“Quantum Leaper”

This week issue 40 of Infinity magazine comes out, featuring a couple of articles I wrote, including one about the cult sci-fi series Quantum Leap. The show saw Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) bouncing around time into other people’s bodies and striving to put right what once went wrong, while his holographic friend Al (Dean Stockwell) smoked cigars, letched, and relayed exposition from Ziggy the computer.

I end the article by wondering whether it’s time for someone like Netflix to bring the show back (it definitely is). What I don’t mention in the magazine is that – unbeknownst to almost everyone – Quantum Leap has already been rebooted once.

This, my loyal readers, is the story of Quantum Leaper.

 

Season One (1995)

As teenagers, my friend David Abbott and I were huge Quantum Leap fans, and were bereft when the show was axed in 1993. I was developing an interest in filmmaking, having dabbled in 2D computer animation on my Atari ST and borrowed my grandfather’s Video-8 camcorder on a couple of occasions. When I was given that camcorder for my 15th birthday, David and I decided that we would make our own version of Quantum Leap, which we imaginatively titled Quantum Leaper.

The first episode was called “Just What the Doctor Ordered” and saw my character – named, again with great imagination, Neil – leaping into a doctor just as his patient is flatlining. I don’t remember much about the plot, but I do remember that we climbed the nearby Malvern Hills to film a fight scene.

Dave played Albert, my holographic helper, communicating with Project Quantum Leap’s supercomputer Ziggy by means of a special hand-link, just like Dean Stockwell did. Unlike Dean Stockwell’s, this hand-link was a calculator.

The two of us also played all the supporting characters (often with the judicious addition of a hat or jacket) and operated the camera, unless we were both in shot, in which case it was locked off. Much of the the editing was done in camera – rewinding the 8mm videotape, cueing it up to the exact moment the last piece of action ended, then hitting record and calling action simultaneously – and the rest I did tape-to-tape with two VCRs connected together. A cheap four-track disco mixer enabled the addition of music (badly composed by me) and sound effects (many of which were sampled from Quantum Leap itself). As YouTube was still years away, the only viewers for the series were our parents and friends, forced to sit down in front of the TV and watch it off VHS.

Episode two, “Boom!”, saw the fictional Neil as a bomb disposal expert supposedly in Northern Ireland in 1980, though like the first episode it was all shot in and around my house. My sister Kate was drafted in to play a journalist whose life Neil has to save.

“A Leap into the Blue” was the next episode, with Neil in the body of a parachutist. Scenes of characters in free-fall were shot with us standing in front of a white wall; I digitised the footage on my ST with a Videomaster cartridge and composited scrolling clouds into the background. The resolution of the Videomaster was very limited – maybe 320×240 – the frame rate was very low too, and it could only do black and white.

A digitised visual effect using a shot of a plane stolen from some TV programme or other

Next we shot a “pilot” episode explaining how Neil and Albert switched places with Sam and Al. I remember digitising shots of Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell from Quantum Leap and compositing them atrociously into our own footage. At about 30 minutes long, the pilot was double the length of our other episodes.

Then we continued the series where we’d left off. Dave’s script “One Giant Leap” has Neil on a space shuttle mission, an episode that included NASA footage taped off the TV. We made almost no attempt to create sets; the space shuttle cockpit was a plain wall, a computer keyboard and a piece of card to cover an incongruous bookcase.

The space shuttle cockpit “set”

The next two episodes find Neil meeting (and shooting) an evil future version of himself, then leaping into the crazy future space year of 2017. The latter involves a flying car – my mum’s Citroen AX with the wheels framed out, intercut with an extremely crude CGI model.

Dave’s episodes “Virtual Leaping” and “Bullets Over Leaping” see Neil become a VR programmer (with a headset made of Lego) and then an actor (in a studio suspiciously like Dave’s shed).

The VR headset “prop”

My next episode has Neil leaping into himself and saving his father’s life. (My actual dad provided some splendidly wooden acting.) But doing this causes a paradox, and the season finale sees Neil and Albert swap places (as Sam and Al do in a classic Quantum Leap episode) and Neil having to restore the timeline to prevent the destruction of the universe.

We were ambitious. You can say that much for us.

 

Season Two (1996)

The following year, while doing our GCSEs, we began work on a second season. In between I’d made a bad 40-minute comedy, Bob the Barbarian, and an appalling feature-length sci-fi film, The Dark Side of the Earth, and I’d learnt a few things that would lift the production values of Season Two very slightly. I’d also nagged my parents into buying me a genlock which would let me superimpose CGI over analogue video, meaning I didn’t have to digitise footage and suffer the horrendous image degradation any more.

The holographic Albert enters the Imaging Chamber, an effect enabled by my new genlock.

The actual Quantum Leaping effect from this era of the show is surprisingly decent given the equipment we were working with. We would lock the camera off and jump-cut to a blue filter being over the lens, then a white glow would creep over me – an animation I achieved in software called Deluxe Paint – followed by tendrils of electricity. The screen would then fade to white and a similar effect would play out in reverse to show the leap in.

Leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong…

Another improvement was that we managed to convince a few other friends to act in the series, including fellow Quantum Leap fan Lee Richardson, as well as Chris Jenkins, Conrad Allen, Matt Hodges, Si Timbrell and Jim McKelvie. Recognising my lack of musical talent at last, I abandoned composing and instead used soundtrack CDs from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Dennis McCarthy), the John Woo film Broken Arrow (Hans Zimmer), and the Doctor Who story “The Curse of Fenric” (Mark Ayres). Albert’s hand-link prop got an upgrade too, from a calculator to a custom Lego build with flashing lights.

Lee Richardson “acting” in the control room “set”

Season Two opens with Dave’s episodes “Project Hijacked” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” which focus on events at Project Quantum Leap, supposedly a high-tech facility in the New Mexico desert in 2005. In reality it was a living room with a control console made out of painted cardboard boxes and Christmas lights. In an early manifestation of my cinematography leanings, I snooted the ceiling light with a rolled-up piece of silver card, lending a little bit of mood to the look.

At the time, Dave’s family were training a hearing dog, Louis, so I wrote an episode to feature him; “Silence is Golden” sees Neil leap into a deaf man, and was followed by the morbid “Ashes to Ashes” where he leaps into a corpse.

The next episode, Dave’s “Driven to Distraction”, is probably the best of the lot. For once there were few enough characters that no-one needed to confusingly play dual roles, and there is plenty of action to boot. (I uploaded this episode to YouTube so long ago that the ten-minute time limit still applied.)

The X-Files-inspired “Close Encounters of the Leaping Kind” comes next, with Neil as a ufologist bothered by a shadowy government agent. Then Neil becomes a teenager who must prevent a drugs overdose, then a one-armed man who must overcome prejudice to hold down a job. Cringingly entitled “Not So Armless”, this latter was shot in a newsagent’s owned by a friend’s parents, one of the series’ few non-domestic locations.

Like Quantum Leap we had a mirror shot in every episode where Neil would see the leapee’s reflection looking back at him. Sometimes Dave would track the camera behind my back and we’d hide a cut in the darkness to swap me with whoever was playing the reflection. Another time we pretended the serving hatch in Dave’s house was a mirror and the two of us synchronised our movements. For a fight scene in “Not So Armless” Chris hid one arm inside his t-shirt so that Neil’s mirror image could appear to punch the antagonist with an invisible fist!

Facing mirror images that were not his own…

The penultimate episode of the season features several brief leaps, ending with one to Hiroshima in 1945, where the A-bomb detonation (more footage off the TV) causes both Neil and Albert to leap simultaneously. In the finale, Albert becomes a mountaineer caught in an avalanche, while Neil is a member of the rescue team – a premise thieved from the Quantum Leap novel “Search and Rescue”. We started shooting it during snowy weather, but the snow thawed and the episode was never completed. The friends who had been appearing as supporting characters now had part-time jobs and couldn’t spare the time for filming.

 

Legacy

We wrote all six episodes of a third season which would have explained how Neil became the evil future version of himself seen in an earlier episode, but nothing was ever filmed.

In 1997 we began a remake of the pilot using the experience we had gained since shooting the original, but again it was never completed. One part we did film was an action sequence with me on the roof rack of a car while the driver swerves around trying to throw me off. We shot this on Malvern’s Castlemorton Common and used a dummy of me for some of the wider and more dangerous shots. Its acting was probably better than mine. We remade the scene four years later as part of my Mini-DV feature The Beacon.

Today only five of the 20 Quantum Leaper episodes that we made survive, the rest having been callously taped over at some point in my late teens. That’s probably for the best, as most of it was hilariously bad, but making it taught me a hell of a lot about filmmaking. Without it, I doubt I’d have a career in cinematography today.

His only guide on these journeys is Al, an observer from his own time…
“Quantum Leaper”

This Morning With Richard Not Judy

20 years ago today, I was on TV. I had my fifteen seconds of fame on a slightly obscure BBC2 Sunday morning show in the late nineties, primarily watched by stoned students. Yes, I was a King of the Show on Lee & Herring’s This Morning with Richard Not Judy.

https://youtu.be/9LXCjx97_-o?t=1084

The year was 1999. All anyone could talk about was The Phantom Menace and the Y2K bug. I had a rubbish beard that looked like the strap of a helmet. (Thank God beards have gone out of fashion, eh?) And I worked as an admin assistant for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in Worcester.

On Sunday mornings (or sometimes Friday teatimes, for the edited repeat) I would turn on my comically huge cathode ray tube TV, receiving its hilariously archaic analogue UHF signals, and watch Stewart Lee and Richard Herring squeeze as many blasphemies and euphemisms as possible into what was most definitely a pre-watershed slot.

