The Crime Traveller Homepage

Background about Crime Traveller

Crime Traveller was a BBC attempt at venturing into science fiction. Made by Carnival Films for the BBC it follows the adventures of Detective Jeff Slade and Holly Turner who solve crimes by travelling back in time to a point before the crime happened. However their adventures are governed by certain rules, The Rules of Time. You have to be back at the time machine at the point at which you left, or you will be stuck in a repeating loop of time.

Michael French turned down a six figure sum to stay in EastEnders to play Jeff Slade in Crime Traveller. His co-star Chloë Annett (Holly Turner) is best known to the Science Fiction world as an alternate universe version of Lister's ex-girlfriend Kochanski in Red Dwarf VII.

Crime Traveller is the brain child of Anthony Horowitz who came up with the idea when writing an episode of Poirot.

"It was a feeling of trying to do that sort of drama, detective drama, but breaking the mould, changing the usual format - you know, Act One is the murder, Act Two is the investigation, Act Three you time-travel, as it were, in a flash back to the murder. And a thought came to me: if the investigator could time-travel back properly, wouldn't that be interesting? The bottom line is a detective who can solve crimes before they happen."

Quote taken from the Radio Times (1st-7th March 1997)

The series took Anthony eight months to write the series, however he wasn't averaging one a month! "...three months for the first episode, two for the second, then a mad rush to complete the other five. I was writing episodes while finished scripts were already being shot."

The BBC snapped up Crime Traveller immediatedly, beating a network to make the series. Unfortunately, come renewal time, The Head of BBC Drama left and Peter Salmon replaced him. During the hand over the show was simply overlooked and even though the viewing figures were good (average of eight million per episode), it wasn't given another chance to prove itself. Which is a shame as the show had great potential.