Something different for the article this week! Not a film but a TV Series! One, I wish would be picked up for a film somehow!
‘Crime Traveller was a 1997 science fiction detective television series produced by Carnival Films for the BBC based on the premise of using time travel for the purpose of solving crimes.
Anthony Horowitz created the series and wrote every episode. He got the idea while writing an episode of Poirot. Despite having over eight million viewers on a regular basis, Crime Traveller was not renewed after its first series, because according to Horowitz, “The show wasn’t exactly cut. There was a chasm at the BBC, created by the arrival of a new Head of Drama and our run ended at that time. There was no-one around to commission a new series…and so it just didn’t happen.” The final episode of the series was followed the next week by the first episode of Jonathan Creek, which became a popular long-running crime series.
In it, Jeff Slade is a detective with the CID department of the local police force led by Kate Grisham, although unusually for such a position he is an armed officer; carrying a handgun as routine. Slade is a good detective who gets results although his approach is somewhat maverick and his methods do leave a lot to be desired and have more than once landed him in trouble. Amongst Slade’s colleagues at the department is science officer Holly Turner who has a secret that Slade manages to uncover. Holly owns a working Time Machine that was built by her late father. The machine is able to take Slade and Holly back far enough in time to witness a crime as it happens and discover who committed it. As a result Slade’s track record with crime solving goes through the roof with case after case being solved in record time’ (Source: Website, Wikipedia).
Starring Michael French, who had just left Eastenders and Chloe Annett, better know for Red Dwarf, the acting was wooden at times, the storyline has more holes than a million hole golf course but there wa something about it. Having finally obtained the 8 episode DVD recently, I could keep my eyes of it. I still can’t get my head around the massive paradoxes in the show where the ‘things changed’ happened first then they caused Slade and Turner to go back in time?!? Still with me? But that was half the charm of the series You saw potential in it to become a classic, up ther with the likes of Quantum Leap.
The BBC had been looking for something in the Saturday night slot. Doctor Who (The TV Movie) had been on and got great viewing fiigures. As stated above the week after the final episode Jonathan Creek started, which returns shortly. Horowitz is stated as saying, for the reasons above, that Crime Traveller was the ‘one that got away’.
If you ever come across a copy of the show, I urge you to watch. It really did have something and I just wish it had continued. Hey, there is even slight link to Doctor Who! In one episode, for no reason whatsoever, you hear a few bars of the Who theme and you see, the Tardis. Hell, why not go the whole hog and bring them into a Who episode! I can dream huh!
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I honestly have no recollection of this, but it sounds like a poorly realised version of Spielberg’s Minority Report (a Philip K Dick story is the original source, like so many SF blockbusters) which I thought was very good. Minority Report avoids the temporal paradox problem by having crimes predicted precognitively. I’m now wondering how far back in time the Crime Traveller could go? He must surely have been tempted to travel back and reveal the identiy of Jack the Ripper???
I don’t think it really thought in depth about the paradoxes. For instance. The incident will have happened or is happening WITH them as part of the events more often than not. They then realise they need to go back or can go back to see things happen and then events play out with thermselves already there in the action. So a lot of the time there were two of themselves avoiding each other as they cannot meet. Als in answer to your question, the amount of time the ‘Time Machine’ gave them was randon and anywhere between 30 secs (not often) and 7 days, hence they couldn’t go back to the Ripper days. It was all rather confusing but you had to put that to the side as it really was quite enjoyable, I have the DVD if you wish to see it Paul.