Shaun O'Riordan -- An Interview

by Rob Stanley

Here, at long last is the result of that transcribed interview.

RS:

Hi Shaun. First, I'd just like to thank you for agreeing to talk with me on such short notice.

SOR:

No problem, Rob.

RS:

Shaun, one of the reasons I asked you for this interview is primarily because it seems that there are an awful lot of people on the Internet who still have a great deal of interest in Sapphire & Steel, which never seems to have died.

SOR:

Well, that's marvellous - very gratifying. How old were you when you first saw it?

RS:

Myself? I was about seven-

SOR:

God-no! Really? Well, it was meant for people older than you!

RS:

Yes - so my parents kept telling me - I think that was part of its allure for me! In fact, I was banned from watching the final season, because my father had sat and watched the final episode of the Capsule story with me and had disapproved - very strongly - of the creature which was seen.

SOR:

It was a very effective idea, wasn't it? I must say that I think the writing for Sapphire & Steel was superior. I think that P. J. Hammond was remarkable. He was very different for the time, wasn't he?

RS:

How did you first become involved with the production of Sapphire & Steel, Shaun?

SOR:

P. J. Hammond's agent sent the idea for the very first episode - of the two children and the time-switch - to A.T.V, as it was then, and David Reid, who was the head of Drama, showed me the script and said, "I like P. J. Hammond as a writer, but I don't know what the hell to do with this!" I read it and I said, "I want to make it". It was as simple as that. The thing that was really remarkable was that I read the script and said that I thought David McCallum would be the kind of actor to play Steel, and somebody else replied, "Well, you'll want a blonde girl like Joanna Lumley with him". And everybody else said, "Well, you can't have either McCallum or Lumley because they're much too expensive for television - it'll cost you an arm and a leg". The show was originally scheduled for 5.30pm, with a budget of around £30,000 per episode, which was very little, especially when you remember that the visual effects in those days weren't done electronically, as they are today. Anyhow, I sent the script to McCallum's agent, who said, "Well, he's not doing anything at the moment - you never know". Next thing - back came the reply, "Will do it - want 5 million per episode"!!

RS:

Grief!

SOR:

(laughing) No - it wasn't that much, but it was an awful lot. So, anyway, I went to the Head of Drama, and said, "Look, McCallum wants it, but you'll have to up the budget if you want him to do it". He said, "You can't do that at 5.30 in the afternoon - we'll have to put it out at 7.30 instead…if you can get Joanna, I'll give you the extra budget". So I sent the script to Joanna - back she came, 'yes, she'd do it'. So, having got both McCallum and Joanna, they upped the budget and gave us a 7.30pm slot.

RS:

And that's how it metamorphosed from a children's show into more of a teenager/adult crossover?

SOR:

That's right; it was the fact that McCallum and Lumley had said they'd do it that changed the stakes. Interesting, isn't it? The script remained good, but it was the actors who upped the odds.

RS:

It's interesting to note that, watching the first story, it seems to be targeted more to a younger audience, in contrast to the remainder of the scripts. It looks almost as though the more chilling aspects of the script could have been written in hindsight.

SOR:

During the first story? Well, no, actually Peter Hammond hadn't finished it - when we started shooting, he still hadn't finished. And, in fact, even by the time Lead appeared, Peter still didn't know how he was going to finish the blinking thing! So McCallum and I sat up over an entire weekend, trying to work out what we could do with the sets we'd got, and how we could end it. We came up with what was really rather a tame ending - it was not a good ending, and I thought we'd let it down. If we'd have had more time and a bit more loot, we could have done something stronger. I thought P.J. Hammond deserted us a bit on that last episode.

RS:

I know I thought - and I'm not alone in this - that the character of Lead in that first story was somewhat incongruous; he just came across as this huge black chap who sits about, thinking about his stomach and laughing a lot, which didn't really seem to be in keeping with the general atmosphere of the rest of the show.

SOR:

The idea was fun - that Lead should be less mystical than Sapphire & Steel. Lead was sort of the heavy man, who got shot around the universe, doing the boring jobs, whereas Sapphire & Steel were glinty, mystical characters; Lead had no magic at all - he was just muscle and brawn.

RS:

Do you have any particularly striking memories of the situations which occurred during filming? For instance, I notice from Joanna's autobiography that she relates a story which occurred during the filming of the second adventure; it was where she had to wear those opaque, black contact lenses, and those scenes were being shot during the on-going electricians strike, which brought filming to an abrupt stand-still that day. Joanna relates how she was inadvertently left behind by the crew, unable to remove those horrible lenses, blind, and too terrified to move.

SOR:

Yes - I do remember this - it was true. That was the second story, set in the abandoned railway station, and it took two of us to direct it. I directed the first adventure, but with this one - we had to make them so fast, it wasn't true - I didn't have time to plan the third story and direct all the episodes for the second. What happened was, I got Dave Foster, who was another Director at A.T.V, and he came in and directed all of the scenes upstairs, whilst I directed all the scenes shot on the platform. That platform was magic, because the designer (Stanley Mills) worked out that if we used Studio D, which was the Light Entertainment studio…I don't know if you remember, but Light Entertainment had this trick in those days, where you have a studio with no horizon - where people dance and sing in a 'white world'. Now, the way they made that was that the studio was built with a sunken trench all the way around, just in front of the backcloth. They lit the floor with the lights in the trench and up against the backcloth, and then trimmed the lights, so that they were the same brightness on both floor and backcloth, and the camera couldn't see the difference. Anyway, what Stanley did was to reverse it, and he built the edge of the railway platform on the inner edge of this trench. At the end of the trench, he painted a plaque with a tunnel entrance and, in the middle of that, he stuck a piece of white paper onto a piece of black cloth which was hung behind this painted arch, and it looked fantastic! Just look for that, the next time you watch that story! So, I did all of those scenes, and the flowers changing, and David Foster did all of the clothes changing and the submarine upstairs.

