Rewatching telly from your dim and distant youth can be a dangerous thing. In fact any kind of nostalgia inherently carries with it the danger of disappointment when you relive that thing, or that moment and realise that when you were a lot younger, the world seemed bigger, scarier and less predictable.
Hearing that ITVX had the entire run of spooky TV show "Sapphire and Steel" gave me a conundrum. Keep my memories of that show intact from when I watched it as a kid and it chilled me to the bone, or rewatch it, risking disappointment and a ceremonial smashing of the rose coloured specs I wore about the series.
I opted for the latter, and rather than dive in from episode 1 I made a bee-line for the episodes that gave me nightmares for quite some considerable time, and still make my imagination work overtime even to this day.
Series 2 Episode 7 consisted of a trio of episodes about a shabby old pawn shop and a seemingly innocuous missing persons case. Our heroes appear on the scene to find children playing in a dirty back-yard but nothing else seems amiss, until they enter the shop and the apartments above it and realise there's a dark force at work, lurking in the shadows and messing with interdimensional time.
So far it all sounds like standard S&S stuff, but what changed things was the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1, and the 'reveal' of the big bad - and the start of my kiddie nightmares. This fucker...
Known only as "Shape", he's the man without a face - revealed to be an interdimensional being who used a particular novel method of moving between his realm and ours, injecting himself into every single photograph ever taken.
Let that plot point sink in for a moment, and imagine you lived at a time where a family album of real photographs, developed and stuck in a book, were actually a 'thing' compared to the intangibility of digital photography that we all know and are familiar with today.
THIS FACELESS BASTARD IS IN EVERY PHOTOGRAPH!
Needless to say as a 9 year old, that night I turned all the family photos on sideboards face down or took them off the walls. That simple idea that he was there, maybe tucked into the background, behind a curtain, the person with their back to you, was utterly chilling - more so than any other aspect of the show to date.
When you actually saw Shape's 'resting faces' you couldn't help but be a bit disapointed / bemused (Oh look, it's that bloke off the "Tunes" advert! Course you can, Malcolm!)
Then again he also had an alter-ego that for some reason only Sapphire could see...(and to be honest, this guy is WAY more sinister - let's not dwell on the wicked grin he cracks as he burns one of the missing people to death in a photograph he's just set fire to...)
But it's Shape in his faceless form that elicits the most terror. Creeping up and down corridors like some lost element from a Rene Magritte painting, he's totally soft-spoken but horribly effective as a baddie, almost getting the better of Sapphire and Steel but defeated only by the chance discovery of an old children's kaleidoscope (and you know what added insult to injury? Getting one for Christmas that same bloody year as a kid, ARRGHHH!)
Rewatching it as a grown adult didn't diminish its power. Sure, the script was as clunky as hell and in places it felt like David McCallum and Joanna Lumley were really phoning it in, but the two actors playing "Shape" (Phillip Bird as the younger incarnation, and Bob Hornery (great name!) as the older slightly more sinister version) really went all out to be menacing and overpoweringly nasty.
I feel like I ought to go back and watch some of the other episodes (particularly the one about the haunted railway station and the WW1 ghost) but this was the one I just had to settle in my mind as being as scary as I remembered, and hell, it really was!
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