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.
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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.