Tomorrow People: A Much Needed Holiday

‘The Tomorrow People’ is a show of enormous ambition, being set at all times and all points in the universe and relying heavily on special effects, but it is undone by the execution, which is cheap and clunky and relies upon a largely untutored cast of kids to paper over the cracks. Where the show was successful, however, was in being emotionally disturbing. It’s easy enough to have a monster jump out at you, of course, and lots of people do that, but ‘The Tomorrow People’ took an indirect but no less affecting route, specialising in showing its youthful audience things that would nag at them and, later, twist their dreams into nightmares (I speak from personal – although not recent - experience).

Case in point:‘A Much Needed Holiday’, in which the young homo superiors repair to a distant planet to put on false beards, wear flip flops and swim listlessly and endlessly up and down an eight foot long paddling pool. Outside of the resort, however, nasty aliens with faces like the gravel at the bottom of a fish tank are at large, and are steadily stripping the planet of precious stones using a slave force of adolescent boys. They treat the kids appallingly: zapping them with stun sticks, making them grope around in the mud, putting them in cages, chaining them together as if they were livestock. I can clearly remener that, as a kid, I didn’t like that; I didn’t like that at all, and I was unable to process it before putting my sleepy head on. The resulting bad dream was almost as disturbing as the one I had about Terry-Thomas chasing me around the dining room table whilst dressed as a Pharaoh.  

Happily, back in the awake world, the Tomorrow People were able to sort it all out, freeing the boy slaves and exiling the arsehole aliens to some shitty rock in the middle of nowhere – forever.

I met Mike Holloway once, quite by chance, in the early nineteen nineties (he hired a video from the shop I was working in). Actually, I met him twice, as he had to return the film, and the second time he signed my Look In annual and we had a little chat about the show and the seventies in general. He was a really nice, cheerful, enthusiastic chap, but couldn’t quite disguise the wistfulness in his voice when he described the decade as ‘great times – the best’. I assumed he was talking about being in a group and on posters and starring in a TV show where he got to fire a ray gun every week, not about his legendary impersonation of a man who would later be revealed as the devil incarnate.

I particularly like the way he artlessly gives a little look to the right to get his cue. Bless him, he's just a boy.

The Tomorrow People: The Heart of Sogguth

'Do you really think that young Mike playing an African tribal drum on television could raise the Devil from Hell and bring about the destruction of the Universe?'

Well, yeah, or, at least, that's the general idea of 'The Heart Of Sogguth', a 1977 story from the fifth series of 'The Tomorrow People'. It all starts when the mysterious Jake (Roddy Maude-Roxby) starts sniffing around Mike's band Flintlock, sorry, Fresh Hearts, and promising that, under his management, their anaemic brand of adenoidal pop will be 'bigger than The Beatles'. Immediately, we know that he must be evil. He's actually a Professor of Ethnic Culture and the head of a way out religious sect who worship Sogguth, an ancient evil who's essence is captured in the aforementioned drum, and has the power to control minds through dark percussive rhythms (yes, that is Bella Emberg freaking out at the band's rehearsal).

A slight and rather short story (the two episodes only run for about half an hour combined once you take out the credits, recaps and ad breaks), it nevertheless has three interesting things about it: the rather kinky initiation that John goes through, the tribal surfabilly / haunted house moog jam that Fresh Hearts, sorry, Hearts Of Sogguth, play on the telly, and the extraordinary ending in which they conclude that where there is the Devil, there is also a God, so we should probably all go to Church once in a while.

Anyway, here's that tribal surfabilly / haunted house moog jam, serving as a soundtrack to a really slow stun gun fight between the forces of good and (temporarily) evil.

As our friend Piper Gates previously pointed out, the commentaries on the 'TP' DVD sets are extremely amusing, and this one highlighted the fact that the scary skeleton left behind at the show's climax is a lot less scary when you notice that it still has the hook in the top for hanging it up.

Hauntological Signifiers

A few of the extraordinary images used in the classic 'The Tomorrow People' title sequence.

Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow

Four months after the first show was aired, 'The Tomorrow People' truly arrived when it was awarded a crappy spin off cartoon strip in all conquering comic / TV Times for kids 'Look In'. The strip lasted for five years, eventually running out of steam just before the show did.

The mastheads tell the story of the homo superior's slightly chaotic recruitment policy, especially in the crowded team photo prior to the sacking of Stephen and Tyso in favour of Mike Holloway. Latecomer Andrew is not featured, as no-one could be bothered by that point.

End Of The Pier

Ghost Train scenes from 'The Vanishing Earth'. The invented effects were much more elaborate than the real and rather clunky thing, but it had a certain charm.

Clackers

Some more shots of 1973 Clacton On Sea.

FYI, you can no longer ride your motorbike onto the pier; the Ghost Train is long gone; the Steel Stella rollercoaster burned down only a few months after the show was filmed, and the Dolphinarium closed in the nineteen eighties. When I went last year, I sought out / trespassed into the abandoned Dolphinarium and found it slowly decaying, barred to the public but still intact, concrete seats,  half-empty pools and all, although I believe they have plans to do something with it this year.

Here's an aerial shot of how it looked a couple of years ago. I didn't take it: I don't like heights. The green square is the pool.

Thank you for your attention.

The Tomorrow People: The Vanishing Earth

'The Vanishing Earth' is a 1973 story from the second series of 'The Tomorrow People'. The four episodes take place during a time of increased natural disasters, which turn out to be aftershocks from illicit 'magmanite' mining activity conducted by aliens Sandor and Spidron, a ruthless dolly bird and a sibilant root / humanoid hybrid dressed in a Torquemada outfit respectively.

It's all pretty silly, but I find it irresistible simply because much of it was filmed in Clacton On Sea, exactly sixteen miles from where I was brought up. In the seventies I'd go there to pick up sweets from the grabbers and shells from the beach; in the eighties I went to try and pick up girls; in recent years I've taken my own family and picked up the cost.

The pier and the beach surrounding it is one of my favourite places, so it's great to see it recorded in this way, especially at a time when I was getting to know it and it still seemed like one of the most exciting destinations on Earth.

The Tomorrow People: World's Away

'Worlds Away' is a fun but unsatisfying story from 'The Tomorrow People'. first broadcast in 1975. In it, the homo superior get to go to another planet for the first time, Pyrie, where an evil race of jackal headed aliens called the Khultan are in charge, oppressing and eating the humanoid population. 6,000 year earlier, the Khultan had built our very own pyramids, which are, apparently, actually psychic power suppressing machines.

So fun, yes, but why unsatisfying? Well, Keith Chegwin is in it, but, apart from that, its because they take the time to invent these terrifying Anubis lookalike aliens (and I was really scared of them as a kid), but never actually involve them in the story apart from as holograms and as a disguise. At the end, it turns out that they're not even there any more, they've moved on and left the planet to itself, like intergalactic absentee landlords. It just seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity, really.

This was actually broadcast before the Dr. Who serial 'Pyramids Of Mars', which reiterates the idea of Egyptian Gods as coming from another world, but, quite honestly, Dr. Who looks like 'Solaris' in comparison to this enjoyable but ridiculously slipshod effort.