RS:

It was certainly a very striking story, wasn't it - and the one, when most people are talking about Sapphire & Steel - that seems to be the best remembered.

SOR:

Yes. You see, P. J. really had this thing about death and revenge - about people who'd been 'mal-killed' as it were, like the soldier who'd been killed after the Armistice, and the animals in the following story; he was consumed with this idea of revenge after you'd been wrongfully killed - this haunted P.J., and he piled these characters into the stories. That was the magic for me, in him - that he wrote from his balls. He didn't just sit down and think, 'Now what can I write about this time?' - he poured it out.

RS:

Did you find it very difficult working on the series, Shaun?

SOR:

I found it very, very hard work because, as I say, we were working without electronic trickery, and everything had to be done either with lights or mechanical, physical tricks, and so it was very time-consuming and difficult to make. We'd do take-after-take to try to get the effects right. Very costly. For instance, if you remember where the flowers change in the second story, the only way to shoot that was to get a camera, lock it rigid, shoot with no flowers, stop the camera, put the flowers in place - we couldn't have any hanging baskets because they'd have moved - and roll the cameras again. And then the two shots would be mixed in editing. The terrible problem we had with those type of shots was that, with the television cameras which we had in those days, to stop still pictures from burning into the tube, they did something called orbiting, which mean that the picture scan orbited by about three microns in a circle. The eye couldn't see it, but the picture was offset in each frame just enough to stop it burning into the tube. Now with this orbiting, if you did a mix, the picture would invariably jump, so we had to have somebody physically dive into the inside of the camera and remove the card which controlled the orbiting, take the shot, and get the card replaced as quickly as possible!

RS:

If the series were, somehow, to continue, Shaun, do you think that you'd actively attempt to become re-involved with it?

SOR:

Well, of course, I've retired now…

RS:

Supposing you hadn't, though - playing devil's advocate?

SOR:

Oh, if I hadn't, I'd have gone back to it like a shot! McCallum is one of the very few actors I've worked with who I've continued to keep in touch with. He rang me about two weeks ago, wondering why I'd changed my 'phone number - every time he's across, he calls; he really became a great friend during the filming of the series.

RS:

I remember, from what P.J. Hammond said, that David was very engrossed in the actual mechanics of putting Sapphire & Steel together.

SOR:

Oh, listen - he was on the prop department the whole time! Oh, yeah, he loved that, and was very taken with all the tricks.

RS:

What were David and Joanna like to work with as a team?

SOR:

Well, it's funny. Joanna was going through a patch, having just done the Avengers, where she'd always played these characters who weren't your average housewives. She had this kind of look about her - this ethereal power, and I think Sapphire & Steel convinced her that she didn't want to do that any more. So she struggled a bit I think - not with the part, but with wanting to get away from that sort of thing. David, on the other hand, was immersed in it totally. Now, I'm not suggesting that Joanna didn't deliver the goods, because she's an extraordinary professional.

RS:

She writes of the show very fondly in her autobiography, but she did mention an effects problem; apparently, when it was first discussed how her powers in action would be demonstrated, there was an idea of using a false rubber vein in her forehead, which would pulsate - is that right?

SOR:

That's right! The original thing was going to be the vein in the forehead. But by the time the make-up department had put putty all over her forehead, with a little rubber tube buried in it, I can't tell you…you could see it from two miles away - oh, God - it was a terrible, disastrous thing!! It was actually the lighting man and myself who came up with the blue, glowing eyes, with the blue effect being Chromakeyed in from the make-up girl's dress, which was just the right shade of blue!

RS:

Talking about the Chromakey effect, were there any scenes which required Joanna to actually wear blue lenses; I ask because, in the Capsule story, on the rooftop, it looks as though lenses are being used?

SOR:

Hmmm - do you know, I really can't remember - you've got me on that one - although it's a distinct possibility because we did those scenes on film, and you couldn't use Chromakey with film. I'll tell you why I don't remember clearly; we shot that on the top of A.T.V House, on their roof. It was a flat roof, seven stories up, with no railings at the edge, and I couldn't cope with that - I couldn't go near the edge. The cameraman stood with his heels hanging over the edge, and McCallum joined him - they apparently had absolutely no sense of fear. I had to get down on all fours just to go anywhere close - I can't tell you - I just couldn't cope with it!

RS:

Yes, it was a gripping set of scenes - especially where David's out on the ledge, supposedly against the outside of the invisible capsule.

SOR:

Yes, I couldn't deal with that at all. I mean, he was really out on the edge of the bloody thing - horrifying - and with me vomiting quietly at the side of the camera!! It was a very fierce story and I even had to go to an abattoir to shoot some of the pictures. And that, to a layman -well, it's not what you're used to! Then, of course, we had problems with story five, which P.J. Hammond felt he couldn't write, so we had to go with Houghton and Reid, who came up with a kind of Agatha Christie set-up - not what I'd had in mind, but with the crew booked, we had to go along with it. I was very impressed with those two men, and the rest of the cast were brilliant, especially Patience Collier; unfortunately, the rest of the cast absolutely loathed her - not to mention loathing me too, for thinking she was brilliant!

RS:

Well, Shaun - I know that your time is tight, but I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank you for speaking with me, and to let you know that there's an awful lot of people out there who still rate the work you did on Sapphire & Steel as first-class.

SOR:

Thanks, Rob - it was wonderful talking about the show, which I loved, and most gratifying to hear that the work we did lives on through the fans out there.