Revenge of the geeks
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Juddery
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Mark Juddery's biography and other articles by this writer
The Tomorrow People now seems very "yesterday". It is fondly remembered as a poor man's Doctor Who – and as Doctor Who was notoriously cheap, that's not saying much. Yet when The Tomorrow People was produced in the 1970s, children adored it. They forgave (or were oblivious to) the laughable production values and wooden performances. For them, the show was something special.
But none of this explains why, three decades later, the DVDs and audio plays are selling so well. This is not just nostalgia. Many of the series' current fans were not even born when The Tomorrow People ceased production in 1979. For people raised on the digital effects of The Matrix, The Tomorrow People looks like amateur night. A short-lived revival, produced in the 1990s, was glossier, with better acting – but nobody cares. The original, tacky series is still the favourite.
The Tomorrow People centred on a group of youngsters who had developed telepathic and telekinetic powers. Keeping their powers a secret from the world, they had a hide-out in the London Underground. To some, therein lies the attraction: the heroes were ghettoised for being "different". "These days it's difficult to talk about the original Tomorrow People without mentioning all those supposed thinly– veiled homosexual allusions," wrote the British magazine SFX recently. "We'll just say ‘homo superior', teenagers who ‘break out' and ‘hide from the outside world' and let your minds do the rest."
Thus the characters in The Tomorrow People have unwittingly been labelled "gay icons". However, once we see past the colourful sets and the garish costumes (this was the 1970s, remember?), we notice that there is much more to them. The term "homo superior" (also used, and not questioned, by the macho comic-book heroes The X-Men) referred to the next stage in human evolution. The characters were youngsters with psychic powers. It suggested that the human race was gradually moving forward – a thrilling concept, made even more exciting by the oft-mentioned point that many people have such latent powers. You too could be a "tomorrow person". While their adventures concerned more pedestrian missions, like defeating megalomaniacs and alien monsters, the concept can be appreciated on another level: an exploration of humanity's potential. No wonder it still has a following.
When I first saw The Tomorrow People, in reruns, I was in the perfect demographic. As a teenager, I was publishing a magazine dedicated to Doctor Who with a friend from school. Rather than the latest Dire Straits LP, my pocket money would go to comic books or, naturally, Doctor Who novels. Instead of spending my weekends at the beach like most of my classmates, I would travel to science fiction conventions, where I could discuss favourite television shows with people who had memorised every storyline from Blake's Seven, or could argue vehemently over the best episodes of The Twilight Zone. Though I didn't attend these events in costume (unlike many of my friends), my fashion sense was not particularly cool. Unlike science fiction, it wasn't a priority for me. (While many people from that era now cringe at photos of themselves wearing mullets and glittery Simon Le Bon trousers, I avoided that phase. My photos of the time are not exactly flattering, however.
At the time, science fiction was socially undesirable. I was a "geek" back when that was a demeaning term. It was still the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock precariously close to midnight. The last thing that any "sane" person wanted to do was look at the future. Such fantasies were fine for younger children, but not for an image-conscious adolescent.
Most people over fifteen were laughing at Doctor Who; critics scorned the cheap visual effects and talked of "wobbly sets". (This was unfair. The sets were cheap, and often tacky, but they didn't wobble.) They never got the point. The cheapness worked in its favour. Unable to afford Hollywood sets or state-of-the-art visual effects, the focus was on old-fashioned elements like story and character.
CUT TO 2006. NOW THE TECHNO-SAVY WORLD OF SCIENCE FICTION is not only fashionable, but utterly real. Mobile phones look like the flip-top communicators of Star Trek, while palmtop computers, surfing the internet, suddenly make The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy look prophetic as well as amusing. Science fiction pondered the world of possibilities – not just clichés like alien attack and interstellar travel, but the potential shape of the future. Writers and designers, who possessed the imagination but perhaps not the technical know-how, were envisioning these worlds in the best way they could.
Fans of most literary genres tend to look down on television – and science fiction fans are no exception. Nonetheless, Star Trek's prophecies (in design, if not technology) have proven to be self-fulfilling, and the science fiction television shows of the past are treated with more respect than they were in their prime. Young viewers, willing to forgive the cheap sets and primitive visual effects of Gen– X favourites, are discovering these gems on DVD (and, perhaps more commonly, internet shareware). Of course, the perspective from which they see these programs is quite different from that of the original viewers. Back then, they were visions of the future; now they are relics of the past – and in most cases, this is blatantly obvious.
While they rightly predicted that there would be a future, these television shows have so far gotten most of it wrong. If we had followed the warnings of the ABC's 1980 series Timelapse, New South Wales would have been under a corrupt fascist government by 1991. In hindsight, the well-researched 1975 British series Space: 1999 did better than most (scientific plausibility aside), designing a future so credible that it now belies its age – until the lead heroine ruins the fantasy by writing her diary on a manual typewriter. We are suddenly reminded that, while science fiction was merrily predicting space stations on the moon and talking robots capable of witty retorts, nobody was predicting laptop computers.
Hence, when Doctor Who was revived in 2005 – fifteen years after the last episode – some executives in the BBC assumed that the new series would fail, destined to be watched only by fanatics and nostalgic older viewers. Instead, it was more popular than ever. For the first time, Doctor Who was no longer just a children's series with a dedicated cult following; it was now one of Britain's highest-rating adult dramas. Science fiction is more relevant than ever.