TV – Tripped (2015)

Tripped is a curious little four-part SFF comedy shown on the UK TV Channel E4 in December. Long-term friends Danny and Milo are two young men in present-day England; Milo is a drug-taking slacker while Danny is trying to become respectable. They are shocked to discover that they are the target of a brutal, sword-wielding assassin who appears out of nowhere. They are saved by a carbon-copy of Danny, also wielding a sword, who also appears from nowhere before warning them that their attacker is from a parallel world. Not only are they in peril, so are all of the Dannys and Milos in all of the parallel worlds which contain them. To make matters worse, there is an equally large number of assassins.

The world-hoppers travel by means of a bracelet which looks technological rather than magical (thereby technically making this SF rather than fantasy; on such small points can sub-genres be determined!).  Our unlikely pair of heroes get hold of a bracelet and are accidentally transported to another world which seems identical to their own, including an alternative Danny and Milo, except that Milo's granny is still alive and Danny's fiancée Kate is married to someone else.

Our not-so-heroic heroes' attempts to find their way back to their own world keep landing them in more trouble. First they arrive in a world in which Milo was a world-famous rock star and was going out with Kate – except that he was supposed to have died years before.

Next up is another version of their world about to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Meanwhile, the assassins keep pursuing them, leaving a growing pile of dead Dannys and Milos in one world after another, while our heroes try to work out what is going on.

Eventually they do discover the reason for their misadventures, very much the hard way, but just as everything seems to be back to normal – the final twist positively sits up and begs for a second series!

This is an entertaining and frequently amusing tale which is definitely not to be taken seriously. Worth seeking out if you missed it on TV and enjoy the bizarre.