Out of the Unknown: The Dead Past (Sylvia Coleridge Season)
Another series which hasn't appeared here before, brought to my attention by the happenstance of this series of posts about Sylvia Coleridge's roles. The joint reasons for Out of the Unknown's lack of appearance here are that it is science fiction and I don't tend to do science fiction, and it is also a science fiction anthology series and I've never got on very well with anthology series. In fact the reviews online indicate that Out of the Unknown demostrates my main difficulty with anthology series, which is that the episodes tend to be at best inconsistent, but The Dead Past is a dream.
Out of the Unknown was created by Irene Shubik, a female BBC producer, who started on this series after doing a similar ones earlier for ABC Television. I can only refer you to the show's Wikipedia page for the details but I am absolutely delighted with the account of how she found the main difficulty of the series was dealing with a stream of incredibly temperamental science fiction authors, whose demands were often so far beyond difficult as to be outrageous. Nonetheless she did manage to bag adaptations of some science fiction stories by great names and The Dead Past is by Isaac Asimov.
It's set in an unspecified time and place in the future and is about a historian, the magnificently named Arnold Potterley, who has reached a dead end in his subject which is ancient Carthage. He therefore asks the government if he can use the technology of Chronoscopy to view ancient Carthage to help him in his research. To his frustration, despite the Chronoscope having been trumpeted as a scientific development to match no other, has has his request refused. In fact he can find no evidence that anyone has ever used it.
A rebellious soul, he asks a physicist at the university to make a chronoscope independently. To their disappointment they find that while the technology does work, the claims for it have clearly been untrue, and complications mean you can see events no further back in history than a century and a quarter.
It's not a science fiction persepctive as such, but clearly so far this story includes issues of intellectual honesty, the control of research by a government, publishing misinformation, and conformity and non-conformity. I find particularly interesting that the control of the Chronoscope technology is placed in the hands of the state and it is actually the government who control the university by law, and so the setting is more socialist than the world we live in now. It's an interesting choice, because it makes a refreshing alternative to setting this story in a capitalist society where the control over the Chronoscope would be who owns the patent and therefore sets the fees for who can use it.
However the questions of controlling research and misinformation are curiously modern in feel, almost presecient. The show also focuses quite heavily on the privacy aspect of the Chronoscope, giving examples of wives spying on their husbands and businessmen on their rivals. In fact in the show the university authorities use the Chronoscope to find out what is happening. This is the aspect which is given as the main reason the authorities have suppressed the Chronoscope: it is to protect humanity as much as possible.
There is also an intensely human perspective to this because about half way through a relatively straightforward science fiction story the plot suddenly takes a leap and suddenly Mrs Potterley (played by Sylvia Coleridge) is howling and begging her husband, and he is suddenly smashing up the Chronoscope which he has taken such a risk to have built in his cellar. The reason is that the Potterleys had a daughter who died in a house fire which Potterley blames on his cigarette end (there is a running theme of fire in the episode) but Mrs Potterley doesn't know about his smoking and he doesn't want her to find out. She is naturally distraught with her desire to see their dead daughter and he is similarly distraught at the idea of her knowing what happened.
From here on Mrs Potterley becomes increasingly distressed and of course can concentrate on nothing else. At the end of the episode we see repeated Chronoscope scenes of their daughter running toward us and Mrs Potterly sitting there watching this, visibly heartbroken. Although there is never actually a confrontation about the smoking, the show's focus is on the authorities' concern to protect the public.
Every review of this show I have seen has commented that Sylvia Coleridge is the star of this as the wife, and indeed she is. From the start, where we see her waking up from a nightmare about their dead daughter, and appealing to her husband for comfort, she is what we might as well call the histrionic impetus in the show, everyone else being either posited as an academic or a cold authority figure. She therefore embodies the complete human aspect of this show, and her personality and voice are perfect for it.
I find this an interesting, multi-layered story, done in a science fiction format, which allows its varied plot to unroll in unexpected ways and I would highly recommend it.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog
There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about