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Space turkey past sell-by date
Catacombs Reference Library
The Scotsman, 9 June 1998, p20, Last night's television by Anthony Troon. See BBC 1998 repeats
Space 1999 (BBC2, 6:20pm)
Devotees of space-junk might just be delighted that the BBC is hauling out of the vaults one of Gerry Anderson's greatest turkeys. Space 1999 was a 48-episode series in two seasons, made in the mid-Seventies, and has even been described by telly- historians in Classic British TV as vacuous, slow-moving, hippie drivel. Now that is worse than a poke in the eye with a ray-gun
But we have to take account of the fact that space-fiction on film has moved forward into more sophisticated territory, so these dramas by Gerry Anderson Productions, using live actors rather than his original, brilliantly weird puppets, are not simply risible but are also museum pieces - two qualities that often help to make cult viewing. Maybe this is why the wise old BBC has reintroduced the show. Or maybe it is that next year really is 1999, and they could hardly screen a futuristic space series that looked backwards. Or maybe it is just a money-saver after all.
But to our tale. We are on Moonbase Alpha, the interior of which looks like a television and hi-fi showroom, staffed by salespersons in smart, beige uniforms with loon pants. Maybe this is why the series attracted the "hippie" epithet. The concept is that the moon has been nuked and dislodged from its earth orbit And, er, well- we are all in trouble. Strange things start happening involving beams of orange light, and a maintenance engineer caught in the light suddenly goes ape, transmitting classified information at incredible speed from a keyboard even though he was not supposed to be computer-literate.
Suddenly, too, he is possessed of superhuman strength and anyone who tries to stop him is picked up with one hand and thrown across the showroom. Why didn't they just switch off the computer? Dunno, sorry. But once his task is done, the poor bloke's brain boils and he becomes a late maintenance engineer.
It turns out that the moon and Moonbase have been "captured" by a robot sphere from the planet Triton. of which nobody has heard before, a planet that no longer exists, and dark forces are having a field day. That is a pretty standard sort of sci-fi plot, so why is this series so spectacularly bad? It has something to do with the over-acting- the exchanged glances of dumb terror, the ludicrous attempt to show people running in a weightless environment - the second-hand spaceship models from Captain Scarlet, the over-the-top sound effects. But enjoy it while you can, for next year it will be past its shelf-date.