'Don't Call Me Pop!' Remembering Space Patrol...

Space Patrol: from the first series. L-R: Slim, Col. Raeburn, Husky, Captain Dart

A question I often find myself asking is: are old television programmes best left to mature in the memory, like vintage wine, or should they be uncorked from time to time and tasted afresh? The answer is almost always the former. Old television, especially programmes aimed at children, doesn’t always travel very well, and with a few notable exceptions (such as most of the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson), simply does not stand up to scrutiny when revisited.

An excellent example of this is Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol, a series which will only be remembered by the over-fifties, having been absent from the airwaves since 1968. For years, my recollection was of a darkly strange series with an oddly disturbing atmosphere quite at odds with the bumbling good humour of its contemporaries like Fireball XL5 and Stingray. In 1978 I caught my first glimpse of the series in a decade via the medium of 8mm home movies... and twenty years later saw them all on 16mm film prints when the series was finally rediscovered, an experience that illustrates that old adage about being careful what you wish for...

‘Uncorking’ Space Patrol after so many years was an interesting experience. It had not travelled well. While Supercar and Fireball XL5 may have seemed quaintly nostalgic, they at least benefited from decent production values and scripts from writers who understood concepts like pacing and drama. Whereas Space Patrol... well, where does one start?

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For the uninitiated, or those who have simply forgotten, Space Patrol was a filmed puppet series that shared a little of the DNA of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation, its creator Roberta Leigh having been the progenitor of the entire genre when she commissioned his nascent film production company to produce her Noddy knock-off The Adventures of Twizzle. Its success led to the better remembered Torchy the Battery Boy (well before my time, I’m glad to say), which was even more of a Noddy rip-off, with its tale of a ‘toy boy’ who escapes to a world of lost toys (for which, read Toyland), his gimmick being a battery operated torch in his hat as opposed to a nodding head. After production of a single series of this tosh, Gerry Anderson, unsurprisingly, had had enough, and baled out. You’d have thought Torchy would have cured him of any desire ever to work with marionettes again, but conversely (and more than a little perversely) it left him with the burning desire to go one better: to make puppet films but to make them brilliantly, almost as if to teach Roberta Leigh a lesson...

This parting of the ways was, if you like, a quantum event in popular culture, that would see both Gerry and his former employer Roberta pursuing the same end with vastly different results. What might have transpired had the partnership not been dissolved at this point? That’s a matter for speculation, but I’d venture to suggest the outcome would have been fewer puppet series with more feeble scripts.

While Gerry and co. set to work on Four Feather Falls, Roberta Leigh produced a second series of Torchy, one having not been sufficient, so it would seem. Following this, her team turned out the whimsical Sara and Hoppity, of which only a solitary episode, the pilot, is extant.* (In fairness, Sara and Hoppity is a considerable tehnical advance on the efforts of the BBC Film Unit to make puppet films, but it sure ain’t Four Feather Falls).

(* A second episode, Georgy Goes Visiting, is held by the BFI.)

Meanwhile, Gerry Anderson had conceived an idea that would enable him to side-step the many limitations and technical frustrations of working with marionettes (frankly, he must have been bonkers to attempt a cowboy adventure in that format). His genius idea was simple: he would set his adventures in the future, or within a futuristic format that circumvented the need for his characters to walk anywhere. From here on in, they would fly, or hover, through their various adventures in the likes of Supercar et. al.

Watching from the sidelines of her own endeavours, Roberta Leigh must have been given pause for thought at the sight of Supercar; and at around the same time that Gerry’s team moved into outer space, so did their would-be rivals. Instead of a conventional rocket, Roberta Leigh’s spacemen travelled aboard a gyroscopic contraption called a ‘Galasphere’, driven not by rockets but by ‘meson power’ (in a nod to real-world physics).

Space Patrol employed the same electronic lip-synch that had been developed by A.P. Films, ownership of which was never contested by either party. But all similarities ended there. Whilst the characters of Fireball XL5 were broad caricatures, Space Patrol’s marionettes had more subtle, doll-like faces (some of them were reused from Sara and Hoppity). Like Fireball XL5, it was an outer space adventure, set roughly one hundred and fifty years in the future, but in a distinct improvement over the Andersons’ vision, Roberta Leigh’s version of the future boasted an extraordinary cityscape, whose fantastic buildings now seem like anticipations of the Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie. So far, so good…

The crew of Galasphere 347 with the gender-confused Jovian, Joe (I had my own doubts about Slim, extreme right, who I took for a female for some time).

