Key to Yesterday

I was finding the original 50's version, 'One Step Beyond', to be getting just comfy, like an old slipper - a welcome little tale for tea-break, almost comically dated, but endearing too, with the family-friendly John Newland assuring us that it's all based, however loosely, on real-life incidents.

Twenty years on, it's 'The Next Step Beyond', and we're suddenly into colour - a startlingly different feel somehow, even though Newland, despite his new grey hair and specs, seems to provide a degree of continuity. But it's also addressed to a rather less gullible audience, as Newland later admitted. And it just doesn't touch the same nerve.

A young man inherits a long-abandoned 'burlesque theatre', a code for somewhat rackety entertainments, and pays his first visit to the ghostly interior, suddenly to collapse on the floor, not too convincingly either. He then wakes up in a time-loop, in the body and clothes of his late father, who apparently resembled him closely. (They might at least have dyed his hair, and given him a beard or something.)

Conveniently, he has arrived just in time for the show, and the young Carol Connors, straight from Deep Throat, carries total conviction dancing to her own song 'Hello meant Goodbye', a title possibly significant to the plot. A tense meeting between the two of them in her dressing-room points-up the dangers of taking too many liberties with young chorus-girls who look more innocent than they are. The rest we can't reveal, but never forget the mystic link between mating and death.