Reaching the Outer Limits

 

Part Two: We Are Controlling Transmission

My 1980 diary maps out my journey with The Outer Limits as I sat up until ungodly hours on those late Friday nights while BBC2 provided the series' first (and only) nationally networked UK broadcast. VHS would have helped, but I had yet to get my hands on a machine. For the first week’s outing, Harlan Ellison’s Demon With a Glass Hand, I even wrote up a complete plot summary – understandable in the absence of an episode guide. Week two brought Keeper of the Purple Twilight (series 2, episode 12), before flipping back to series one for the decidedly iffy Moonstone. Whoever was doing the scheduling was clearly a Harlan Ellison fan, as the fourth episode shown was his series 2 opener Soldier. Much later, this story became the focus for controversy when Ellison issued a writ against the producers of The Terminator, alleging that they’d plagiarised his ideas. (In fact, The Terminator was a lot closer in concept to the series one episode The Man Who Was Never Born, which sees a man from the future return to the twentieth century to prevent the birth of a scientist whose invention has decimated civilization.)

Fifth in the BBC run was The Premonition which my diary described as ‘a good story’. It was followed by The Hundred Days of the Dragon, a political story where the ‘monster’ element is a face-reshaping technology. So far, I’d not missed an episode, but following the below-par The Invisibles, I skipped Counterweight. Just as well, as this one really belongs at the bottom of the Outer Limits barrel: boring story, dull production design, and unimaginatively lit.

After no more than half a dozen episodes, I was already becoming aware of the big problem with The Outer Limits – inconsistency. Some of the episodes were enhanced by low key, noirish lighting, whereas others had the flat, drab lighting of a hundred other journeyman television productions. The scripts too were a decidedly mixed bag, with some coming from noted SF authors, whilst others were supplied by Joseph (Psycho) Stefano, series creator Leslie Stephens and a variety of TV scriptwriters, not all of whom rose to the occasion. The ‘bears’ were either creepy or laughable, and sometimes managed to be both. What was it Jeff Rovin had said in A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films? 'One is hard pressed to recall a bad episode'. I was beginning to have my doubts...

My hiatus lasted only one week, and the next episode I saw was the superior Man With the Power, a monster-free episode that saw Donald Pleasance as a mild-mannered university professor, with a brain implant that channelled his inner violent urges. This was followed by The Sixth Finger, an episode I’d been waiting for on account of a solitary photo of David McCallum in his makeup. Oddly, it turned out to be set in Wales, where everyone who works in the mines goes around with a permanently blackened face. Whilst the idea of a super-evolved human was intriguing, the story suffered from a lack of depth or development, although McCallum’s make-up changes were reasonably well realised.

By this time, the series had been on air a couple of months, with the broadcast times getting later and later every week: midnight for The Sixth Finger and Galaxy Being, 00:20 for The Man Who Was Never Born, 00:30 for I, Robot. Simply staying awake through the episodes was becoming a challenge, and when the scripts fell below par, I began to wonder if it was worth making the effort. My patience came to an end with It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, an episode I’d been anticipating after seeing a write-up in another SF book: but my diary entry reads: ‘very bad episode, probably the worst yet’. There were only three weeks remaining of this opening run, bringing us the episodes O.B.I.T.,The Human Factor and finally, on 19 July, Nightmare. ‘Last crappy Outer Limits’ says my diary.

The series was off air for barely a month, before returning on Friday 15 August at the earlier time of 11.30pm. Tonight’s episode was The Zanti Misfits, which I knew was going to be somewhat ludicrous, having seen a picture of the eponymous creatures in a sci-fi book. The earlier timeslot meant I only got to see the last few minutes after getting home from the pub. It didn’t matter, as my friend Tim Beddows had taped the episode – but it was a very long time before I got around to watching that VHS. I now began missing the series more often than I saw it, but I was rewarded with a ‘classic’ episode (according to my diary), in the form of the comedic Controlled Experiment (30 August, 12.00am). On the whole, though, I felt I’d seen enough of the series by now.

On Friday 19 September, I got home in time to see the fag end of Z-Z-Z-Z which was as ludicrous as its title suggests: a queen bee who assumes human form. Oddly enough, no episode had been scheduled that evening, to make way for International Darts coverage. The match must have ended earlier than anticipated, hence this unscheduled broadcast. Episodes continued until 13 December, but no more entries appear in my diary. By November, I finally had a VHS machine, and could have recorded episodes had I felt inclined. I didn't.

After a short break for Christmas, the series resumed on 10 January, now shifted to a late Saturday night/ Sunday morning slot, where it was in danger of clashing with Bilko over on BBC1. I’d obviously decided to give the series the benefit of the doubt, and saw the first two episodes in this run – The Bellero Shield (10 January) and The Mutant (17 January). The latter was very much a case of ‘this is where I came in’, as the monster of the week was none other than the ‘Man With Super Sight’ that had caught my attention back in 1975. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t as intriguing as Warren Oates’ insane make-up had led me to believe.

I finally committed an episode to tape on 7 March 1981, having had a VHS machine since the previous November. Cold Hands, Warm Heart had been mentioned in Jeff Rovin's book, and with William Shatner as guest star, there seemed good reason to tune in and tape the episode for posterity. There were no stupid monsters, either. From 24 April, the series was back on Friday nights, and for the first time in a good few weeks, I was tuned in to see Cry of Silence, summing it up in my diary with the single word ‘hilarious’. This was, of course, the notorious ‘old couple menaced by tumbleweeds’ episode. Adam West was in next week’s episode, The Invisible Enemy (possibly the most over-used title in the history of television), so I again made an effort to watch; but this for me was the end of the line.

