In the 1980s, younger television audiences in France eagerly tuned in each week to Temps X on the TF1 channel to see what the future would be like. Their guides, the heirs to the traditions of Jules Verne, were two striking-looking identical fraternal twins, Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff.
The programme, presented from a set resembling a spaceship, showcased foreign science-fiction series, such as Space: 1999, Star Trek and Doctor Who. It also, like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, introduced viewers to exciting technological advances, prototypes of mobile telephones and websites. Yet the journey of the Bogdanoffs on planet Earth would become more outlandish than even they could have predicted.
They were born Igor and Grégoire Bogdanoff in 1949, in the village of Saint-Lary,