Type-casting doesn't just mean racial stereotypes: it means getting so used to Raymond Burr playing Perry Mason that people wouldn't accept him playing Stalin. Les Dawson, he of the weary Playdoh face and voice like a sack of rubble being dragged around a cellar, would like to play King Lear, and I for one would dearly love to see him do it. I suspect he has a snowball's chance in hell of being offered the part. After The New Avengers, I knew I would have to be very lucky to have the chance of playing someone who was not a secret agent or a policewoman. When Sapphire and Steel came along, I snapped up the part of Sapphire with gratitude.
P. J. Hammond had thought up a rather different kind of mystery series. Sapphire and Steel were aliens, sent from outer space to Earth to combat a shifting sort of evil which tampered with time, changed history and stole children. It was given an early evening slot with two episodes a week; and although it was fairly frightening, it built up a healthy following among children and people who had the time to think and the willingness to suspend disbelief. David McCallum was Steel; his appearance hadn't changed since he broke hearts as Ilya Kuryakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. We filmed at ATV in Elstree; by filmed I mean recorded, because it was all done on videotape. Before we started the first of the thirty-four episodes, there were make-up tests and consultations about special effects. One of Sapphire's skills was being able to manipulate time herself - we had to discover a device that the viewers could see, so that they'd know that Sapphire was exerting her influence.
The first idea was a throbbing vein in the temple. Apart from looking funny, I feared what the vein might be required to do under pressure, spread across the whole face, say, or grow huge and burst. I would have had to manipulate its pulsations by squeezing a rubber bulb in my hand, like a buttonhole flower that squirts water, a rubber tube running up through my hair. Contact lenses which flashed a vivid sapphire blue seemed a safer alternative and I went to have my pupils measured for clear soft lenses that that would easily absorb ink-like eyedrops. On the shelf were Christopher Lee's prepare-to-bite eyes; I was in good company.
McCallum and our director Sean O'Riordan used to work very hard to make sure that each story, lasting four to eight episodes, had its feet as firmly based in possibility as science fiction can be. Should there be a shadow from that wall, if the wall ceased to exist in the mind of a ghost? Should the children see the attic room stretching as long as a football pitch, or from their point of view was it normal until Evil set the music box working? McCallum had the sort of brain that thrived on these problems. He studied astronomy and was in the process of building his own house near New York where he lived with his wife and children. Fearfully fit, he would walk and run miles each day and was keen on a healthy diet.
'What did you have for breakfast today, Jo?'
'Coffee, bread with the fur cut off. And you?'
'Two walnuts, half a satsuma, an ounce of melon seeds.'
This was probably how he kept his ridiculously young looks. He hated smoking, and if someone lit up in the cold rehearsal room, he would fling the windows open like a schoolmaster. His enormous experience in working in films gave the show an extra sheen of professionalism.
So much of the series depended on special effects that during the shooting there were periods of longueur for the actors. In the studio next to us was The Muppet Show, and we would sneak through to watch them at work. The Muppets stayed in character even when the cameras weren't rolling, and Gonzo and Kermit would lounge around on their high sets chatting desultorily in Gonzo/Kermit voices. I watched Christopher Reeve singing to Miss Piggy as he played the piano. She swooned until he mentioned her weight. Hell hath no fury like a pig insulted. Down the corridor, Petula Clark was preparing a variety spectacular, and the canteen filled up with leggy dancers and backing groups.
Talking to a group of children at a Saturday morning cinema group, I asked how they thought my greeny-grey eyes were suddenly able to flash so blue. A small boy put up his hand and said, 'Double glazing.' It was in fact an ingenious run-of-the-mill effect, which goes roughly like this. Pick a primary colour (in my case blue), and key it out, which means remove all that is blue on the screen. I had to wear blue lenses to make my pupils blue enough to be keyed out. Into the space that's left from the absent colour is transmitted whatever another camera is seeing; flames, galloping animals, or, in our case, a makeup girl's overall, which just happened to be a good turquoise colour. So: one camera fills its screen with turquoise, and the other camera focuses on my face (not my blue dress) and as the blue is taken from my eyes the turquoise is inserted rather like a backcloth. Setting all this up involved minutes of non-blinking, non-moving. Contact lenses made it easier not to blink.
I became accustomed to wearing them quite easily, so easily that a story was written to show all my eyeballs going black as the Evil Thing tried to take over my brain. I had to have plastic lenses made to the size of my eyes, painted black and put in by our eye man. I simply wept and couldn't keep them in. Anaesthetic drops were inserted: at once my eyes lost their sensitivity and their ability to focus and for a short while I was completely blind. That day there was some rumpus about an electricians' strike, and we were plunged in darkness as the crew took an early lunch. I was left behind on the set: in the heat of the moment, everyone forgot that I couldn't see. I sat glumly in a chair, terrified to walk over the cables and weights, unable to take out the lenses as my eyelids had now been anaesthetized as well. Blindness closed round my head like a blanket and got into my brain, whispering, 'Did you ever think of blindness? This is blind.' I was rescued: much fuss was made, lenses out, much soothing and apologizing. As my eyes slipped in and out of focus, I could see blindness standing in the shadows.
[...]
[...] in Sapphire and Steel we were able to change history, enter old photographs, take revenge for slaughtered animals, set ghosts free and bring back the dead. It was an absorbing and often terrifying show which I was sad to finish. To our dismay, the last episode had Sapphire and Steel banished in a time-lock, in a garage in the black distances of outer space. The Darkness appeared to have beaten them, but only temporarily, we were assured, we would be released in the next series. There never was another series and our characters are still up there, waiting to break free and continue the fight. It's like a film of someone diving, inched forward frame by frame but never hitting the water. It interferes with your breathing.
from
Stare Back And Smile
by Joanna Lumley
©1989
Viking
ISBN 0-670-82174-8