Catacombs Reference LibraryUK Press
1974 Press
Catacombs Reference LibraryThese articles appeared in UK newspapers while the series was being made, but long before it would be seen on television (September 1975).
"Look Ahead" column by James Thomas, p14
It's a decade away now back to Supercar and the £500 capital which Gerry and Sylvia Anderson invested in their puppets.
Sir Lew Grade of ATV picked up the idea and turned the Andersons into a multi-million pound empire. They have ceased to have the world on a string and moved to the lusher areas of Pinewood film studios.
From the £300 plastic puppets of Thunderbirds and Stingray, they went on to command the attention of established stars like Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, now working on 24 episodes of their latest dreamchild, Space 1999.
At £100,000 an episode this will be the biggest gamble the intrepid couple have taken. It's about a colony on the moon where dumped atomic waste suddenly explodes and thrusts the planet out of orbit, sending 300 people from the world's different countries on an inescapable, no-return journey into the indefinite void of space.
A full extra camera unit is being used just to film the special effects and Anderson feels there has been nothing like it since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
He confidently asserts: "Science fiction is coming back. We are moving forward at such a pace with long- distance space probes that what was strict fantasy a few years ago could now certainly become fact.
"This will be alarming enough to make people watch -but I think that people will enjoy it with the same attitude they give to motor racing or a Cape Kennedy launch. No body really feels they are in that capsule with the astronauts. The second-hand excitement is there.
"It's all desperately expensive, the biggest thing by far we have ever attempted." Anderson started life in the old B.B.C. Lime Grove studios as a cutting-room assistant who graduated to a "not very successful" director.
Now, as the boss, he can persuade some of America's biggest TV stars to spend a year in Britain on his productions.
Harrow Observer, Friday 16 August 1974 p21
Wayne Brooks, at the age of six and a half, found himself in a tight squeeze when he made his first appearance in ATV's new science fiction series Space: 1999 due to be screened later this year.
Wayne, who lives at 12 Glebe Road, Stanmore, had to compress his body into an incubator built for undersized new born babies.
Knocking 18 months off his age to become a five-year-old, the extraordinary position in which he found himself was the result of the remarkable events in the story in which the first baby to be born on the moon grows to the age of five within a matter of hours of birth.
Acting is nothing new to cheeky-face Wayne. He will be remembered by many cinemagoers for his performance in The Fourteen, a film based on a true story about a family of 14 children orphaned by determined to stay together. He has also appeared in a few television commercials.
An acting career, however, has not been marked out for Wayne. He attends an hour-long drama lesson each week and dreams of directing horror films. The greatest thrill he had, while filming to date was when, during filming for him "Alpha Child" episode of Space: 1999 he found that Christopher Lee was working on a film at the same Pinewood Studios.
Sunday Express, 1st September 1974, p2; profile of Sarah Bullen
Sarah Bullen, 23 the youngest member of the famous equestrian family that represented Britain at the last four Olympics, has started a new carrier as an actress.
"I decided that I would like to do riding in period costume for historical films," she says, as the rest of my family are too good to compete against.
"I was sent to Pinewood by my agent for my first job and put in a white space suit. When I asked where the horse was, they all laughed."
Now as Operative Number One at Main Mission Control in the television series 1999 Sarah has not only put three- day eventing behind her, but also her boyfriend Richard Meade, the Olympic Gold Medallist horseman at one time tipped to marry Princess Anne
"We are very good friends." says Sarah, "but we both go out with with lots of different people now."
One thing that Sarah will not be doing in her acting career is changing her name.
"My ancestor, Anne Boleyn changed her name from Bullen as Boleyn was more romantic," says Sarah, "but it didn't do her much good." (Not actually true, Boleyn was the standard spelling for several generations before Anne, although, in common with most surnames of the time, there were various spellings)
Unknown UK tabloid, probably October 1974 just after filming The Full Circle
If relations are looking a little strained between Barbara Bain and Martin Landau, that cool husband-and-wife team from Mission Impossible, then blame it on their new television series. The title is Space 1999. In spite of Landau's caveman tactics, this means AD not BC.
