TV: Dominick Hide

Dominick Hide

A fondly remembered pair of time-travel tales about a naïve researcher from the future who can't stick to the job.

Broadcast as part of the BBC's long-running Play For Today series, The Flipside of Dominick Hide starred a pre-Spooks Peter Firth in a cheerfully optimistic story. Charming young Dominick lives in the antiseptic and rational post-Apocalypse world of 2130, with his wife Ava. Sent "flipside" - to the past - Dominick's task is to research London bus routes of 1980. Information about a locally based relative sends him off chasing after his great-great-great-grandfather instead, in the process becoming amusingly baffled by day-to-day life in 1980s London.

Befriended by Caroline Langrishe as Jane, Dominick enters into a relationship with her and, in a nicely paradoxical turn, gets her pregnant with his own great-great-grandfather, but is unable to remain in her time zone.

Dominick and his world were revisited a couple of years later in Another Flip for Dominick Hide. A mission to track down a student missing in 1982 gives Dominick the chance to see Jane and his toddler son. But it also forces him to decide between staying with them, or returning to Ava in 2130.

Warm and endearing, the two Dominick Hide stories played with the usual tropes of time-travel, creatively subverting cliches in a way that means they retain a cult status today.