Sapphire and Steel (1979--82)

…have been assigned

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) are trans-dimensional agents who appear when fractures in reality produce ghosts, monsters and unexplained happenings. It is up to Sapphire and Steel to fix things, often to the detriment of the humans caught up in their investigations.

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension

Well, here’s a tricky assignment: how to explain why Sapphire and Steel is still talked about.

To begin with, we should say what it is. It's a paranormal investigation show, a cross between The X Files (on which it was an undoubted influence) and Doctor Who. Doctor Who because the villain of the series is Time; or, possibly, monsters from outside Time; or is it forces from the beginning of Time? Or maybe the end?

Let me start again.

Every story starts with Sapphire and Steel arriving somewhere in mundane early-‘80s Britain -- say a crumbling townhouse down the end of an alley -- and encountering some very weird events. Sapphire is attacked by a flock of umbrellas that all squawk like crows. There is a man with no face halfway up the stairs. There is a sex-worker in an upstairs flat whose best friend has been trapped in a picture of a Victorian street market.

Finally, a few half-hour episodes later, they will appear to solve the problem by doing something weird themselves, like trapping in a kaleidoscope the shape that’s haunting all the photographs in the world. A kaleidoscope that they hide in a shipwreck. Under the ice pack.

Wait. That’s no clearer.

Oh, I haven’t explained who Sapphire and Steel are. For a start, they aren’t human. Indeed, they’re frequently extremely harsh with the human characters they encounter, especially Steel, who is often an utter shit. Anyway, it’s not clear what exactly they are. The introduction to each episode says they’re elements, which they’re patently not. Steel is an alloy and Sapphire is a gemstone.

This isn’t helping, is it?

The show, as you may be beginning to suspect, is delightfully, ludicrously weird.

The secret -- the reason why Sapphire and Steel is exemplary TV of its kind, and why it still works and is still remembered decades later -- is its budget. Or, rather, its lack of it.

David Reid, Head of Drama at ATV, loved creator P. J. Hammond’s pilot script so much he gave the show’s producer Shaun O'Riordan £5,000 on top of the usual budget. But then they got David McCallum, who was a big TV star after Man from U.N.C.L.E., and his fee took care of that five grand. So Reid moved them to an adult drama slot of 7pm, which gave them enough money to get Joanna Lumley too.

This, however, left very little to make the actual series. It’s largely shot like a stage production, almost all on studio sets, with only the simplest special effects. In ‘Assignment Two’ (probably the best of the stories), which is set in an abandoned railway station, the effect of bright light at the end of a railway tunnel was achieved by McCallum himself pinning up an arch of white card against a black curtain.

The thing is: it works. As series producer Sean O’Riordan said, having access to better effects would have been detrimental; the cheapness is its superpower. Contemporary British sci-fi shows like Doctor Who now look deeply silly in comparison, trying to do the Star Wars Cantina scene on a BBC budget with nothing but some bubble wrap and radiophonic voices. Sapphire and Steel had to rely on other aspects of the production to achieve its effects: trivial things like acting and writing.

Most of the Assignments were written by the show’s creator, P. J. Hammond, who was in the practice of starting stories without knowing how they would end. He would throw Sapphire and Steel into situations that he himself didn’t yet understand, and would then discover what was going on as his characters did. Such were the pressures of making the show that he was often still writing the end of a story as they were shooting its beginning. It has a sense of breathless invention and the crazed, dream-like logic of a child’s make-believe.

Although this approach led to Lumley storming off set in exasperation at the nonsense she was having to spout, it also led to delirious, inspired, terrifying images: the mother with the wrong eyes in Assignment One; Sapphire’s face melting in Assignment Two; the abattoir sequence in Assignment Three. All of this made Sapphire and Steel the holotype for the kinds of ‘70s TV shows that seemed designed to give children nightmares and therapists a career.

And whatever its frustrations, the production is extremely effective. The atmosphere is achieved by thoughtful direction, theatrical but inspired lighting effects and inventive sound design. The performances are terrific; McCallum and Lumley persistently playing it straight, selling the nonsense admirably. It's not just the leads, either. Part of the success of Assignment Two is the brilliant job Gerald James makes of the parapsychologist Tully: credulous, frightened, kind and brave. He roots all the strange things happening around him in a true and believable character, and so makes the horrors more horrific and the tragedies more tragic.

This is part of what made Sapphire and Steel so good and what has helped it last. It turns its improvisational, studio bound, ‘70s cheapness to its advantage, so that it lodged itself into the memories of a generation and remains eminently watchable, decades later.

Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life.

And then there’s the truly brilliant decision about the setting to the series. Or lack of one.

Every episode starts with a voiceover.

This sort of thing is usually used to explain the premise, as it does in The A-Team and Knight Rider. But instead, this voiceover just muddies things even more:

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic 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.

Each sentence makes successively less sense. The whole thing tells us nothing, but promises everything. It suggests a complex cosmology and then purposefully obscures it.

At first glance Sapphire and Steel, like its successor The X Files, appears to be a ‘Mystery Box’ show in which an underlying lore will be discovered that will eventually explain everything.

This quasi-genre is named after a TED talk given by the writer and director J. J. Abrams, whose show Lost might be considered the prime example of the genre. He talks about how, as child, he bought a ‘Mystery Box’ from a magic shop: a box that apparently contained lots of bargains but which you had to buy sealed, so you couldn’t know what you had bought till you opened it. He talks about how he has never opened this box, as the mystery is more enchanting than any revelation could be.

The Mystery Box show traditionally drops characters into the middle of a mystery. It provokes curiosity in two directions: the solution to the immediate story, and also the solution to the puzzle of how the characters came to be there in the first place.

The possible weaknesses with this approach are evident. If your primary means of holding the audience is continued mystery, then things have to get ever twistier and can never be resolved; and any resolution is only going to be disappointing. Lost, for example, became famously convoluted and was notoriously unsatisfying in its conclusion.

Sapphire and Steel manages to escape both problems. It resolves immediate mysteries in ways that are emotionally satisfying but otherwise just as mysterious as the mysteries themselves; and it determinedly explains absolutely nothing about its fictional universe. We understand nothing about what has been going on, who Sapphire and Steel might be, or what the series is actually about.

In many ways this is a Mystery Box series as it should be, rather than it has been in practice: constantly posing and solving puzzles without ever opening the box and revealing its secrets. In doing so it avoids the fundamental flaw of the genre: lore. Fictional lore -- the backstory to narrative settings -- can lend an epic, mythical weight, as it does in Lord of the Rings. It can also generate new stories, as it did for Ursula K LeGuin in her Earthsea series. But it has become the great weakness of contemporary serialised fiction, reducing shows and movies to a series of characters and tropes, trivia answers instead of stories.

The best example of this kind of failure is probably one of J. J. Abrams’ own films, the final movie of the most recent Star Wars trilogy: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). The film answers questions posed in earlier episodes using answers cribbed from previous films, and in doing so becomes nothing but a series of references, call-backs and cameos. It is a two-hour curtain call of nothing but lore, not so much a film as a chore, a movie not to enjoy but to have been seen.

The closest Sapphire and Steel gets to lore is the final episode of the last series, in which our heroes are trapped in an extra-dimensional travel cafe by ‘transient beings’, enemies who are hinted to be agents of a power rival to whatever it is that assigns Sapphire and Steel to their missions. But that merely poses a fresh mystery, leaving the protagonists lost, gazing out from between gingham curtains at a spinning star field forever. Unrescued, unresolved. Unspoiled.

No wonder we’ve been unable to forget it.

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For a slightly more successful Star Wars sequel, try our piece on fictional fascists and Andor: