Polite Dissent

The Tomorrow People was a British science fiction show that ran in the UK from 1973-1979. It was later shown in the US on Nickelodeon (long before they became a popular cable station); I remember watching the show daily after school in 1984-5.

The show was about a handful of young men and women who were the next step in evolution from Homo sapiens (hence the Tomorrow People name). They had mental abilities such as teleportation, telekenesis and telepathy. They lived in a secret undreground hideout run by a sentient robot named Tim. They had adventures not only on Earth, but across the galaxy as well.

The Tomorrow People was similar to Dr. Who in that each storyline consisted of a handful of 25-minute episodes. Each episode tended to have a cliffhanger ending. The production values were much worse than Dr. Who. There was one particular episode where the Tomorrow People were dealing with alien ambassadors — one looked like a cheap rubber bug suit and the other looked like a giant ice cream cone.

Most of the episodes were simplistic and full of science-fiction cliches, but still fun to watch in that automobile accident kind of way. There are two episodes that I remember best. The first dealt with the Tomorrow People traveling back to the Roman era to stop another time traveler from teaching the Romans steam power. Time paradox tales are always fun, and very hard to screw up (and they did OK here). Another episode dealth with the return of Hitler, who convinced British school boys to start a new Nazi party in England. Turns out that Hitler was really a mind-controlling alien. Thankfully the Tomorrow People stopped him (whew!).

Nickelodeon started their own version of the Tomorrow People in the mid-90’s, but I was in medical school thenand free time was just a dream to me (I once read an article that reported that the average third-year medical student gets 20 minutes of sunlight a day, and I remember thinking “When?”)