In a nod to realism, the adventures of Galasphere 347 were for the most part confined to our own solar system (referred to throughout the series as ‘our galaxy’ – a misunderstanding which probably explains the name ‘Galasphere.’) Realism fell down somewhat with the realisation that pretty well every planet was inhabited, including the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (pronouned the old, ‘rude’ way) and Neptune. Although the credits boasted a ‘Space Consultant’ in the form of astronomer Colin Ronan, whatever advice he gave was subjected to considerable dramatic license, since the depictions of the planets reflected ideas that had for the most part been debunked or never accepted in the first place. Not that any of the young viewers tuning in would have been any the wiser.

It had dodgy science, doll-like characters and a budget a fraction of what Lew Grade was lobbing at Gerry Anderson, but what, if anything, had Space Patrol to offer the viewers of 1963? Well, it had atmosphere, of a kind. It had the first electronic music score of any television series (coming to air a full six months ahead of Dr. Who). And in spite of its glaring inaccuracies, it included some real science – Roberta Leigh may well have sold the series on this basis, as several episodes include explanations of actual scientific principles from obligatory ‘mad’ scientist Professor (don’t call me pop!) Haggerty... mention of whom brings us neatly on to the Space Patrol cast.

Like Fireball XL5, Space Patrol revolved around the adventures of a spaceship crew: hipsterish Captain Larry Dart, complete with goatee and collar-length hair was joined by his colleagues Slim (an elfin, pointed-eared Venusian whose thinking was dominated by logic – I know...) and Husky, a tall, endearing Martian with twig-like hair and a fixation on eating. Back on earth, their exploits were overseen by Colonel Raeburn (a handsome, aquiline-nosed character whose head was evidently broken sometime during production), and his ultra-efficient Venusian secretary Marla. Much of the interplay between the characters derived from repeated dialogue, re-used throughout the series to the point of tedium. A typical example:

RAEBURN: Tell General Smith I’m on my way to see him.

MARLA: I have already ordered your monobile.

RAEBURN: You think of everything.

MARLA: A Venusian has the facility never to forget.

If they did it once, they did it a thousand times... Elsewhere, the dialogue clunked like a steamroller over boulders. Attempts at humour were usually disastrous. The characters frequently behaved like idiots. In one episode, an unprotected Dart attempts to sneak up on a dangerous Martian bird (made from a dismembered teddy bear) and repeatedly gets stabbed in the arm for his trouble: “Agh! It got my arm again.” The man is clearly a cretin. You can hear voice artist Dick Vosburgh’s embarrassment at some of the lines he’s expected to deliver, not least when having to fight off the attentions of a Jovian creature called Joe whose one desire in life is to have Dart come and live with him. (I suspect he also produced Telstar by the Tornados...)

A special mention has to go to ‘Professor Aloysius O’Brien O’Rourke Haggerty’, Space Patrol’s resident mad genius and the most irritating character in the series by a long way, beating even the garrulous Gabblerdictum (a martian parrot voiced by Candaian comedienne Libby Morris). Again, Haggerty’s dialogue quickly becomes tediously repetitive with his endless rebukes of ‘don’t call me pop’ to his daughter Cassiopeia (a name which voice artist Ronnie Stevens was incapable of pronouncing). This is what passes for character development in Space Patrol: by the latter part of the series, even Raeburn is referring to it, in between making snide comments about Haggerty’s encroaching baldness.

Like Fireball XL5, there is an exotic space pet on offer: but Roberta Leigh immediately nixes any possibility of the Gabblerdictum’s involvement with the Galasphere’s adventures with the rule (oft repeated from the lips of Captain Dart) that ‘birds aren’t allowed on board spaceships.’ Instead, the pink, feathery fool is left on earth to annoy Professor Haggerty (who taught it to speak in the first place and should have known better).

