Having written more than I expected to about Sapphire & Steel, I suppose it's only natural that I should say something about it's unforgettable final serial, 'Assignment Six: The Trap'.
(Readers will notice that I avoided any reference to the 'title' of 'Assignment Five' in my entry on it. This is because properly speaking, none of the episodes actually have titles: P.J. Hammond wanted each Assignment referred to only by its number. The later titles appended to these appear to have evolved from fandom: they were not included in the listings for episodes at the time of original transmission. Grant G at Fire-Breathing Dimetrodon Time cites a friend who discovered the earliest apparent instance of these titles in a fanzine called Time Screen, and rightly notes that the idea they're a fan creation explains why some of them are, well, a bit crap. The fan title for Assignment Five is 'Dr McDee Must Die!' and while that's an extremely good summary of the plot, it is extremely cheesy and in no way fits the tone of the show, sounding more like one of those films you may remember Troy McClure from. I have chosen to add the fan titles where I think they fit the serial in question, which I think works well for Assignments Two, Three and Six, inoffensively enough in Assignments One and Four, and extremely badly in the case of Assignment Five, hence my just following Hammond's nomenclature for that one. And to answer the question you're about to ask, I would simply follow the example set by Assignment Two and name each serial after its location, given that the claustrophobic focus on single locations [and the relatively elaborate sets this focus allowed the show to play with] is one of its trademarks. So: 'The Farmhouse', 'The Railway Station', 'The Capsule', 'The Photographer's Shop', 'Lord Mullrine's Party' and 'The Service Station', though I actually think 'The Trap' is a perfect title for the last assignment, and disagree with Grant that it gives away the twist - which, full disclosure, I am probably going to spoil in the course of this piece so, if you don't want the ending ruined, skip this entry.)
The problem you run into writing about the final episode of Sapphire & Steel as a lefty blogger is that the big lad, Mark Steel, already got there first, in the introduction to Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, his 2014 essay collection from Zero Books. So to avoid treading too much on ground already covered by the late Vampire Castle dodger, I'm going to do one of my favourite things and cheat, by invoking a context Fisher can't, which is that on Tenor.com the gif at the start of this essay is labelled 'Social Distancing Social Distance GIF'.
 |
| Mentioning Vampire Castle of course gives me an excuse to include a pic of the gang from State of Decay, watching which is a much better use of your time than rereading or relitigating that essay. |
Isn't that perfect? Especially given the weird resonances Assignment Five's viral apocalypse takes on in the aftermath of the novel coronavirus pandemic (which also imparted similar significance to Eldred and Rothwyn's capsular isolation in 'Assignment Three: The Creature's Revenge'). At some point during the lockdown, someone (a masking advocate? An Ivermectin-guzzler? We'll never know, but thanks rugsunshine, whoever you are: there are not nearly enough Sapphire & Steel gifs online) thought the perfect image to describe it was Sapphire and Steel gazing out of a curtained window, drifting through space, alone and, as Sapphire says, 'nowhere, forever'.
It's a superb image, the perfect juxtaposition of the mysterious and the mundane which is the show's stock in trade. Watching it, I was struck by how much the window - supposedly that of a cafe in the 1940s, though we'll get to that in a moment - reminded me of those in the schools I had attended as a child. Whether you choose to interpret this as an indication that British design didn't advance much between 1948 and 1982, or that those postwar windows were surprisingly hard-wearing, or that there was so little money about the windows never got replaced, is up to you. The easiest explanation is that the producers just used a contemporary window because they didn't think there was much chance of viewers picking up on any potential differences. Remember that in 1982 HDTV and Tivo did not exist, so people couldn't pause programmes when a character's bookshelf appears on screen and look up all the books they couldn't possibly own because they hadn't yet been published.
But to be honest, the provenance of the window itself doesn't matter that much because the location Sapphire and Steel find themselves trapped in is not a 1940s cafe. It is, in fact, as one of the duo's enemies in this serial points out, 'nowhere' - a false memory designed to trap them, eternally. A single period room, with Glen Miller on the radio and period-appropriate posters (what a shame that the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, so comprehensively anatomized by Owen Hatherley in The Ministry of Nostalgia, had not yet been rediscovered: that would have been a tasty anachronism) on the walls. It's a nice memory, a cosy, comfy memory - but you can never get out of that memory.
This is, of course, the ultimate danger of nostalgia: what was a source of comfort (literal physical comfort in the case of the serial's roadside cafe/service station location: a place to take a comfort break, a rest stop) becomes a prison. If you want to imagine the future, imagine being trapped at Tebay Services. Forever.
 |
| This. This is what caused the timebreak in our reality, I'm not joking about this. |
Actually, let's do something these entries have had a habit of doing (I was recording a bunch of them yesterday to make into videos for my YouTube channel, so I had a chance to notice patterns) and expand on something mentioned parenthetically earlier. The Keep Calm and Carry on poster caused a Sapphire and Steel-style timebreak in our world, and we have been living in a false reality ever since. The only question is whether the timebreak occurred in 2000, the year of the Millennium Dome and meeting up when we're all fully grown by that fountain down the road, when the poster was first rediscovered by Stuart and Mary Manley in Barter Books, Alnwick, or whether it occurred in 2005, when the poster became ubiquitous as a result of being featured in The Guardian. If you want my opinion, it's the latter: while it's nice to imagine that 9/11 was a false track we could skip our way out of with a timey-wimey two-step, I think if KCACO hadn't been allowed to publicly metastasize in the media the disturbances would have remained localised to Barter Books itself. Instead, Aisha - it got out.
So, to paraphrase a trademark of a more recent show, it's time to ask a very germane question after this series of posts about nostalgia: what now?
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment