The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980)

You won't be disappointed!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

"Are there somewhere places...?" If you could get past the appalling (and relentlessly repeated) signature song by the deservedly obscure Meal Ticket, you'd be entering a place that truly had travelled in time. This timeslip drama unaccountably has 1980 stamped on the base. You remember 1980? Yep, it was nothing like the society depicted here, of vaguely-political, pint-glugging, chirpy Notting-Hillers. Ferchrissakes, setting it in Portobello says it all.The place was a living museum to the early '70s back then and has only recently dragged itself into the,ooh, early '90s. Dominic Hide's's naif rapidly loses his charm and his stoner persona combined with the look, attitudes and stylings of the supporting cast had me in mind of the early '70s, certainly not the hard-nosed era of Thatcher and 3 million unemployed! Truly just how irksome is Firth and how inexplicable that even 200 years hence such a hippy-dippy twerp could be charged with such an important task as travelling back in time (and potentially upsetting history). Once there he predictably starts messing around and his canoodling with Langrishe whilst happily spliced in his own time (without seemingly much in the way of moral dilemmas) might ring true when seen through the prism of those long-gone late '60s/early '70s mores (free-love, "if it feels good do it" etc) but it should have struck a dull note to a reasonably progressive 1980s audience and by 2007 seems utterly anachronistic. And this feller's from the 22nd century,remember! I'll let you into a secret here - I saw this on telly on its first repeat in the early 1980s and loved it. I was an incurable romantic back then and I guess that on rewatching it today,I was hoping to be swept back to happier times. But I found I just could not buy its sloppy idealism. To compound matters I began watching the 1982 sequel but at the point where the (male) babysitter entered the story, looking like the bloke from The Joy of Sex and with all the patchouli-scented charm of Sher's History Man, nausea overcame me and then when an even sillier time-traveller (Pyrus Bonnington) began flirting with the Spanish au-pair, Alice was duly summoned with the sick-bag. Just how has this tripe acquired the status of a classic?? Or am I simply an old curmudgeon?

Just watched this on bbc 4 and just have to say i thought it was great.The story was well written.The writers letting the story flow and not trying to speed it up with unwanted action.The acting was superb from Firth and the rest of the great cast,Patrick magee giving a good performance in his small but pivotal role.The music at the beginning and the end was very good.Although i have no doubt i am probably looking at this through rose coloured glasses,and that there was a fair share of trash on TV in the 80s.This really puts the TV programmes of today to shame.Given a choice what my TV license fee should be spent on it would be this kind of programme not reality TV.Anyway i do hope the sequel will be shown on TV soon.

After 24 years, you would expect a low budget play to show its age, but Flipside holds up very well. Of course the references to 1999 are now, thankfully, inaccurate. Large wall TV's, holographic projectors, video phones, a London Underground that shows which stop you are at - really not a bad effort at prediction.But what really stands out is the great attempt to show the evolution of English after 100 years and more, clipping the sentences to a more precise style. And everything is perfect here, and different too - the editing for instance, where there is a gentle fade between Dominick and Ava as they talk, culminating in a merge of both faces. Even the saucer doesn't look too tacky considering budget constraints. And to think that this was just one of a seemingly endless parade of new plays shown each week. Shame on the BBC for not promoting new drama, and new dramatists in this way any more.There is something so nostalgic about the way the play unfolds, and the music is great too.

When this film was shown as part of the BBC's 'Play for Today' season I had some French homework to do for school the following day.The story which took time travel, a genre which was and always has been popular with science fiction writers, to a new level. Concentrating on the characters in the story (and an excellent story it is), rather than the sci-fi elements themselves made this compelling viewing. It actually made the science fiction elements appear to be more 'real'.I'm sure if I were to see it again it would seem a little dated, but at the time (and a few years later when it was repeated as a prologue to the inferior, but nonetheless interesting and worth watching sequel 'Another Flip for Dominick') it was way ahead of anything else on the screen (small or large).Needless to say, I failed to complete my French homework and received some extra work to do as a punishment - but it was worth it.