Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Six [TV] (1982)
Directed by David Foster

Film Review

Sapphire & Steel, one of the most innovative and challenging television drama series of the late 1970s, early 1980s, ended not with a bang but with a barely audible whimper.  Held over after the transmission of Assignment Five in 1981, the last four episodes that make up Assignment Six were broadcast by ITV in the scheduler's graveyard of late August in 1982, almost as if the network was ashamed to claim ownership of it.  The newly formed Central Independent Television company, the successor to ATV, had no interest in continuing the series and so it became one of the casualties of the switchover.  The fact that its stars, Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, had had enough and were unwilling to make any more episodes made the series' demise inevitable.

Scripted by the show's creator P.J. Hammond, Assignment Six is the least intelligible of Sapphire and Steel's adventures but it is nonetheless a compelling mystery serial, eerily atmosperic and containing some of the most chilling moments in the entire series.  Sapphire's sudden realisation that she and Steel are facing imminent destruction is a dramatic highpoint that lends an aura of expectant dread to what follows, and at no time before have they appeared to be up against so sinister and powerful an opponent as the ones they now face, the three scarily Pinteresque Transient Beings.  Christopher Fairbank's Johnny Jack could not have been creepier if he had been played by Jack Nicholson, and Edward de Souza's unnamed character (The Man) genuinely does look like a fugitive from the 1940s. 

As ever, the performances, direction and camerawork are of an exceptional calibre, and even if the plot makes no sense whatsoever (surely there are far less convoluted ways of disposing of unwanted Time Operators than this?) Assignment Six is gripping stuff from the first second to the last.  Despite it's brevity, it's a more than adequate swansong for television's weirdest investigative duo.   For four years, Sapphire & Steel had television audiences puzzled and perplexed with one mysterious exploit after another, but the greatest mystery of all is how ITV could let such a brilliant series die.

Film Synopsis

Sapphire and Steel arrive at a seemingly deserted service station in the early 1980s, a place where time appears to be standing still.  The only people they meet are an eloping couple who at first refuse to talk to them but are revealed to have been transported here from 1948.  They are joined by their associate Silver, who is as ignorant as they are as to the nature of their present assignment.  At the back of the service station they glimpse a ghostly image of an old man from the 1920s and then time suddenly advances by twenty minutes.  The appearance of an eccentric tambourine player from the 1950s convinces the time-investigating trio that something sinister is afoot and Sapphire soon realises that they are in mortal danger.  Sure enough, the strange people they have encountered are not humans, but Transient Beings acting for a higher authority, their purpose: the destruction of Sapphire and Steel!