Toomorrow

Scrooge

August

The Shadows’ Bruce Welch considered Toomorrow ‘a disgrace. It was reminiscent of so many of the low-budget pop pictures that were made during the early sixties, and the biggest let-down of all was the music. It was all so lightweight. There were no hit songs – the numbers were jive and instantly forgettable.’ The MFB was equally unimpressed with

The blandness of Toomorrow’s songs, all by Ritchie Adams and Mark Barkan, who had written much of the Monkees’ material, is a blatant handicap. The numbers in Gonks Go Beat, a much more audacious other-worldly enterprise, knock Toomorrow’s into a cocked hat. The discernible items include the title song, ‘Taking Our Own Sweet Time’, ‘Happiness Valley’, ‘Goin’ Back’, and ‘If You Can’t Be Hurt’, but lack character or context. Some sources credit other Adams and Barkan songs, ‘You’re My Baby Now’, ‘Let’s Move On’, and ‘Walkin’ on Air’, which some may identify within the film.

What Toomorrow succeeds in is firmly embedding itself in its time capsule: this is 1970, and the students at London College of Art are sitting in, protesting, wanting to be taken notice of, much to the annoyance of the film’s very own old codger college principal (Robert Raglan). In fact, the generation gap plays little part in Guest’s play; there is already the very considerable gap between earth and space, nicely accentuated in John Spears’s special effects. For some reason, thousands-of-years-old anthropologist John Williams (Roy Dotrice), who has barely introduced himself to us before he peels off his face, has been sent to earth to investigate the vibrations created by the pop music of 1970, specifically the sounds made by the student pop group Toomorrow, comprising Olivia (Olivia Newton-John), Benny (Benny Thomas), and Karl (Karl Chambers).