Space Patrol is a classic case of a little going a long way. Repetition may be loved by children, but viewing the series as an adult, it’s just grating. Almost everything in the series is repeated or recycled time and time again: the same take-off programme sequence (used irrespective of the fact that the Galasphere is referred to by the wrong number), the same bits of stock footage, the same puppets, recycled with differing facial hair to portray different characters, and the same aliens. In fairness, the other races encountered by the Galasphere crew were on the whole more imaginative creations than the humanoid types so often seen in Fireball XL5, and included walking, talking cacti, a knitted bell, four-armed dinosaurs, and a kind of floating balloon. Unfortunately, there was also the supremely annoying Tyro, master of Neptune, a male character with a female voice (Gene Roddenberry would invert the same idea in Star Trek's first pilot: I've a sneaking suspicion he saw Space Patrol when it aired in the US as Planet Patrol).

If we are to believe the generic end credits, every single episode of Space Patrol was written by its creator, Roberta Leigh, a possibly unique feat for any television series. On the plus side, this allows for the development, across multiple episodes, of what we would now refer to as a ‘story arc’, and there are frequent cross-references between scripts. On the down side, with no other creative input, and no one to challenge some often cranky ideas and dodgy storytelling, it means that an awful lot of rotten scripts made it into production. It’s too much to expect a single authorial hand to write thirty-nine television episodes, and even with her background in churning out potboilers for Mills & Boon, Roberta Leigh must have had her work cut out. It is this single factor above all considerations that contiunually mitigates against Space Patrol. Scripts are alternately whimsical, feeble, poorly constructed or all three. Of the complete run of thirty nine, about a dozen are acceptable, and a handful more might have been made to work with some judicious script editing. Of the actors who breathed life into Ms. Leigh’s creations, only Dick Vosburgh was prepared to talk about his contribution (with a good deal of fondness) in later years, while Ronnie Stevens and Libby Morris disowned it completely. You have only to listen to them making fools of themselves to understand why.

Space Patrol is no fine wine: those who choose to sample it do so at their peril, as I have done recently. As I near the end of a re-run of all thirty-nine episodes, I can pause to reflect on how I felt about the series as a youngster. For the most part, I avoided it for its unearthly strangeness. Here in the midlands, it was a staple of Sunday teatimes, and my memories are mostly of seeing it in my grandparents’ back room. My dad thought the Gabblerdictum was great fun. I was less sure myself. If anything, it was the weird electronic music concrête that put me off. I didn’t notice the cheap sets (hard to see on 405-line television) or the deficiencies in the scripts; but there were some curious moments that embedded themselves in the memory, to resurface over thirty years later when the episodes were finally rediscovered.

Space Patrol was made in two discrete series, with notable visual differences between them: the puppets and sets were all spruced up for the second batch of thirteen episodes, and Libby Morris’ credit was replaced by Ysanne Churchman – who, in the role of Grace Archer, had been ‘sacrificed’ in a BBC attempt to trump ITV’s opening night in 1955. (Morris was still providing the voice of the Gabblerdictum). The first twenty-six episodes went out during 1963, with the second series airing in two batches between 1966 and ‘68. It is these later broadcasts that I remember the best, with the ‘66 screenings still having the power to evoke an irrational fear. By ‘68 I was lapping it up to the extent of recording my own made-up episode on my dad’s open-reel tape recorder. The seven episodes shown at this time were not, as I thought, repeats, but the last dregs from the barrel, and were shown over the last seven weeks of the old ABC network, prior to its closure in July 1968. For years, I laboured under the misapprehension that only seven episodes had been made... which would almost certainly have been an improvement.

I have to take some blame here, for without my involvement, Space Patrol might still be languishing in obscurity. Considered lost for years, a complete set of film prints had been stored in Roberta Leigh’s garage from which they were retrieved in the late 1990s by my friend Tim Beddows. He’d recently rescued the old Robinson Crusoe series from oblivion in a Paris archive, and on the back of that success, I urged him to try and do the same for Space Patrol. My nagging, coupled with Tim’s tenacity, led to us being the first people to see the episodes in thirty odd years, and it is in the form of that rough set of 16mm prints that Space Patrol has survived to this day... Network’s DVD release has been widely bootlegged and most episodes are available to view on YouTube. Just remember when you watch them who put them there…