(author uncredited)

At the time, Peter J. Hammond was a writer better known for his work on police and crime drama series such as Z Cars, Hunter's Walk, New Scotland Yard, Special Branch, Crown Court and The Sweeney. He had also scripted episodes of Emmerdale Farm and General Hospital, although he was no stranger to children's telefantasy having penned four serials for Thams Television's Ace Of Wands and an episode of the anthology series Shadows.

1977, Hammond approached Pamela Lonsdale, producer of Ace Of Wands and Shadows, at Thames Television with his new series proposal, but although Lonsdale was very keen to take up the idea, a suitable timeslot was not available and the proposal was rejected by Thames. Hammond next approached Southern TV who also turned down his proposal, but eventually the draft scripts for the first story arrived on the desk of David Reid, head of drama at ATV. Reid immediately recognized the potential of the series as an early-evening family serial primarily aimed at older children and decided to commission the initial six-part story as an ATV production.

Reid appointed Shuan O'Riordan as producer/director. A former actor who had appeared in series such as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, David Flame, Escape, The Larkins and The Strange World Of Planet X in the 1950s, O'Riordan moved behind the cameras in the Sixties to direct episodes of Emergency: Ward 10, The Worker, Front Page Story, Knock On Any Door, Love Story and George And The Dragon. He gained a reputation as a director with a particular knack for comedy, also producing Seventies sit-coms such as The Best Things In Life, Girls About Town, You're Only Young Twice, Alexander The Greatest, Coppers End, Lollipop Loves Mr. Mole and The Squirrels. However, he was also an effective director of atmospheric suspense drama, having helmed episodes of ATV's Thriller and Scorpion Tales series, and the children's ghost serial Come Back Lucy.

Urged by Reid to cast two major actors in the lead roles, O'Riordan offered the parts of the time detectives Sapphire and Steel to Joanna Lumley and David McCallum. Impressed by the highly unusual nature of the premise and the quality of the scripts, both actors jumped at the opportunity. Lumley was particularly keen, recognizing that after being propelled to instant fame as Purdey in The New Avengers, she could have been easily typecast in similar roles as secret agents or policewomen. She noted in her autobiography Stare Back And Smile, "When Sapphire and Steel came along, I snapped up the part of Sapphire with gratitude." For McCallum too, the role of Steel offered a changed from playing action heroes in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Invisible Man and HTV's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

In 1978, the first six-part story was shot on videotape at the ATV studios in Elstree. The two leads were joined by juvenile actors Steven O'Shea, son of Milo O'Shea, and six-year-old Tamasin Bridge, both of whom impressed producers with their entirely naturalistic performances as Rob and Helen Jardine. Joanna Lumley was fitted with soft clear contact lenses which could absorb ink-like eye drops to make her naturally blue eyes a more vivid blue for effects sequences in which Sapphire's eyes glowed when she used her powers: Chromakey was used to remove the blue and replace it with a bright turquoise - actually a make-up girl's overall shot by a second camera.

With production completed on the initial serial, ATV executives were so impressed with the series that they decided to hold back transmission of the first story so that it could be accompanied by a second seven-part story to make a single opening season of 13 episodes. Then, Reid learnt that the ITV network schedulers were looking for something to fill a twice-weekly evening slot for seven weeks in July and August 1979, while the rural soap Emmerdale Farm was off the air for its annual summer break. It was decided that Sapphire and Steel would fill the gap and Reid commissioned Hammond to pen a new eight-part story to bring the episode total for the first season to 14.

Hammond retired to his remote farmhouse home in Oxfordshire to write scripts for the second story and a novelization of the first which would be published by W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd. As he was now aware that series would be aimed at a more mature audience, Hammond abandoned the idea of involving children in each story and crafted scripts that were distinctly darker, scarier and more melancholy than before. However, the tight schedule to have the episodes completed for transmission at the end of July meant that Hammond had only written the first five parts of the story before production on the serial began. He was still writing the story's concluding parts while the initial episodes were being shot in Elstree, and at that stage, no one working on the production - including Hammond - had any idea how the story would end. O'Riordan shared the directing suties on this story with David Foster, who would later alternate directing stories in the second season with O'Riordan.

Transmission of the series began at 7:00pm on Tuesdays, July 10th 1979 with the second weekly episode shown on Thursdays. The programme was received favourably by viewers but suffered a setback after the third episode of the second story had been transmitted when a technical dispute on the ITV network blacked out the third channel for nearly three months. When transmissions resumed late in October, the network schedulers wisely decided to repeat the first three episodes of the second story before screening the remaining episodes. The series finally concluded on Thursday, November 22nd, 1979.

Sapphire and Steel was judged to have been a reasonable success and had proven favourable to both critics and viewers, so a second season was commissioned for production during 1980 and transmission from early January 1981. This second season would consist of 20 episodes which Reid and O'Riordan decided would break down into two six-part stories and two four-parters. A new character, Silver, would be introduced in the first story and then reappear in the last, and the producers cast David Collings in the role. Collings was best known at the time for his role as Julian Oakapple in the ITV children's series Midnight Is A Place, but he had also been seen prominently in episodes of UFO, Doctor Who and The Professionals.

Hammond set to work on the scripts for the first two stories, but felt unable to write all of the new episodes of the new season as he had been working too hard and was desperately in need of a break. Reid and O'Riordan turned to former Doctor Who writers Don Houghton and Anthony Read for the third story. Don Houghton had been one of Hammer Films' leading writers in the Seventies with credits on Dracula A.D. (1972), The Satanic Rites Of Dracula (1974), The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires (1974) and Shatter (1976), although he had previously scripted episodes of Emergency: Ward 10, Crossroads, Ace Of Wands and New Scotland Yard. At the time, he had recently completed two scripts for The Professionals and created the Scottish soap opera Take The High Road.

Anthony Read had made his name as producer and script editor on The Trouble-shooters and creator and producer of the highly-acclaimed The Lotus Eaters series. Like Hammond and Houghton, he was best known for his work on police and crime drama series such as Z Cars, Quiller, Crown Court and Sutherland's Law and he had also recently completed scripts for The Professionals prior to being approached to contribute to Sapphire and Steel. Apart from Doctor Who, Read's only previous experience with the genre was on the BBC series The Omega Factor, although he went on to script-edit the anthology series Hammer House Of Horror shortly after finishing his Sapphire and Steel scripts. Houghton amd Read's 'take' on the Sapphire and Steel format parodied the 1930s detective story genre which did not entirely meet with Hammond's approval, although he was impressed by some of the ideas that the writers introduced.

One of the biggest problems facing the producers on the second series was arranging the shooting schedule around the availability of David McCallum who was filming the Disney supernatural horror movie The Watcher In The Woods. In the end, it was decided to shoot the initial, six-part story separately and to record the three other stories in a single block after a short production break.

As he began writing the last, four-part story, Hammond felt that the series had gone as far as it could and that after the completion of the second season it should be rested for the time being. He did not want to rule out the possibility of further series in the future , but to suspend it with a cliff-hanging final episode that would leave the characters in limbo for a few years. The expectation of all concerned was that a third series would be produced at some point, but possibly not before 1982 or '83.

Set in a penthouse apartment, the third Sapphire and Steel story opened the second season on January 6th, 1981. The series was still being transmitted twice weekly, but was now in a later 8:00pm timeslot having been deemed unsuitable for transmission earlier in the evening. This six-part story was then followed on January 27th by a four-part story set in a junk shop, Hammond's personal favourite of the five stories he wrote for the series. Hammond was fascinated by old photographs and was quite taken with the idea of sepia-coloured children climbing in and out of them. He also very much enjoyed writing the character of Mr. Shape, the first identifiable adversary that his protagonists had encountered.

Plans for the second season to run its full ten weeks were curtailed after the transmission of this second story ended on February 5th, 1981. The new season was not performing as well as expected in the new timeslot and so the network schedulers decided to replace Sapphire and Steel with a new 18-part detective series, Bognor, based on a series of novels by Tim Heald and starring David Horovitch.

The third story of the season, the six-parter written by Houghton and Read, had been previewed in TV Times magazine at the start of the season in January, but was now held back until the autumn and eventually transmitted from Tuesday August 11th. The series moved back to its original 7:00pm timeslot but the second weekly episode ran on Wednesdays. Having lost the momentum and high profile of the earlier stories, the episodes failed to make a significant impact on viewing figures and, once again, the series was pulled from the schedules after the transmission of the last episode of the story on August 26th 1981.

Changes in the Independent Broadcasting Authority's rules governing the ITV franchises meant that ATV would only be allowed to maintain the Midlands franchise on the condition that parent company ACC (Associated Communications Corporation) reduced their shares in ATV to 51 per cent. Rather than dispose of 49 per cent of ATV, ACC decided to form a new company, Central Independent Television, to assume the Midlands franchise of which 49 per cent of the shares would be held outside ACC. ATV ceased transmissions on December 31st, 1981 although the company continued to make programmes for the ITV network which were broadcast by Central.

However, the executives at Central were keen that the channel be seen to broadcast innovative new self-produced programming during its initial months as a franchise-holder, so the final four episodes of Sapphire and Steel sat on the shelf until the following August when the story slipped almost unnoticed into the schedules for four nights from Thursday August 19th, 1982. Back in its original 7:00 timeslot on Tuesday and Thursdays, the short series came to a cliff-hanging conclusion on Tuesday, August 31st. Although viewers are unaware of it at the time, this was to be the final episode of Sapphire and Steel.

After the disastrously expensive failure of various movies financed by ACC - including Saturn 3 (1980), Raise The Titanic (1980), Green Ice (1981) and The Legend Of The Lone Ranger (1981), ATV's parent company found itself in financial difficulty which ultimtely saw the closure of ATV as a television production company. This curtailed any plans which might have existed for further episodes of Sapphire and Steel.

Although Sapphire and Steel has never been reshown on British television (apart from the repeat screening of the first three episodes of the second story in 1979), over the last 20 years the series has acquired a reputation as one of the finest science-fiction series ever produced in the UK. This reputation was bolstered by the complete video release of the series on VHS video cassette by ITC Home Video in 1992/1993, for which captions were added to the start of each serial in order to label the previously untitled stories as 'Adventures' ('Adventure One', 'Adventure Two', etc.).

With the purchase of the ATV catalogue by Carlton International Media in 1999, the stories were re-branded more appropriately as 'Assignments' ('Assignment One', 'Assignment Two', etc.) for marketing and promotional purposes, although new digital transfers of the episodes themselves remain untitled as originally broadcast.