1999 @ 45

Part One: A Stylish Weirdness

Forty-five years ago, at the end of August 1975, I was getting a bit excited about something new on television. I’d known about it for months, and as far back as March of that year, I’d bought the first in a series of paperback novelisations, published prematurely to tie-in with an anticipated broadcast date that never materialised. The programme in question was, of course, Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 and there was just cause for excitement, if not celebration, given that it was all of five years since we’d last seen a new Anderson sci-fi production on our screens, in the form of UFO.

Viewers might have been forgiven for thinking that the Andersons’ run on television had come to an end. I remember my disappointment with The Protectors when the series appeared in 1972. A vapid, watered-down clone of a standard ITC action/adventure template, this glossy cosmopolitan trash wasn’t what anyone had come to expect from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. For me, The Protectors – slick, soulless, formulaic junk – was the death knell for the futuristic schtick that had been the Andersons’ stock in trade. But I would be proven wrong.

News of nascent film and television endeavours was hard to come by in that era, with few if any magazines or informed sources available to consult. Latterly, and, I have to say, regrettably, far too many putative Anderson productions were flagged up across the media, with barely a single one actually making it into production. I saw the man himself, at a convention in Birmingham some time during the 1990s, outlining the format of a new science-fiction series he had in development. He spent a long time describing it, and to my certain knowledge, a former acquaintance of mine was already helping to develop the script. I think it may have been called Eternity... appropriately enough, since it never arrived. Back in the 70s, it would have been quietly set aside and nobody would have been any the wiser (viz. the Anderson’s puppet/live action pilot The Investigator, filmed and shelved circa 1973).

Unless one was a regular subscriber to British entertainment trade papers, no advance notice was given of any TV series until it was well into production and at a stage where stills could be released to the likes of the TVTimes. And it was, indeed, in the TVTimes, some time during 1974, that I first learned of a new Gerry Anderson endeavour called, so the piece told me, Space 99. Cool title, I thought. Cooler, in fact, than the somewhat clumsy title it ended up with. There wasn’t much to go on at this stage: a black and white photograph (reproduced above, in colour) of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (neither of whom was familiar to me) was accompanied by a single, short paragraph referring to the new series. The uniforms and the Main Mission control panel backdrop hinted at another sci-fi production, if the text didn’t make it explicit. And in any case, the name Gerry Anderson was synonymous with science fiction.

I’m fairly sure this small promotional piece appeared quite early in 1974, and I awaited further developments, expecting to see the new series on air in the autumn. What I did see, on Monday 23 December 1974, and in the context of a BBC Horizon film about the movie special effects industry, was a brief clip from the pilot episode Breakaway. The clip showed an Eagle, being flown by remote control, making a crash-landing on the moon, but it was devoid of context: no mention of the series; no sign of any of the cast members; even the ship itself was referred to simply as a ‘moon bus.’

Fast forward to Saturday March 8, 1975, when on a trip to the nearest branch of WH Smiths, I discovered the first two Space:1999 novelisations; ‘Breakaway’ and ‘Moon Odyssey’. The cover designs were somewhat simplistic (and I should know, having designed many covers for Space:1999 DVDs and blu-rays), but back then all one wanted from a TV tie-in paperback was a decent rendering of the logo, and some colour photos, and the Orbit paperbacks offered all that. In fact, I had no idea whether the cover treatment of the logo was accurate or not, but it looked like the kind of thing one might expect to see. Notably, there was no ‘Gerry Anderson’ credit either – something which the man himself took me to task over after I omitted it from a Fireball XL5 DVD. In fact, the Anderson name did not appear anywhere in either publication; the back cover blurb referred only to ‘ATV’s space spectacular’, and the authorial biographies referred only to the writing credentials of authors E.C. Tubb and John Rankine.

You might imagine that, as a Gerry Anderson fanatic, I took these books home and immediately read them from cover to cover. But you’d be wrong. I held fire on reading my Space:1999 books for the time being, happy to wait for the real thing to turn up on television. The books’ appearance was a sure sign that the series must be about to appear on television any day, and a spring ’75 debut was, I believe, the original plan. How or why it got deferred until the autumn, I have no idea, although autumn was the traditional time at which the television companies rolled out their big new productions.

My diary doesn’t mention Space:1999 again until Saturday 30 August 1975, when a trail for ITV’s ‘Big Season’ included excerpts from the forthcoming Anderson space opera... and also, oddly, enough, the third season of Batman which was finally coming to viewers in the midlands... a mere eight years after its US broadcasts. By this time, I already knew that Space:1999 would begin its run the following Thursday, 4 September, at 7.00pm. It seemed an unusually early hour for such a big budget, adult sci-fi series. After all, UFO had aired at 8pm, with some of its more controversial episodes deferred until even later hours; and over on the BBC, Star Trek had long since settled into a comfortable 8.10pm slot. Perhaps ATV’s programme planners were thinking back to the 1960s, when series like Thunderbirds, deemed to have ‘family appeal’ were shown at this same hour, drawing in both the target audience of children and their parents as well.

