CRIME TRAVELLER
Do the crime, do the time… Miles Hamer remembers a fourth-dimensional slice of ’90s Brit TV
In 1997, there was one problem-solving time traveller fans wanted to watch on Saturday evenings. What they actually got wasn’t exactly Gallifreyan.
As everyone’s favourite TARDIS-dwelling hero was left twiddling his sonic in America, weighed down by legal issues, Saturday night was getting on without the good Doctor quite happily. Not to mention noisily. Hi-octane, quasi-futuristic espionage series Bugs had been waving the explosive flag for action family drama. It was a solid hit for BBC One and the channel soon sought out another show to fit the same post-National Lottery, pre-watershed timeslot.
Bugs’ production company, Carnival Films, pitched an idea from writer Anthony Horowitz. “The BBC wanted another Saturday evening show so we were able to persuade them to give this one a go,” producer Brian Eastman tells SFX. The two had worked together on prestige ITV drama
Poirot, where the prolific author had the idea of a reverse engineering crime drama: where the detective could nip back in time to prevent, solve, or on occasion, be the unwitting cause of the case. Already a seasoned crime drama pro by this stage, Horowitz undertook writing all eight episodes of the series.
Remarking on the task of grappling with all the mindmelding implications of time travel, he admitted that he “read a couple of books, didn’t understand them, and then wrote the series.”
Time bandiTs
The premise, on paper, looked fairly simple. Teaming a rule-stretching copper, Jeff Slade, with time-bending scientist Holly Turner, Horowitz envisioned a fast-paced howdunnit of non-chronological investigations and circular logic. Plus, just a little on-off romance between the two leads (hey, this was back when The X-Files still carried mainstream cultural heft).
For the all-important casting of maverick detective Slade, only one actor was up for consideration: Michael French.
As Eastman explains, “The BBC wanted him. He had been quite a success as an actor in EastEnders and they wanted to keep him as an actor. So when we came in with the idea they said we would have to go along with that.”
Tabloid favourite French had built a hot and hugely popular public profile, thanks to his character David Wicks’s Albert Square bed-hopping.
During this age of ex-soap star golden handcuff deals for the likes of Robson Green and Nick Berry, the corporation was keen to keep the actor loyal to their brand. Luckily, Horowitz approved of the casting.
“I thought he looked exactly right for the part. He also had the ability, I think, to jump from the comedy side of it to the more serious.”
For the role of science officer Holly Turner, Chloë Annett brought sci-fi cred to the proceedings, having recently debuted on Red Dwarf’s seventh series as navigation officer Kristine Kochanski.
With soon-to-be Royle Family matriarch Sue Johnston in the role of the pair’s forever despairing DCI Kate Grisham
(Horowitz’s favourite casting), the series began shooting in late 1996.
Afforded a prestigious Radio Times cover on the week of transmission (shared with Goodnight Sweetheart’s two-timing time traveller Gary Sparrow), Crime Traveller debuted on 1 March 1997. Hot on the heels of Noel Edmonds’s perennial gunge tank and the lottery results, the nation finally got to experience Eastman and Horowitz’s crime time splice-up.
And what they got was a breezy, entertaining romp. After an achingly ’90s soft sax theme and ticking title sequence, there followed a lengthy motorbike chase full of destructive mayhem, a crafty puzzle of a murder mystery, and some swiftly-paced shenanigans. The template was set for seven further escapades of clockdodging and police procedural.
But it was immediately apparent that the certainty of its furrowbrowed sci-fi stitched to the tapestry of light entertainment whimsy made for a curiously awkward mix. Additionally, the broader, pantomimic yuks sat uncomfortably with the show’s crime drama house style. This erratic flit made for an uneasy tonal schism: as if channel hopping furiously between Sapphire & Steel, The Bill and ChuckleVision.
One person who noticed that the queasy mesh of genres wasn’t quite clicking was Horowitz himself. “Certain errors were made along the way, particularly in the tone of it… I think the light-heartedness, some of the jokiness of it got a little out of hand for me.”
Producer Brian Eastman is less caustic. “I wouldn’t have thought that was a worry: in that early evening timeslot the audience aren’t looking for pure seriousness. I think a little light touch in there is a good thing for that. Whether they came out broader than what Anthony wrote I don’t know, but I don’t remember him saying that at the time…”
be kind rewind
Horowitz singled out some of the supporting cast. “If I had any misgivings about the casting at all it was only in some of the smaller roles. Some of the smaller parts veered too far towards comedy. This wasn’t the fault of the casting necessarily or the actors – it was as much the script as anything else. But if I could go back in time and do it all over again I might have made those smaller parts a little more serious, a bit more credible.”
Scenes of relatively high-ranking detectives struggling to read and performing comedy pratfalls seem to bear this out. The off-kilter broadness didn’t concern Eastman, however. “Don’t remember that being a worry. The question of tone in any show is very important and it can easily be that you don’t get the tone right in a first series. In a way it’s disappointing that it didn’t go to a second series because I expect there would have been changes that we would have made to give it a clearer identity. You do your best with the scripts and then it goes into production. Other factors come into play and they determine how it comes out.”
Across the original transmission, viewers witnessed the team combat a crooked assassination scheme, a doomed attempt to buy a winning lottery ticket and a bent cop subplot featuring Slade’s wronged jailbird father (played by grizzled go-to tough guy, The Bill’s Chris Ellison). Doctor Who fans were placated (or possibly enraged) by former companion Mary Tamm popping up in a guest role, and a police box even made a small cameo, accompanied by a few cheeky bars from the iconic theme.
Sadly, while its jaunty antics were compelling enough for those who remained faithful, the audience had dropped off sharply across the run, falling from almost 11.5 million to a low of just over seven. Although big by today’s numbers, the viewer indifference was evident.
Episode titles such as “The Revenge Of The Chronology Protection Hypothesis” and the show’s adherence to its strict and slightly cumbersome rules probably didn’t help bring in the casual audience either.
Each week, viewers were reminded of the show’s unique approach to time travel: the machine could only fling the characters back in time, and to get back to the present they had to arrive back at the machine in real time the same
Audiences got a breezy, entertaining romp with a ’90s soft sax theme
moment they left it. It was a set of laws that provided the same frantic finale almost every episode to get back to Holly’s flat in time (or risk “death” by infinity loop). This also made for a fair amount of clumsy, often repeated exposition.
“That was the problem with the time machine element of it because there have to be certain rules to make the story work,” recalls producer Eastman. “It did have lines in there saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this, we can’t do that’ and you worried that the audience would think, ‘Do I really need to be told these things?’ I would like to think if we’d done more the rules would be completely clear and you wouldn’t have to talk about it very much.”
The sentiment echoes Horowitz’s self-critical evaluation looking back at the show. “All the stuff about time travel seems to go on forever.”
Overall though, Eastman dismisses these criticisms. “It didn’t seem to matter and I think people liked the idea of having some rules that they had to understand. I was very pleased with it.”
Alas the show never got past its debut series. With management in transition, new BBC1 controller Peter Salmon simply overlooked commissioning any more crime-busting time travel.
“There were lots of changes of personnel at the BBC at the time,” explains Eastman. “Although if it had been a huge ratings success that wouldn’t have mattered. I guess the ratings were a bit borderline, and then you had new people come in and they think they can do better so they didn’t ask us to do another one.”
Ultimately, the decision was made to re-commission another debuting Saturday night drama that year which highlighted quirky crime-solving methods: Jonathan Creek.
Production team Carnival were deflated by the news. “We’d done a lot of work in getting the rules of the show going, how the time travel worked, getting the time travel itself to look good on screen and have an identity. Once we’d got that all right there was so much more mileage in it. So it was a big disappointment.”
Coupled with the less than enthusiastic press response (“venomous,” remembers Horowitz), this unfortunately earned the series a tarnished reputation in genre television history; the undeserving punchline to a lazy joke told by people who’ve probably never even seen the show.
Perhaps in an alternate universe, Jeff Slade and Holly Turner have battled baddies across the time streams for 20 successful years, instead of as they are now: caught short in their own fateful loop of infinity.