| Genre: | |
| Creator: | Tim O'Mara |
| Director: | Paul Wroblewski |
| Starring: |
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| Composer: | Garry Hardman |
| Country: |
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| Language: | English |
| Num Series: | 3 |
| Num Episodes: | 40 |
| List Episodes: | List of Jeopardy episodes |
| Executive Producer: |
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| Producer: | Andy Rowley |
| Cinematography: |
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| Camera: | Multi-camera |
| Runtime: | 24 minutes |
| Company: |
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| Channel: | BBC One |
Jeopardy is a children's science fiction drama programme that ran for three series, from 26 April 2002 to 11 May 2005, on BBC One. It was created by Tim O'Mara, directed by Paul Wroblewski and produced by Andy Rowley, with executive production by Richard Langridge for Wark Clements and Claire Mundell for CBBC Scotland. The series was produced for CBBC Scotland and was filmed on location in both Scotland and Busselton, Australia. It also aired on ABC in Australia. In 2002, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awarded the first series Best Children's Drama.[1]
Jeopardy is about a group of eight secondary-school students and their teacher from Falkirk, Scotland, who travel to the Australian bush to look for UFOs. They are given camcorders to record any sightings, and the series makes extensive use of 'found' footage, ostensibly recorded by the characters themselves.
See main article: List of Jeopardy episodes.
The group travel to the Australian outback to look for extraterrestrial activity, which has seen an increase in reported activity. The eight teenagers, their teacher, and a park ranger, Melissa Williams, stay in tents, with monitoring equipment set up around the area. On the first night Sarah sees strange lights and is convinced that they were visited by aliens, but not everyone believes her. Soon after Leon is bitten by a deadly snake, and the anti-venom is missing from the medical supplies. Melissa goes in search of medicine, but something stops her on the way, and when Gerry goes missing after falling over a waterfall, the teenagers find themselves alone.
The group see strange lights in the sky and radio signals are weakened by continual interference. David is thwarted by Simon and Chrissie who do their best to save themselves by sacrificing Melissa to the aliens. Later, the group members find both Gerry and Melissa, and discover that the alien activity was faked by smugglers who captured Melissa and are holding her ransom. With the mysterious events seemingly solved and Melissa standing guard over the smugglers until the police arrive, the teenagers and Gerry return to the ridge awaiting the rescue helicopters, only to be abducted by the aliens they had come to find.
The group find themselves back on the ridge and are picked up by helicopters before being returned to a military complex. The group realise their friends David and Sarah are missing, and Gerry, who has been ranting about an alien abduction, is separated from the rest of the group, who do not remember any such event. Escaping the facility, the group realise they have lost a whole day, and knowing they are being pursued by the agent from the complex, Helen Stanich, they purchase an old Kombi van to travel the country and look for David and Sarah, who appear to each member of the group over the course of the series as visions or dreams, guiding them.
Simon betrays the group by dealing with Stanich, thinking it was the right course to take, so the rest of the group lock him into a railway wagon for the night to teach him a lesson; they are separated when a train takes the wagon across the country overnight. The group continue to the Gold Coast to look for twins who they met at the facility and who may help them in their journey, while Simon is rescued by a man named Vic, an Aboriginal tour guide who shows him cave paintings that he believes depict the nature of time, as well as the fate of their group. After the twins guide the group to the same caves, they eventually meet up with Simon and deduce from the paintings that they will need to come together as a group at the Glass Mountains during the next visitation, occurring at the same time as a solar eclipse. With the help of Stanich, who claims to be working against her superiors, who want to capture the aliens, they arrive at the mountains and form a circle to bring the aliens back, in the hope that they will return their friends. They briefly see David and Sarah, who beckon them to come forward, but shortly after, they begin to fade.
Realising they have broken the circle, and with their friends fading away, the group quickly reform the circle and find themselves back home in Falkirk, six weeks in the future and invisible to everyone. They encounter a shocked David and Sarah, the only people able to see them, who explain that they were both returned to Falkirk after the night of the Glass Mountains with no memory of the encounter there; everyone believes the six teenagers and Gerry to be dead, while an eyewitness in Australia reports seeing four teenagers swim out to their deaths. While David and Sarah stay in Scotland, the rest of the group return to Australia via the same time travel portal they arrived at.
Back in Australia three days from their apparent death, they find themselves visible again, and are continually pursued by Stanich. They realise that they must try to contact the aliens so that everything can be returned to normal, but they soon discover that they are suffering from a condition they name the "red-eye virus" – when an individual is stressed or fears for their life, their left eye glows red and they appear to "split", as if they are two separate people for a number of seconds, before vanishing. Leon is the first to suffer this fate, shortly followed by a panicked Shona, and Chrissie, whose rescue of Lucy from a passing truck puts her in fear of her life. During their search they find Gerry, who has escaped from hospital, and travel to a top-secret base on Astrid Island; the group are surprised to find their friends who had disappeared, but are dismayed to find they have the mentality of seven-year-olds, and appear black on an infra-red camera (according to a research document, they have been "frozen in time").
After the splitting of Gerry and Simon, Harry and Lucy realise that the eyewitness was actually watching the two of them in the water, just before they split. Avoiding their fate by remaining calm, they meet the eyewitness who is in fact one of two twin boys, who reveal themselves as aliens. They inform them that they are an ancient branch of the human race that evolved millions of years ago, before leaving the planet to avoid an asteroid, and that all of their species are twins. The red-eye virus was an unintended side-effect of being taken aboard their space craft, likely due to the solar flare activity from the eclipse, and that there is no known cure. With the clues they provide, Harry and Lucy realise the island is another portal, and persuade their friends to form a circle. This allows the pair to travel back in time to Falkirk on the day of the UFO meeting and manage to convince an initially skeptical group not to go to Australia by showing them the tapes they recorded throughout the show.
At the end of series 3, CBBC viewers were asked to vote for a way to end the series. The choices were a "spooky", "happy", or "surprising" ending. On the premiere of the final episode, the "spooky" ending won the vote; on a later repeat of the episode, the vote was run again, but the "happy" ending was chosen.
|-| 2002| Jeopardy| British Academy Children's Award for Drama| |}