I counted down the days and, in anticipation, began reading the ‘Breakaway’ novel (itself somewhat different from the TV episode, having been derived from the original 90-minute pilot script). Thursday 4 September was also the first day of the new school year and, as mentioned above, the evening schedule also saw the return of Batman – which I was able to see in colour for the first time. The caped crusader, however, paled into insignificance next to Space:1999 which was literally the most extraordinary thing I’d seen on television up to that time.

It was also the last time that I’d get the frisson of excitement at the unknown that always came with any new Gerry Anderson series (well, most of them anyway, we’ll exclude The Secret Service). The first sight of the opening titles (with their fast-cut montage of tonight’s episode which took me right back to Thunderbirds); the first hearing of the music; working out the characters and their roles; marvelling at the hardware, sets and special effects. All this had been part of the ‘first run’ experience of every Gerry Anderson production going back to Thunderbirds, and in this respect, Space:1999 did not disappoint.

I was more than satisfied with what I’d seen on that September evening, and looked forward to more of the same as the autumn wore on into winter. However, it seemed my opinion was not widely shared. The next day at school, friends were complaining about the ‘cardboard characters’ (they’d probably been reading some of the less than complimentary newspaper reviews) and the strange low-key ‘whispery’ speech of leading characters like Koenig and Russell (I hardly noticed it at the time, but today I find it somewhat irritating...)

Within a week or so of this first broadcast, I’d begun creating my own Space:1999 comic, unhindered by the fact that I had only scant photographic or illustrative references. Look-In comic had featured the series on its cover, graced with a typically dynamic, scumbled illustration by noted movie poster artist Arnaldo Putzu. The comic strip inside was less appealing, drawn in a hectic, jagged fashion by either John M Burns or Martin Asbury. Whoever was responsible, I didn’t like it, and this was the only Look-In of the era that I took the trouble to acquire.

 

How not to design a Space: 1999 Annual... wrong font (Data 70), flipped pic of Barbara Bain. Orbit books did better with their 'as seen on screen' title treatment... well, almost.           

The first Space:1999 annual arrived on Tuesday 23 September (I know annuals are meant for Christmas, but I wasn’t about to wait that long). A friend ordered copies for us through his mum’s mail-order catalogue. Now, at last, I had a few more photographs to refer to, although the artwork was dreadful – as were the scripts. As the autumn wore on, a few more paperbacks began to appear, which I dutifully collected, but did not bother to read – nothing, after all, could top the experience of watching the series itself.

At the age of 14, my ability to judge any television or film production was fairly limited, if not non existent. As long as it fulfilled various criteria – space, or spy, or comedy, and preferably made in the UK (I made an exception for Star Trek), then it was good to go. Never mind how good, bad, indifferent or frankly rubbish the script, acting or direction were. Direction? I barely knew such a thing existed... Thus, Space:1999 didn’t have to do very much to meet with my approval. It was set in space, made by Gerry Anderson, featured a lot of explosions and had good, solid special effects. I couldn’t ask for much more. Yet even I had to acknowledge that certain episodes fell some way below the standard set by others.

Second to air was Force of Life, an episode whose direction (by Prisoner and UFO stalwart David Tombin) gave it a stylish weirdness that compensated for a script where odd things happened but were not properly explained. I liked it a lot, without realising that this would become something of a template for the series – show a lot but explain almost nothing. Some episodes dabbled in metaphysics, whilst others were simply obscure for obscurity’s sake. The best stories were those whose plots were developed and resolved with acceptable logic, no matter how bizarre the events they depicted: Voyager’s Return and The Last Sunset were probably the outstanding examples. My diary records that I found Dragon’s Domain ‘one of the best yet’, an opinion I’ve had cause to revise over the years, but even now, I’ll still concede that it looks great, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The real ‘stinkers’ from series one were, for my money, The Full Circle (caveman stories begin and end for me with The Flintstones), End of Eternity (Peter Bowles looks wrong in every conceivable way), Ring Around the Moon (just boring) and, worst by a long margin, Missing Link (dreary, pretentious, tenuous tosh not even alleviated by the presence of Peter Cushing). I’m even less forgiving of the series today, but back in 1975-6 these episodes struck me as lacking a certain something.

As to how well the series was doing on television, I had no idea. As long as it remained on ITV, on Thursday nights, all was well. It meant I missed out on six months’ worth of Top of the Pops, but there wasn’t a great deal to see there as 1975 shaded into ‘76. But the new year would bring changes on Moonbase Alpha, not all of them good.

To be precise, not any of them good... as we’ll explore in part 2.