Roger Price, creator and writer
Working for the BBC in the early 70s, I made a Junior Points of View episode in which kids said they thought most BBC children’s programmes were patronising rubbish. Soon after I was at a get-together for TV people where Monica Sims, the head of BBC children’s programmes, challenged me to do better. I said: “Give me a time slot and budget, and I will.” Lewis Rudd, the Independent Television equivalent, overheard and asked: “Did you mean that?”
We had lunch and he said: “We need an answer to Doctor Who.” Twenty years earlier, I’d been enrolled at a boarding school full of German kids. We were all the best of friends, and knowing that only seven or eight years earlier our fathers would have been trying to kill each other in the second world war made me think that we must be the next stage of human evolution. That was the inspiration for the idea I pitched to Lewis – kids who had special powers, but who were unable to use them to kill or do harm.
These “Tomorrow People” were telepathic and telekinetic, and could teleport or “jaunt” from one place to another via hyperspace. They became aware of their abilities after “breaking out” – deliberate shorthand for puberty. I wanted kids watching at home to feel that they too might be a Tomorrow Person, and that it was OK to feel different.
I’d worked with David Bowie a couple of times while directing a music show for Granada and discussed my ideas with him. Bowie was with me the day I had lunch with Peter Vaughan-Clarke, who we cast as Stephen, who breaks out in the first episode. As Peter left, Bowie said: “Oh, he’s a pretty thing.” He was alluding to a song of his which includes the line “You’ve got to make way for the Homo superior” – the name I’d given the Tomorrow People. I had them refer to Homo sapiens, ie “normal” people, as “saps”.
Right from the start, I said: “I’m not prepared to make a series about superbeings without black people being represented.” One comment I got from an executive was: “Oh, the advertisers won’t like that.” The advertisers loved it. I was encouraged to include props which could be sold to children, but at the time, the idea offended my leftwing mentality. Jaunting belts were easy to recreate at home.
Doctor Who had a much bigger budget and better resources. We didn’t have a special effects department – it was basically me and a couple of engineers. When we solved the problem of having Tomorrow People appear and disappear while the action carried on around them, I got a call from the Doctor Who producer asking how we’d done it – they still had actors having to stay frozen while the police box materialised. It took them another two years to work it out.
Often the Tomorrow People’s adversaries were from other worlds, but they also faced many Earthbound threats. One story was inspired by the Troubles; we referenced child slavery and drugs and even had a potential teenage recruit blown up onscreen by the Russian Intelligence Service. Despite the early time slot, it felt important not to talk down to children.
I was ready to end the show after its third series, but it was too successful and it was continued for another five. I carried on writing it and Vic Hughes took over as producer. Each episode took me two days. The original series didn’t quite make it to the 80s – towards the end, the budget couldn’t keep up with inflation, shooting was held up by strikes and a fire destroyed many of our props. I produced a new version for Nickelodeon in the early 90s and there was a US revival more recently, which I wasn’t fond of. It did away with the non-violence aspect, which was always important to me.
Nicholas Young, played John
John was the oldest member of the team, and lived in their underground lab with Tim, the Tomorrow People’s biological AI computer. Philip Gilbert, who provided the voice of Tim, was the only cast member apart from me to feature in every story. He spent most of his time perched on a stool behind a screen talking into a microphone – a frustrating situation for a former Rank film star. Early on, the show employed a scientific adviser and some of the tech was pretty forward-thinking. John even used a tablet-like device, which Samsung used as “prior art” evidence nearly 40 years later during a patent dispute with Apple.
Some of the spacecraft looked quite good even though they were built out of plastic cups from the canteen painted silver. But the aliens were often ridiculous. It’s difficult to act with a straight face against a puppet with an aerial on its head or something that looked like a Dalek on Viagra.
In the early days, when Tomorrow People were seen floating in hyperspace, we’d be standing on one foot in front of a yellow screen – then the yellow would be electronically overlaid with a star field or psychedelic effects. Later, we were hung on wires which could clearly be seen on TV. We looked like Thunderbirds puppets. I said: “Why don’t you paint the wires yellow?” Someone covered them with yellow gaffer tape and bingo! They disappeared.
Each series introduced a new regular Tomorrow Person as others came and went. Halfway through the run, Roger brought in Mike Holoway whose real-life band Flintlock doubled in the show as the Fresh Hearts. My character, John, was the sensible overseer alongside Liz, a student teacher played by Elizabeth Adare, who had joined the team in the second season, so Mike added a younger, more reckless element. In one story he got mixed up with a devil-worshipping sect, and during another, I got to give him a dressing down for trying to go out in a “fashionable” Nazi uniform.
The series was sold to 55 territories around the world, though Sweden turned it down. They said it was, “psychologically too violent.” Personally, I think the comedy elements were sometimes overplayed, but I suspect many people remember the programme being frightening because they found the title sequence disturbing. Dudley Simpson’s theme is a great, spooky piece of music. I once worked out a new arrangement with my son’s guitar teacher and uploaded it to YouTube, and when Greg Berlanti revived the show in 2013 and wanted to feature me, he showed Warner Brothers the clip. I read for the part of Tim, which ended up going to Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey, but they created a special guest role just for me.
The Tomorrow People: The Complete Look-In Comics is available from Chinbeard Books. Car Number Classics by Nicholas Young is available now.
