New Avengers). It was set on Earth and involved two extra-terrestrial, paranormal detectives, with unknown abilities, sent by an unknown agency, to investigate and deal with breaks in time and any creatures that escape into the normal Universe through these breaks. At least, that's what they claim....
The agency has three divisions - investigators, operators and specialists. Investigators check over any incidents and forward their findings to the operators, who then carry out the bulk of the work. If expertise in specific fields are required, then specialists in that field can be called upon. More than this is never revealed in the series and even this much is given as vague hints and obscure references.
The main two characters in the series - Sapphire and Steel - are operators. Two others appear - Lead and Silver - but there are a total of 127 on active duty. (115 according to Steel, as the transuranics are unstable.) Both Lead and Silver are specialists - Lead in force-fields and Silver in anything technical.
Other organisations exist, though - and some are not so friendly. Strange creatures exist at the extreme ends of time, with the ability to travel through the time corridor, looking for ways to break through.... Mysterious transient beings, with terrifying powers, can be hired as assassins...Secret, poweful organisations vie for power over time itself... Nothing is safe - nether past norpresent - even from those who guard it...
Definitely one of the strangest series ever produced, Sapphire and Steel blended Gothic Horror with both Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you were to compare it with another series, it would probably be to the X-Files, which has a similar format - two operatives of an agency tackling paranormal mysteries, one friendly, the other colder than liquid ntrogen.
There the similarity ends. Each adventure in Sapphire and Steel spanned approximately half an entire season. Humans, far from being the central figures, were relegated to inconveniences at best to both sides. In the X-Files, the skills, abilities and characteristics of the leading figures are known. In Sapphire and Steel, you know the names they operate under and precious little more. Nothing is explained, absolutely nothing. This is where the series gets most of its dramtic impact - the near-total ignorance of the viewer as to what is going on. No nice pauses in the action whilst the master fiend explains his/her plans for conquest of the Universe. In many of the stories, the master fiend is even invisible, so you never even see what it is that's being dealt with. Either that, or the creature is every possible shape simultaneously, as in adventure 4. (The adventures just have numbers - no names - so even that knowledge is kept from the viewer.) Production quality, though, is another matter. The costumes are minimal. The sets all but non-existant. Only one episode sports any location work and it's just a single roof-top. Many special effects are achieved by flash-lights and fishing twine. The incidental music, when used, is excellent and achieves much of the atmosphere, though it is often over-loud and does threaten to drown-out everything else. The scripts are indisputably the strongest part of the series, though.
Ratings:
Overall: V. Good (4/5)
Titles: Poor (2/5)
Adventure 1:
In this, Sapphire and Steel have to contend with an intelligence which has broken through into the real world, due to a nursary rhyme creating a weak-spot in space/time. Most of the story deals with the immediate hostility between Rob (a child in the house the creature is loose in) and Steel. As with almost all the stories, the pace is slow, though it isn't as bad as some. Other characters to make an appearace in the story are Lead (another agent), Helen (another child in the house), two Roundhead soldiers from the English Civil War, three patches of light and a country policeman. Some of the lighter moments of the story include Sapphire using time as an extended wardrobe and Lead being, well, crazed.
Ratings:
Storyline: V. Good (4/5)
Scripting: V. Good (4/5)
Incidental Music: Limited (1/5)
Special Effects: Poor (2/5)
Costumes: Poor (2/5)
Sets: Good (3/5)
Overall: Good (3/5)
Adventure 2:
The adventure almost everyone who's seen the series will remember. A World War 1 soldier haunts a railway station. A psychic investigator by the name of George Tully bumbles round aimlessly. An invisible creature that feeds on negative emotion feeds on the resentment of those who've died out of place. This is the longest and perhapes the scariest of all of the stories. It is certainly the bleakest and most despairing. The latter episodes seem to lose their way a little and the viewer is left wondering if the writer knows how to finish, which takes a little away from the impact, but it is definitely one of the strongest stories.
Ratings:
Storyline: Excellent (5/5)
Scripting: V. Good (4/5)
Incidental Music: V. Good (4/5)
Special Effects: Average (2.5/5)
Costumes: V. Good (4/5)
Sets: Good (3/5)
Overall: V. Good (4/5)
Adventure 3:
Time travellers, out to survey the twentieth century get stranded as the cyborg system that brought them there goes berserk and seeks revenge for vivisection by carrying out a few experiments of its own on humans. It's very much a flavour-of-the-month story and P. J. Hammond frequently looses direction in his script here. The biggest plus for this story is the introduction of another agent - Silver - who is the single-most irritating, irreverent, whimsical, (fill in word of choice) character imaginable. David Collins plays the part with a brilliance that the rest of the story badly needed. If morals and ethics alone made for a good story, this would rate highly. They don't.
Ratings:
Storyline: Poor (2/5)
Scripting: V. Poor (1/5)
Incidental Music: Limited (1/5)
Special Effects: Good (3/5)
Costumes: Average (2.5/5)
Sets: Average (2.5/5)
Overall: Average (2.5/5)
Adventure 4:
In this, a creature has found a way of entering and leaving photographs. What's more, it can take forms out of photographs and give them a sort of reality. It can also take real people and trap them inside photographs. This is again one of the most terrifying of the stories and is usually one that people remember. It's also one of the shortest, so the action is unusually fast-paced. The ending is also a little surprising, with a relatively minor character - Liz - playing a major part.
Ratings:
Storyline: V. Good (4/5)
Scripting: V. Good (4/5)
Incidental Music: Limited (1/5)
Special Effects: V. Good (4/5)
Costumes: Good (3/5)
Sets: Good (3/5)
Overall: V. Good (4/5)
Adventure 5:
A 30th anniversary celebration goes horribly wrong as the guests are assassinated, one by one. This is the only one of the adventures not to be written and directed by P. J. Hammond and it shows, having a much lighter, more frivolous atmosphere and rather more violence, though much is still off-screen. It reminds me of Agatha Christie, though I doubt she ever considered writing a murder mystery in which the object was to wipe out the entire human race by causing time to go into reverse and then releasing a deadly mutant virus. Definitely a very silly story, but still gripping in its own way.
Ratings:
Storyline: Good (3/5)
Scripting: V. Good (4/5)
Incidental Music: Limited (1/5)
Special Effects: Average (2.5/5)
Costumes: V. Good (4/5)
Sets: Good (3/5)
Overall: Good (3/5)
Adventure 6:
Sapphire and Steel find themselves in a roadside cafe. Time has stopped, Silver is there, confused, and people from the wrong timezones are walking around. What could be going on? This story is an odd-one-out. It's not really a story as such at all - there's no mission, no objective, nothing. Just uncertainty. In the end, there is a very real reason for them being there. Since this is the last story, it's not hard to guess. Note, though, that this story should certainly be watched last of all of them. It makes precious little sense when you know something about the series and would make no sense at all if watched out of sequence. The story has no beginning, no middle, only an ending.
Ratings:
Storyline: Average (2.5/5)
Scripting: Good (3/5)
Incidental Music: Variable (2.5/5)
Special Effects: Poor (2/5)
Costumes: Good (3/5)
Sets: Average (2.5/5)
Overall: Average (2.5/5)