Timeslip
 "Have
you ever had the feeling that you've been here before and yet
everyone tells you you can't have been? Or perhaps you've felt
that this has all happened to me before just like it's happening
now, and I know what's going to happen next. Well, a lot of people
do get these sensations and nobody can yet explain them".
So began the first episode of the first Timeslip story (The
wrong end of time) introduced by Peter Fairley, a science
correspondent for ITN Television. Part adventure story, part
puzzle and part horror story, this intelligent series told the
tale of Liz Skinner and Simon Randall in four separate
stories.
Liz and Simon were two children who found a time barrier that
enabled them to travel into their own past and future. In this way
they were able to help others, while constantly exposing
themselves to danger.
The invisible time barrier was at a deserted naval station in a
Midlands village (run in 1940 by Commander Traynor). Liz and Simon
simply fell through a "hole" into another time (and
sometimes another location). When they crossed the barrier they
were able to see into the present but were not visible themselves
to those they had left behind.
The issue of time travel was a confusing one at the best of
times. For example, when Liz was shot she felt pain and saw blood
but had no wound because she didn't actually exist in that time!
Liz's parents (Frank and Jean Skinner) were heavily involved in
their adventures. Jean's telepathic link to her daughter enabled
her to see Liz's experiences in other times. Commander Traynor
also figured large in the adventures. He was a government
scientist with hidden secrets and a greed for knowledge - He
headed up the "Ministry of Forward Development".
Although Timeslip was a children's show it took onboard many
adult themes, such as the destruction of the Earth's climate, the
dangers involved in the progress of science and the
inter-dependence of past, present and future.
 Some
of the times and places visited by Liz and Simon were; World War
II (where Liz meets her father when he was a young naval officer
and the children help to dismantle a secret laser before it falls
into the hands of the Germans); A future England (now a tropical
jungle due to climatic changes); and an Antarctic research base
(called The Icebox) in the year 1990 where experiments with a
longevity drug called HA57 are being carried out on human guinea
pigs (and Liz meets her mum in the future performing experiments
in telepathy)
This episode featured one of the scariest scenes of my
childhood when Liz discovers the body of a woman who took a faulty
batch and aged rapidly to 100 years old!
The time barrier was basically a split screen effect which
allowed characters to "vanish" into thin air. In 1971 I
hopefully hunted high and low all over the Yorkshire village I
lived in for a Time Barrier. For the record, I never found one .
EPISODES
The wrong end of time (6 episodes) | The time of the
Icebox (6 episodes) | The year of the burn up (8 episodes) | The day of the clone (6 episodes)
|
