The Tomorrow People: Jaunting Back To The Seventies (article).

Before Stranger Things turned adolescence into a supernatural brand extension and before every other genre show discovered the ancient magic of “young people with powers,” there was The Tomorrow People, ITV’s gloriously peculiar, occasionally wobbly, often brilliant 1970s answer to Doctor Who. It first appeared in 1973, created by Roger Price for Thames Television, and ran until 1979 across 68 episodes. Which is quite a respectable innings for a children’s science fiction series made on what often looked like a budget assembled from old bus tickets and hope.

The premise was pure catnip. Somewhere among ordinary humanity, certain children and teenagers would “break out” into the next stage of evolution, Homo novis, armed with telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation, or “jaunting” if you wanted to sound properly in the club. They hid away in a secret Lab in an abandoned Underground station, guided by the biotronic computer TIM, and tried to help others like themselves while dodging militarists, aliens, cranks and the usual parade of humanity’s less attractive impulses. It was X-Men before most British telly had worked out how to afford one mutant, let alone several.

What made The Tomorrow People special was not simply that it had kids with powers. Plenty of things have kids with powers. These days you can barely open a streaming service without tripping over three of them and a grim prophecy. What mattered was the way Roger Price folded ideas about adolescence, outsiderdom, fear, prejudice and moral responsibility into the format. The Tomorrow People were not simply superior in the comic-book sense. They were different, secret, vulnerable and very often frightened. “Breaking out” was basically puberty with teleportation and existential panic. Which, to be fair, is not far off the school experience for some of us.

Then there was the prime barrier, one of the show’s most unexpectedly elegant ideas. The Tomorrow People could not kill. Not should not. Could not. Their evolved nature placed a psychological block on taking life. In another series this might have been an annoying narrative handbrake. Here it gave the programme a curious moral backbone. This was not a gang of psychic super-brats zapping their enemies into vapour between tea and homework. They had to out-think, out-feint and outlast their opponents. For a children’s series, that was rather sophisticated stuff, and a good deal more humane than many louder modern genre efforts with ten times the budget and half the imagination.

It also had one of the eeriest title sequences in British television. A clenched fist unfurling. Monochrome faces hurtling at the viewer. Odd, dreamlike imagery. Dudley Simpson’s theme creeping in like a signal from a future that may or may not be friendly. It looked like public information film surrealism had been crossbred with a telepathic nervous breakdown. If you were a child in the 1970s, there was every chance it lodged in your head and rented space there for life. Screenonline notes that director Paul Bernard played a major role in shaping that haunting opening, and it shows. The whole thing arrives before the story has even begun and whispers: this is not ordinary children’s television, sunshine.

And yet, despite the atmosphere and the ideas, The Tomorrow People was also magnificently, unavoidably, charmingly cheap. Cheap in the best British telefantasy sense. The effects did not always so much convince as make a brave argument in favour of themselves. Chromakey shimmered nobly. Robots looked as though they had been assembled in a hurry from bits of boiler and grievance. Sets could occasionally resemble school assembly halls commandeered by the future. But this somehow added to the programme’s flavour. You were not watching glossy illusion. You were watching television imagination in its natural habitat, fighting above its weight with all elbows out.

The cast helped enormously. Nicholas Young’s John gave the show authority and a slightly severe centre of gravity. Peter Vaughan-Clarke’s Stephen provided a more accessible way in for viewers, being the first of the team to “break out” on screen. Elizabeth Adare’s Elizabeth M’Bondo remains one of the series’ most important additions, not just dramatically but culturally too, as a Black female regular in a British genre programme of the mid-1970s. Philip Gilbert’s TIM, meanwhile, supplied the voice of calm intelligence from the Lab, sounding as if the future had decided to become a kindly headmaster made of circuits and bottled ectoplasm.

And what a flexible little beast the series was. Over its run it did alien invasions, espionage capers, time travel, occult silliness, political allegory and some wonderfully bonkers ideas that only 1970s children’s ITV would have waved through with a straight face. The Blue and the Green turned society into warring fashion tribes over coloured badges. Hitler’s Last Secret offered Nazi revivalism with a distinctly nasty edge. The Heart of Sogguth gave us pop music with apocalyptic overtones. This was a programme perfectly happy to throw together youth culture, psychic evolution, government menace and the occasional extra-terrestrial weirdo, then see what came out of the test tube. Often it came out looking slightly unstable. Often that was the point.

Looking back now, perhaps the most striking thing is how modern some of its anxieties feel. The fear of being singled out. The suspicion that governments will weaponise anything unusual. The idea that adolescence is not merely awkward but transformative, dangerous, world-altering. Even the divide between the Tomorrow People and the “Saps” has a nasty little social sting to it, like a children’s adventure version of generational panic. The series could be goofy, yes, but it was never entirely innocent. It understood that growing up often means realising the adult world is not especially wise, merely taller and better funded.

It also sits in that very British sweet spot where science fiction was allowed to be both earnest and daft at once. Doctor Who had that gift too, naturally, but The Tomorrow People had its own flavour. It was less about wandering into history and more about hidden evolution in the suburbs. Less cosmic tourist board, more psychic sixth form. It made the London Underground feel like the doorway to a secret future, which is no small trick given most of us are just trying to find the correct platform without losing the will to live.

The show did, of course, spawn later revivals. There was the 1990s remake, there were Big Finish audio dramas using members of the original cast, and there was the 2013 American attempt, which polished the concept until some of the old oddity leaked out through the floorboards. But the original remains the thing itself: the strange, earnest, telepathic chrysalis from which everything else emerged. Big Finish’s revival, in particular, showed the idea had real staying power, with Nicholas Young and Philip Gilbert returning to the world decades later.

So what is The Tomorrow People now? A cult relic? A nostalgia object? A period curiosity? Yes, all of that. But it is also one of those shows that reminds you British science fiction once had the nerve to be concept-heavy, morally engaged, faintly unsettling and utterly unembarrassed by its own ambition. It was about kids becoming the next step in humanity, but it was also about difference, conscience and the unnerving possibility that the world to come might already be sitting in double maths, waiting for its brain to catch fire.

For all the creaking sets, all the chromakey wobble, all the moments when the future looked suspiciously like an afternoon in Thames Television with a limited lunch allowance, The Tomorrow People still works because the central idea is sound as a pound and twice as strange. It understood that the real science fiction engine was never the effects. It was the thought experiment. What if the next generation really was different? What if it could read our minds, see our hypocrisies, and jaunt clean past our borders and bunkers? What if tomorrow was already here, and found us a bit primitive?

Quite a rude thought for teatime ITV, really. Which is one reason it still deserves remembering.