The Tomorrow People, created by Roger Price and broadcast for six years on UITV throughout the 1970s, is an almost textbook example of a British telefantasy series whose ambitions far outweighed the technical prowess and budgetary requirements needed to its big ideas justice. Often hampered by special effects that were crude even at the time and with acting that ranged from the solid to the utterly abysmal, it nevertheless overcame its limitations to prove to only hugely entertaining (for the most part) but also unexpectedly durable – it has been remade twice.

The basic premise is simple enough. The next step in human evolution, homo superior (the disparagingly refer to homo sapiens as “saps”), is among us in the shape of teenagers and young children with the power to communicate telepathically, teleport (“jaunting” in the parlance of the show) and move objects with their minds. Unable to kill, the “Tomorrow People” – who realise their powers after a painful process known as “breaking out” – live among us in secrecy, worried that if they are discovered their powers will be weaponised by the authorities. From their base in an abandoned London underground station and with their “biological computer” TIM (voiced by Philp Gilbert) offering advice, the youngsters battle aliens, madmen with plans to destroy the world, intelligence agents who stumble upon their presence, gangsters and assorted other villains.

All exciting stuff then and some of the stories – told in serials ranging from 2 to 5 episodes – have fascinating ideas work despite the tiny budget, atmosphere-sapping videotape and hopeless effects. In The Blue and the Green, an alien presence feeds on human aggression and pits schoolchildren against each, dividing them into antagonistic camps that either identify as “greens” or “blues”; in Into the Unknown, the Tomorrow People find themselves on a space ship falling into a black hole, temporarily trapping them in a pocket universe; The Dirtiest Business is genuinely tragic, the tale of a young Russian telepath (played by Anulka Dziubinska from Vampyres (1974)) on the run from her KGB handlers; and in The Heart of Sogguth an ancient evil – possibly the Devil himself – is summoned to Earth by the power of rock music…

There was much silliness along the way too. A Man for Emily features then real-life couple Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson as aliens in a ludicrous bit of high camp pantomime while Hitler’s Last Secret is revealed to be that the Führer was an alien metamorph reborn to lead a fascist uprising in Europe and in The Living Skins the planet’s youth become obsessed with the latest fashion craze – bubble wrap suits that turn out to ameboid aliens bent on possessing their wearers.

Fortunately, the more intriguing stories tended to outnumber the sillier ones. A recurring theme was the Tomorrow People’s struggle with the shape-changing android Jedikiah who we first meet (in the shape of Francis de Wolff) in the opening story, The Slaves of Jedekiah. He turned up again in the following story, The Medusa Strain, now played by Roger Bizley, and in The Revenge of Jedikiah, where he’d reverted to looking like Francis de Wolff again. With his pathological hatred of the Tomorrow People and the technology to nullify their powers, Jedikiah turned out to be a popular villain and returned several times in Big Finish’s audio adventures spin-off series.

The main cast was an ever-changing company of young actors, the only constant being Nicolas Young as John, the de facto leader of the Tomorrow People, the only character to feature in every story. The original series started with the “breaking out” of Stephen Jameson (Peter Vaughn-Clarke) who disappeared without explanation after series four, and introduced us to the other two known Tomorrow People Carol (Sammie Winmill) and Kenny (Stephen Salmon) who both left after series one – she because she wasn’t prepared to commit to a long-running series, he because his character hadn’t clicked with audiences and because, to be fair, he was no actor (nor did Salmon appear to have the desire to be one). Of the others, the most enduring were trainee school teacher Elizabeth (Elizabeth Adare) and Cockney wide boy Mike, played by Mike Holoway, drummer with the then popular pop group Flintlock who turn as the fictional Mike’s group in The Heart of Sogguth. The rest were rather unremarkable child actors who came and went as and when their characters were required.

The acting was often one of the series’ weakest links though as kids we barely noticed. Creator Roger Price knew his target audience well and pitched the stories at just the right level – series one ends with a lengthy monologue hinting that any one of the young viewers might be potential Tomorrow person, the introduction of Elizabeth allowed her debut story, The Blue and the Green, to be set in the sort of school that many of the audience would have just got home from and the very idea that the future of the human race was in the hands of a group of kids appealed enormously to 70s youngsters looking for a chance  to escape the humdrum mundanities of everyday life.

The Tomorrow People has often been referred to as ITV’s answer to Doctor Who (1963-1989). It isn’t that and ITV had made several attempts to hitch a ride on the tail of the BBC’s enormously popular science fiction behemoth – Ace of Wands (1970-1972) and Timeslip (1970-1971) had been two earlier examples – though Price always maintained that The Tomorrow People was never imagined to be a rival to Doctor Who. Where it does rival Doctor Who is with its magnificent and rather terrifying title sequence which featured the opening and closing hand image symbolising “breaking out”, an inexplicable foetus and other images to obscure to make sense of. All of this is underscored by a fantastic theme tune by frequent Doctor Who composer Dudley Simpson. The result is one of the most memorable and haunting opening title sequences of any British television show.

The strength of The Tomorrow People lies in its central idea, the notion that evolution is still in progress and that slowly but surely the human race might be transforming into something better, less war-like and more tolerant and understanding. By telling its young audience that they too might one day “break out” and become something better than their parents and grandparents ensured that it was a huge hit with the kids who cared less about the dodgy CSO effects and often cringeworthy acting and more about the programme’s big ideas. Price was always careful not to talk down to his audience – there were moments of info-dumping where some of the more outré ideas are explained at some length but for the most part Price, who wrote or co-wrote the majority of the stories, trusted his audience to keep up with him.

Sadly, it’s the shoddiness of the production that lingers in too many minds today but the show has an army of dedicated fans who manage to see past all that. The enduring appeal is not hard to understand. Exciting, action-oriented plots, a few creepy moments, some bright ideas and that ever present promise of becoming a Tomorrow Person appealed immensely to its young audience. Unfortunately, it never picked up the family/adult audience that Doctor Who enjoyed and as the original audience grew older, viewing figures started to fall as did the budget and its fate was sealed.

Price has managed to resurrect the idea twice. The first time was a new version for British television that ran between 1992 and 1995, It featured none of the original cast, abandoned the iconic theme tune and reset the whole story, a new group of Tomorrow People now operating out of a psychic spaceship in the South Pacific. In 2013 the show was remade again, this time in the States and set in Manhattan, which ran for just one season before being cancelled. Some of the original cast, including Nicholas Young and Philip Gilbert, returned to their roles for five seasons of audio dramas from Big Finish, joined from time to time by other originals Peter Vaughan-Clarke, Elizabeth Adare and Mike Holoway.