Marty McFly

The greatest time-travel story ever told (no debate) put a 5ft 4in teenager into a magic sports car and sent him 30 years into the past, where he invented skateboarding and french-kissed his own mother. And it says much for the scope of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 blockbuster, that this precis covers about 10% of the overall story… At its centre was Marty McFly (Michael J Fox), a 17-year-old from the 1980s who found himself in the 1950s, a peer of his courting parents and a threat to his own existence. A bolt of lightning and a Chuck Berry number put things right. Lesser sequels pitched Marty forwards (flying cars!) and backwards (public hangings!) in time.

Gary Sparrow

How did the BBC persusade us to get behind a sitcom hero who was a liar, adulterer and bigamist? By making him a time traveller! Over six series of Goodnight Sweetheart, Gary Sparrow (Nicholas Lyndhurst) scurried between the 1940s and the 1990s, keeping a war-time mistress, Phoebe, sweet with nylon stockings while deceiving his beleaguered modern-day wife, Yvonne. A show that began with cheater-forced-to-eat-two-dinners scenarios evolved into something more sombre and uneasy, Gary eventually marrying Phoebe and getting stuck in the past. “I have to come and go!” he complained. But as Gary found out, it can’t work like that for ever.

Sam Beckett

In my memory it was never fully explained why Dr Sam Beckett, in the 90s TV show Quantum Leap, could only time-travel “within his own lifetime” – as far back as the 1950s, in other words. Perhaps the show’s producers weren’t keen to shell out for things like Roman armour or Noah’s ark every episode. Anyway, Quantum Leap was brilliant, flinging Sam (played by Scott Bakula) through contemporary American history with Al, a holographic chum who had access to a Wikipedia-like database of catastrophe. Together they worked out ways to “put right what once went wrong”.

Sam Tyler

This shouldn’t have worked… John Simm played Sam Tyler, a respectful modern copper, hit by a car and inexplicably plunged back to 1973 for 16 episodes of politically incorrect police work. Yet Life on Mars was a hit for the BBC in 2006, taking a sideways look at 70s corruption and having fun at the expense of its present-day viewers (“Television… in a pub?”). Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt got the memorable lines (“Now is not the time to have a one-night stand with your conscience”) while Tyler frowned a lot, and began to wonder whether everything was an exotic dream.

Ebenezer Scrooge

Dickens got in early on the time-travel game, publishing A Christmas Carol in 1843, a good few decades before Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and HG Wells’s The Time Machine. Ebenezer Scrooge was whisked back several decades by the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then forward a year by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, where he was shown his own grave. “Assure me that I yet may change...by an altered life!” Scrooge begged, and on his return to the present he became (prefiguring many a time traveller) an improved person.

Phil Connors

In Doctor Who, the Tardis-spoiled Doctor goes anywhere, to any time. Is that so impressive? In 1993’s Groundhog Day, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) was forced to travel back to the start of a nondescript February day, over and over again, for decades. Connors was locked in his time-loop for so long he evolved into a weary action-man, jogging around town averting accidents he knew about in advance. To pass the time he learned languages and card tricks and the piano, endlessly trying to woo an attractive colleague, Rita. “A very long day” for Connors came to an end when they slept together.

Abe and Aaron

The time travellers in Shane Carruth’s pinched, low-budget film Primer relived particular days (thanks to a home-made portal) in order to get rich, placing clever trades on the stock market. But were stocks and shares the only things Abe and Aaron (David Sullivan and writer-director Carruth) were manipulating? Gluey and engrossing, this 2004 film was also brain-achingly complicated. “Are you hungry?” Aaron asked. “I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon...” Events ended in chaos. If time travel existed, Primer suggested, it wouldn’t all be meeting famous dead people and making therapeutic returns to the present; things would get messy, quickly.

Billy Pilgrim

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Kurt Vonnegut’s hero in Slaughterhouse-Five lived a luckless, meandering life and became a luckless, meandering time traveller. “[He] has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun… he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” Now a bullied private in the second world war, now a widowed optometrist, now a sex slave on an alien planet, Pilgrim ultimately found spiritual peace. Having seen “his birth and death many times”, he learned that “it is just an illusion we have on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string”.

River Song

Women have not often been cast as time travellers (quickly you’re looking to Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger, who once used time travel to resurrect a dead pet... but then, curiously, seemed to forget she had the ability once her peers started dying). At least there was River Song, a recurring Doctor Who character, played by Alex Kingston, who we watched whiz from the 51st century back to 100AD, stopping at 1969 and elsewhere between. In an episode from 2011 the character (played, confusingly, by another actor at the time) delivered one of the best lines in the time travel canon: “You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun... What the hell! Let’s kill Hitler.”

Time Bandits

This gang of fantastical time-travelling dwarves introduced themselves, in 1981’s Time Bandits, by leaping on to a young boy’s bed and beating him up with a baseball bat. This happened only eight minutes in to Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin’s surreal and much-loved film, which went on to align the dwarves (led by David Rappaport’s Randall) with the young boy (Craig Warnock’s Kevin) for a jaunt through history. They met Robin Hood (John Cleese) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery) and wound up on the Titanic. “More champagne!” Randall told an on-board waiter. “And plenty of ice!” You can guess what happened next.