Trying on the Curious Orange head

Broadcast live, TMWRNJ (“TMWRNJ!“) was a surreal, sketch-packed affair loosely hung on the format of a spoof daytime show. Memorable characters included the Curious Orange, Simon Quinlank and his weak lemon drink, Jesus (“Aaaaah!”/”No, not ‘aaaah’!”) and an inexplicably jelly-obsessed Rod Hull.

Each week Lee and Herring would crown someone “King of the Show”, a largely ceremonial office with no real power. Usually it was a random member of the studio audience, but in an episode which saw Rich taking a shady product placement deal from Ian Cress of the Cress Marketing Board, a competition was announced. The next week’s King of the Show would be whoever could make the best advert for cress.

Immediately I picked up my amusingly quaint landline and tediously placed a call to my friend Matt Hodges by pressing a sequence of numbers associated with his own, equally quaint landline, a sequence of numbers I had to remember using my actual brain or possibly pen and paper. Do you remember the nineties, Stew? Weren’t they hilarious? Ahahahahahahaha!

Matt and I backstage with the Curious Alien, TV’s Emma Kennedy and Darth Maul

Matt was one of the poor unfortunates who regularly got roped into appearing in my amateur filmmaking efforts with my Video-8 camcorder. A massive Python fan, Matt’s influence had ensured that I churned out many surreal comedies in those halcyon days.

We quickly came up with four ideas for cress commercials, each one spoofing a different type of ad: McDonald’s, army recruitment, charity appeal and gay exchange. Sadly I no longer have copies of the latter three. I recall the army one involved a punnet of cress with a cardboard machine gun glued to it, abseiling down ropes to a bombastic voiceover (“Be the best!”). The charity appeal, shot in the sandpit of our local primary school, featured a cardboard cut-out of Mark Hamill pathetically farming in a desert. (“If you give Mark a punnet of cress, he can feed his family for a day. But give him the means to grow his own cress…”) The less said about the gay exchange one the better.

Matt contemplates his upcoming moment of fame in the glamorous BBC B&B. “I’m going to be on television,” reads the sign.

We sent off the four ads on a VHS tape (imagine Netflix but… oh, never mind) and crossed our fingers.

A few days later, I was sitting at my desk at MAFF, probably trying to skive proper work by writing macros in Excel, when the phone rang. I couldn’t quite believe it when the voice at the other end told me he was calling from TMWRNJ (“TMWRNJ!“), they loved our ads, we were going to be on the show on Sunday, travel and accommodation all paid by the BBC.

That Saturday, Matt and I caught the train to London. Even the decidedly-unglamorous Bayswater B&B we were booked into couldn’t quell our ex-like-a-bird’s-eggs-citement. We spent most of the evening trying to come up with witty proclamations to make when we were crowned. “I’d like to see Jamie open a passage with his magic torch,” was the punchline, but I forget the set-up.

The following morning a taxi dropped us at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, where we felt very important muscling past the queueing audience and into the backstage area. I remember awkwardly hanging around Stew and Rich, agog at meeting actual famous people in real life.

Awkward

The show itself seemed to go by very quickly, and we didn’t get chance to deliver our hilarious Jamie gag. But afterwards we got to hang out and properly meet the cast, having lunch with them in the studio canteen.

Less awkward

Then we were given a tour of the studio and allowed to sit and watch – just the two of us, the rest of the audience having departed – while sketches for the next week’s episode were pre-recorded. These included an instalment of Histor & Pliny, a spoof children’s series featuring a pair of time-travelling crows puppeteered by Stew and Rich, whose dialogue on set that day was considerably bluer than what would ultimately be broadcast. (“Eat the fucking eggs, you cunt!”)

I vividly recall TV’s Emma Kennedy walking past us, dressed in some typically outlandish costume, remarking that she might have just farted a baked bean out of her bumhole. What a great day!

With TV’s Emma Kennedy

Later that year, Matt and I bumped into Stewart Lee on the platform of Worcester Foregate Street station while on our way to the Reading Festival. I asked Stew if we could have a regular slot on the next series of TMWRNJ (“TMWRNJ!“) and he replied in his usual lugubrious tone, “Firstly, we don’t know if we’re going to get another series. And secondly, no.”

We may not have become the next Adam & Joe, but my brief moment in the spotlight did have an impact on my career. It was only when I told the Rural Media Company’s head of production that I had appeared on TV because of a spoof advert I’d made that she agreed to look at my amateur showreel. She saw some potential and started hiring me, kicking off two decades of freelancing.

Egg egg egg-egg egg egg egg-egg-egg egg.

I’ll leave you with Rich’s own thoughts from his blog at the time…

Thanks to everyone who sent in cress photos etc. The lads from Malvern were actually two of the nicest people we’ve had as king and to be honest the clip we showed was not the best thing they sent us, but it was the shortest and most TV friendly. They did a great Gay Exchange parody which was just a bit too rude. We were also very impressed by the editing and choice of shots. Those 2 guys will go far, but I’ve already forgotten their names! Sorry!

This Morning With Richard Not Judy