The pair's initial assignment - which used to be titled 'Adventure One' on the VHS covers (my first memory of being cognizant of the show was seeing these video tapes on the shelves of HMV [or it might have Forbidden Planet, maybe, it was quite a long time ago] and thinking this was a show that I should probably check out, but the chunky size and chunky price of the double tape set of 'Adventure Two' put me off beginning the journey at that time) but has since been renamed the perhaps more appropriate 'Assignment One' for DVD, and given the fan moniker 'Escape Through a Crack in Time' for the type of fan (me) who likes serials to actually have titles - begins very simply. It begins with a house.
The house stands across a body of water, as we later find - an isolated country house, perhaps on an island off the mainland. In the house we meet young Robert Jardine (Steven O' Shea, giving a good and likable child performance in an era when the likes of Matthew Waterhouse's Adric and Ian Sears' Brendan were rotting up genre TV), sat at the kitchen table diligently doing his homework, while his parents (John Golightly and Felicity Harrison) put his younger sister Helen (the absolutely chronic Tamasin Bridge - I was not surprised that this was the final entry on her short C.V. [I know it's a bit much to overly criticise child actors, but seriously]) to bed. As they read the dreadful child nursery rhymes, Rob works away to the ticking of the many timepieces in this house of clocks. A sudden strange windless wind whooshes through the house and all the clocks seem to stop. Time change. You lose, you gain. But maybe those frozen hours are about to melt the universe's nervous system and seep out of the pores.
As the house grows eerily silent - no time, no voices from upstairs, suddenly stifled mid-Ring Ring-a-Roses - and Rob anxiously rushes up the staircase calling for his parents we dissolve to a shot of the sparkling stars of outer space, and through the vasty deep of the cosmos booms a disembodied voice (allegedly that of Hercule Poirot par excellence David Suchet, though maddeningly I've never found it confirmed) proclaiming:
"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!"
As the terrified tykes try to make sense of the evening's eldritch happenings, suddenly there comes a rapping at the door - these particular visitors entreating entry from the Plutonian night are a taciturn man in a grey suit (McCallum) and a scintillating blonde woman dressed in blue (Lumley). The strangers enter the house unbidden and immediately take charge of the strange situation, assessing the house as old and full of old things, inhabited by a family with an old (Norman French) name; seemingly this confluence of old things has created a weak point where the malevolent forces of Time can try to break through. Taking one of the carriage clocks up to Helen's bedroom, Sapphire and Steel recreate the circumstances of the parents' disappearance down to Sapphire reading aloud the nursery rhyme 'Ring a Ring o' Roses'm causing strange phantasms - seemingly period appropriate to the 17th century by their clothing - to appear in the room, and for the far wall to zoom off into the distance; a horrifyingly scarred and cloaked figure credited as the 'Countryman' (Ronald Goodale) shambles towards us up the corridor of eternity chanting the rhyme:
"Cattle in the meadow, lying fast asleep..."
Banishing the spectres by reciting the rhyme backwards to reverse the effect, they tear the page containing that rhyme out of the book, Steel giving the order to burn it, and barricade the door of the bedroom to buy them time to formulate a plan against Time. In the interval, they make mention of their previous adventure, when they tracked an incursion to a ship in the middle of the ocean - a ship that they casually mention as being named the Mary Celeste. Of course, we all really know that the Daleks caused that. Though I suppose 'The Chase' counts as a temporal event doesn't it?
When Rob is lured to the boarded up door of the shuttered room of the shunned house (how many H.P. Lovecraft references can you get into one sentence challenge?) by an entity purporting to be his lost mother crying for help, his misguided attempt to release her allows a fragment of temporal maleficence to escape - through a crack in time one assumes, given the fan-bestowed title. This latest incursion manifests through the nursery rhyme 'Goosey Goosey Gander', taking the form of Puritan Parliamentary soldiers from the English Civil War ascending and descending the floors of the house.
"Upstairs and downstairs..."
The paranormal pair attempt to explain these ghosts as "visual refractions... an anachronism", whilst the fragment itself (appearing as a moving, flickering patch of light) is described as "a scion... a descendant, a successor, a child". The thing gets into an old painting upon the wall (the picture in the house, there's another Lovecraft-ism!) and draws Sapphire in with it, into an old cottage redolent with echoes of terrible past happenings; a rope hanging from the ceiling and a meat cleaver glinting in the periphery of her vision (here comes the chopper to chop off your head) giving clues to her imminent fate from the distant past. Steel manages to rescue her from this anomalous and perilous situation at great risk and cost to himself by lowering his own body temperature to near absolute zero, thus putting himself temporarily (temporally) out of action, and so whatever mysterious aegis they work for dispatches another agent into the field to assist. This is the hulking and powerful Lead (American actor Val Pringle, who was sadly murdered by intruders in his home in 1999), here to serve as Steel's backup and "insulation".
Our three adventurous elementals and two mere mortal children proceed to clear the house of all the antiques that they can (old things being the 'triggers' for the weaknesses in the fabric of the continuum); paintings, boxes of books and nicknacks removed to the "youngest" place available - the outhouse recently added by the father. Unbeknownst to the others, the sinister force appears to young Rob in the shape of his errant father, drawing the callow youth down into the basement. Down, down, deeper and down to the earliest foundations of the building and backwards in time to the eerie twilit evening when the builder's cornerstone was first set in place. It is here, at the building's very beginning, that the elementals must pit their wits against the force to fight for the boy's freedom and banish the evil forever.
"And hide his head under his wing, poor thing."
A truly timeless testing trial against Time itself, and a wonderfully weird (in the best uncanny meaning of the word) introduction to the adventures of the intrepid titular Time Agents - or, at least, agents against Time's agency - portrayed by a pair of screen legends.
And legends always live on.
(Just in case it's not obvious from the opening line of the review, it's taken quite a bit of time between me starting it and finishing it. Though not as long as my All Hallow's Eve review)
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