Quantum Leap was my favourite TV programme when I was a kid. It felt like it was made for me. 

I loved the ideas of time travel and being someone else. Which probably said a lot about me and how I felt about myself. Escaping my time and my body.

The sci-fi series ran for five years from 1989 to 1993, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who has invented time travel. But unlike Marty McFly and his DeLorean, Sam doesn’t have a flux capacitor, he can’t go to a specific year, and returning isn’t as straightforward as driving 88 miles an hour or finding 1.21 gigawatts of energy.

Instead, Sam inhabits the bodies of people in history, within his own timeline, and with his own mind. He learns that in order to get home he has to change events in the past to make the final leap home. It was such a brilliant idea. Every episode he’d be somewhere different, as a different person, doing something he’d never done before. 

Who, where, what. 

Sam had to figure out who he was, with the help of Al (Dean Stockwell), a friend who only appears as a hologram and Ziggy, a super computer, and fix whatever had gone wrong in someone’s life. He never said, after leaping into a body:

‘I can’t do this! I know nothing about flying a plane, playing baseball, firing a machine gun, or even being a woman.’

He just had to work with what he knew and what he had. He even jumped into the body of Lee Harvey Oswald (an episode I missed!).

This was what was so fascinating about the programme… How would Sam get through this problem, inhabit the character and complete the mystery? And will it lead him to returning home? Invariably [SPOILER ALERT] it didn’t, until the 97th time, when he finally made it back. Sam would say ‘Oh Boy!’ each time he leapt and saw who he was. A family-friendly version of ‘Oh fuck!’ 

I was reading Will Hines’ book, How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth, when he drew the comparison of Quantum Leap to improv. It was like a 100 lightbulbs going off in my head. Of course it is! It’s exactly the same, and just like Sam, you can’t say I don’t know how to ride a horse, fix a car, play guitar or be an old person. If someone tells you that’s who you are and what you do then to the best of your knowledge you inhabit that character and their skills. Obviously unless you truly know how to be or do those things, you do your best. And fucking that up is part of the fun and the comedy.

Denying what you’ve been told, rejecting that offer, and countering with a reply that you’re someone completely different, is of course wrong, and not much fun. I’ve seen it happen and it spoils the scene. You may well have a great idea, but if your partner starts with something then you build on that. That’s who you are and what you do. Don’t change it because it’s not what you wanted to do.

The consequence is you’ll both get confused and so will the audience. I’ve walked into scenes not fully knowing who I was and found out along the way. But like with Quantum Leap, you become that person, but instantly,  and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in what you say, how you behave or in your body language. 

There are exceptions and the possibility of a twist. For example, I was once told I was a phlebotomist (a person who takes blood) and I was retiring. My patient (scene partner) was the last. Except I thought it would be funny if in my 30 years in the job I’d managed to avoid extracting any blood at all and I didn’t know what I was doing. Totally preposterous, it would never happen, but it was a funny idea and it worked. There’s a distinction between that and an out right denial, e.g. ‘I’m not a phlebotomist, that’s not my name, I’m actually a cowboy named Tex and this is all a dream… etc.

So, take a deep breath. Say, ‘Oh boy’ (in your head), let go of that idea you had, and see where others and the scene takes you. And, enjoy, because unlike with Sam, the stakes aren’t as high. 

You’re still going home at the end of the evening.