Catacombs Credits Guide
Barbara Bain

Extracted from: TV Zone Number 38 (Jan 1993); "Barbara Bain: 1992" interview by David Richardson p32-37

Science-fiction was new turf for me when Martin and I were invited to do Space: 1999. I had read quite a bit of it, but I certainly wasn't a buff. The thing that I loved about the concept was that we were not there because we wanted to be. The accident that thrust us out into space was unexpected and whatever we encountered we had no way to cope with. We were ultimately homeless, looking for a place that would accommodate us and there was something quite romantic about that. The best scripts were the ones that kept to that.

When we spoke about who would design the clothes for the series, Sylvia Anderson said that the only American designer she would be interested in approaching was Rudi Gernreich, so I said that he was a very dear, close friend who at that time was on a sort of sabbatical. He was as much a philosopher as a dress designer and his thinking was reflected in the first meetings we had with him. There we were in 1973 talking about what people would be wearing in 1999, and Rudi said that people would be wearing armour and face masks. He thought that the world would become such a hostile place that we would encase ourselves in metal and cover our vulnerable parts. We thought about that, but we couldn't do that for the show because we wouldn't have been able to move and we couldn't wrap our faces.

I think my favourite episode was Black Sun, which wasn't a story I had a major role in, but it was just lovely where Barry Morse and Martin turned into old men. I liked War Games where I was captured and put into a glass case, but I absolutely adored The Full Circle. They darkened my teeth and matted up my hair and I ran around in skins. I remember thinking about eleven o'clock in the morning that I was shooting a sequence running out of a cave after lunch and I thought I should find some very primal guttural sound for this creature. I went to my dressing room overlooking Black Park and tried out some animal sounds. I don't know if people were worried about what was going on in there!

I wasn't as happy with the second season. It wasn't as clear for me what the intent was and the changes were cosmetic as opposed to philosophical. Some of the ideas were good, but some were not.