'Next week, the return of Dr Who…' Early encounters with Star Trek, part 2

The Star Trek 'fotonovels' (see below). Why scan when you can download?

Star Trek was responsible for introducing me to Dr. Who, a series I’d avoided since its debut (I was too young for it in 1963, and scared stiff of the Daleks). But following the ‘last in the present series’ in the BBC’s first 25-episode run of Star Trek (The Gaileo Seven) on December 27^th 1969, there came a preview of what was coming up in that timeslot next week... a brand new series of Dr. Who... in colour (not that it made any difference to us with our black and white set)... and with a new Doctor in the shape of Jon Pertwee. I’d been dimly aware of Patrick Troughton, but never took any interest during his tenure. That trailer, though... well, I was sold.

But let’s get back to Star Trek. Unknown to myself, the BBC had taken a small creative liberty with their film prints by moving the opening credits to the beginning of each episode. This meant that the three or four-minute ‘teaser’ scene intended as a pre-credit sequence now cut straight through to the episode title. Why the BBC chose to do this remains unknown: pre-title sequences were familiar enough to UK viewers, and had been seen as far back as the first series of The Saint, if not earlier. Nevertheless, this is the way we saw Star Trek in the UK until the early 1990s. A favourite BBC trick during this era was to fade the BBC’s rotating world symbol into the star field that now appeared at the head of the programme. They never tired of doing this, as my extant VHS copies from 1984 attest.

Following the first run of episodes during autumn of 1969, Star Trek returned in April 1970 with a mix of leftover shows from season one, combined with the bulk of season two. I, of course, believed this selection to be the ‘actual’ second series of Star Trek, and it wasn’t until much later that I realised that The Enemy Within (13^th April, 1970) was one of the first episodes to be filmed. This edition was somewhat confusing in this respect, because as the series progressed, I came to recognise certain aspects of the production that set the later episodes apart from the earlier ones. The most obvious aspect was the presence (or absence) of Mr. Chekov. The second was the appearance of Captain Kirk’s ‘other’ tunic (which I later discovered to be green): this is the one with the V-cutout neckline, seen in a few first series episodes, but more often worn by Kirk during series 2. Its presence in The Enemy Within (as a device for distinguishing between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Kirks), along with that episode’s inclusion in the BBC’s second block, was the cause of my confusion...

One other intriuguing aspect of those first broadcasts that has stayed with me concerns the frames used to adorn the end titles. As time wore on, I began to notice images that were unfamiliar from the episodes I’d seen: one, in particular, of a futuristic city (from Operation Annihilate), and another of a typical Star Trek creation, a white furry gorilla with a horn. Alongside these were pictures which harked back to early episodes like The Naked Time or The Corbomite Manoever, which, as time wore on, didn’t seem to be repeated as much as others – or if they were, I chanced to miss them.

As it turned out, Operation Annihilate – despite being from the first series – wasn’t shown by the BBC until December 1970, and I probably didn’t watch it at that time because it clashed with UFO over on ITV. My first clear recollection of seeing that episode was as late as December 1975, when I recognised the story from one of the Star Trek novels...

Yes, the novels. Back then, novelisations were the only means of revisiting any TV programme outside of its appearances on screen. During the summer of 1971, a rather battered copy of Star Trek 3 found its way into our house, although I’d glimpsed the first novel on a carousel in our local newsagents some time earlier. I quickly devoured this, and in so doing discovered that one of my favourite episodes – the two-parter The Menagerie – had in fact derived from an early pilot for the series. This is now, of course, common knowledge, but back then the discovery came as something of a revelation. In fact, it was the first time I had come across the concept of the ‘pilot’ episode, which added a small but significant item to my understanding of television. The story in its novelised form abandoned the framing material from the two-part episode, and presented it as a piece of Enterprise history, raising the still more intriguing prospect of how the episode might have looked in its original state... in the event, it was almost twenty years before I found out.

During the early 70s, I acquired as many of the Star Trek novelisations as I could find. And finding them was no easy matter. Some larger branches of WH Smiths carried them, but beyond the fourth edition, interest appeared to wane, and I remember acquiring volumes five and upwards from specialist sci-fi bookshops. These were still imported editions, with their distinctive yellow-tinted edges (does anybody know why American paperbacks looked like that?) Later in the decade, an ‘official’ UK imprint series appeared, and these editions were much more widely available. But by this time, a more interesting series of books had begun to appear... the Star Trek 'fotonovels'.

In the pre-video era, those 'fotonovels' were the nearest thing to having your own copy of the episode. I bought every one as soon as it appeared, and was somewhat disappointed when the series came to an end after only twelve editions. The episodes selected for this treatment stemmed from across the series, and comprised some of the most memorable editions (The City on the Edge of Forever, The Devil in the Dark) alongside a couple of lesser entries. But by the time they appeared, I knew the best of the Star Trek episodes inside out...