The BBC broadcasts ran until 18 July 1981, when the series 2 episode The Brain of Colonel Barham wrapped things up. There would be no repeat broadcasts. When The Outer Limits next appeared in the Radio Times, it was the mid-90s reboot which would run for a staggering seven seasons. I didn’t watch a single episode. The original series finally emerged on DVD, and recently reappeared on the small screen when Talking Pictures picked it up.

To date, I’m sure there are still a good many of the original Outer Limits episodes that I’ve never seen, and a fair few I probably shouldn’t bother with. I’ve owned both series on DVD for over 20 years, but every time I embark on a rewatch, the same old ennui kicks in. The Outer Limits promised a lot and, for me, after waiting half a decade to see it, never quite delivered. I’m currently in the process of watching it again, on Friday late nights in homage to that 1980 BBC broadcast. Whether I stay the distance remains to be seen. Have I, like David McCallum, out-evolved it?

“We now return control of your television set to you...”

Reaching the Outer Limits

Part One: There is Nothing Wrong With Your Television Set...

These days, it’s easy to get information on any vintage piece of film or television, even if you’ve never heard of it before. There are episode guides online, and in many cases, complete episodes to watch. Often, there’s a DVD release available. Compare this to the situation back in the 1970s. I’d never heard of the science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, and it had hardly made an impression here in the UK, clocking up only sporadic appearances on a couple of regions across the ITV network. Then, in 1975, it popped onto my radar...

It was a magazine that put me onto the scent. World of Horror was a short-lived, cult publication, focused on the whole genre of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Issue 4 caught my eye with its cover featuring Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, and it was in here, on page 48, that I got my first glimpse of the weird creatures – or ‘bears’ – that had been a feature of the 1960s science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits. The magazine’s editors didn’t seem to know very much about it. A reader had sent in a set of bubblegum cards (which were apparently never returned), and a very brief panel of text informed us that 'these creatures are very rare and seldom seen’, as if they were describing some rare fauna. I liked the look of them, especially the bizarre ‘Man With Super Sight’, who boasted eyes the size of fried eggs. Also depicted were ‘Man From Galaxy X’, ‘The Radio-Active Man’, ‘Incredible Ice Man’ and a reptilian creature ‘Hunting New Victims’. The descriptions had nothing at all to do with the TV series: Topps, who produced the cards, had licensed only the images, and were not permitted to include any material from the scripts, so they simply made up their own stories, printed on the backs of the cards.

Not long after seeing these examples in print, I was shown some of the real things – a friend of mine had a handful of the cards, including ‘The Man With Super Sight’, and they looked even better in colour. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get him to part with them. Much later, I chanced upon a few examples in a random bag of old gum cards, but complete sets sell today for significant sums.

Here in Britain, the cards had been issued in 1964 by A&BC (who later produced several Batman sets). It seems a strange decision to release a set of bubblegum cards based on a series that was almost unknown in the UK, but perhaps the manufacturers thought that the weird monsters would appeal to kids regardless, and the cards were indeed sold under the banner ‘Monsters From Outer Limits’. Any kids who had chanced to see an episode would have had to sit up well past their bedtimes. Granada had broadcast a batch of episodes between April and October 1964, scheduled at 9.40pm on Thursday evenings, with a further selection shown sporadically between July and December of 1966, at the later time of 11.05pm on Friday evenings. Elsewhere across the ITV regions, the series was either absent from the schedules or as good as.

It was no wonder then, that I’d never heard of The Outer Limits when I turned up those gum cards in World of Horror. But my interest had been piqued, and I needed to know more. I held out no hope whatsoever of actually getting to see any episodes, and it was as much as one could hope for to find a few stills and the odd paragraph of description. For this, I had to wait until Christmas 1975, when a copy of Jeff Rovin’s A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films found its way into my collection. The book focused primarily on movies, but the author had (I suspect rather grudgingly) conceded a chapter dealing with science fiction on television. Rovin was dismissive of the likes of Irwin Allen, and had almost nothing to say about the efforts of Gerry Anderson, but he did find room for two paragraphs in praise of The Outer Limits, which he described as ‘a consistently high quality series […] One is hard pressed to recall a bad episode.’ This all sounded very promising. The book didn’t run to an episode guide, but the text mentioned a few key episodes including Demon With a Glass Hand, I, Robot, and Cold Hands, Warm Heart, all of them name-checked on account of their notable guest stars. There were also two photographs, one depicting the Andromeda creature seen in the pilot episode Galaxy Being, and the other showing David McCallum as a highly evolved human in The Sixth Finger. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start and, more importantly, I knew now that The Outer Limits was a series worth watching out for – in the unlikely event of its ever resurfacing on British television.

A few years later, I chanced upon an Outer Limits Annual at a jumble sale, one of two published by World Distributors in 1965 and 66 and made up of reprints of American comics. As with the gum cards, it seems an odd choice of publication for a series that was clearly not aimed at a juvenile audience. The stories offered a few clues to the style of the series and the type of stories one might expect from it, with a preponderance of silly monsters, one of whom also featured on the cover painting.

As things turned out, it was almost five years to the day after I’d seen those bubble gum cards that I finally got to see what the fuss was all about. Inexplicably, BBC2 bought the series and began broadcasting episodes on 28 March 1980, scheduling them in a very late timeslot, with many not starting until after midnight. Like ITV before them, the BBC chose to ignore the original US broadcast order, and went even further by mixing up episodes from the two seasons. Thus it was that this UK network premiere kicked off with Harlan Ellison’s Demon With a Glass Hand, whose reputation preceded it – although it wasn’t exactly typical of the series as a whole.

