PJ Hammond back for more Torchwood

The element man
From Sapphire and Steel to his recent contribution to Torchwood, PJ Hammond has been responsible for some of the spookiest shows on television. In this exclusive interview, he tells Rod Edgar his highest weekend body count and more.

PJ Hammond is one of Britain’s finest TV fantasy writers, but he has been largely absent from the genre since his strange, unsettling series Sapphire and Steel reached its memorable conclusion in the early 80s.
Now he is making a comeback, however, with an episode of Torchwood already under his belt (Small Worlds), and another on the way for series two.
“I was very pleased with Small Worlds,” he says of his first foray into the Doctor Who spin-off. “I don’t usually watch things again, but I watched all three transmissions because I was just so pleased with the production.
“It was a good crowd to work with, too. It’s taken a while because the show has to find itself. So, at the very beginning, none of the writers really knew what they were writing. We didn’t know the shape – so it was a lot of work – but it was worth it.”
In recent years, Hammond has been a writer on ITV1’s offbeat crime drama Midsomer Murders. Coincidentally, his latest script for that show aired at the same time Small Worlds debuted on BBC3.
“It was a bit frustrating,” he admits. “But then, I had it to see again on Wednesday. I worked out that with three murders in Midsomer, and another three plus 15 men in the railway carriage in Small Worlds, I was responsible for 21 deaths that Sunday.”
Creepy stories
Hammond began his TV career writing crime drama. “I worked as a script editor on Z Cars,” he says in soft, genteel tones. “I wrote 27 episodes, but they were all on edges of crime. Really they were just strange, creepy stories.
“I don’t like writing about crime,” he says, perhaps surprisingly for a man whose credits also include Dixon of Dock Green and Special Branch. “I don’t like writing about guns and things,” he continues. “I like writing about things that disturb us.”
Hammond escaped into fantasy television in 1970, with the ITV series Ace of Wands, starring Michael MacKenzie as Tarot, a magician who solved mysteries.
“It let me have free reign,” says Hammond. “If you’re talking about a magician then you have to give it plenty of fantasy. That was ideal for me.”
Hammond’s 1978 instalment of the children’s anthology series Shadows also centred on a magician. However, in And Now For My Next Trick, it was a hapless magician, who found three magic eggs. The eggs could save him from ruin, but at a price.
“I was always writing psychological things,” Hammond recalls. “I could never write slashing things. One has to with Midsomer Murders, but that’s another fantasy world – another strange landscape. It’s not the things you see, it’s the things you don’t see. It’s the old Hitchcockian theory of fear.”
The Time Menders
Hammond followed Shadows with his own creation, Sapphire and Steel, in 1979. “Again, that was for Thames Television,” he says. “For Pamela Lonsdale and, I think, Ruth Boswell. They wanted me to write a first episode that could possibly develop into a series. A fantasy story for children. I called it The Time Menders.”
Thames passed on the project, after which Southern Television expressed an interest. “But before they could do it, ATV said, ‘No, we’ll do it,’” recalls Hammond. “They said, ‘We don’t need an outline. Just go for it!’
“That was David Reid, I think. He didn’t want to do a children’s show. He said, ‘Make it an adult show. And call it Sapphire and Steel, not The Time Menders.’”
Viewers have long puzzled over the titular heroes, who mysteriously arrive to tackle strange disturbances in time. But Hammond admits that he never had a firm idea of who Sapphire and Steel were, or where they came from.
“It never occurred to me,” he says. “It was all just part of the fun and the mystery.”
The show’s opening credits indicated that the characters were elements, despite the fact that sapphire is a mineral and steel an alloy.
“The producer assembled the title sequence and went a bit haywire with the elements,” Hammond remembers. “It was discussed, but by that time it was too late to do anything about it. I think it’s part of its charm.”
Shining stars
In the show, Joanna Lumley (then most famous for The New Avengers) played the ethereal Sapphire, while The Man From UNCLE’s David McCallum played the very sober Steel. But Hammond never anticipated such big names.