Landau, 42, is an astronaut, based on the Moon, where Miss Bain is working as a doctor. An explosion knocks the Moon out of orbit, and sends it charging off into space and back in time.
The scene comes from one of 24 hour-long episodes being filmed at Associated Television's studios at Pinewood for screening next year.
Picture: Ian Vaughan
By Philip Phillips
Unknown tabloid, 1974
The notice at Pinewood film studios boldly states: "This is the most spectacular, expensive and exciting space science-fiction series ever made for TV."
It refers to the mammoth space odyssey series, Space 1999, which will be orbiting the world's television networks next year.
But are these claims justified?
The one about the cost certainly is. For the 24, hour-long episodes, being made by ATV chairman Sir Lew Grade in partnership with the Italian Television service, are running up a bill of £2,500,000.
The stars of Space 1999 Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, the American husband-and-wife team from Mission Impossible, and London-born Barry Morse, who played the pursuing Lieutenant Gerard in The Fugitive.
I spent yesterday with them on the set, which is built on the massive Hollywood movie scale.
In one studio is a gigantic mock-up of the Moon's surface.
In another studio is the space ship, with a barrage of lights, computers and controls.
A third studio houses the Moon-based command. headquarters of the international spacemen- and women-whose adventures we shall follow.
Many British stars will make guest appearances.
They include Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Roy Dotrice, Richard Johnson, Cyd Hayman, Judy Geeson, Joanna Dunham, Julian Glover and Paul Jones.
The action takes place in the year 1999-hence the title.
Landau, 42, plays a high-ranking astronaut, Commander John Koenig, who has just taken over a vast scientific laboratory on the Moon.
Morse, 54, is Professor Bergman, an English space scientist who is the father figure" of the series.
Barbara Bain plays Dr Helena Russell, whose husband has disappeared on a space mission.
In the opening episode, the Moon is ripped apart by violent explosions, caused by dumped nuclear waste from Earth.
The scientists' part of the Moon is pulled out of orbit, and into the unknown. And so their adventures begin.
Landau says: "The effects are out of this world. There has never been anything like them.
"Hollywood has never done anything like this.
"We have the most extraordinary adventures among the inhabitants of the planets of other solar systems.
For instance, in one episode, Barry and I age 1,000 years. You should see our make-up!
"In another episode, we reach a planet where all feelings are reversed.
"You laugh when you are in trouble or pain. You cry if you are happy."
Viewers will notice nobody wears spectacles in Space 1999. They're old-fashioned in 1999. Contact lenses are used.
For Landau and his wife, Barbara, the series represents a great challenge and a sustained period of very hard work.
Their day starts at 6.30 am, and goes on until 5.30 pm. And so it will go on for 15 months.
Their's is one of the lasting Hollywood marriages. They were wed in 1957 and have two young daughters.
But they are not the only husband-and-wife team working on Space 1999.
It is being produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who gained world- wide fame with their UFO and The Protectors series.
TV Diary by Martin Jackson, "Looking ahead to 1975", p13. This was the day Tom Baker became the new Doctor Who. One correction: Space 1999 was filmed at Pinewood, not Elstree. ITC's Life of Jesus would be renamed Jesus of Nazareth and would air in 1977. The other ITC Biblical series mentioned, Moses the Lawgiver, would air in June 1975.
But still no one knows who will be the new Jesus Christ
WAVES of nostalgia and flights of space fantasy. Cops and robbers and costume drama. Television 1975 threatens a repeat of 1974, possibly even more so.
But with everything plummeting except prices, it is perhaps understandable that TV should pander to a mood of escapism.
Nothing though can match the out-of-this- world splendour of SPACE 1999, a lavish science fiction serial costing around £2 million now in production at ATV Elstree.
The flavour is that of an adult Star Trek, though not too adult, about a nuclear explosion which blows the Moon out of orbit spinning through the galaxy.
Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, the husband and wife team from Mission Impossible, lead the moon base refugees through this equally impossible mission in the sky.
1975 also promises to be the year of the biblical epic. Sir Lew Grade's Life of Jesus is due to begin production in Israel at the end of next month...