Of the scripts, Jeff Rovin’s summary had described the plots as ‘fresh and exciting, and with rare exceptions when a moral or fable took centre stage, they were all classic science fiction’. Now at long last, I would get the chance to find out if he was right in his estimation or hopelessly deluded...

In part 2, I’ll revisit those BBC2 broadcasts in more detail…

Tales of Eclipses

 

Maximum eclipse and nearing the end: projections of the 2026 event.

The recent solar eclipse visible from the UK generated a fair amount of media coverage. Some of the language used was a little unusual to say the least. ITV's Martin Stew spoke of how eclipses have 'mystified' humanity for generations, which is an odd thing to say given that the ancient Chinese and Babylonians were able to predict solar eclipses as early as 2500BC. What's mystifying about the moon obscuring the sun, when you understand the process involved? Primitive races treated eclipses with fear and superstition, but to say that they've 'mystified' us all this time sounds like a throwback to those ignorant ages. The BBC didn't do much better, describing the moment of totality as 'surreal'. On the whole, the media coverage of the eclipse leaned towards this kind of new age, emotive description: that is when they weren't focused on the unavailability of eclipse glasses.

The other odd feature of the 2026 eclipse in the media is how long it took for the event to even make it onto the news agenda. Only in the days immediately prior to the eclipse did attention turn towards the coming event, and it was focused mainly on travellers heading into Iceland (a poor choice, as viewing conditions were far better in Spain). This contrasts sharply with the situation back in 1999, when the media were on the case well ahead of the event. Admittedly, in 1999 there was no social media, and the total eclipse was visible from the extreme end of Cornwall, making it the only time totality would be visible from the British mainland until 23 September 2090. In 1999, the eclipse generated a veritable mini industry, with books, posters and other memorabilia produced to commemorate the event. Patrick Moore was still with us and journeyed to Cornwall where he joined the crowds to experience totality under a 100% overcast sky. There was live coverage on BBC1 from 9.45 until 11.30am, with totality occurring at 11.04am. This year, it fell to the news programmes to report on the event, which, admittedly, they all did, and ran as the lead story on the evening's bulletins. But somehow, it all fell short of the hype surrounding 1999's eclipse.

Having a passing interest in astronomy (that stops well short of the technical) I'd known about the 1999 eclipse more than ten years ahead of the event, and was also well aware in advance of the partial eclipse on 12 August of this year. Even if I'd not been so clued up in 1999, it was impossible not to have been aware of the coming event. The date probably helped to ramp up the level of interest in the 1999 eclipse, which was the last total eclipse of the century. Search online and you'll find dozens of commemorative items from the time: newspaper covers and supplements, wallcharts, mugs, eclipse-watching glasses, a video narrated by Brian Blessed and even a set of commemorative thimbles. This year, even with the eclipse very near total here in the UK, there was nothing of the kind to be had. It lacked that magic ingredient: totality. I dare say those who travelled to Iceland or Spain might have found a few stalls selling eclipse merchandise, but here in Britain it was a case of glasses or nothing.

Solar eclipses aren't rare. Total eclipses occur somewhere on the Earth's surface roughly every eighteen months, but many are visible only in remote areas of ocean or around the poles. When a total eclipse is visible from any of the major continents, it is automatically a media event. There was much coverage of the 2024 total eclipse which was visible across large parts of North America. As a much smaller island, Britain hasn't been so well favoured, with only 158 total eclipses having occurred since the beginning of the first millennium. During the 20th century there were just four, although the majority barely touched the northern and southernmost tips of the country, and the only one to be visible from any further inland was the eclipse of 29 June 1927, when totality lasted just 24 seconds and was largely obscured by cloud. The total eclipse of 2090 will once again graze Cornwall, and totality will be viewable from Poole, Newquay, Plymouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight – in case you want to note the date in your diary...

I'm not sure when I first became aware of solar eclipses as a phenomenon. I was born in 1961, a few weeks after a total eclipse that was visible across much of Europe and parts of the then Soviet Union. I don't remember hearing or seeing anything about eclipses in the media until 1968, when a partial eclipse was visible here in Britain. Our mum told us there was 'a neclipse of the sun' (I misheard her) that day. Another partial eclipse followed on 25 February 1971, and this time I recorded it in my diary, somewhat over stating the dangers of looking directly at the sun: 'Partial eclips (sic) of the sun is DEADLY!!!!' Patrick Moore had appeared on television (either on Blue Peter or Nationwide), advising viewers not to look at the sun with the naked eye – and certainly not through a telescope! There were further partial eclipses in 1972, 1973, 1975 and 1976, none of which made it into my diaries. The 76 eclipse was again on a schoolday and was in progress during morning break: I remember trying to see it in a mostly cloudy sky. Of all the eclipses I'd been able to view to date, this was the largest, with coverage of the sun's disc ranging from 85% in northern Scotland to 95% across southern England. Despite the extent of the eclipse – which at its maximum was equivalent to the 2026 event – I don't recollect the media having much to say on the topic. It was certainly mentioned, but didn't generate anything like the amount of coverage we've seen recently.

