Catacombs Credits Guide
Martin Bower

Some people have said that the trouble with my models for Space: 1999 was that they fell apart, but in fact the only model that did was the battle cruiser, and the reason for that was that it was made when I was sixteen years old - four years before Space: 1999. It was never intended to be filmed for television so I don't think I can be blamed for it notwithstanding the rigours of special effects filming. As it was, it can't have been too bad as it ended up appearing in four different episodes - Alpha Child, War Games, The Last Enemy and Dragon's Domain. Considering it cost five hundred quid, they got a lot of value out of that model.

In series two there was an episode called The AB Chrysalis where I had to make five spherical buildings, like balls on stalks, three feet in diameter. We had a forty-four inch Eagle land in the middle of these things and a thunderstorm going on in between them with lightning flashing around them. I had to have ten 36" hemispheres made. The perspex company delivered them to my workshop in the garden shed of my parents' home and I built them into these wonderful balls, which were too large to get into the car. Brian Johnson's secretary came over in a van and then we discovered that they wouldn't come out through the workshop door, which was only 28" wide, so I had to take the door frame off to get them out, I couldn't dismantle the models because they were wanted for shooting the next day, so I had a bit of egg on my face that time.