Time Travel is Dangerous
Muswell Hill, a suburb of north London known for music and murder, home to Alexandra Palace from where the BBC’s television service was first broadcast, noted for its “curious inhabitants, people of imagination and ingenuity,” among them Ruth and Megan, owners of the vintage clothing and curio shop Cha Cha Cha, and the members of the Technology, Engineering, Scientific Thought and Innovation Society currently presided over with disdain by Martin Onions.
Ruth and Megan looking to the past for profit and the Society looking to the future for possibility, there are links uniting the otherwise discrete entities, the shared love of an old television series which showcased science and new inventions, its disastrous final edition broadcast live in 1994 and never repeated, former host Ralph Sheldrake chair of the Society until he was ousted by Onions, and also the time machine Sheldrake built, supposedly destroyed but now in the possession of Ruth and Megan.
Unwary and irresponsible travellers in the fourth dimension who have been using the disco light dodgem car for increasingly frequent trips to the past to gather rare collectibles which can be flogged to their customers without any consideration of the wider consequences of changing the past, the concept that Time Travel is Dangerous is apparently something which would not have occurred to them, wrapped up in their own shallow concerns.
A lo-fi sci-fi comedy of rough manners directed by Chris Reading from a script co-written with sisters Anna-Elizabeth and Hillary Shakespeare, Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson are the entrepreneurs challenged by Guy Henry’s snooty Martin, enforcing membership rules and undertaking risk assessments, with Brian Bovell, Sophie Thompson and Johnny Vegas as Ralph, Valerie and Robert, former presenters of The Future Today.
The recurring joke the ubiquitous incompetence of the characters, Ruth and Megan lacking any semblance of curiosity about the implications of their actions and the members of the Society browbeaten misfits whose cranky inventions are of limited utility, Time Travel is Dangerous feels like nothing so much as a BBC Three pilot hustling for audience approval before a full series is commissioned, but it is less plucky underdog than wayward mongrel, wacky for the sake of it and certainly lacking imagination and ambition.
Brunner’s Society of Time as told by shop assistants who admit they have no understanding of or interest in what is going on, with smutty acronyms and a robot who answers to “Botty” the humour is as basic as the plot, aiming for neither the knotted loops of Predestination nor the growing self-awareness of Timestalker, the only notable aspect the voiceover by Stephen Fry which recalls his time as “the voice of the book,” hoping like Cha Cha Cha to profit from unquestioned nostalgia.
Time Travel is Dangerous had its UK premiere at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest
