Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: David Warner, Susannah Harker, Keith Drinkel, Lisa Daniely, Victoria Gould, James Daniel Wilson.
Time goes by, they say it’s the time of your life, the best of days, the ones that you will look back upon with a fair degree of fondness; and yet there is also pain, suffering, the sense of alienation and fear that hides in those memories, the real sense of confidence taken apart, the spirit shattered, and as for the pupils, the first love’s kiss can be a mess, the promise of a future swept away. It is no wonder that when we look back at our days at school, depending on the mood we are in or the company we are keeping, we experience the high of the reminisce, the low of emotional recall.
Time’s greatest ally is emotional resonance, the dichotomy of returning to that one place, the chance to sit down at your old desk and look through the eyes of both the adult that you are, and the child that that you were; Time flows through both memories at once, Time lays its own trap for the unsuspecting.
The School, alongside prison, is arguably the perfect place for the corrosive nature of Time to draw strength, for it soak up the atmosphere of pressure, dreams and aspirations, whilst also infecting all who walk through the halls with the screams and shouts, the beatings, of days long since passed.
Sapphire and Steel are called to investigate the damage being wrought by Time upon a school celebrating its 100th year, but not is all it seems, not all is hymns and registers in the place of learning, instead there is danger, expanded fear, and forgotten places which have the ability to turn any adult back to the child in time that they were.
Whilst the premise and originality of the story holds great fascination for the long-term fan of Sapphire and Steel, the story line itself is allowed to drift in parts, and at one point it suffers from a kind of writing apathy, as if a moment was reached and there was nowhere else to go but onwards. The overall quality of the piece is not completely devalued by this sense of intrusion, it is though to be noted that it makes the story one that could be seen as less than it could have been; a promise not quite fulfilled.
School is supposed to be the best years of your life, but what kind of life do we leave in the memories of the walls that surrounded us and the corridors where we once left our invisible footprints. If buildings have memories, then The School is not the place to cross Time’s path.
Ian D. Hall