DOCTOR WHO may be marking a significant anniversary this year, but so is its competition from the other side, The Tomorrow People: its 50th. Produced by Thames Television, this teatime kids’ show saw confused teens discovering new abilities, including telepathy and the ability to teleport, or “jaunt”. Considered the next stage of human evolution, they were referred to as Homo superior.
Over the course of eight series and 22 stories, these young heroes (aided by biotronic computer TIM) took on the likes of shape-shifting robot Jedikiah, evil god Sogguth, ameboid aliens disguised as jumpsuits and your actual Adolf Hitler from their secret base the Lab – all without striking a blow in anger, thanks to their code of non-violence.
EVOLVING THE IDEA
The man responsible for the madness was producer/writer Roger Price. As he tells SFX in a Zoom call from his home in Canada, the seeds of the idea were sown around 1952, when Price (whose father was working for Farouk I, the recently deposed king of Egypt) was attending a German-language boarding school in Switzerland.
“I would have died for them, and they probably would have for me,” he says of his schoolfriends. “They were Germans and I was British. The war had been over