Using fairly rudimentary equipment: a telescope or binoculars projected onto card mounted on a music stand (!) I've been able to view some of the most interesting eclipses of the past decade or so, along with a couple of transits of the sun's disc by the planets Venus and Mercury, which are even rarer events (there won't be another transit of Venus until 2117, but Mercury will cross the sun's disc again on 13 November 2032). Back in 1999, I didn't even have eclipse glasses, but the sky was part clouded, so I risked a few glances at the moment of maximum eclipse – which remained visible on my retinas for a good ten years or more after the event. What I also noticed about the 1999 event, and was very noticeable during the 12 August 2026 eclipse, was the strange 'faux twilight' that came on as the eclipse neared maximum. It's nothing like the full darkness experienced under a total eclipse, but it's still strangely atmospheric, especially when all the birds in the neighbourhood head off to their roosts, believing it to be dusk. There's also a gathering gloom in the sky below the sun which during last night's eclipse took on a rusty tint. Photographing the sun's projected disc, one could also see it turn increasingly yellow as it descended in the sky (see the top photo).

There will be another large partial eclipse visible from the UK on 2 August next year, with maximum eclipse occurring at 10.07am. After that, there's a 40% partial at sunset on 26 January 2028, and a 50% partial at sunrise on 1 June 2030, but neither of these is an ideal time of day to view. The next large partial (60-70% coverage) will be on 21 August 2036, for those of us still around to see it. If you want to see totality, next year's eclipse is total across the Atlantic, Southern Spain, Gibraltar, North Africa and the Indian Ocean, and the eclipse of July 2028 is total across parts of Australia. The Aussies get another in 2037, but the total eclipses of the 21st century are, for the most part, frustratingly far from centres of population. Unless you're a seasoned globe trotter, a science correspondent for the news media, or a presenter on The Sky at Night, to experience a total eclipse of the sun is a genuine once in a lifetime event... or, for many of us, a never in a lifetime event...

'Fun fact': the total eclipse of the sun mentioned by Carly Simon in her song 'You're so Vain' was either that of 7 March 1970, or 10 July 1972, both of which were visible from the Canadian Maritimes, including Nova Scotia.

Eclipse memorabilia: from the 1927 totality visible across northern England

1976: Summer of Stingray

By the mid 1970s, Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series were largely off the air. A few ITV regions kept up random repeat runs of the colour series, but they were few and far between. One of the only stations keeping the flag flying was ATV who had, of course, financed the series in the first place. A few years earlier, the midlands operator had faced criticism for the sheer volume of Supermarionation shows that were to be found in its children's programme schedule, but all this meant in practice was that, during 1968, the only Gerry Anderson productions broadcast on ATV were first run episodes of Captain Scarlet and Joe 90. Stingray had, in all honesty, been played to death, having been on an almost continuous loop of repeats since 1964. By 1967, even I was getting fed up with seeing it.

Colour television provided a ready made excuse to dust off and repeat older colour series that had formerly been seen only in black and white, and the years from 1969 through to around 1973 provided an ‘Indian summer’ of ITC material getting its first outing in colour.

Beginning in December 1969, ATV began an early evening repeat of Stingray, which ran all the way through to September – the last time the series would be shown in a single, unbroken run by the midlands operator. Viewers with colour sets could, for the first time, see Troy Tempest and Marina as they were meant to be seen, and no doubt marvelled at the episodes’ rich colour palette. In our house, we were still watching in black and white. In fact, I doubt if I was even aware at this time that Stingray had been made in colour, so I didn’t feel we were missing out.

The show was then off air in the midlands for nearly three years; and when it returned, on 24 July 1973, it was in a new morning timeslot. 1973 was the first year in which ITV showed children's programmes and films during the school summer holidays, which now became a prime time to see Stingray, and the run of episodes continued through to the end of the summer break. There were more at Christmas, followed by a further run through the summer of 1974, by which time another near complete run of episodes was drawing to a close (the few remaining ‘orphaned’ episodes were stripped into editions of Tiswas during 1975).

In 1976, yet another repeat run began, marking the sixth outing for the series on ATV since its debut in October 1964. As ever, the repeats had an annoying tendency to begin a few weeks ahead of the school summer holiday, and this year the summer morning schedule began on the week commencing Monday 28 June. The TV Times didn’t give a title, but it seems reasonable to assume that the episode shown on Thursday 1 July, at 10.35am was the untitled pilot. The original ITV broadcast order was significantly different to the ‘official’ episode order, as seen in all episode guides and subsequent physical media releases, and the second episode was Emergency Marineville (8 July) followed by Ghost Ship (15 July). Our school didn’t break up for the holidays until the following day, so I missed all three of these repeats. We were then on a family holiday in Wales, which meant missing Subterranean Sea on the 22nd. Thus it was that the first episode I got to see in this 1976 repeat run was Loch Ness Monster, on 29 July.

This was only the second episode of Stingray I’d ever seen in colour, so as a fan it felt like a significant moment. It's hardly a typical episode, but it's certainly colourful. The episodes shown over the remainder of the summer holiday were something of a mixed bag, and only An Echo of Danger (19 August) conformed to the standard action adventure formula, while the others were either exotic, whimsical or romantic stories. I’d have much preferred to see episodes like The Big Gun or The Invaders to In Search of the Tajmanon (1 September), but any Stingray was better than nothing. One thing we did notice about this run of episodes was the different openings, some in colour, others in black and white, denoting episodes from the series’ two production blocks. We also committed the soundtracks faithfully to tape – I can still recall listening to a playback of Raptures of the Deep (28 August) and wishing that there was a way to record the picture along with the sound, little knowing that home video lay just around the corner, and that by the time of the next run of repeats we'd be able to do just that.

