“What is a Time Bubble? You can’t see it, of course, but it might help you visualise it to think of a balloon… Supposing some little patch of information – some little patch of history – gets slowed down, and instead of flashing backwards and forwards it floats, gently, as if in a bubble… Supposing you could get into that bubble – that bubble of history – and travel with it. Then you could move forwards and backwards in time at will…”

–one of the many introductions before the episodes

I was randomly poking through Netflix not too long ago and stumbled across a DVD recommendation labeled under “British Television”.  This was before I was doing this blog so there wasn’t much motivation to rush it into my home, but I was intrigued.  When I was younger I used to watch a lot of PBS and they would play all sorts of British children’s science fiction, most of which was far superior to anything that was marketed to children over here.  I went ahead and rented the first disk of a show I had never heard of – Time Slip.  The show, from 1970-1, was about a group of children who travel to various points in time.  Rather than echoing Doctor Who’s overlying theme of adventure and exploration as many similar show do, Time Slip (at least from the first serial) seems to be more about how folks misuse technology.

The first serial, containing six episodes, revolves around our two main characters a boy named Simon Randall and a girl named Liz Skinner.  Simon is traveling with family friends to keep his mind of off his mother’s recent death.  While hanging out near the site of an old naval base Simon and his friend Liz discover a time portal that we just saw suck up a mute girl named Sarah.  When on the other side, the pair discovers that it is suddenly night time and that they seem to be in a Nazi over-run base.  They end up running into a man named Frank and Sarah both held captive by the Nazis.  Here is the shocker Frank is her father thirty years ago!

The first six episodes of Time Slip are fairly entertaining if not a bit on the slow side.  You can tell that the show was on a very low budget as there are a magnitude of scenes where long expanses of dialog are tossed out with little or no action to be seen.  I can imagine that this most likely is one of the reasons that the show is a cult classic; I honestly don’t think a ton of children would be able to handle a show that is paced this way.  Then again, I was born some ten years after this originally aired, so one never knows.  I do know that the show ran somewhat over-budget and was seen as a flop despite running to its full duration, something unheard of nowadays.  Doing some online research, I found that Time Slip still has a legion of devoted fans and even runs the occasional convention.

I really enjoyed Time Slip – The Wrong End of Time and plan on watching the remaining three serials.  It’s a shame that the color prints of these are mostly lost as I would have loved to see this as originally aired.

My rating 3 out of 5

The show itself is available to rent on Netflix or is available for purchase at such places as Amazon.com