An Apocalyptic 70'S British Time Travel Film?

[arthurscargill]

this is my effort to describe an early 70's british apocalyptic film (at least i assume it was a film, and apologies if it was a tv series or play as i was only 6 or so when i saw it). memory being what it is, some of what follows may not even be from the same source...



i recall a few scenes.



the narrative jumped from the present day into the future, taking the lead character along. we see society starting to break down: on a bit of news film we see a political meeting, and someone on the platform throws a bomb into the crowd.



several centuries on: the lead man is on a grassy hill in england. he's told that most of the earth's surface has turned to glass. a nuclear war - or something - has occurred.



some long time later we find him in a very futuristic (as envisaged in the 70's) house. an elegant lady lives there. the man is playing chopin(?) on a grand piano - the only non-futuristic item in the place. he says this was what music was like in his time. she offers to play some of her music: ethereal electronic stuff. he asks about england: is it unchanged? she says it turned to glass ages ago; her house is actually the only habitable place on the whole planet, now a glass ocean. i think she materialises a meal for him in a techno food maker.



pretty depressing. keep kids away from this kind of character-setting material.... thanks for any clues. i think this and the end credits from camberwick green explain much of my subsequent life.

[oxfam1uk]

Sounds a bit like "The Flipside of Dominic Hyde", which was a BBC Play for Today, starring Peter Firth.



It's quite a while since I watched this (on DVD), so I can't remember if your memories match it exactly. However, the plot is the same.

[CaptainWaggett]

Dominick Hyde goes from the future back the 1980s though - this play seems to be the other way round.

[arthurscargill]

thanks for the idea but this must have been a decade earlier, screened about 1972. it feels like it was an english film, but probably tarkovsky influenced. maybe it was foreign...

[robotoid97]

If you can think of more details please post them if they come to mind, do you recall any of the actors in it? I enjoy watching most scifi movies from that period and earlier and it des not ring a bell so may be TV specific..

[arthurscargill]

hi there. robotoid. it's hard to be more specific; the way memories get worked over and mixed up and so on. maybe the man had the kind of short Roman haircut that scifi characters had in 1970, was aged 45... the elegant lady long blonde hair. her house was seen from above in its glass sea: low rise and all rounded contours, on a crucifix groundplan.... she was waiting for her own subsumation by the spreading glass.



it was the idea of being in an unchanged english hillside, but with complete annihilation out of sight elsewhere that struck me. definitely shades of tarkovsky, but it can't have been subtitled..



it's clearly not a famous film, maybe not even a film, but it felt like there was a budget involved, and it must have taken some time to play the scenes out...