BELT UP! AS MARKS ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY, WE REVISIT OLD JAUNTS WITH CREATOR ROGER PRICE
DOCTOR WHO may be marking a significant anniversary this year, but so is its competition from the other side, The Tomorrow People: its 50th.
Thames Television, this teatime kids’ show saw confused teens discovering new abilities, including telepathy and the ability to teleport, or “jaunt”.
Considered the next stage of human evolution, they were referred to as Homo superior.
Over the course of eight series and 22 stories, these young heroes (aided by biotronic computer TIM) took on the likes of shapeshifting robot Jedikiah, evil god Sogguth, ameboid aliens disguised as jumpsuits and your actual Adolf Hitler from their secret base the Lab – all without striking a blow in anger, thanks to their code of non-violence.
EVOLVING THE IDEA
The man responsible for the madness was producer/writer Roger Price. As he tells SFX in a Zoom call from his home in Canada, the seeds of the idea were sown around 1952, when Price (whose father was working for Farouk I, the recently deposed king of Egypt) was attending a Germanlanguage boarding school in Switzerland.
“I would have died for them, and they probably would have for me,” he says of his schoolfriends. “They were Germans and I was British. The war had been over for seven, eight years. Before that, our fathers had been trying to kill each other. I thought there was an insanity back then which these kids were nothing to do with.
“I thought we may be the next stage of human evolution – a superior kind of human being to these bumbling, stupid adults. My proof for that was the fact that the adults’ heads didn’t stick out at the back, and ours did – that’s where our extra bit of brain was. But all stars who received early screen credits in guest roles included Nicholas Lyndhurst, Keith Chegwin, Peter Duncan and (most embarrassingly…) Peter Davison. Elizabeth was mostly absent during season six, with it explained that she’s working on diplomatic missions for the Galactic Federation. In reality, actor Elizabeth Adare was pregnant.
