Did anyone else watch this? I remember avidly watching it in my early teens. It was ITV's answer to the BBC's 'Dr Who'. At the time most teenagers thought that it was much more hip (cool). Unfortunately, I've seen it again more recently on the Sci-Fi Channel, and the acting is atrocious, the special effects bad, and the storylines are full of plot holes.
This early 1970's Thames Television show followed the exploits of a group of teenage super beings that were based in a secret lab in an abandoned London Underground railway station. They were the next step in human evolution: 'Homo Superior' (a name taken from a David Bowie lyric). The show's creator Roger Price came up with the idea after meeting Bowie, while making a TV pop show at Granada, and reading a mind-expanding novel called 'The Mind in Chains', by psycho-scientist Dr Christopher Evans. Evans would become the show's 'scientific adviser'.
The title sequence music and images was quite memorable, with a fist, a brain and some other objects that I never worked out, alternated between the faces of the current cast.
The child actors came and went at an alarming rate, explained away in the series by them going to the Galactic Federation, the Galactic Trig, which Earth would one day be able to join, if we stopped waging wars. In reality, they had gone on to Drama school, or to get 'proper' jobs.
Many stories involved them discovering a new Tomorrow Person as they 'broke out' during puberty and discovered their powers. This could be a both frightening and potentially dangerous event.
They were able to teleport (jaunt), move objects by telekinesis, and communicate telepathically with each other as well as their own biotronic supercomputer 'Tim'. Tim could amplify their powers, and also kept a constant watch on all TV and radio broadcasts. He was a source of information only comparable with Batman's Bat-computer in an age before unlimited computer memory and the Internet.
Each week the villains would be a variety of military types who wanted to use them as cold war spies, evil galactic criminals with bushy beards, and aliens who used forced child-labour. They would inevitably be knocked out, have their minds controlled, or lose their special powers completely.
The earlier episodes were the best and most thought provoking. This is quite a realistic review:
http://www.animus-web.demon.co.uk/tellydoc/peeps.htm and stacks of further information here:
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
There was a recent re-imaging of the series, but I only saw part of an episode, and it just wasn't the same. The older series ended very abruptly, there was supposed to be a concluding serial, but the day that they would start filming the last serial, there was a strike at Thames Television, and it was cancelled.