The Tomorrow People: Season 1: Slaves of Jedekiah

Sorry - it's been a week since I last posted. I have actually been working, watching various things including the start of Blake's Seven - but we'll come to that in time. Firstly, though, let's start with the very first story of "The Tomorrow People"

I posted last week a general post about “The Tomorrow People”. One of the points that I made was that I only came to this show at the start of the second season, and had never watched the first season. So I decided to put that partly to rights, and over the last couple of evenings I watched the first five part serial – “Slaves of Jedekiah”.

There’ some things that I think Roger Price and the others involved got right about this show. For one thing we’re right into the story. The first episode is all about the three existing Tomorrow People – John, Carol and Kenny – zeroing in on the fourth whom they know is about to ‘break out’ – that is, come to a crisis whereby he will realise his powers, or he will die. Which brings me to my first observation. Carol and Kenny I remember hearing mentioned in later stories, but I never saw them in the show. I was lucky. The two characters together, or rather the actors playing them, demonstrate the opposing poles of the acting problems that a predominantly juvenile cast can bring you. On the one hand we have Sammie Winmill, who plays Carol. I struggle to think of any actress who has quite set my teeth on edge so much with her amateur dramatic society style overacting since Bonnie Langford’s stint as Doctor Who companion Mel Bush. Yes, love, you do have to emote – but not every other word, sweetheart. As a counterpart we have Stephen Salmon’s Kenny, who certainly couldn’t be accused of overacting. The trouble is that he’s hardly acting at all, and for most of the time seems supremely disinterested whenever he’s not actually speaking his own lines (badly).

OK, soft targets, I know. Let’s get to the story. I’ve already praised it for getting straight down to business rather than giving us a long set-up to the series, and we do learn what we need to know about the TPs as Stephen gets info dumped on several times during the story. The story itself, such as it is, though, does suffer from some padding. Stephen faints when he is breaking out. He is taken to hospital. The TPs find him, and Carol gets him through the breaking out crisis. He is abducted from hospital by Jedekiah’s henchmen, Ginge and Lefty – more about them afterwards, The TPs rescue him, and bring him back to the Lab, their base. Stupidly they leave him alone that night, and he is taken over by a post-hypnotic command, and switches TIM the computer off, enabling Jedekiah’s henches to break him into the lab. They set traps, which send John and Carol into hyperspace. In the morning Kenny comes and saves the day, he and Stephen switch TIM back on and it rescues the other 2. Kenny gets abducted by Jedekiah – look, that’s enough, you get the point I’m sure. Back ad forward, back and forward. Capture, rescue, escape. Sophisticated this is not.

But then, it doesn’t necessarily need to be. The jobs that this story absolutely has to do are to introduce the main characters – check – who and what they are – check – and their powers and abilities – check. It certainly establishes where the TPS stand in relation to the rest of humanity, what they can do, and what they can’t do – kill. We know where they’re based – a disused Underground station – we know their self imposed mission – to help other TPs break out safely and eventually shepherd humanity along to this next stage of its evolution. We know where the money for all of this stuff comes from – John, it turns out, is an incredibly successful inventor. That was handy.

If we consider it on its own merits, there is a kind of twist in the ending. We did find out earlier in the story that Jedekiah is not actually the top of the chain of baddies. The Cyclops is. He’s a green, vaguely reptilian, vaguely humanoid alien with one eye in the middle of his forehead sitting in a spaceship in orbit around the earth. Jedekiah, it turns out, is a shape changing robot. Well – all I want to say about that for the moment is that he wasn’t when he came back in one of the later seasons. One of the good things the script does is to cast ambiguity over the Cyclops’ actions and motives. The Cyclops needs telepaths as crew to get him home, only telepaths can fly his ship. The TPs claim that his past crew must have been galley slaves – he contradicts this and says they would have been well rewarded, as would the TPs, and returned to their homes. We never find out if this is all lies or not. The fact is thouth that when his ship is fatally damaged by the crazed Jedekiah, the TPs arrange to get him home safely, which they do.

Coming back to Jedekiah, I was delighted to see that, in his human guise he was played by Francis De Wolf.A very big man in many ways, he’s one of those actors who, while never being a household name, you’d recognise if you’d been around in the 60s and 70s from countless TV and film appearances. He’d twice appeared in William Hartnell Doctor Who stories. As I said, a large and impressive man, who always looked as if he’d eaten a badger and left half its arse hanging out.

As for the two henches, who are converted to friends of the TPs by the end and went on to become semi regular characters for a while, Michael Standing’s Ginge may be a bear of very little brain – well there’s no may be about it, he is – but he’s at least a bit of light relief. As for Derek Crewe’s Lefty, though, it’s very difficult to see what the character brings to the party. He hardly ever speaks, and the late Mr. Crewe’s demeanour is unthreatening to say the least.

History tells us that the ITV network, and Thames television in particular, really wanted their own home grown Sci Fi fantasy series in the early 70s, to tap into a similar audience to that attracted by Doctor Who on the BBC. I’ve recently been watching Timeslip, which was the first attempt. I’m just over halfway through watching the whole of “Timeslip” and I’m enjoying it, but it was rather leisurely, and rather serious and po-faced – and it lacked some action. So I can see why Ruth Boswell, who was heavily involved with both shows would settle on this one rather than the earlier. Of course, in between came “Ace of Wands”, which was more strictly fantasy, but we’ll come to that in the fullness of time.