The Tomorrow People: A Rift in Time (Sylvia Coleridge Season)
The Tomorrow People is a show which needs no introduction to the readers of this blog, and while I haven't blogged that much about it, I have actually blogged about the second series A Rift in Time before. It's the adventure when the Tomorrow People time travel back to Roman Britain, using a device based on the design on a vase, to help Peter, who has been trapped in a gladiator school. In an alternate history Romans are altering history so that they invent the steam engine in Roman times, so that they never leave Britain. At one point we see the Tomorrow People in this alternate future Britain, still under Roman rule in the 1970s. It is a mixture of the show doing a mixture of sword and sandal and Sapphire and Steel.
You will of course readily see that this is a hugely ambitious plot, and in fact all the stops are pulled out for this one, with lots of different sets, location filming, effort put into the different histories, and so on. I see when I first blogged about it, I said that I thought there were plot holes you could drive a Roman chariot through, and in fact there are. There is also a major weakness that the ending is rather weak, in that the protagonists of the alternate history just disappear for no apparent reason, and history returns to its normal route.
If you haven't watched this I would strongly recommend watching all four episodes through several times, with and without the cast's commentary. Perhaps it's that I've lost the ability to concentrate in my old age, but I have found the plot becomes much clearer on repeated viewings, although I don't think it's just me because the cast keep wondering what is going on in their commentary track. The reasons for the complexity and confusion are of course a mixture of: the Tomorrow People's need to hide their tomorrowness from others; two different histories going on at once; the need to explain what's happening to their non-Tomorrow Person friend, and thus to the audience; the need to set the scene on what is going on in Roman times; and so on.
In fact this ambition and complexity makes an interesting variation on the usual Tomorrow People adventures, which can tend to be a bit set into the here and now. I keep fighting back a nagging feeling that I think it's over-ambitious, but I think that would be an unfair conclusion to come to. For a show with a tiny budget, what they've pulled off here is a remarkable feat. My only criticisms are that I think this should really have been The Tomorrow People The Film, my criticism about the weakness of the ending, and there are a few production problems. For example, the commentary really makes you notice the slave boys showing their modern underwear as they roll around in their little tunics. Surely it wouldn't have been impossible to reshoot that sort of thing or airbrush it out?
Sylvia Coleridge's role is as a professor who brings the vase used to create the time travel device. She is wonderful as a stereotypical scatty professor with her glasses on crooked. It's a very minor role, and I could wish they had made more of her!
Overall a very ambitious adventure of a legendary children's show.
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