In Search of the Tajmanon brought the 1976 summer repeats to an end. Barring a solitary episode (Tune of Danger) shown on New Year’s Day 1977, and an unscheduled Stand by For Action on 15 November 1980, this marked the end of the line for Stingray on ATV. In 1977, rather than picking up Stingray again, ATV chose to show episodes of Joe 90 commencing Friday 1 July, in a run which included the decidedly unseasonable Christmas episode The Unorthodox Shepherd (22 July). I wasn’t bothered with Joe 90 and didn’t even bother to watch most weeks. Viewers in Yorkshire were doing rather better, with episodes of Thunderbirds, but elsewhere the ITV network was largely a Supermarionation-free zone.

The 1976 repeats of Stingray made use of somewhat worn and washed-out 16mm copies, occasionally marred with splices and missing scenes. By the time Stingray returned to our screens in 1982, it was in the form of newly struck 35mm prints. Curiously, the battered old 16mm versions were dusted off for a further repeat run in 1987, while the 1990s BBC2 revival was different again, with brand new transfers, replacing the monochrome opening shots with the colour version across the whole series. Both of the 1980s repeat runs had seen the series back in its time honoured summer morning slot, and when BBC2 placed it in their early evening schedule, it felt almost wrong.

For me, Stingray will always belong to summer mornings. All told, between 1973 and 1976 we got to see maybe half the series during those holiday screenings. The repeats of 1976 seem to belong to the whole fabric of that legendarily hot summer. Somehow, it wouldn’t have been quite the same without them. 

Highway to the Sun

The Lost Golden Age of the BBC4 Documentary

Hidden away on BBC4 while the World Cup final was playing out over on BBC1 was one of the best factual programmes I’ve seen in the past twenty years; a film that hails from a now vanished golden age of original documentaries from the BBC’s fourth television channel.

A303: Highway to the Sun first appeared back in May 2011. In the hour-long film, writer Tom Fort takes as his subject a modest British trunk road, travelling its length from Micheldever, just south west of Basingstoke, to its unremarkable terminus, twenty five miles short of Exeter, where, like a meterological depression, it loses its identity, becoming the A30. Along the way, he stops to give us some of the route’s history, and explores places and artefacts to be found close to the highway. His encounters include a Roman mosaic fish, uncovered specially for the film; an 18th century folly; the Neolithic ‘Amesbury Archer’; and, of course, Stonehenge, whose site is, notoriously, bypassed by the A303, despite numerous efforts to have its course diverted or sent underground. 

Despite being only fifteen years old, the film is already a historic document, as the landscape around the monument has been drastically reconfigured in the intervening time. When the film was made, the A344 still formed a triangular junction with the 303 due east of Stonehenge, but two years later, it was closed and the route returned to the landscape. 

I’ve only once had cause to use the A303, on a weekend when I had occasion to travel to Yeovil after an overnight stay in London. My diary describes it as a memorable drive – I’ve long had an abiding fascination for Britain’s older roads and landscapes – and my soundtrack of choice for the drive included Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. I knew I’d be passing Stonehenge and, never having visited before, made the time to stop. The trip was still quite fresh in my mind when, a few years later, I first saw Tom Fort’s film, and I recognised a lot of the route: even the dull parts.

Fort, at the wheel of a vintage Morris Traveller, made for an engaging presenter, avuncular in manner, well-informed and clearly with an abiding interest in his subject. In approach, the film recalls John Betjeman’s classic Metro-Land, wherein the poet laureate used the route of the Metropolitan Railway as a springboard to local history and eccentric individuals. Where Betjeman met a man with a cinema organ in his suburban home, Fort took a drive with a gentleman who found and ate roadkill.

Fort’s BBC film was later turned into a book, published the following year; and two years later, he embarked on another cross country journey, developing his book ‘Downstream’ into the BBC4 film, River of Dreams: Crossing England in a Punt. This time, his journey took him through territory much more familiar to myself, as he traced the route of the river Trent from its source on Biddulph Moor in Staffordshire to its confluence with the Humber Estuary. His ports of call en route included Donington Hall, where he recounted a scandalous elopement; the Bass Museum in Burton on Trent (sadly now closed) where he learned the history of India Pale Ale; and the abandoned cooling towers of Willington Power Station, one of the last surviving relics of the chain of coal fired power stations that once followed the line of the Trent and were known collectively as ‘Megawatt Valley’.

Crossing England in a Punt was a worthy successor to Fort’s A303 film and one might have hoped for more of the same: he’s written around a dozen books on similar themes, and is still writing, so there was plenty of scope. Alas, not. The likelihood of BBC4 commissioning any further films has now receded into history along with the Amesbury Archer. In short, the channel does not now commission new documentaries, and has no budget allocation. In retrospect, we can look back to the first decade of this century as something of a golden age for BBC4 factual series. From The Secret Life of the Motorway (2007) through The Department Store (2008) to The Secret Life of Rubbish (2012), there was always something new and interesting to watch on the channel, and these relatively low key documentaries, presented with minimal promotion, were a welcome antidote to the ‘point the camera at the presenter’ style of Brian Cox, Lucy Worsley and others.

Tom Fort was no shrinking violet as a presenter, but his style was easy going and undemonstrative. ‘That’s enough of that,’ he blushes, having been cajoled into recreating a novices’ initiation ritual from Weyhill Fair in Hampshire in a pub full of customers. He’s the kind of bloke you could listen to for hours in the pub without getting bored, and he clearly has a passion for his subject matter, not to mention a genius for winkling out interesting historical tit-bits.

A303: Highway to the Sun has, fortunately, been repeated on numerous occasions, and at time of writing is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer. I’ve seen it easily half a dozen times, and I know I’ll watch it again. Like Metro-Land and other classic documentaries, it repays repeated viewing. One can only hope that, with no new factual programmes being commissioned, BBC4 will unearth some of the other gems from its archive – The Department Store would be especially welcome, as indeed would Fort's Crossing England in a Punt.

I’d happily tune in for a whole series of Tom Fort travel films, but I expect it’s a vain hope. If the BBC can’t oblige, surely there’s room for him on one of the other channels? Sky Arts? His latest book is a history of the Lido, and this summer’s weather would have provided an ideal opportunity to turn it into a documentary. Come on, film makers, and commissioning editors, get on the case! 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0116ly6/a303-highway-to-the-sun

1976: Summer of Nostalgia

Part Three: Episodes on Holiday

During the summer of 1976, most ITV regions were showing old ITC series on weekday mornings and afternoons. On Tuesdays London had The Saint at 11am; Yorkshire and Southern were showing Jason King at 3.25, whilst ATV had Strange Report in the same slot. These were likely to be the last outings for programmes that were now as much as ten years old, and viewers could hold little hope of seeing them again. There would, of course, be further repeats of ITC titles during the mid 1980s, but back in the 70s, it seemed highly unlikely that such vintage material would ever be broadcast again. In an age when most if not all such series are still readily available to own on DVD, others on streaming platforms, it’s hard to convey just how much it meant to see as much as a single episode in any of these 1970s repeat runs.

Our family took its 1976 annual summer holiday in late July, staying in a rented cottage in Wales. The dates meant I would miss episodes of both Strange Report (Tuesday 20 July) and Stingray (Thursday 22 July) but as compensation I would get to see Danger Man, which HTV were repeating in the same Tuesday afternoon slot as Strange Report. Outside it was brilliant holiday weather, with wall to wall sunshine – but on that Tuesday afternoon I chose to sit inside where a small black and white portable television sat within an inglenook in the lounge. At least I wasn’t missing anything by watching in monochrome, as Danger Man had been shot in black and white.

Back at home in ‘ATV land’, Danger Man had last been repeated on Friday afternoons in 1973, and I’d caught a random episode during that broadcast. That aside, I scarcely knew the series, so getting to see even a one-off episode was something of an event to anyone with an interest in those old ITC shows. I took in as much as I could, even drawing the opening title panel in my diary entry for the day, and writing up a synopsis which I summarised as ‘all in all, a pretty good one’.

The episode I’d chanced to see was Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet, first broadcast on 16 March 1965 as episode 22 of series 2, the first run of hour-long episodes. In Macolm Hulke’s storyline, Drake is sent to Haiti where a husband and wife scientist couple have disappeared from a beach. The trail leads to a mine where other captured scientists are being forced to work on an atom bomb for a rogue African state. Malcolm Hulke wasn’t one of the usual Danger Man writers – I knew his name for his work on Doctor Who – and this was his sole contribution to the series. With its sound stage ‘exteriors’ of Haitian beach and jungle, Parallel Lines... had rather the look of James Bond on the cheap, but on the tiny portable I scarcely noticed, and what the hell – it was Danger Man after all! Just to hear that famous harpsichord-driven theme provided an instant burst of nostalgia.

In common with this last round of ITC repeats, the programme was shown with all of its original commercial break captions intact: in this case, the ‘adcap’ took the form of a jagged hole framing John Drake’s eyes, accompanied by a sting reduction of Edwin Astley’s famous theme music. But after the first ad break, something odd happened. The storyline had jumped ahead, and didn’t follow on logically from the end of part one. Someone at HTV had got the reels mixed up and accidentally started up the third reel in place of the second. The programme ran for a couple of minutes before someone noticed, stopped it, and started it again in the right place. This is interesting because it tells us that, rather than whole reels, or even a video transfer, the episode was supplied as three individual reels of 35mm film. These kind of technical errors, though uncommon, were par for the course in the era when material was still broadcast direct from physical film. A few weeks later, one of ATV’s Stingray episodes ground to a halt mid way through the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates to fill in for a few seconds while the fault was fixed. We were recording the soundtrack, so his ad lib was captured for, er, posterity…

While I was watching Danger Man, viewers back home were sitting down to an episode of Strange Report – but it was not the one billed in the TV Times (Report 1533:Racist – A Most Dangerous Proposal). Tim Beddows saw it but afterwards couldn’t remember the complicated title. ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ was the best he could report back, and we had no TV Times listings to go on. The correct title was, in fact Report 7931: Sniper– When is Your Cousin Not. I’d actually got the best of the deal with Danger Man, as Sniper is a candidate for the weakest episode of Strange Report. For the record, the scheduled episode, Racist, remained on the shelf at ATV where it was finally pulled out as a last minute replacement for a cancelled race meeting in January 1979. Tim missed it and, incensed, wrote to ATV to complain. You can see the reply he received below:

Next year's summer holiday saw us return to the same cottage. By this time, ATV had run out of ITC repeats, but HTV was still working its way through repeats of the last episodes of The Saint. In fact, we only just caught the series before it finished. The episode we got to see – on the same black and white portable TV – was The Man Who Gambled With Life, the antepenultimate outing for Roger Moore as Simon Templar. This time it was my turn to get the title wrong, misremembering it from Templar’s closing speech as The Man Who Gambled With Death – actually, a much better title, but unlikely to go down well on the American networks who always baulked at ‘death’ in the title of anything.

The biggest surprise on this occasion was the music that played over the opening titles. I well remembered Edwin Astley’s famous theme that had accompanied the first five series, but by series six he had been prevailed upon to write a new theme incorporating Leslie Charteris’ own whistling motif, which I’d never heard before. Tim had supplied me with a tiny tape recorder – almost small enough to fit inside one of John Drake’s shavers – and a correspondingly small reel of tape, with instructions to record the beginning and end titles of The Saint. The recording was dire quality, but that tape – comprising the whole ‘cold opening’ as far as the end of the main titles, and the tail of the final scene running into the titles – got played an awful lot over the coming months!

That 1977 Saint broadcast was one of the last ITC repeats of the era, and the whole experience of seeing different series when holidaying in different regions was a decidedly 1970s phenomenon. Before the end of the decade, the repeat rights on all the old 1960s series had expired and wouldn’t be renewed until the mid 1980s. As time wore on, the whole regional nature of ITV was slowly eroded until today, when the only difference you’ll notice from one region to another is in the local news programmes.

God Bless America...

 

...says the Radio Times

We were just ten days into what would prove to be a memorably hot and dry summer when this particular edition of Radio Times appeared in the newsagents, fifty years ago this week. Its cover, featuring the distinctive sculptural caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, was promoting a series of programmes on TV and radio celebrating the American bicentennial. Fluck and Law would, eight years later, give the world Spitting Image.

This week’s edition was all American, beginning on page 4 where no less an eminence than Andy Warhol provided a piece about his favourite television programmes – few of which would have been familiar to British viewers. His main focus was a series called The Neighbors, which encouraged real people to bitch about their friends in order to win cash prizes. Said Warhol: ‘it shows what ordinary people will do to get on television; in this case they are willing to destroy their social and personal lives’. An interesting observation from the man who predicted that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.

Butted up against Warhol’s piece, on page 6, is a juxtaposition of which he would surely have approved: a page and a half ad for Crown ready-pasted vinyl wallpapers, showcasing some of their ‘beautiful florals, geometrics and bright modern patterns, in warm, and fresh cool colours’. You can see the reality below. Did people really decorate their homes like that?

On pages 8 and 9, another feature examined how major US film studios were moving increasingly into television production, while page 10 was taken up with an overview of the career of Mary Tyler Moore. On page 11, Philip Jenkinson’s regular film review column previewed the mostly American-flavoured movies to be found this week on BBC1 and BBC2, including, on Saturday morning, the very first appearance on BBC television of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, edited together into two instalments. (The serial would be shown in full over Christmas later the same year.) Other major films in the BBC’s ‘Great American Picture Show’ season included Psycho (Saturday, 11.30pm BBC1), True Grit (Sunday 8.15pm BBC1) and On The Waterfront (Friday, 11.32pm, BBC1). 

The bicentennial theme extended to radio as well as television: a feature across pages 12 and 13 looked at country music station KLAC, based not in Nashville but Los Angeles. It was all a bit too much for regular RT columnist Peter Tinniswood, who sounded a sour note, dismissing the bicentennial celebrations as ‘tedious’. With his 70s shoulder-length hair and beard, he looked like Reggie Perrin’s boring son in law…

Saturday’s television kicked off with a repeat of the very first Mr. Benn (The Red Knight) at 8.55am, although those of an academic bent might well have been tuned in even earlier to see Foundation Maths – Relations at 7.40am, the first in the regular morning sequence of programmes from the Open University on BBC2. What was I just saying about 70s beards? No OU presenter was complete without one. Over on BBC1, Flash Gordon made his British television debut at 10.35am, stepping aside for Hopalong Cassidy at 11.25, before concluding his adventures on Mongo at 12.30pm.

The afternoon on BBC1 was given over to Wimbledon Grandstand, while an Italian-French film Morgan the Pirate (1960) opened BBC2’s late afternoon schedule (the channel was off air between 1.55 and 3.50pm). BBC1’s early evening news was followed by a magic show For My Next Trick, which included contributions from newcomers Faith Brown and Paul Daniels. The evening’s big American film was The Music Man (1962), followed by a very British slice of light entertainment in the form of Seaside Special, a show I always made a special point of avoiding. Tonight’s edition included The Three Degrees and Kenneth McKellar, which I suppose was diverse if nothing else…

Starsky and Hutch had more or less taken up permanent residence on Saturday evenings since their BBBC1 debut back in 1975, and put in an appearance this evening at 9.30pm, followed by the news at 10.20 and The Spinners at 10.30. Hitchcock fans would have to wait up until 11.30 to see Psycho (1960), clocking up its fifth appearance on British television since its BBC1 premiere in 1968. Over on BBC2, an alternate evening schedule included Victor Borge and something called The Drummonds of Megginch (typing of which is enough to make your spellchecker explode). According to my diary I didn’t see any of these programmes, but I did catch the very first edition of the now legendary late night music show So It Goes over on ITV. I also ignored the BBC's season of American films with one exception: Laurel & Hardy's 1932 short The Music Box, shown at 6.50pm on Tuesday 6 July – the last time that the famous comics would be scheduled during prime time television.

The day’s radio included The Elton John Story on Radio 1 at 1.00pm, up against a Radio 2 offering from forgotten comic David Morgan. Radio 4’s schedule included Pick of the Week, Any Questions and Desert Island Discs, all of them still with us half a century later.

