Holiday Star Trek
Monday, December 23rd 1974. We had the television on early – it was the Christmas holidays, and there were programmes on in the morning. This was a relatively recent development, and the coming years would see an interesting mix of nostalgic programming occupying the post-meridian slots on BBC and ITV. On this particular morning, we were tuned in to see Top Cat at 9.55am on BBC1. And when I say Top Cat, I mean Boss Cat – the BBC had coyly rebranded the series back in the 1960s to avoid giving free publicity to a brand of tinned cat meat. This retitling merely consisted of a new caption card, jaggedly cut into the original opening titles. How I wish they’d got someone to sing ‘Boss Cat’ over the title song, but it was not to be. I mean, ‘close friends get to call him BC’?
Top Cat was all very well, but this morning’s schedule included a first for British television – an episode of Star Trek broadcast during the day as opposed to in the evening. It felt a bit special: I mean, it was Christmas, and Star Trek was on in the morning. Moreover, it was on again tomorrow, Christmas Eve – and again on Boxing Day. This wouldn’t seem in any way remarkable to modern viewers but back in 1974 it was a broadcasting first: four Star Trek episodes in the space of a week. How special can you get? The BBC obviously felt that way because the Radio Times billing gave the title as ‘Holiday Star Trek’, which still gives me a warm glow of nostalgia. Those broadcasts were special for me in another way, as they was the first episodes I ever got to see in colour (we’d got our first colour TV set back in November).
There was nothing different about the presentation, although it’s quite possible that the continuity announcer would have added a festive note or two – unlike Top/Boss Cat, we didn’t get the word ‘Holiday’ superimposed over the opening titles. Although I rather wish we had…
One aspect of the BBC’s presentation of Star Trek that would surprise modern audiences was the decision to relocate the opening titles to the beginning of each episode. The BBC didn’t go a bundle on the kind of ‘cold opening’ favoured by American series, and wouldn’t do it on any of their own productions until Doomwatch in 1970. Having the main titles up front allowed the programme presentation technicians to crossfade from the rotating BBC world to the star field that opened each episode. I don’t know if they did it from day one, but it became a kind of stock in trade. I may even have some examples preserved on VHS tape somewhere.
Another BBC tradition around this time was the addition of festive trappings to the rotating globe logo. I’m not sure exactly when this got started, but my diary entry for December 24 1977 begins with the observation ‘BBC world is a Christmas pud.’ So that may have been the first year. Unfortunately, ‘Holiday Star Trek’ was over and done with by then – indeed, the original series didn’t get a solitary airing during 1977. So the prospect of seeing a spaceborne Christmas pudding accompanying William Shatner’s magisterial ‘space, the final frontier’ must remain an unfulfilled fantasy.
‘Holiday Star Trek’ would run for only two festive seasons, in 1974 and 1975. Its first year comprised eight episodes from the show’s first two seasons – although, by the BBC’s reckoning these were all ‘second series’ episodes, the corporation having mixed up episodes from the three original US seasons to create four British series. The festive missions of the starship Enterprise kicked off with one of my personal favourites, The Enemy Within. I know I watched this, because the entry is there in my diary. Christmas Eve’s episode was Court Martial, but Christmas Day was a Trek-free zone. Boxing Day saw the Halloween episode Catspaw beamed into our living rooms, then Kirk and co were off air from Friday 27 December through Sunday 29th , returning on Monday where viewers could have seen a pre-Starsky and Hutch David Soul with an iffy hairdo in The Apple. New Year’s Eve brought Metamorphosis, while 1975 kicked off to the accompaniment of Wolf in the Fold at 10.55am. The Changeling followed on Thursday 2 January before The Trouble With Tribbles brought the short season to an end on Friday 3rd.
The BBC weren’t just showing any old episodes at random – not yet anyway. Aside from transposing the first two episodes, this short run preserved the broadcast order adopted by the corporation for their ‘second series’ of Star Trekback in April 1970. A run of ‘first series’ repeats had come to an end on Wednesday 28 August 1974 with The Galileo Seven, and the festive season simply picked up where the evening repeats had left off.
When Star Trek was restored to its rightful place in the evening schedule – on Monday 19 May 1975 – the episodes were again following the BBC ‘second series’ broadcast order. It didn’t last long – Monday 9 June saw a leap forward with Return to Tomorrow (ironic titling if you like), before doubing back the following week with I, Mudd. By 21 July, the run of repeats had reached the BBC’s ‘third series’ (originally aired from October 1970 to February 1971), but conked out with The Gamesters of Triskelion (18 August).
In September, the cartoon series took over (on Saturday mornings), with ‘Holiday Star Trek’ returning for a second run on Saturday 20 December with an episode I had never previously seen – Wink of an Eye. I was tuned in again the following day for Let That be Your Last Battlefield, but with Amok Time on Monday 22 December, the BBC broadcast order went out of the window. The next day saw viewers beamed all the way back to series one for the episode Dagger of the Mind, while Christmas Eve brought Operation – Annihilate, a first season episode that the BBC had held back until its own third series (originally airing on 9 December 1970). Boxing Day saw The Paradise Syndrome scheduled at 10.05am immediately before a screening of the Beatles’ film Let It Be, following which Trek took a day off on the 27th before resuming on the 28th with The Cloud Minders – another first run for me. The last three days of 1975 saw Requiem for Methuselah, All Our Yesterdays and Day of the Dove, while two further episodes snuck in under the radar of 1976: Spectre of the Gun on Thursday 1 January and The Way to Eden on Friday 2nd. And with that, we were done. Star Trek went back to being an evening programme and would remain that way until a repeat run on Sunday mornings in October 1995, by which time the series had transitioned to BBC2.
These days, time-shifting, physical media and the plethora of digital channels mean that no programme seems particularly wedded to a specific time of day, so the ‘special’ quality of those festive Star Trek broadcasts may be hard for modern viewers to grasp. But at the age of thirteen, when one of your favourite TV series turns up at Christmas, in the morning as opposed to the evening, and you’re able to watch it in colour for the first time... you bet it was special.
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