1999 @ 50

 

I’d known about Space:1999 for months. Paperback novelisations had begun appearing in bookshops well before the series got anywhere near a TV screen. The TV Times had mentioned it a year earlier, publishing a photo of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and calling the series Space 99 (a better title if you ask me). The BBC’s Horizon had included clips in a film about the special effects industry, How on Earth Did They Do That, broadcast on 23 December 1974. I knew something was on its way from Gerry Anderson, I just didn’t know when to expect it.

Finally, on September 4, 1975, it arrived, promoted as part of ITV’s ‘Big Season’ of autumn programmes. Viewers in the ATV Midlands region, of whom I was one, got to see it first, at 7.00pm that evening, along with the Yorkshire, Grampian, Scottish, Border and Ulster regions. In the London and Anglia areas, it began two days later, on Saturday 6th at 5.50pm – arguably a better slot, but up against Dr. Who on BBC1 – and the Timelord had stolen a march on the Alphans by grabbing viewers a week earlier. This, clearly, didn’t help the Andersons' cause. Neither did the events of the coming months, when many ITV regions relegated the series to different slots. Christmas has a habit of interrupting any scheduled series, and in the LWT area, it provided the perfect excuse to demote Space:1999 to Saturday mornings at 11.50 commencing January 1976. One can only imagine what Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade thought of seeing their £3m investment treated as kids’s stuff.

'Space 99' gets its first mention in the TV Times, September 1974

It was too often the case on British television that science fiction was dismissed as juvenile fodder, the BBC’s Quatermass and Out of the Unknown being notable exceptions to an almost universal rule. Science fiction meant space ships, robots and men in monster suits. It did not equate to serious drama. When the BBC began showing Star Trek in the summer of 1969, it was in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who. When the show’s appeal to adults was better understood, it got taken more seriously, and was promoted to a 7pm slot on midweek evenings – exactly the same slot that most ITV regions originally chose for Space:1999. Mr. Spock would have approved of their logic...

By the time the series appeared, I'd got ahead of the curve by reading the novelisation of the first episode. Further novels appeared through the autumn, along with a Space:1999 Annual, which a friend of mine got ordered for us through his mum's mail order catalogue. The series was promoted in the comic Look-in, where John Burns provided a rushed strip cartoon version (he reportedly hated drawing comics based on TV series). I'd stopped reading Look-in when it started featuring the likes of David Cassidy, but I made an exception this week. I might have kept on buying it if I'd liked the comic strip, but I wasn't keen on John Burns' artwork. Why couldn't they have got Mike Noble? (Don't tell me, I know...)

Here in the ATV region, Space:1999 stayed put on Thursday evenings for its whole first series run, with only a single episode, The Last Sunset, broadcast in an earlier slot on New Year’s Day 1976. When it returned, in the autumn, for a second season, ATV played the same trick as LWT and Anglia the previous year, putting it up against Dr. Who. I was quite happy to forsake the Doctor (I was never that keen on Tom Baker), and tuned in on Saturday 4 September for the first of the new series. Teatime on Saturday felt like a good time to watch Space:1999, ideally accompanied by a bacon and sausage sandwich – but it wouldn’t last. Only seven episodes were shown in that slot before the series was bumped to 4.45 on Thursday evenings, commencing with the all time dud episode, The Rules of Luton. Had the programme been under-performing against Dr. Who? It seems highly likely. But series two got the scheduling it deserved – under Fred Freiberger’s influence, it had degenerated into a children’s show, on a par with Lost in Space. Aged fifteen, I was keenly aware of this, and although I kept on watching, I knew the series had lost everything that had made it special – the serious, metaphysical air that pervaded year one was replaced with comic gags about Tony Verdeschi’s home-brewed beer, and a parade of increasingly silly monsters. It’s clear from my diary that I wasn’t taking the new series entirely seriously when I wrote about the Alphans blowing up ‘Brian Blessed’s fizzy drinks machine’ in the season opener, The Metamorph. Series two disappeared after Christmas, leaving seven episodes as yet unbroadcast, but by this time, I didn’t really care. The tail end of the series finally made it to the screen in August of 1977, when five episodes were shown, whilst the remaining two (The Immunity Syndrome and The Dorcons) were rolled out on a couple of Bank Holiday Mondays in 1978.

It’s sobering to reflect that half a century has passed since I first saw Breakaway. That broadcast was probably the very last time that a new sci-fi TV series gave me a frisson of anticipation. For the first few weeks it was all new, and strange and amazing, the sets, the hardware, the music – I’d got the same buzz about every Anderson series from Thunderbirds onwards, when I was old enough to enjoy the anticipation of a new and exciting series. I know it’s a feeling I’ll never get again.

TV Times looks at Space:1999 during its first week on air.

The Big Season

ITV pulls the stops out... September 1975

Autumn was always traditionally the time when broadcasters unveiled their new programme line-ups for the coming season, and this week fifty years ago, it was all kicking off on ITV and BBC1. From quite an early age, I was aware of the 'new series for autumn' phenomenon: for me, it usually meant a new series from Gerry Anderson: Thunderbirds (1965), Captain Scarlet (1967), Joe 90 (1968). Every autumn, the TV Times would promote forthcoming attractions in a special feature, whilst on-air promotional trails often featured a special jingle or seasonal graphics. In 1975, it all came together – on ITV at any rate – in a package called ‘The Big Season’. It even had its own logo – a very 70s design – featured prominently on the trailers, and splashed across the cover of seven weeks’ worth of the TV Times. No broadcaster in the UK had ever put this amount of effort into trailing their new autumn schedule, and whilst the BBC had been previewing its own autumn line-up since the middle of August, there was no comparable cross-over into the pages of the Radio Times.

