The TOMORROW PEOPLE

   UK tv series (1973-9). A Thames TV Production. Series conceived by Roger Price. Prod Ruth Boswell and Price (1973), Boswell alone (1974-5), Price alone (1976), Vic Hughes (1977-9). Technical adviser Dr Christopher Evans. Starring Nicholas Young, Peter Vaughan-Clarke, Sammie Winmill, StephenSalmon, Elizabeth Adare, Mike Holoway. Written mostly Price. Dirs included Brian Finch, Price, Hughes. 8 seasons (2 in 1978); 68 25min episodes. Colour.

   TTP, incorporating many childhood wish-fulfilment fantasies, concerns a group of MUTANT children-Homo superior - with PSI POWERS. They band together for self-protection, occasionally conscripting other child mutants. They can teleport themselves, the term they use (taken unacknowledged from Alfred BESTER) being "jaunting". They are free of parental control and live in a secret, underground base protected by a smooth-voiced supercomputer. Most of the stories, each lasting on average 4 episodes, involve either TIME TRAVEL or encounters with evil beings fromouter space. As with most UK tv series made for children, the budget was limited, but within that constraint the sets and special effects were adequate. Probably intended as commercial tv's answer to the BBC's DR WHO, TTP was not in that league. Novelizations, all by Roger Price (1941-),were The Visitor * (1973) with Julian R. Gregory, Three in Three * (1974), Four into Three * (1975), One Law * (1976) and The Lost Gods, withHitler's Last Secret and The Thargon Menace * (coll 1979).Beginning in Nov 1992 a tv miniseries of five 23-min episodes entitled The New Tomorrow People was broadcast in the UK (ITV), starring Kristian Schmid and Christian Tessier. This was entirely written by Roger Price, who had written and conceived the first series twenty years earlier. More of a remake of the first series than a continuation, it made no reference to the first series' chronology. This time the kids are not just British: there was one from England, two from America and one from Australia.

   JB/PN/GF