“That was a big surprise,” he says. “It was wonderful, wonderful casting. They took it seriously and that was important. I always had Michael Byrne [Secret Army, Force 10 From Navarone] in mind, but then they talked about star casting and that just changed it.
“I didn’t mind, because the budget was quite big. We didn’t do much location filming, but I think it was better without it. They built these wonderful sets. The railway station [from Assignment Two] was a massive set, and the atmosphere we created made it work.”
The show was produced to a tight deadline, with Hammond still writing episodes of one story as the first episodes were being transmitted. “It was like writing for live theatre,” he says. “You didn’t know how they were going to end. They just said ‘just keep writing.’
“In fact, I didn’t have the ending to the one about the railway station. That was a worry! But it came eventually.”
Hammond penned all six of Sapphire and Steels 'assignments' bar one, with Don Haughton and Anthony Reed stepping in to write the fifth.
“I was supposed to carry on writing, but by that time I had just written so many,” Hammond says. “My head had seized up and I had to take a bit of time out. They had to get a couple of other writers in at short notice. To me, it wasn’t a Sapphire and Steel story. It was a variation, but it’s not one I would have chosen.”
Cosmic café
Today, Sapphire and Steel is remembered for its slow, tense atmosphere and creepy concepts. The series came to an end on 31 August 1982, but Hammond still receives “lots of letters from people who remember being scared by it as children.”
The finale of the last assignment saw the two heroes outmanoeuvred by their enemies, and seemingly trapped forever in an empty café, floating among the stars. But it isn’t exactly the ending Hammond originally envisaged.
“As a possible get-out I wanted Silver [David Collings] to be trapped in the café with them,” he says. “I felt he could have worked a few tricks with the knives and forks.
"But I think David McCallum didn’t like that idea very much, and I think he and the producers agreed that – because the show was called Sapphire and Steel – it should be just the two of them at the end. It’s not something I agreed with but I had to go along with.
“I think by then I’d had about enough. I could see changes with what was going to happen, because ATV was going to be taken over, so I thought it would be a good idea to end it. I thought ‘I’ll just put it on hold,’ if you like.”
Recently, however, Sapphire and Steel have been taken 'off hold', in a series of new audio adventures, made by Big Finish Productions. But Hammond has not been involved in the project, which stars David Warner and Susannah Harker in the title roles.
“I was asked to do one, but I didn’t want to do that," says Hammond. "I didn’t feel it was an audio medium and I didn’t think it was for me. I just like to write visually.
“They didn’t send me any copies, so I haven’t heard them.”
Back from outer space
Hammond briefly flirted with science fiction in the late 90s, with Space Island One, but complains that the Sky One drama was too mundane. Then, in May 2006, he revealed that he was in talks with senior ITV executives about the possibility of reviving Sapphire and Steel.
“I had one or two conversations with people at ITV who wanted to assess it,” he says. “I put some paperwork together, but it reached an impasse. I’ve got a folder of things I put down, but, of course, things have moved on. The people involved have now left ITV.
"I found it difficult, because they didn’t want any reference to what had happened to Sapphire and Steel before. I felt there had to be a link of some sort, from them being trapped. Just suddenly turning up would mean you have to explain them all over again.
“The other big sticking point was that they wanted to know exactly where they came from, and I had no idea. No one’s ever asked in 27 years.
”It was definitely going away from the direction I would have wanted it to be in. I did manage to put together some good thoughts together, though, so I could always use them for something else.”
Hammond says that his experience on Torchwood would inform any revival of Sapphire and Steel. "I would know what could be done by opening it up" he says. "I would put it on a wider canvas."
As for Torchwood, Hammond is reluctant to give away his ideas for series two. “If I talk about them now I’ll probably lose interest. But I think they want me to keep to the supernatural. They probably think it’s my bag.”