On Avenue Mews in the leafy North London suburb of Muswell Hill, long-term friends Ruth (Ruth Syratt) and Megan (Megan Stevenson) run Cha Cha Cha together from rented premises. There they sell vintage goods – “anything we can get our hands on that’s from the past”, as Ruth puts it. They do not, however, sell the old dodgem car – with flashing lights and lo-fi control boards attached – which they find abandoned by the bins outside their shop, but instead, upon discovering that it is a time machine, use it to gather genuine antiques from different places and eras.
Six years later, business is booming, but strange meteorological phenomena suggest that something is amiss in the space-time continuum. A secret club of local eccentric inventors known as the Technology Engineering Scientific Thought and Innovation Society, or ’T.E.S.T.I.S’ (it will later be renamed B.R.E.S.T.S., in part to reflect the shifting gender balance of its membership), realises what is happening, and recruits the two women to their group.
The group’s sidelined founders Valerie Lancaster (Sophie Thompson) and Ralph Sheldrake (Brian Bovell) had decades earlier featured in ‘home learning programme’ The Future, Today along with the ‘robot’ mascot Botty/Robert (Johnny Vegas) before a nightmarish accident with a time machine brought the show to an abrupt end live on air. Martin Onions (Guy Henry) is the officiously power-hungry chair of the group, despite having no discernible scientific or engineering knowhow, and Alex Lemin (Tom Lenk) is his toadying secretary. Peter Kiddler (Tony Way) is the most active inventor, even if his Rocket Boots and Predict-o-Goggles, like the Flying Bus, Invisibility Suit and Re-Sizer created by others, are all makeshift, Heath Robinson-esque prototypes of variable functionality.
Broke and facing eviction, Ruth and Megan ignore Ralph’s warnings never to use the time machine again, and inadvertently open a portal to a hellish dimension known as The Unreason where lost things and missing people (including Jane Horrocks’ Aviator and Mark Heap’s Dandy) come out to play.
Co-written with sisters Anna-Elizabeth and Hillary Shakespeare, Chris Reading’s Time Travel Is Dangerous (aka The Unreason) may be concerned with interdimensional journeying, but it is superlight to the point of weightlessness, pitching itself somewhere between Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (2024) and British television’s Spaced (Mark Heap!) and The Office. The last especially is evoked by T.E.S.T.I.S.’ bureaucratic dynamics, and by the fact that everything here – even the trips through a portal to an alternative, Lovecraftian plane – purports to be shot by a fly-on-the-wall documentary crew whose omnipresence is often the source of puzzled comment from the other characters.
Narrated by Stephen Fry, Time Travel Is Dangerous is a very English kind of sci-fi comedy, with very little actual science, but plenty of absurdist emphasis on the schlubbish, amateurish, no-budget side of invention – and indeed of inventive filmmaking. It is an endearing, surreal and funny portrait of friendship lasting across time.
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