7.2 /10 1 Votes7.2
7.1/10 No. of series 1 Final episode date 19 April 1997 | 7.2/10 Country of origin United Kingdom First episode date 1 March 1997 Number of episodes 8 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genre Crime dramaScience fiction Starring Michael FrenchChloë AnnettSue JohnstonPaul TrussellRichard DempseyBob Goody Cast Similar Murder in Mind, Collision, Foyle's War, Injustice, City of Vice |
Crime traveller titles 1 and 2
Crime Traveller is a 1997 science fiction detective television series produced by Carnival Films for the BBC based on the premise of using time travel for the purpose of solving crimes.
Contents

Anthony Horowitz created the series and wrote every episode. He got the idea while writing an episode of Poirot. Despite having over eight million viewers on a regular basis, Crime Traveller was not renewed after its first series, because according to Horowitz, "The show wasn't exactly cut. There was a chasm at the BBC, created by the arrival of a new Head of Drama and our run ended at that time. There was no-one around to commission a new series...and so it just didn't happen.".

Plot

Jeff Slade is a detective with the CID department of the local police force led by Kate Grisham; although unusually for such a position he is an armed officer, carrying a handgun as routine. Slade is a good detective who gets results although his approach is somewhat maverick and his methods do leave a lot to be desired and have more than once landed him in trouble. Amongst Slade's colleagues at the department is science officer Holly Turner who has a secret that Slade manages to uncover. Holly owns a working time machine that was built by her late father. The machine is able to take Slade and Holly back far enough in time to witness a crime as it happens and discover who committed it. As a result, Slade's track record with crime solving goes through the roof with case after case being solved in record time.
Premise

The Time Machine featured in the series was invented by Professor Frederick Turner. The machine has been cobbled together from various different pieces of electronic equipment over the years and has a distinctly home-made look about it. Turner built the machine in the living room of his flat in Sundown Court where he lived with his daughter Holly and presumably at some stage his wife. Holly is the only other person he ever told about the machine. The most vital component for the machine is the electro-magnetic crystal which is in the heart of the machine. Unfortunately it is also the single most expensive part of the machine. Turner had to sell his house to buy his. The machine can only travel backwards in time as it is not possible to travel into a future which does not yet exist and it can only go back a few hours into the past, although it could in theory go back a week.

Attached to the machine is a time piece which has a small analogue clock and a digital countdown display. This indicates how far back the machine has taken you and how much time remains until you are back at the time you left. This time piece can be removed from the machine and placed in a watch which the time traveller can carry round to remind of how much time is left. The time piece must be replaced in the machine before the countdown reaches zero otherwise the traveller or travellers will be caught in a loop of infinity constantly living out the same few hours that they travelled back in time. This is what happened to Frederick Turner. The machine is now maintained by Holly and she was the only person to know about it until she told her friend and colleague Jeff Slade.
The rules of time travel in the series are as follows. The time machine sends the traveller back in time by a random interval. Usually this is about a day but it may be as little as a few minutes or as much as a week. In the final episode of the series it is found that the length of time travelled back can be controlled by altering the length of the photon rods; this is discovered by the research company Webb Biotech, who have also invented a time machine. However long you go back for, you must live through that time again. You must not meet yourself in the past. It is not clear what would result if you did, but it is presumed the consequences would be dire. You cannot change the past. One of the results of this restriction is that the effects of the time traveller's journey back in time are already visible "before" the journey is made. You cannot exist more than twice in the same time frame. If you try to go back a second time, the machine will simply fail to operate. When "in the past", you must get back to the time machine by the time you "left". Otherwise, you will be trapped in a "loop of infinity". This is what happened to Holly Turner's father. The time machine never travels into the future. Holly tells Jeff in the first episode "You can't travel into something that doesn't exist."