The Flipside of Dominick Hide is a BBC mini-series from the early 1980s, comprising two 90-minute Made For TV Movies (The Flipside of Dominick Hide and Another Flip For Dominick). The setting is a very bland, possibly dystopian future.note Time Travel is possible, and used as a tool to investigate "The Flipside". Dominick Hide is a "Corro", one who records the past. In this case, he is a Corro for London, early 1980s. One day, he decides to land his flying-saucer shaped time travel device and go off on foot, something utterly forbidden, searching for his great-great-great-grandfather who is alive in that time. Dominick is utterly taken aback by the vibrancy of the age, compared to the sanitized and automated time he comes from.
The sequel, Another Flip for Dominick, begins with Dominick having been Kicked Upstairs after the end of Flipside, but discovering that another Corro has decided to emulate Dominick's own feat. This time, however, things are not going to end well.
A minor bit of trivia is that the conclusion of Flipside also had one of the first depictions of gay marriage on British television, albeit as just a throwaway line.
Tropes:
- Apocalypse How: A planetary class 1 called the Holocaust of 1999 devasted Earth. Human society has recovered, but is careful to avoid intense feelings, and much of the biosphere is unusable. While some small tourist spots have been decontaminated and restored, you have to book years in advance to be able to visit them.
- Baby Carriage: Dominick accidentally knocks one of these into the road. The child is saved, but it makes Dominick realise just how much he has been playing with fire.
- Bittersweet Ending: When Flipside ends, Dominick and Eva's relationship has rekindled some of the passion, and they have a child together. But Dominick can never return to see Jane or his 1980s child (although he does leave them with a large lottery win). The sequel undoes that a bit.
- Blithe Spirit: Dominick becomes a Blithe Spirit on his return to his home time. This effect is explored, and deconstructed, in the second installment. While he may have energized the people around him, this inspires one of his protege to nearly wreck the timestream, and Dominick's wife to almost break up with him.
- Brits Love Tea: Referenced. The first hints that all is not well at all in the future is that people in Britain almost never drink tea.
- Butterfly of Doom: While Dominick's adventures ultimately form a Stable Time Loop, the Butterfly of Doom is fluttering away in the background as a threat. The sequel uses this as its central premise.
- Cool Old Lady: Dominick's Great Aunt Mavis, who is pretty much the reason Dominick sets off in his quest, and is also the one who first recognises the change in him when he starts arguing back over stuff. People in the 22nd Century never argue. At best, they express mild discontent.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Used to highlight the disparity between the bland future and vibrant eighties, but also shows that the future is shockingly progressive when Alaric's final selection of spouse is another man.
- False Utopia: At first glance, the future looks pretty good, with the recreational time travel tours, the holograms, the computers attending our every whim. However, it is also a pretty sterile world, with everyone living in a Stepford Suburbia, no one allowed any intense feelings, and as it turns out, most of the world outside was poisoned in an unspecified holocaust at the end of the 20th Century.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Dominick's experiences on the "flipside" is a classic fish out of water tale.
- Flying Saucer: The time machines used by Dominick and the other Corros for observations resemble small, fairground ride-sized, flying saucers. Larger ones exist for tour groups though. Careless Corros whose ships were spotted are the origin of the stories of flying saucers throughout history.
- Innocent Aliens: Dominick is an innocent Time Traveler; friendly, naive, and utterly good-humored and well-intentioned.
- Kicked Upstairs: Dominick at the end of Flipside.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Dominick picks the name "Gilbey" after seeing it on a bottle of gin. According to the DVD notes the producers had hoped to score a couple of free bottles of gin from the company in gratitude. They didn't.
- Mission Control: Alaric is Dominick's mission control, enabling the time travel and also covering for Dominick with their boss, Caleb.
- "Mister Sandman" Sequence: Dominick's first attempt at interacting with 1980s London at night are unremarkable, but when he ventures out in daylight to Portobello market, we get a full Sandman Sequence with the bright daylight, long shot of Dominick amongst the crowd of people moving market goods around, shouting in market slang, and cockney street music buskers providing the soundtrack.
- My God, What Have I Done?: In Flipside, Dominick accidentally knocks a child's buggy off the curb, going into the road, and almost causing an accident. His face, when he realises that in his emotional state he almost killed a child and unleashed the Butterfly of Doom on the future, says it all. That is when he knows his traveling and messing with the past has to stop.
- My Own Grampa: Dominick eventually becomes his own great-great-grandfather.
- Polluted Wasteland: Dominick's hat is designed to protect him from acid rain.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Caleb, Dominick's boss in both movies, and despite seeming a bit sinister, is secretly helping Dominick due to the Stable Time Loop.
- Ret-Gone: A Corro named Teddy Cochrane broke the rules and landed his Flying Saucer in Ohio in 1955. In the process, he accidentally killed a dog. This resulted in history being altered as the dog was supposed to raise the alarm about a fire. In the dog's absence, the fire killed many people who would have otherwise lived and their descendants were erased from existence. The story of Teddy Cochrane later served as a cautionary tale to other time travelers.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Memory is the only thing that is ripple effect proof. Change the past, and cities can fall and people vanish from existence. At least you can remember it and try to Set Right What Once Went Wrong as Another Flip has to do.
- Rule of Symbolism: The person he has been searching for was himself all along. A riff on Dominick's self-actualization and his discovering in the 1980s how to have a happier life in the 22nd Century.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Pyrus, in Another Flip, convinces himself that is what he is doing when he steps into history, forcing Dominick to pursue him back and stop him.
- Shout-Out: As a man, who is effectively living two lives, Dominick's last name is a shout out to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
- Someone to Remember Him By: The conclusion of Flipside has Dominick return to the future forever, but Jane is pregnant with their child and will always remember her first true love. Unfortunately, the sequel undoes this a bit.
- Stable Time Loop: Dominick had to go back into the past, because locked away in secret files is information about him coming from the future.
- Time Travel for Fun and Profit: The end of Flipside has Dominick using his future knowledge to ensure Jane gets a nice large lottery win.
- Time-Travel Romance: Jane and Dominick. One is from the 1980s, the other a bland future.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: Some sort of apocalypse at the end of the 20th century, the Holocaust of 1999, occurred which left most of the planet contaminated with pollution and poison, but the series isn't specific as to what did it.
- What the Hell, Hero?: In Another Flip, Great Aunt Mavis gives Dominick the required (metaphorical) kick up the arse over his dalliances in the 20th Century. She states that while Ava might have forgiven his first affair, since she hadn't gone through the same emotional awakening that Dominick had then, him continuing to pop back to the 20th Century (to see Jane, the woman he had an affair with and their child) might now peeve her off just a little.
