Even today, four decades after it was first broadcast, it still fairly boggles the mind that anything as unashamedly weird as Sapphire & Steel could have been made by British ITV franchise ATV at all, let alone be broadcast in an early evening prime time slot. And yet it was, baffling as many as it enthralled with its bizarre plot details, mysterious characters and wild central premise. It was created by P.J. Hammond (his working title had been The Time Menders) who had a long track record of writing for British television, but mainly in more mainstream fare like cop shows Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976), Z-Cars (1962-1978) and The Sweeney (1975-1978) and the popular soap opera Emmerdale Farm/Emmerdale (1972-). His only previous experience with anything as odd as Sapphire & Steel had been when he wrote 13 episodes for the children’s television series Ace of Wands (1970-1972). Whatever brainstorm he had that led to the creation of Sapphire & Steel was a welcome one leading to a series that has remained a cult favourite ever since and enjoyed multiple afterlives in various other media.

Each episode began with a voiceover that was no doubt meant to establish just what was going on, but which just added to the mystery: “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.” Sapphire (Joanna Lumley in her first TV work since playing Purdy in The New Avengers (1976-1977)) and Steel (former Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1978) David McCallum) turn up to investigate incidents where Time, a malignant force in the series, threatens to disrupt the lives of mostly ordinary people.

Hammond tells us next to nothing about Sapphire or Steel (the only other agents we get to see in the 34 episodes are Silver (David Collings) and Lead (Val Pringle)), even to the point of never revealing if they’re actually human or not. They possess superhuman powers which suggest that they’re not – they communicate telepathically, Sapphire can make minor changes to the flow of time, even rewind it for short periods and is psychometric, while Steel can freeze himself to absolute zero, is unnaturally strong. But we’re never sure exactly who they are, where they come from nor who they work for but each week for six multi-episode serials over four series they turned up in a variety of times and places, trying to work out head-scratching mysteries that usually involved something old in a “modern” setting that created a weakness that Time might exploit to its own impenetrable ends.

This was all heady stuff for post-teatime mainstream viewing and often quite unsettling too – the series was as much horror as science fiction, Steel early on likening their incorporeal enemies to ghosts. The six serials, none of which had on-screen titles but which have long been identified as Assignment One, Assignment Two and so on (though there are also titles that were apparently culled from the pages of a cult television fanzine), encompassed: intangible forces forcing their way into the coastal home of a pair of young children whose parents have vanished, their method of entry being old nursey rhymes (Assignment One); Darkness, another intangible force that menaces Sapphire and Steel, using the bitterness of people who died too young, particularly men who died in war, to break through to our dimension at an abandoned railway station (Assignment Two); Time attacking a young couple from the future who have been placed in a time capsule at the top of alate 70s tower block (Assignment Three); a faceless being that moves through time in photographs (Assignment Four); Time trying to change the course of human history by preventing the death of a man who has invented a virus that can wipe out humanity (Assignment Five, the only one not written by Hammond being instead the work of Don Houghton and Anthony Read); and people from different time zones turning up at a modern day petrol service station (Assignment Six).

One-word synopses can barely do justice to just how peculiar Sapphire & Steel was. It was the accumulation of odd happenings, mysterious details and unfathomable characters that gave the series its uncanny atmosphere. Poltergeists, time travel, ghost hunters, elaborate traps and cliff-hangers guaranteed to keep even the most baffled of viewers (and there were certainly plenty of those) coming back for more were all par for the course. But more than anything else, it was the eponymous “Operators” that tantalised British viewers the most.

In Assignment Five, Steel does admit that the couple are alien “in the extra-terrestrial sense” but remains as maddeningly vague as ever as to where they really come from (assuming he’s telling the truth of course). Lumley and McCallum are terrific in the roles, she the warmer of the two though as capable of emotional distance as Steel. She’s witty, intuitive, clever and more likely to interact with the humans they encounter, he’s cold, even rude and arrogant at times and certainly more emotionally closed off. Yet there’s also humour here – Sapphire will occasionally flirt with Steel, giving him a peck on the cheek at one point, much to his discomfort. To say that there’s sexual tension between them would be to overstate the case considerably, but there’s certainly a genuine affection for each other that often manifests itself in very odd ways.

The series came to an end after four sometimes difficult years, the broadcast of Assignment Two having been disrupted by the ITV industrial action of late Summer/early Autumn 1979 (when broadcasts resumed, the earlier episodes were shown again, the only time that ITV ever repeated any of the episodes though they later turned up on various UK cable channels). McCallum and Lumley being increasingly in demand elsewhere, the budget for the programme growing over time (early series struggle through with the cheapest of special effects, later ones get more elaborate) and the transition of the ITV Midlands region franchise holder from ATV to Central all conspired to put an end to Sapphire and Steel’s adventures.

They bowed on a fantastic cliff-hanger that was never resolved on television, though Hammond always maintained that that he had several stories already mapped out for a future series. It’s an ending that has lingered in the memory ever since and the programme left our screens with its eponymous agents as enigmatic and unknowable as they were when we first met them. They certainly made an impact though. In 2005, they joined the likes of The Prisoner, The Tomorrow People, Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who in finding a second life (fifth if we include a paperback novelisation, a long running comic strip in children’s magazine Look-In and an annual) in audio plays produced by the indefatigable Big Finish, with Susannah Harker (from the vampire thriller Ultraviolet (1998)) taking over as Sapphire and David Warner stepping into McCallum‘s shoes as Steel. David Collings returned as Silver while Mark Gatiss guested in one story as the previously unseen or heard Gold.

There had been little quite like Sapphire & Steel on British television before and in a television environment that now increasingly plays things as safely as possible, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing anything quite as eccentric, unsettling or innovative any time soon. It may only have lasted for four series, the last a truncated one at that, but it went out in considerable style and left behind some of the most indelible images from late 70s and early 80s television – images like the faceless man in the junkshop, the parade of ghosts haunting an old railway station and that positively chilling final shot. It’s the product of a time when British television was still open to taking risks, willing to leave part of its audience behind if needs be and scare the pants off any younger viewers who were allowed to watch it, viewers that probably understood it far better than many of their parents. It remains a unique oddity, and a marvellous one at that.

Regular Crew
ATV; Created by: P.J. Hammond; Executive Producer: David Reid; Producer: Shaun O’Riordan

Regular Cast
Joanna Lumley (Sapphire); David McCallum (Steel)

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