Two British SF shows

The fifth season of SAPPHIRE AND STEEL tries for a change of pace: the heroic duo show up at a nostalgia dinner party where everyone’s dressed 1930s style, entertainment is an old radio and even the meal is old-fashioned. This, of course, gives the forces of temporal evil a gateway, and before long a fog has isolated the house, the phones are dead and the guests are dropping like flies. Unfortunately this has none of the series’ usual weirdness, and it’s too flat to work as a tribute to Golden Age mysteries; Doctor Who‘s Black Orchid and Unicorn and the Wasp did much better. “They have so many ways of killing each other on this world.”
CHILDREN OF THE STONES is a much stronger series staring Gareth Thomas as Adam, an astrophysicist researching whether the standing stones around the village of Milbury could have been used an ancient observatory. However it becomes obvious that the Milbury residents are unnaturally happy, Adam’s son Matt is getting strange psychic flashes from the stones and other out-of-towners keep undergoing personality changes. This builds well but falls apart at the climax: having been primed for some sort of psychic battle, I was disappointed to have the villain thwarted by a mundane trick. It’s also very confusing in its babble about parallel timelines. “You lead them—but blindfolded, so they can’t see what you’re leading them into!”