‘It’s the Big Season on ITV’ sang the trailers, accompanied by the big, flabby 1970s logo that had been designed for use across the campaign. There were clips of everything from Raffles to Space:1999, and a lot of attention lavished on ITV’s big new crime drama, The Sweeney, about to enter its second season. I even drew my own ‘Big Season’ graphic in my diary to mark the occasion, although I misspelled the title of the new series – as did the publishers of the spin-off novel that appeared in bookshops the same week.

Here in the Midlands, 'The Big Season' even merited a whole programme to itself, which also got a mention in my diary. Aimed specifically at local viewers, and shown at 6.45pm on Saturday 30 August, this clip-fest, hosted by one of the regional continuity announcers, provided a first look at the new autumn line up, including clips from Space:1999 and the long deferred third series of Batman, both of which would make their debut the following Thursday. For me, Space:1999 was the big event of the season. Ironically, my first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s outer space epic had been on BBC2, almost a year earlier, when the Horizon series presented a look at the special effects industry (How on Earth Did They Do That, 23 December 1974). Space:1999 was not well served by ITV, with broadcasts split across the various regions – London and Anglia scheduled it on Saturday teatime, in deliberate competition with Dr. Who, whilst in other areas it arrived two days earlier, at 7.00pm on Thursday 4 September. 

ITV’s big promotional push was pipped to the post by the BBC, who had begun to roll out its own autumn programmes a week earlier, in much the same way that supermarkets start stocking mince pies as soon as August Bank Holiday is out of the way. Pre-September debuts included rugged adventure series Oil Strike North (Tuesday 26th August), Le Carré-esque espionage drama Quiller (Friday 29th August) and new series of old favourites Softly, Softly: Task Force (Wednesday 27th August), The Liver Birds (Friday 29th) and Dr. Who (Saturday 30th), while September would bring new arrivals in the form of student nurse drama Angels (Monday 1st), beat-pounding comedy in The Growing Pains of PC Penrose (Thursday 4th) and an eighth series of Dad’s Army (Friday 5th). Also that autumn, a little number entitled Fawlty Towers shuffled hesitantly onto the small screen with next to no fanfare...

I'm sure no one at ITV took any notice: the network had plenty of its own big guns still waiting to roll out, including the return of Upstairs Downstairs (Sunday 7th September), while other popular titles being dusted off for the new season included Sale of the Century, Within These Walls (Saturday 6th) and World in Action (Monday 8th). Brand new drama included The Stars Look Down (Wednesday 3rd), Shades of Greene (Tuesday 9th) and Raffles (Wednesday 10th). But the biggest highlight of all, and a guaranteed ratings winner, was the television debut of James Bond, when Dr. No made its first appearance on the small screen on Tuesday 28th October.

All through September and well into October, the TV Times kept up its promotional campaign, with ‘Big Season’ cover montages highlighting the week’s biggest new arrivals. Inside the magazine, listings were accompanied by a ‘Big Season’ thumbnail, replacing the austere ‘new series’ flash that had previously served to alert viewers. Even children’s television got the same star treatment: Cosgrove Hall’s Noddy (Monday 22nd September), Here Comes Mumfie and Sooty (Wednesday 24th) all merited ‘Big Season’ status in the listings.

All of which merely served to guarantee what most media watchers already knew: in 1975, ITV were regularly trouncing the BBC in the ratings wars, with some of the year’s biggest audiences tuning in for The Benny Hill Show, The Royal Variety Performance, The Sweeney, Edward VII and Coronation Street. Not all of ITV’s new autumn programmes did the business, though. Space:1999 fared quite badly and in the London area was demoted after Christmas to a Saturday morning slot. One can well imagine what Lew Grade thought about this, having bankrolled the series to the tune of £3m. A brand-new Sunday evening comedy My Brother’s Keeper, starring George Layton and Jonathan Lynn as an ill-matched pair of brothers (one a policeman, the other a lefty agitator) is now long forgotten, along with Jewish family comedy My Son Reuben, and Vince Powell’s Rule Britannia, a sitcom embodiment of the old ‘Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman’ gag, which I think posterity can probably do without.

The ‘Big Season’ run of TV Times covers ended with the edition for 11-17 October, with a cover highlighting afternoon viewing. For many, this meant horse racing, but there was also the return of Crown Court and the medical soap General Hospital, alongside programmes focusing on travel, cookery and antiques. A latecomer in the sitcom stakes, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s national service comedy Get Some In! also began the same week, whilst Rising Damp – still some way off becoming a cult favourite – returned for a second series in November. I had yet to discover its brilliance, as it clashed with The Invisible Man over on BBC1 (David McCallum’s short-lived fantasy adventure, cancelled after a single series). 

Fifty years on, it’s interesting to look back at an era when television viewing was a good deal more straightforward than it has become: just two networks competing for viewers, and all the big new series available to anyone with a TV set and a license. Today, I wouldn’t have the first idea where to look for big new television series this autumn, and I doubt I’d bother even if I did know. Streaming services have fragmented and diffused the television viewing experience, and one would need a second mortgage to keep up with them all. You may well think that more channels, more choice, high definition and feature film production values all adds up to a whole lot more than viewers were being offered back in 1975. I’ll beg to differ with you.

Part of a large preview feature from the TV Times for 30 Aug-5 Sept 1975