It was on Sunday that the bicentennial celebrations really got under way, with the whole evening on BBC1 from 8.15pm onwards devoted to commemorative material: the movie True Grit was followed by an hour long programme Uncle Sam Celebrates, which saw James Burke presenting highlights of the day’s celebratory outside broadcasts from NBC. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, America Plays (8.15pm) was a celebration of stateside sporting achievement; Bicentennial Summer (9.10pm) focused on the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Alastair Cooke made his own contribution to the festivities with By the Rocket’s Red Glare (10.10pm), ‘a salute to America’. The evening was rounded off with the feature film 1776, an extravagant musical that had proved a costly failure to Columbia Pictures when released just four years earlier.

The Yanks didn’t have quite the whole evening to themselves: BBC1’s early evening programmes included a Blue Peter special revisiting John Noakes’ famous freefall descent with the RAF’s Flying Falcons, followed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, all quintessentially English viewing. Not to be outdone, the Welsh moved in at 7.25 with a repeat of How Green Was My Valley, a 1975 adaptation starring Stanley Baker and Sian Phillips.

The week’s programme listings were peppered with icons of an eagle’s head, highlighting programmes with an American theme, and fairly plastered across the radio programme pages for Sunday, with much music and drama on Radio 3, G.B. Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (a satire on puritanism) on Radio 4, and many other themed items. Even Jimmy Savile was getting in on the act, speaking ‘only to Americans’ on his Speakeasy show.

Doctor Who fans were in for a summer treat this week, with two complete serials repeated: Planet of Evil from Monday to Friday, and the two-part Sontaran Experiment shown complete on Friday evening. Monday’s programme page even found room for a neat little illustration from Frank Bellamy, who always nabbed the Doctor Who gigs at the RT. This being the summer, repeats were inevitable, and included The Good Life (at the surprisingly late hour of 9.25pm on Tuesday), The Pallisers (Monday 10pm BBC2), scary kids’ drama The Changes (Wednesday 5.15pm BBC1), Porridge (Thursday 7.50pm BBC1) and David McCallum’s The Invisible Man (Friday 7.15pm BBC1). Another invariable fixture of the summer schedules was It’s a Knockout, which presented a one-off celebrity edition on Friday at 8.00pm. Amongst those taking part were Judith Chalmers, Anita Harris, George Layton, Bernard Cribbins, Frazer Hines, James Villiers (!), Ian Carmichael, Shaw Taylor, Raymond Baxter, Willie Rushton and Z Cars’ James Ellis – a unique and unrepeatable line-up of talent!

One or two series were making their debut: forgotten American cop Bert D’Angelo pounded the mean streets of San Francisco beginning on Friday evening (9.25pm BBC1): it’s safe to say that there really were far too many imported American detective series on British TV at this time – and we only had three channels in which to accommodate them. That aside, the only other new series flagged up in the RT listings were The Mister Men (Sunday), Speed Buggy (Wednesday) Newsround Extra and Bellamy’s Europe (Thursday), the latter providing yet another vehicle for the burbling bearded naturalist famously parodied by Lenny Henry.

Children’s programming included Blue Peter Flies the World and Play Away (Monday), Animal Magic and Lippy Lion (Tuesday), ‘Boss Cat’ (Thursday) and Screen Test on Friday. The pre-news slot was occupied by Barbapapa, a kind of pink blobby thing like a sentient blancmange, whose tales were told by Michael Flanders (and if you want more of this kind of thing – pre-news kids shows I mean, not sentient blancmange – I’ve got a huge item in preparation…)

The letters page reads very much like a primer for Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (1977), with several readers writing in praise of The Roussos Phenomenon, shown on 10 June on BBC2, and showcasing the then unknown (in England) Greek musician and vocalist: ‘the most fantastic singer I have ever heard’ wrote (Mrs) Linda Reynolds of Cornwall. ‘Truly a great, talented, gifted, natural, joyous man’ agreed Pat de Kercrech of Cowen. One can almost hear Mr. Leigh’s pencil scribbling furiously… But not everyone was smitten with the warbling man-mountain: ‘his only remarkable features are that he weighs 17½ stone and wears silver boots’ complained F.W. Langley of Anlaby.

No review of an old Radio Times would be complete without a look at some of the week’s advertisers. The inside back page looks ironic in retrospect: a full-page colour advert for the ‘Philips Deluxe Sun Lamp’, one item that would certainly not be required over the coming weeks. Elsewhere there are ads for Omega watches, Nescafe Gold Blend (long before the brand was associated with Sharon Maughan and Anthony Head), the Peugeot 104, National Savings Certificates, the QE2, something called ‘the Pifco Steam Valet’ (don’t ask) and WH Smith: ‘a writer’s toy shop’, according to Kingsley Amis whose mugshot dominates a page ad for the once beloved high street retailer.

Across pages 52-57, critic and director Gavin Millar(rrrrrr) examined the world of America’s celluloid heroes, with illustrations from Ralph Steadman in his typical splattery style, and on the penultimate page, Stacey Keach delivered an essay on Kenneth Griffith’s film Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, a personal interpretation of events surrounding the American Revolution. And finally, lest RT’s readers were tiring of the relentless Americanisation of this week’s edition, came a preview of next week’s cover, featuring… wait for it… the Queen and her corgis. The same edition promised recollections of British Army officer Orde Wingate, Beethoven’s Solemnis kicking off the Proms, Patrick Moore looking towards Mars and the imminent touchdown of the Viking lander, and memories of the Spanish Civil War… none of which, I’d like to bet, would get anywhere near a 2026 edition of Radio Times...